Hornswogglers, Fourflushers & Snake-Oil Salesmen (9 page)

Yes, the portly businessman could see now, the man was one of those Mexican beggars, no doubt looking for a coin or two. “Now see here, I have no time for this sort of thing. I'm a very busy man, In fact, I'm on my way to . . .”

Suddenly, a new stranger stopped, stepped close. He fixed the portly businessman with a kindly gaze and spoke in a low, precise voice. “Sir, if I may allay your fears.” The man was tall, dressed in a smart gray wool suit, high collar, and silk necktie of a gentleman. He wore impeccably trimmed mustaches and a beard, and atop his head perched a fine black hat with a matching silk band. On his hands he wore gray gloves with a polished ebony cane gripped in one.

“Who the devil are you?” said the businessman. Despite the new fellow's dapper appearance, he was truly busy and in no mood to be accosted here in Denver, or anywhere else for that matter.

The dandy leaned in. “I am, sir, at the moment, donating my services as this unfortunate man's translator.”

“How's that? Why? What is it he wants of me?”

Now the dapper man smiled. “In fact, sir, he would like to do you a favor, if you'll permit me but a moment or two of your time.”

“A favor? I don't need favors.” But the businessman lingered a moment or two. The Mexican was a sad-looking case, to be sure—what could he possibly offer?

The dapper man nodded to the swarthy little Mexican, who lifted a grimy sack that contained something of obvious heft. He and the dapper man glanced at each other conspiratorially, the dapper man nodded again, then spoke a brief phrase in Spanish. “It's fine, Miguel. He's anxious to see what you have there.” He pointed a gloved finger at the sack. “Open it,” he said in English.

The man must have understood, for he rolled the top of the sack down to reveal something that caused the businessman to gasp and widen his eyes. “Is that . . . ?”

The dapper man nodded vigorously, said, “Shhh, yes. It is what it appears to be.” He leaned closer. “A brick of solid gold.”

A few moments passed while the businessman gazed, lost in honest admiration of the dully beautiful object. Then he regained his composure. “I . . . I don't understand. Why are you showing this to me?” He mimicked the other two men and spoke in a lowered voice as he glanced around at the nearly empty sidewalk.

The dapper man said, “To be blunt, sir. He needs to sell it.”

“Sell? No offense intended, but what's a fellow like that doing with it in the first place? And why me? Why not you?”

“I am afraid I am not at liberty at present to take advantage of his kind offer. But perhaps we could talk somewhere a little more, um, private.”

“Very good.”

In a few moments, the oddly matched trio made their way to a quiet alley entrance. The Mexican placed the brick of gold, unbidden, in the businessman's fat, sweating hands. It was a heavy thing, and he grunted and almost lost his grip on it.

Almost.

“You can tell by the heft, sir, that it is pure gold.”

“The only thing I can tell you is that it is worth far more than what he is willing to sell it for. Far more.”

The fat businessman pooched his lips and hefted the thing close to his face. He sniffed at it, glanced at the two men watching him, and realized gold would have no discernible smell. He scratched at it with his fingernail. It was soft, as he supposed such things should be. And it did have the weight he'd heard blocks of solid gold should bear. It was roughly the same width and length of a regular brick, but with half the height and seemingly more weight. Hmm. He flipped it over and stared at it. No markings of any sort that might track it back to some crime, which he supposed was the reason for this fire sale.

“I am interested, provided we bring it to an assayer's office for verification. You don't mind, do you?”

The dapper man, still looking amused and slightly bored, shrugged, then spoke in a low voice to the worried-looking Mexican.

“It's just that I don't normally carry much money, so I would like to be assured as much as is possible, you see. I am a businessman, after all, and I am used to conducting my affairs in a lawful and legitimate manner.” The fat man straightened up with that last declaration.
Let them know my intentions from the start
, he thought.
That I'm no one to be trifled with
.

“Absolutely, sir. And since you are from out of town, would you like me to suggest an assay office? One is as good as another.”

The fat man paused.

“Of course, if you'd rather have one of your own choosing to perform the inspection, by all means.” The dapper man smoothed his mustaches. “Or if we are, as they say, barking up the wrong tree, we will leave you in peace and bid you a good day.”

The Mexican gently took the brick back and stuffed it into the sack.

“No, no, no, don't misread me, my good man. I am happy to go with your suggested office, being as I am a stranger here, as you so aptly pointed out.”

“Excellent. Then let us not idle here any longer here. Follow me, sir. Follow me.”

The three once more made their way up the sidewalk, the dapper man in the lead. What the fat man didn't notice was the thin smile barely showing on the dapper man's trim countenance.

In short minutes they arrived at a narrow, plain storefront with a sign out front reading, “Charles Dinsdale, Assayer.”

They pushed in and a small brass bell at the top of the door dinged their entrance.

“Mr. Dinsdale? Are you in?” The dapper man stepped inside the shop and motioned for the Mexican to follow him. “Come on in, Miguel, and . . . er, sir,” said the dapper man. “I realize I don't even know your name.”

The fat out-of-towner nodded. “Yes, yes, well, given the nature of this venture we have in the offing, I find I don't mind that prospect in the least.”

“As you like.” The dapper man smiled as a man dressed in a leather smock stepped through a curtain partitioning off a back room from the front. The assay office itself was filled with the usual clutter of equipment, including scales, sacks of ore bearing tags, and various bits of scientific-looking apparatus the fat man had never seen before.

“Mr. Dinsdale,” the dapper man leaned over the counter. “We have need of your services.”

“Oh?” said the assayer. “I certainly hope so. Otherwise, I'd be wondering just what it is you're doing here.” He smiled and looked at each of the three men in turn.

“My acquaintance here would like to know if this brick of gold is indeed the real thing, the genuine article.” As he spoke he nodded to the Mexican to set the precious bagged commodity on the counter.

“I trust you will be discreet?”

“If that means will I keep my mouth shut about what it is you're showing me, well yes, I will. I wouldn't be in business all that long if I couldn't, now would I?”

“Very good.” To the fat man the dapper man said, “He'll have to cut out a portion of the brick in order to test it accordingly.”

The fat man nodded in agreement to these terms, and the man behind the counter carved out a chunk of gold from the brick, then went through the chemical process required of the assayer's art. The piece tested high—the quality, it seemed, was as good as the gold bar's looks led the quivering rube to believe.

The fat man didn't catch himself doing it, but the dandy saw the out-of-town businessman lick his lips. The dandy suppressed a smile, knowing the hook was set, the fish was almost landed, and soon, one of them would be richer, and one poorer.

Within the hour, the dapper gent had kindly escorted the portly visitor to Denver to a bank where he was able to retrieve cash, borrowed against his reputation as owner of a rather large freighting concern.

It wasn't until the fat man was on the train and nearly back to his home town of Wichita that he discerned his wonderful bar of gold was little more than a painted bar of carefully shaped stone. He suppressed a groan, closed his eyes, feeling a throbbing in his temples and a tightening deep in his gut as he thought back on the entire episode. He'd given a great wad of cash to a man he'd met in the street, and all for something that was too good to be true. Oh, but he should have known better.

By the time Charles L. “Doc” Baggs had perfected the gold-brick scam—which he is credited with inventing—he was one of the best bunco operators of his day. And in the nineteenth-century West, that was saying something.

Charles L. Baggs was born in Soda Bay, New York, on February 11, 1843. When he was sixteen he joined the rush to Pikes Peak, and had already decided that a life of office-bound drudgery was not only boring but painful. He'd recently lost a finger to the maw of a printing press while working in Illinois as a postal clerk. Baggs spent two months rummaging in and around the mines near Boulder, then decamped to Denver in early June 1859.

He went on to serve in the US Army as a quartermaster before agenting for the Overland Stage Company. From there he ventured north to Virginia City, Montana Territory, where his attorney father, Charles Sr., was busy lawyering and serving as a member of the territorial Council. Ever droll, Baggs the younger was, years later, quoted as saying, while on the stand at a murder trial (as a mere witness), that of the three years he spent up north, toiling under his father's thumb, he had worked a total of “several days,” and that the only swindling he had engaged in was “selling mines.”

For a man who, by his own admission, was arrested “about a thousand times”—and who are we to not believe the claims of such a fine, upstanding citizen?—Doc Baggs was never convicted of a single bunco crime.

As with many of his conniving cohorts in the field of swindling, Baggs was indefatigable, bouncing back time after time, arrest after arrest, conjuring deceits of greater daring and loftier planning, increasingly complex and oddly successful. So what kept him—and for that matter, so many of his ilk—returning perennially to fleece the sheep, as dupes were considered? Baggs once famously and quite candidly addressed this very point:

“I defy the newspapers to put their hands on a single man I ever beat that was not financially able to stand it. I am emotionally insane. Whenever I see anyone looking in a jewelry store, thinking how they would like to get away with the diamonds, an irresistible desire comes over me to skin them. I feel like drowning them if I can.”

That said, the man was also quick to point out that he was himself a fine, upstanding chap: “I don't drink, smoke, chew, or cheat poor people. I pay my debts.”

A famous instance illustrating Baggs's impressive self-confidence took place in court one day shortly after he was arrested by Denver lawman Michael Spangler on the not-uncommon charge of “bunco steering,” or sleight-of-hand swindling. Not only did Baggs act as his own attorney, but standing before the court, immaculately dressed as always, Baggs refuted the charges against him, then went on to successfully debunk the very charge of bunco steering itself.

“Gentlemen,” we can picture him thumbing the lapels of his immaculate suitcoat and stepping slowly back and forth, a gentrified rooster explaining barnyard etiquette to a bunch of upstart cockerels. “How might I possibly be guilty of a charge that does not even appear in the statutes defining criminal acts? Indeed, no such term as ‘bunco steerer' appears there.”

He let those words hover in the hushed air of the court for a moment. “Indeed,” said he again, flipping open a massive dictionary he'd thoughtfully brought with him for just this moment. Baggs made a quick, deliberate show of thumbing through the mighty tome's pages before driving an imperious forefinger in the midst of a page. “It would appear that this very dictionary, a most revered work in itself, does not even hold the term ‘bunco steerer.'”

His bold gaze met that of the judge, eyebrows raised. The dictionary was checked, the statutes were checked and double-checked. And then the judge dismissed the case. One can only assume Spangler the lawman reddened and worked his jaw muscles as he watched the dapper form of Doc Baggs exit the courtroom, whistling as he strolled down the sidewalk, free and easy.

As high theater as were his various courtroom antics, Doc Baggs's grandest productions were his infamous “big-store” scams. Elaborate to the extreme, these involved setups became his signature swindles, emulated to this day.

The big-store scam was, as the name implied, a storefront setup, often a grand and expensive design for the express purpose of bilking a wealthy mark out of a large sum of money. Baggs's shops were full-blown offices filled with bustling workers and grand furnishings, and anchoring the scene was a massive built-in vault. The door would be partially open to allow visitors—marks—a glimpse inside. And what they saw would go a long way toward convincing them that this was an office to be trusted.

Even the oak railings and counters were designed such that they would collapse and be hauled off or stashed away in hidden compartments in the event that the setup was rumbled by the police. And this would happen now and again. But naturally, Doc had that angle covered as well.