Bangor outwitted its flimflammers a century ago

Confidence men, grifters, flimflammers and bunco artists seemed to be everywhere a century ago ready to trick you out of your money. In Bangor, one could find them at the train station, in hotel lobbies and on busy street corners. They preyed on farm boys at the Eastern Maine State Fair, and they sought out the wealthy through the mail. From money-changing scams to the old Spanish Prisoner fraud, they had ways to part the naive and optimistic from their money. Here are a few cases as reported in the pages of the Bangor newspapers.

Two dandies, recently acquainted on the trip up from Portland, get off the train in Bangor. One of them is having the darnedest time opening his jackknife. His companion watches his struggle with increasing glee. “Well, it isn’t every man who can open a jackknife when it sticks,” the first one says. “Easy as pie,” smirks his fellow traveler. “Well, if you care to bet, I’ll wager $25 that you can’t open this one,” challenges the owner of the knife.

The bet accepted, a third man loitering nearby enters the scene. He will hold the wager money until this weighty question is settled. The smirker takes the jackknife and opens it in a twinkling. But when he looks up the other two men have skedaddled, and he is the proud owner of a jackknife. This momentous event was described in the Bangor Daily News on April 3, 1906, along with the tale of Mr. Eugene C. Ordway, bunco artist extraordinaire.

Ordway, well-dressed and exceedingly charming, walked into the office of the Windsor Hotel and told the manager he had come to pay the $49 that he owed from some time before. The manager nodded his approval, recognizing Ordway as a traveling salesman who had once been widely known in eastern Maine.

Pulling from his pocket a large wad of bills, Ordway continued, “I’ve made a barrel of money in the West – rich mines and all that sort of thing you know – and now I’ve come back to Maine to pay all of my debts.” But there was one catch. “I’d rather give you a check than the money,” Ordway said innocently, stuffing the bills back in his pocket and producing not one but two blank checks on the City Bank of Hartford, Connecticut.

The hotel manager continued smiling and nodding his head in a positive manner and the deal was consummated – a check for $49 for the hotel and a check for $10 for Ordway. To make a long story short, the manager was not the fool he played. A wire to the bank in Hartford and a call to the police station ended in Ordway’s arrest. “Well,” the manager snorted in disgust. “Does that fellow think we are all innocents down in Maine?”

“FLIM-FLAMMERS WERE FLAMMED” proclaimed a headline on another story about another confidence game gone awry. “It was the old, old game,” declared the Bangor Daily News reporter on Jan. 25, 1907. Two well-dressed young men entered a grocery store on Harlow Street. One asked for two 5-cent cigars. All he had was a $10 bill he said apologetically. The inexperienced clerk had just finished making change, when the purchaser discovered a dime in his pocket. He asked to swap it for a bill to make everything right “and by the usual slick sleight of hand and conversation tried to confuse the clerk so that the stranger would be $5 to the good.” Just then the proprietor, a more worldly gentleman, entered the room and put a stop to things. When the purchaser protested, the owner announced he would call the patrol wagon and let the police settle it, and the scammers “did a quick skidoo.”

The Spanish Prisoner, an international swindle, is centuries old. Like the Nigerian money transfer fraud that many people receive in their e-mail today, it depended on convincing a recipient to send money before he could claim a fortune. A piece in the Bangor Daily News on Oct. 31, 1906, and another in the Bangor Daily Commercial on Jan. 17, 1907, detailed how widespread the scam was in eastern Maine. The story of how one Lebanese shopkeeper in Bangor dealt with the phony promise of wealth had a happy ending, however.

“CASTLES IN OLD SPAIN VANISH INTO THIN AIR,” announced the Commercial’s headline. “Clever Swindling Game That Did Not Take in Myron George of Bangor – An International Affair.” Myron George was actually Maroun George, the Lebanese storekeeper at 192 Hancock St. whom I have written about in previous columns.

George received a letter from a man who claimed to be a distant relative imprisoned in Madrid. If George would send him 118 English pounds he would be able to get his trunk from Spanish authorities. In it were hidden certificates of deposit for 98,600 pounds, or about $500,000, deposited in the Bank of England. All George would have to do is promise to care for the prisoner’s young daughter who would appear on his doorstep with the money.

This drama played out during a series of letters in which George always neglected to send any money. Eventually he heard from the daughter who said her father had died in prison. She pleaded for help.

About a month later, a Bangor lawyer got a letter from the U.S. district attorney’s office in Portland. The Spanish government had arrested a man in Madrid with the letters from George in his possession. George turned over the letters he had received and made a deposition. Not everyone was so canny. The newspaper said a man in Dover had been so moved by a similar appeal, that he had forwarded the money as directed.

In an age when con artists such as these and much worse were everywhere and banks were unreliable, it’s no wonder Grandma and Grandpa kept their money under a loose board in the shed floor.

Wayne E. Reilly can be reached at wreilly@bangordailynews.net.