Crime City: Manchester's Victorian Underworld (25 page)

By the 1870s, however, this scam was more elaborate and involved far more money. It was also more sinister. Con men now sought out the desperate and the vulnerable and squeezed them dry. In some cases they did not stop there. Many of these charlatans flourished unimpeded for so long that they came to believe their own claims. They behaved as if they really were respectable physicians of unimpeachable character. They spent enormous amounts on advertising – it was impossible for anyone to walk along Manchester’s main thoroughfares without being accosted by someone passing out handbills advertising the services of a fraudulent physician.

Jerome Caminada despised those who preyed on the sick and deluded. He describes them as the ‘bloodsuckers of the human race’, a greater threat than the garrotter and the burglar. In particular he loathed them because the bulk of their victims were the poor. Yet the profits they made were enormous, amounting to many thousands of pounds.

Caminada recounts a case so poignant that it fully explains his contempt for swindlers of this type. It began one Saturday when a friendly pawnbroker called the detective to his premises on the corner of Deansgate and Gregson Street. He was suspicious of a young man of striking appearance who was pawning prints. The prints, it turned out, belonged to the young man’s employer. Even as Caminada arrested him, he was appalled by his appearance. In an age when death from tuberculosis was common, this man was frighteningly sickly in appearance. Like a spectre, with ‘cheeks hollow, shrivelled and cadaverous, eyes large and unnaturally bright, his form was shrunken and bent’. The reason was soon apparent. Caminada found 153 bottles of medicine in his home. Immediately he knew the root of the problem – he had fallen under the thrall of a quack.

A typical hypochondriac, the young man had in fact been in perfect health when he first consulted a quack doctor. The doctor, of course, played on the victim’s morbid imagination and convinced him he had a life-threatening illness, which he alone could cure. But only with a lengthy programme of treatment. First he fleeced his victim. Then he directed him to a loan shark. In order to repay his debts, the young man sold two houses he owned. Then the quack, having convinced him that he was at a critical stage of his treatment, induced him to steal.

Without looking very far, Caminada was able to summon twelve such quacks to prove they were doctors. Many did a sideline in pornography and he also summoned seven of them to explain why the police should not destroy obscene books found on their premises. The first of these defendants was John Lewis, who had premises at Booth Street, Chorlton-on-Medlock. Mr Lewis, despite having no medical qualifications, was evidently prospering as a doctor, as he also maintained addresses in Leeds and Liverpool. He also did a brisk trade in dirty books and police found no less than twelve-hundredweight of them at his Manchester premises. The loss of this reading material was a far more severe penalty than the £20 fine he received. This is another instance of the courts’ inexplicable leniency in dealing with such criminals.

A slight variation on this scam enjoyed popularity in 1877. A number of advertisements appeared in religious publications making claims for the Reverend E. J. Silverton’s ‘Food of Foods’. According to this man of the cloth, his patent food was a guaranteed remedy for deafness. When Caminada responded to one of the advertisements, the Reverend asked for a fee. When the detective went to the address in the advertisement, he found it empty. But he did not forget what he had discovered of the way in which this particular fraud operated. Sure enough, the Reverend was at it again in 1884, this time advertising more extensively than ever. On this occasion he hired the Free Trade Hall, where he offered his services free. Yet when Caminada consulted him, he found that the Reverend’s immense skills extended beyond curing the hard of hearing. When the detective complained of a sore foot, the doctor, without any examination, charged him for a guaranteed remedy. Other detectives had similar experiences. Once the newspapers covered the Reverend’s arrest, many of his victims came forward. Several were incurably ill. One woman had sold everything for her son’s treatment. Many explained how the Reverend’s pamphlets, liberally sprinkled with Biblical quotations, had fooled them.

A well-dressed gentleman who went from door to door worked a low-level variation on this scam. Armed with testimonials from prestigious hospitals extolling the wonders of his potion, he made an excellent living for many years. A more despicable and brazen variation was that of the ‘official hospital agent’ who invited people to make a small donation towards the building of a new ward. Polite, respectable and unassuming, the collector seldom attracted unwanted attention and by moving from area to area lived better than any honest working man.

In an age when class distinctions permeated every area of life, when men of the cloth and those in the professions commanded deference, few working men would challenge an apparently respectable gentleman. This, more than anything else, allowed these con men to operate with impunity – even when the bait they dangled was the implausible promise of an unearned fortune.

Equal to the National Debt

No con man ever failed to make money because he overestimated others’ greed. The avarice of the Manchester public flourished when J. S. Rogers offered them unearned fortunes, theirs for the taking.

In May 1882, Jerome Caminada went to impressive offices, sumptuously furnished, at 72 Piccadilly. Outside, restrained by two flustered peelers, an irate crowd of 100 people surged forward, demanding to speak to the proprietor, Mr J. S. Rogers, Attorney. Rogers had duped the bemused office junior just as he had his irate customers.

The next of kin fraud that Rogers operated with such spectacular success was, like all the best deceptions, very simple. It played on people’s greed, their desire to get something for nothing and their natural tendency to trust members of the educated middle class, especially when they have impressive offices and are associated with the law.

Rogers advertised in local newspapers offering to help anyone who thought he might have claim to a bequest. This advertisement came immediately after local and national coverage he received courtesy of an accommodating journalist. This story claimed that through the efforts of the Next of Kin Agency a local man had secured a bequest of £200,000 – worth about £27 million today. While this story was still reverberating around pubs and music halls, the tricksters struck. They hired Stockport Theatre for a public lecture entitled ‘The Unclaimed Property of Next of Kin Lying in the Hands of the Government’. The speaker maintained the sum involved was equal to the national debt. A large and rapt audience hung on his every word and afterwards many stayed behind to arrange a private interview.

First Rogers promised to discover if his client had a claim to money or property left in a contested will. Invariably he was delighted to announce that this was, in fact, the case and the client was about to become the beneficiary of a large inheritance. All he had to do was cover Rogers’ trifling expenses while the Attorney expedited the process. Having hooked his prey, Rogers showed great skill at exploiting the expectation of immediate wealth to bleed his client of every penny. Upon investigation, Caminada found that Rogers was in the process of reeling in 270 dupes. Perhaps the most pathetic of these were two elderly ladies who, in order to pay the fake attorney’s fees, sold the entire contents of their home and then borrowed money they could not repay. All that kept them from the workhouse was the sixteen shillings a week their children gave them.

Rogers’ squalid career had begun as a moneylender. He fancied himself as an impresario, leasing a theatre, which he later abandoned owing money to everyone associated with the enterprise. His next venture – an exclusive club – ended in like fashion. In operating other ventures he used the aliases the Reverend J. S. Rogers and J. S. Rogers, BA, Next-of-Kin and Foreign Law Officer. Nor was he alone in operating this fraud. Its extent was so great that he ran offices all over the country and employed three fellow conspirators.

Rogers’ modus operandi was always the same. First he induced his victim to sign an agreement granting him ten per cent of all money received, together with all out-of-pocket expenses. For this he charged £1.12s 6d – a week’s wages for a working man. Then he drew up a power of attorney, for which he charged as much as he felt prudent. Next he charged for ‘declaration’, followed by a charge of between £10 and £20 for ‘administration’, which also required a trip to the London courts and further unavoidable expenses. The number of these trips to London depended on the client’s gullibility.

Then, of course, there was the cost of taking counsel’s opinion, which he sought on several occasions. When a client pressed for results, Rogers was quite prepared to provide proof of progress. He even took one dupe down to Somerset House where she met a bogus commissioner who assured her that the case was progressing well. That same day he took her to view the Old Red Cap Hotel, which, Rogers assured her, was part of the inheritance coming her way. All she had to do was pay the fee of £575 to cover the legal technicalities. This particular victim travelled to London with Rogers on a further two occasions. She was not the only one whose reservations he soothed in this way.

When Rogers eventually appeared in court in July 1882 the case attracted blanket coverage. A large, indignant crowd packed the public gallery. They had no time to take refreshment while the jury was deliberating – the twelve men returned their guilty verdict without leaving the court. Rogers received the remarkably lenient sentence of two years’ hard labour and his associates got lesser terms of imprisonment. At least one of them, McKenzie, was undeterred. Five years after his release he was back in court, this time the Old Bailey, to receive a ten-year sentence for frauds similar to those he carried out in Manchester.

Despite the publicity surrounding the case, the British public remained as gullible as ever and men like Rogers lost none of their faith in the power of avarice to distort a man’s judgement.

Handsome Charlie and George the Greek

The ignorance of those who live outside the business world blinds them to its pitfalls. The uninitiated believe anyone can make money. Loan swindlers exploited this naivety. Surprisingly, the victims of these scams were not the poor or those who are often deceived into paying exorbitant interest on tiny loans. These particular sharks were after more substantial fish. Their victims were usually gentlemen anxious to make a quick return on their disposable income. Most had no business experience but had saved money through thrift and self-denial. They now hoped to reap the benefits of their frugality.

The con men put advertisements in the local newspapers inviting interested parties to lend £50. As security they offered jewellery worth far more than the loan. Not only that, but they offered to repay interest at the extremely generous rate of £10 per calendar month. To the unwary this was an attractive proposition with no risk. A Manchester crook who delighted in the sobriquet of ‘Handsome Charlie’ operated this scam until complaints led Caminada to answer one of his advertisements. Another practitioner was ‘George the Greek’. Both got six months hard labour.

A similar scam came to light in 1886, when two men newly arrived in Manchester from Liverpool, Samuel Bush and Thomas Holliday, placed an advertisement in a local newspaper. It read: ‘Money. £25. A gentleman requires this amount for a month. Will give £5 interest and deposit his railway bonds for £200. Strictly private.’ Bush and Holliday were practised frauds. Holliday had lived at Stoke Newington, where he described himself as a merchant and financial agent. In fact, his activities consisted of operating a version of the long-firm scam, a perennial favourite with professional criminals and practised by both the Krays and the Richardsons in the 1960s. Holliday’s version of the long-firm scam was beautiful in its simplicity. He set himself up with a valid bank account and used it to build up a record of prompt payment for small consignments of goods, which he sold abroad. Once he had established his creditworthiness, he placed large orders with many Birmingham suppliers and sold the goods to Italy. When his Birmingham creditors began to close in, he simply disappeared.

He next washed up in Liverpool, where he set up as an endorser of bills of exchange, working on commission. It was while there that he came across bogus railway bonds for the non-existent Iowa Pacific Railway Company, nominally worth $1,000, and promising a half-yearly yield of six per cent. Having successfully operated the loan scam in Liverpool, he and Bush tried their luck in Manchester. They had not been in the city long before the police arrested them. Holliday got eighteen months with hard labour and Bush twelve.

This, however, did nothing to deter others operating the same scam. James Melville and George Beck were in many ways more interesting characters. These incorrigible rogues had total confidence in their ability to charm their way out of any situation. It never occurred to either man that the people they duped would ever do anything so disagreeable as to involve the police. James Melville called himself a ‘commission agent’ and resided at a variety of addresses in Manchester’s respectable suburbs. He was, in fact, a cashier in a bank and active in a Manchester chapel, where he often spoke from the pulpit. Despite this Melville was no ordinary member of the city’s solid commercial class. He had at least one previous conviction for embezzling from his employers. His colleague, George Beck, lived in the less fashionable Leamington Avenue, Chorlton-on-Medlock. He appeared to be what he had once been – the owner of a large ironworks near Manchester, before gambling on the stock market reduced him to penury.