Behind the Scenes Minis: Jack and Ponzi

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Tracy D. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. This week we talked about thief and serial prison escape artist Jack Shepherd a K A John Shepherd a K. I really don't know how much of what we said in this episode was actually factual, and how much of it is like the same in Bellish story being crept from different authors by other authors and printed as new books, which was a thing in the Lite in the eighteenth century. Yeah, the sensational folk tale of Jack Shepherd. We I mean, we do know for sure real person there. There's old Bailey records. They are also you know, written records of the time. But in terms of a lot of the details that are pretty consistent from one account to the other, I don't feel fully confident over whether that consistency is because those were the correct details, or whether it's just because everybody was lifting from everybody else's account, because some of those came out before he died, So after question marks, questions, but very fun ones. Yeah. I had said in that Six Impossible episodes that I was really focused on the escapes that seemed really ingenious and not ones that seemed like horrifying or violent in some way. And the list that I had been compiling of which six things I was going to talk about, had included Jack Shepherd. And as I started taking notes about Jack Shephard, I was like, I think this one is its own thing, though, And that helped me narrow down from a list of things that had been I had had like, uh, seven or eight or nine potential topics that I had to narrow down to six. And Jack Shephard moving into it an own standalone episode. Uh, it was part of that. Well, will say his his escape seem less ingenious and more just determined as hell. Yeah. And I there was one point as I was taking the notes where I just wrote, who keeps giving him a saw? You gotta get some better security if you want to stop having the guy have a saw to saw out some bars and squeeze through them. Right where do these nails keep coming from? Yeah? Uh? I tried to get to to some of the social and economic and other factors that were like leading to a both crime, the fear of crime, like the perceived the perception that there was suddenly a ton of crime, also people's fascination with crime. Um. And you know, there was definitely crime happening in the nineteenth century when there was the big resurgence in Jack Shepard fame. But like the idea that books about Jack Shepard were causing suddenly there to be this giant It just reminded me of so many things, like violent video games, heavy metal music, like dungeons and dragons causing all the problems. Yeah, that's all bless their hearts moment for me. Yeah, bless your heart ards crime. Yeah, so many things going into crime. Do you know what they were planning to do with a hundred and eight yards of wool, because I'm like, I have idea. I think they were probably just planning to sell it. Yeah. I found some number and I didn't know how accurate the number was or how it was arrived at. That was about how many people in London around the seventeen thirties were basically supporting themselves through crime, and it was stuff like stealing small items from one place and selling them at a pawn shop or somewhere else. Um And so I I imagine the plan had been to sell that, although you know he could have made himself, some ropes to climb out the prison next time he got captured, or a fancy pair of pants that would be a lot of pants, Maybe a disguise since he's basically going to just go next door and try to pretend to have a regular life. Yeah, the um there was one thing that I had read that was the account of somebody that that was living at the time, and I didn't put this in the episode, but it it had some kind of snide comments about uh, the fact that then like then he went to just hang out right down the road from the prison and also like commit some more small crimes in full view of the prison. And how maybe if he had wanted to remain not in the prison, that some different choices could have been made. I do love how um, his choices are never questioned. It's always other people that just led him to these things, where got him the tools to escape. Right again, he was twenty when he started stealing things, and sure he was an apprentice, he didn't have any money. That was, he was living in a time when it was very hard for a lot of people to get by financially. But still, like Elizabeth Lyon, did not make that choice for him. He made that choice his own self. We talked about Charles Ponds Ponzi schemes this week, Holy Moses. I read a lot of old articles in the Boston Post for this research. The Post was not the only Boston paper reporting on at the Globe had reports to other newspapers, and other cities also had reports. But I stuck with a lot of the Post reporting because the Post didn't win that Pulitzer Um. One thing that I had in the outline that I wound up taking out because I just did not have a great place to put it. On the twelfth, on the day that the Post had like printed all of this stuff about. It was a bunch of stuff that was related to Charles Ponzi having been arrested and incarcerated in Canada. They printed photos from his nine eight arrest and at that time he had a mustache. He was no longer wearing a mustache, so it printed these photos of his like nine eight mugshots, and then below that there was a photo of him from nine twenty, like a current photo um and it was next to one that was captioned how Pons would look with a mustache, and then below that was quote the photo of Ponzi without the mustache that he wore at the time of his arresting Canada was taking recently for the purpose of comparing it with his Canadian pictures. The posts artists painted one in. I found this so hilarious that I stopped what I was doing and laughed out loud for like a meaningful amount of time. And I was like, I know, I knew already that the Post had won a Pulitzer for this reporting, and I was like, I know, y'all got a pulitzer for this, but this drawn in mustache on the photograph is funny. Um, it looks funny on its own. The wording of the caption was very funny to me. Uh, it brightens my day. It makes me wonder if that isn't the start of people drawing mustaches on picture, maybe as a form of graffiti. Yeah, yeah, if a pulitzer comes out of it, sure. Yeah. I didn't put this in either. But one of the other things that had been mentioned in some spots, but it was kind of an aside, was that the like the specific pulitzer that the paper was awarded was related to service for having done this reporting. That led to arrests, and then like, that's not an award that's given regularly. It's given when something has happened specifically that seems to warrant it. And according to various sources that I did not have time to like go comb through Pulitzer records. The next time that particular UM award was also granted was also for a Boston paper. It was for the Boston Globe, for the Boston Globes reporting on the sex abuse within the Catholic Church. And it was similarly like this reporting that led to some arrests of the people who were involved, which I thought was an interesting connection. The Boston Post does not exist anymore at the Boston Globe, Does I UM have the reaction to this story that I have to so many stories of people who are engaged in somewhat complicated criminal activities. Is this really easier than finding a legitimate way to make money? Yeah? I think for the very brief window of time when Charles Bonds he had millions of dollars, that probably did feel pretty easy, but also probably incredibly stressful because like he knew right, he knew he was lying. Yeah, And I think he might have thought that he could maybe transition this into something that was like on the up and up, like he could get to a point where he had enough money to be seed money for something that would not be a criminal enterprise. But like that, it didn't uh, And a whole lot of people lost their money, and a lot of the people that lost their money lost like their whole life savings. A lot of the people that he had targeted were like other Italian immigrants, a lot of whom had just come to the United States hoping for a better life and then lost all their money. I am most fascinated in this story though by Rose. She is very interesting to me. I would love to know more about her, and I'm sure there's almost nothing available about her, but yeah, I think there are some letters and and things like that. It does seem like she really genuinely loved him, And I'm not totally clear on whether she loved him and that was enough to offset the fact that he had committed this huge crime, or if that she more continued to believe that he had been like just the victim of some kind of hapless misadventure rather than having perpetuated a huge crime, or that she was cool with crime. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, she knew he was troubled from the outside. When someone's mother goes, I know you love my child, but for real they are yes, and you go, I'm fine with it all right. Um. One thing that I did notice we talked about, um, some of the other people who had perpetuated Ponzi schemes before Ponzi, and one of them was Sarah Howe, who had like just she had established these banks in quotation marks. They were not really banks, but they were specifically for women, and she had done them in all these different places. I know somebody who works specifically as a forensic accountant and investigates fraud, like that's their whole job, is investigating people who do this kind of fraud or sometimes people who have done some other kind of a crime, and she is investigating like their financial paper trail of this crime, that kind of stuff. Um. And one of the things that they have expressed frustration about is that us a person will like defraud an elderly couple, get caught, be tried, convicted, serve their time, get released, do the exact same thing again, and that initial conviction can't be part of the next trial because it's considered to be prejudicial, which is incredibly frustrating. And uh, and I like, I know people who have been the victims of pretty serious financial fraud that just nothing ever came of any kind of like criminal trial for the person who perpetuated it, And it sucks. Yeah, I mean, it jeopardizes people's into your futures. Yeah. Yeah. And there's not a lot of recourse really in many cases. Um, I feel like in some cases there's a focus on like financial literacy for people to protect themselves from being defrauded, but not as much focus on preventing the fraud from being carried out in the first place, which I mean the same thing is true from other categories of crime as well. But still, um, a lot of the people who are targeted are like people who are getting older and like maybe their decision making is not as clear as previously that kind of stuff, So it sucks. Uh. And Charles Ponds he was one of those people who was like so charismatic and so charming in a lot of ways that like that may have been one of the reasons that Rose still supported him, is that, like he came off, it's just affable and kind and eager to be friend. No, no, but I'm donating so much to charity. That's the thing that always gets me, Like the misdirection of like, I'm starting a fund for orphans. Uh, this is all It's gonna be fine. I'm gonna did I mentioned that I donated a bunch of money to this cost like I'm gonna run for office. The fact that his PR guy sued him for not paying the bills. I was so excited about that detail until I learned about like his counter suit and that that Ponsy won both of them, and I was like, I was really hoping that the guy that informed on him to the Boston Post was then going to get to sue him for the four thousand dollars and get it. But that's not how that went. Nope. So anyway, that's our Charles Palsy episode. Uh. If you want to send us a note about this or any other podcast history podcast that I heart radio dot com. Whatever you've got going on this weekend, I hope it's great. I hope, uh, you know, whether you're at work or doing some leisure time, I hope everything goes as swimmingly as possible. You can subscribe to the show if you have not already on the iHeart Radio app or wherever you like to get your podcast. We'll be back tomorrow with a Saturday classic, and then next week with brand new episodes. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. 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