No Cigar

what truly matters in life. He says, and I quote, stocks may rise and fall, utilities and transportation systems may collapse, and people are no damn good, but they will always need land, and they'll pay through the nose to get it. And he wasn't wrong. Look back at the legend of Johnny Appleseed, for example, he was a real man named John Chapman who hailed from Massachusetts. A nursery man by trade, Chapman spent much of his life working around plants and flowers.

He set out in the late seventeen hundreds to plant vast apple orchards in states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, and even up north into Ontario, Canada. But Contrary to the stories told in school, he wasn't doing it randomly. You see, the government recognized new orchards on unclaimed land as proof of ownership. In other words, Chapman planted apple trees to build up his real estate portfolio. But Johnny

Appleseed had gone about things the right way. He'd been a shrewd businessman who worked within the law to earn himself a hefty income. Another man, on the other hand, found a much different way to acquire land, although he might have fared better if he had just stuck with apples Don Miguel de Peralta was born in seventeen o eight and joined the military in sevente He became a lieutenant into dragoons, a class of infantry that traveled by horseback,

as part of the King of Spain service. Fifteen years later, he traveled to New Spain, a portion of North and Central America that encompassed modern day Arizona and Mexico. He had been appointed a royal inspector by King Philip the Fifth, who also happened to be his cousin. Although on paper, Peralta had been sent to merely hash out financial issues in the region, he was also there on a separate

secret mission. The king wanted him to observe the Jesuits, as there had been rumblings about them wanting independence from Spain, and Philip wanted proof, and Peralta delivered. He sent back the evidence his cousin needed to expel all the Jesuits from New Spain, which worked in Peralta's favor. He was given the new title of baron day Arizonac and three

hundred square leagues of land. Peralta lived to be one hundred and sixteen years old and had only one child, a son, who had a daughter of his own name Sophia, and as you might imagine, he listed his progeny in his ill as the heirs to the barony of Arizonac, the tract of land that makes up most of modern day Arizona. One hundred and thirty years later, that land was suddenly under the purview of one James Rivas, a

former Confederate soldier turned land barren. He had come into possession of several grants, one of which happened to be the Peralta grant, which gave him ownership of the territory, and it was a massive territory to the grant specified a breathtaking eighteen thousand, seven hundred fifty square mile area that was bigger than Maryland, New Jersey, and Washington d C. Combined. Rivas quickly established himself as a force to be feared

among settlers and the indigenous people's occupying the territory. Many left for greener pastures, while railroad and mine owners had to pay steep taxes to operate on his lands. Anyone who defied him was either beaten or had their homes set ablaze, sometimes both. If the newspapers ever wrote anything bad about him, Rivas's men would show up the next day and destroy their printing presses. He was a tyrant,

and eventually his tactics could no longer be ignored. The press stopped being afraid and started printing expose s on the shady deals that he had been inking behind the scenes. The governments also then stepped in to assess whether the land really belonged to him in the first place. Desperate to hold onto his status in power, Rivas presented Sophia Treadway. He had met fifteen year old Sophia on a train trip and noted her uncanny resemblance to Miguel de Peralta's granddaughter, Sophia.

After getting to know one another over several months, he learned the truth. The girl's mother, Sophia de Peralta, had died giving birth to her and her twin brother, who had also passed away. Her father had run off to Spain and sent her to be raised by his friend John Treadway in California. She was the true heiress to the Peralta fortune. Rivas was thrilled by the discovery and married Sophia on December thirty one, eighteen eighty two. He

was now officially bona fide royalty. He and so Via traveled to Spain and enjoyed living in the lap of luxury, rubbing elbows with all kinds of nobles and elites while they were there, But their extended honeymoon soon came crashing to a halt when Rivas learned that his barony was

being challenged. Back home, President elect Grover Cleveland's new Democratic administration was taking a long look at the Peralta grant, especially since its owner had been in the pockets of the previous Republican administration, and after a long drawn out lawsuit, the truth finally came out, Rivas did not officially own any claim to the land in Arizona, nor did his wife, the Heiress. In fact, she wasn't related to the Peraltas at all, because there had never been any Peraltas to

begin with. Sophia had been upon and one of the greatest con jobs in American history. Rivas, you see, had made the whole Peralta family up. He had invented Miguel the son and the granddaughter, the relationship to King Philip, all of it. He had also spent a decade forging all kinds of official documents as his way to legitimize

his claim, and it had almost worked. Unfortunately, Rivas had made a lot of enemies along the way, including a surveyor general named Royal Johnson, who had nearly brought his scam to an end years earlier. It was his investigation that had forced Revas to invent a living air in the first place. Six years after opening up the case, Johnson came back with proof that all the documentations surrounding

the Peralta grant was fictional. They was full of spelling and grammatical errors, and had been written with a modern pen. Rivas lost everything his land his money and his freedom. He went to prison for six years, after which he spent his remaining days homeless on the streets of Phoenix, a far cry from the mansion that he had lived in not long before. James Rivas was a career criminal,

always looking for the next con. Had he applied half the effort that he'd put into forging an entire Spanish family, he might have gone on to do great things. Unfortunately, he'll be remembered as the artificial land baron who was left with nothing, no money, no spouse, and no land. A baron baron, now, I'd call that curious. Each of the assassination attempts so far had failed miserably, but the

CIA wasn't going to give up. They had Marita Lawrence in the perfect position, and if everything went according to plan, they wouldn't have to deal with del Castro anymore. Castro once said, if surviving assassination attempts were an Olympic event, I would win the gold medal, and he was right. There were six hundred and thirty seven attempts on his life as leader of Cuba, spurred on by years of

Spanish colonization and violence followed by dictators and presidents. Castro and his recruits waged a guerrilla war against the Batista dictatorship, culminating in the ousting of Batista on January one of nineteen fifty nine. Castro took control of the government, rounded up Batista's supporters, and consolidated power. Batista's supporters were tried and executed, which helped Castro cement his foothold. The elections Castro had called for never materialized, and he seemed to

install himself as a new leader for life. At first, the United States had a friendly relationship with the new governments and with Castro himself. He visited Washington, d c. Not long after he took power, where he met Vice President Nixon and saw the sites and Americans watched Cuba with interest. That interest turned to anger and fear when Cuba began reaching out to the other superpower of the day.

The USSR AS relations continued to dissolve through the nineteen sixties, including the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban Missile crisis. The United States became desperate to rid themselves of Castro. The U. S government knew that there wasn't likely going to be a serious challenge to Castro's regime from the inside, but they hoped that they might be able to help the dictator shuffle off his mortal coil

so to speak. Now, you would assume that this would lead to serious meetings with serious outcomes as they discussed how best to handle the Cuba problem. And maybe there were, but the results were something that seemed to come more from the ACME Corporation's boardroom than any shadowy CIA office. Marita Lawrence was just one of the CIA's attempts to assassinate Castro, called Operation Mongoose and costing four point four

million dollars. Young Cuban exiles were recruited to infiltrate Castro's Cuba, and Lawrence was among them. You see, she was Castro's ex girlfriend, and even though she had been spurned years earlier, she still had an intimate access to his home. The CIA gave her poison pills that would dissolve quickly into food or drink and we're entirely lethal. Unfortunately, Lawrence decided to smuggle them inside a jar of cold cream, which dissolved them. She panicked and confess to everything to Castro,

who lost his temper. He proceeded to rail against the United States for several minutes before handing over his forty five and telling her to finish the job. She claimed to have thrown down the gun and left both Castro and the CIA to their own devices. Now, clearly this plan failed due to bad luck, but the CIA had others in store that probably would only have worked against

the likes of Wiley Coyote and Yosemite Sam. In the early nineteen sixties, for example, the CIA poured money and time into researching cigars that would be rolled with explosives so that they would blow up in Castro's face when he smoked one. Other sources say that they thought about coding one of Castro's ever present cigars with a nerotoxin

that would take care of the job. Looking back, the CIA seemed to be enamored with the idea of explosives, so when the cigar plan wasn't successful, they decided to focus on his love of diving. Based on CIA documents, they debated painting a conk shell with bright colors to catch his attention, and when he swam over to pick it up, it would be an explosive. They also tried a poison pen which apparently failed because the inside man

thought that it was a stupid plan. That attempt to pass the poison pen off happened on the day that JFK was assassinated, so the CIA decided to do away with that one entirely. And there were other crazy ideas as well. They tried thallium in his shoes, hoping that he would lose his beard, because in the CIA's mind, that was the true source of his influence. They tried blowing up a podium while he was giving a speech

in Panama, which was foiled by Cuban security. For all the dynamite happy, proactive poisoners that seemed to be operating the CIA, their most spectacular attempt came when they tried to hire the real professionals to help. The mob was extremely bitter about Castro's control of Cuba because they lost several profitable casinos, and so a CIA agent went undercover and approached three members of the mafia, pretending to be an international businessman who had lost money to Castro's gam

billing band. Apparently, poison pills were passed over to the mafiosi and they tried to get the drugs into Castro's food for months until the plot was called off due to the extreme heat and the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion. Of course, we know that Castro managed to dodge every assassination attempt that came his way, ridiculous as some of them may have been, and lived to the rifled age of ninety. The CIA may have been successful at toppling regimes all around the world, but in Cuba they hit

a wall that they never quite overcame. As more historical files are released to the public, maybe we'll come across something stranger than poison pens and exploding seashells. But for now, as Porky Pig always said, that's all folks. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Mankey in partnership with how

Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can learn all about it over at the World of Lore dot com. And until next time, stay curious. Yeah,