Pros and Cons

it would change our lives. What we don't often think about is why people deceive us. In the case of David Copperfield and other magicians, it's for entertainment to get a rise out of us, to instill a sense of wonder and awe in the audience. The supposed pray is just looking for a quick buck from an unwitting victim. Then there are people like Victor. Victor was born in Austria, Hungary at the turn of the century, and he had a gift. He was a reader of books, yes, but

also of people. There was no real reason for him to turn to a life of crime, though It's not like he fell into a deep pit of debt or lived on the streets. As a teenager, he studied in Paris and gained fluency in multiple languages. Victor was on track to be a great student. He might have gone on to be a great man, but will never know. At nineteen years old, Victor needed a break from his education. He went on holiday where he discovered gambling and women,

and those things didn't mix too well for him. Victor quickly found himself on the receiving end of a nasty scar on one side of his face. One of the women he had met had a boyfriend with a jealous streak. But Victor recovered and he took his talents to the open seas, where he pulled schemes on unsuspecting travelers sailing between France and New York. In one he pretended to be a Broadway producer and solicited investor funds for a non existent production. As the years passed, victor scams grew

in size and boldness. By the time had come to do something big, something that would establish his legacy all over the world. He returned to Paris and came upon a newspaper story about the Eiffel Tower. The monument had fallen into disrepair and the money to fix it had run dry. The article also mentioned how the time might come one day when the city would have to simply tear it down. But where Paris saw an eyesore, Victor saw a way to get rich in the most ludicrous

way possible. He hired a forger to draft fake credentials for him, then invited several scrap metal dealers to a large hotel. He introduced himself as a high ranking official within the government and claimed that Paris just couldn't afford to keep the Eiffel Tower up anymore. It had to go, and Victor had been selected to choose the scrap metal

dealer who would haul the pieces away. He read their faces as he spoke, paying attention to the mannerisms and ticks that might give away the perfect mark for his con They weren't hard to spot either. The man who would end up with the winning bid for victor Sham business was relatively unknown in the Parisian business community. His name was Andre and he wanted to make a name for himself, so after all the bids were sent in, he put in a little extra just for Victor. It worked.

Victor accepted Andrea's offer and collected both his bribe and the money necessary to secure the towers supposed sale, and then he fled to Austria with his winnings. Poor Andre didn't know what had hit him. He couldn't go to the police, nor could he tell his fellow business men without looking foolish. Victor made sure to read the French newspapers for any mention of his scheme, but when nothing surfaced, he he'd done it. He had sold the Eiffel Tower. Now,

if that had been me, I'd have stopped there. To pull off one of the greatest cons in history without anyone else knowing about it, including the police, would have been great enough. But I'm not Victor lustig. He wanted to press his luck, to see if he could hit the jackpot twice, not once. So one year later he returned to Paris and tried the same scam again, this time with a new group of scrap metal dealers, only

this time they were prepared. The police had been tipped off about Victor's meeting and went after him, but his craftiness got the better of them. Once again. He moved to the United States, where he returned to a life of smaller, pettier crimes. Well almost you see, he'd found a new mark, a businessman from Chicago, a man no other con man would have thought to cross. Victor promised the man that he would double his money if he would just invest in an amazing new business opportunity that

he had planned. The mar agreed and gave him fifty dollars. Victor promised that he'd have twice that much in just one month. Well, the month came and went, and Victor hadn't doubled the man's money. Except this time, the conman didn't flee the country. Honestly, there wasn't anywhere that he could have gone anyway. His mark would have found him and made him pay one way or the other. So Victor just returned the fifty dollars to him, without a

cent missing. The mark was so impressed with Victor's honesty he refused it, telling him to keep it for his trouble. And the man he tried to swindle out of that fifty grand none other than the King of crime himself, al Capone. Roderick Ross McFarlane had always loved nature. He'd run up off the coast of Scotland in the early eighteen hundreds, where he was surrounded by a veritable zoo

of birds, mammals, and sea life. His love of the outdoors eventually took him to the Hudson Bay Company, a retail business specializing in the trapping and trading of first the perfect place for a budding naturalist to grow his career. Starting as a clerk, Roderick traveled all over the world, working his way up to management. He ran the trading post at several forts in the Northwest territories of Canada for many years until he was put in charge of

Fort Anderson, farther north in eighteen sixty one. During his time there, Roderick befriended the local indigenous people who traded with him and taught him about life in their territories. He also encouraged them to bring unique specimens they found for him to send to the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, d c. Where he worked on the side as a collector. During the winter, he'd stow away eggs, hides, and other natural history items and write letters to the museum's curators

about what he found. Then, in the weather warmed up, he'd box it all up and ship everything south to Washington. Over time, Roderick and the Inuit came to respect and enjoy each other's company, which is probably why they approached him After an unexpected kill one day in eighteen sixty four. Their hunters had been attacked by a bear that day

and barely survived. Using a Hudson Bay rifle, spears, and knives, they managed to kill the animal and drag its carcass back to the trading post, where Roderick happily accepted it. He honestly didn't think anything of it. It looked a little different from the other bears he'd taken, but nothing extraordinary. He skinned the bear, had the hide cured, and then sent everything to the Smithsonian, as he'd done so many

times before. The items sat in storage for over fifty years before the Dean of Naturalists, Dr. C. Hart Miriam found them that he'd never have seen anything like them. What McFarland had dismissed as a standard barren ground grizzly bear was actually something in highrely new. It had been found far outside the normal hunting grounds for bears of

the region at the time. It's fur was yellow, not dark brown like the grizzlies nor white like a polar bears, its skull was smaller, and its sharp teeth had formed much differently than the teeth of the bears known to the area. Dr Miriam concluded the objects that had been sitting in a box in the Smithsonian's archives belonged to a whole new species of bear. Vetti larcis in open natas is what he called it. It meant ancient, unexpected bear,

though it hadn't entirely been unexpected. Other explorers, such as journalist Caspar Whitney, noted encounters with bears just like the one McFarland had been given. Whitney described it as a cross between a grizzly and the polar, with rear claws as big as the front, a wide forehead, and ears like a dog's. Unfortunately, there was no way to verify the existence of others like it, given the time in which it was discovered and the lack of similar specimens,

the bear was declared extinct. As our knowledge of different species and our methods of testing d NA grow, it's becoming easier to track the lineage of such rare animals. It's possible the bear really was as Whitney described a hybrid grizzly polar bear. Others have suggested that the bear was a species that had survived past the ice age and died out on that fateful day in eighteen sixty four. We might never get a definitive answer as to what

species it really was, though, which is disappointing. I know some might even call that unbearable. 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 Manky in part ownership 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.