Welcome to Criminalia, a production of Shondaland Audio in partnership with iHeartRadio.
If you were a financially savvy man in Chicago in the early nineteen twenties, there was one investment you wanted to be in on the Biano River Syndicate. It was an exclusive investment and it was the topic of conversation among the Chicago elite. The opportunity centered around oil rich lands and Panama that were said to also be ripe with other money making potential, including timber and specifically mahogany.
And it was a mild mannered, balding and bespectacled Chicago lawyer named Leo Coretz who was the architect of the deal and the guy who held the key to investing in it. And we're here to talk about how Coretts scammed millions of dollars from unsuspecting investors. Ah Yes, con artist season. Welcome to Criminalia. I'm Maria Tremarky.
And I'm Holly Frye. Leopold Coretz was born in Or around eighteen seventy nine into a Jewish family in what is now chech Ya. The family moved to Chicago, Illinois when he was just about six years old. He was a good student and excelled in debate at Lakeview High School, and it said that even while in school, Leo had a talent for quote separating people from their money. After graduation, he went to work as what was then known as
an office boy for a prestigious law firm. That's no longer a job description, but the job's responsibilities would have fallen into administrative services. Basically, he clerked. He studied law at Chicago Kent College of Law and graduated in nineteen oh one. After a few years in law practice and reportedly practicing without technically ever being admitted to the bar, Leo became bored and impatient with the routine legal work that he was doing every day. It was time for
a change. It was time to shake things up. It was time to separate people from their money.
Leo's life narrative is a little fuzzy here when it comes to his dive into the criminal world. Some say he began with fictitious claims in a con involving rice farming in Arkansas. Others say he may have started by selling fake mortgages to his clients. The story most agree on, though, is this one, Leo was part of an investor's group that had paid thousands of dollars for a piece of
land in Panama. It proved to be worthless the land and the investment, as it turned out that the land was mud and the seller didn't actually own what he was selling. Leo took a lesson regarding his financial future from this fiasco. The way to make a real fortune was to doupe investors on phony land deals, and so with that bad guy lesson learned, Leo got in.
The con game.
In nineteen seventeen, he began selling stock in his new company, the BiONO River Syndicate, also known as the BiONO Trust Company, which he claimed owned as many as five million acres in Panama. That wait, correction, he claimed to own five million acres of land that gushed with crude oil in Panama. His company offered shareholders annual dividends of a whopping twenty
percent on oil fields that didn't exist. Some accounts suggest Leo claimed his oil fields earned investors a sixty percent return, which is astronomical. Over this long con he builket investors out of at least two million dollars, and that number is not adjusted for today's money.
Leo's own family members, including his mother, brothers, and in laws, altogether invested one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in his land deal. This was a hot ticket idea. Others, including members of Chicago's elite and middle class, as well as clients at his firm, practically begged him for a piece of the action. The more they wanted in, the more
Leo discouraged potential investors. One duped client later described this strategy of negative salesmanship as quote the principle that a person will literally fight for something that is most difficult to get, and people did. Leo is said to have recalled of the situation quote, they camped at the curb outside my home and at my doorstep.
Leo was doing well and treated himself well, very well, and as his wealth grew, Leo's standard of living became more luxurious, and he moved into a lakefront estate on Sheridan Road in Evanstone, which is like twenty miles outside of Chicago. Leo had married may Isabelle Mayer in nineteen oh six, and the couple had a son, Mentor and a daughter, Maury. While he kept his family in the
suburb Verbs. Leo also kept an apartment kind of like a hush hush love nest on Chicago's North Side under the alias of al Branson, where he lived for years with his so called wife, Alice, who was totally not at all legally his wife, but the neighbors didn't know that. When it came to romancing women, Leo once said, quote, I don't see why these women won't leave me alone. In jest, were sure because he himself was an unscrupulous seducer in the wealthy Lithario rule he'd made for himself.
Leo once had flowers delivered to a European divorcee he had his eye on while she was traveling on an ocean liner and route from London to New York City. Women left their husbands to be with him, not knowing he was also married.
Leo belonged to exclusive clubs. He had a box at the Opera, solid Gold, Humidors, Diamond Studs, and he was chauffeured about the city in a Rolls Royce limousine. Leo would say that he had quote a bit of good luck, that's all, nothing to talk about. There was a little more to it than that though, as his wealth was not the product of luck, it was sustained by fraud because fake oil is fake and therefore cannot be bought or sold. Here is how Leo was actually making his money.
He simply took funds from those who invested in his venture and invested it in himself. A little more detail. So Leo promised high returns on your investment, and that, of course is a very attractive offer. Despite his pensiant for what we earlier referred to as negative salesmanship, he was really always looking for new investors because those new
marks were the key to keep this con going. Money he took from new investors was used to pay dividends to keep his early stockholders happy and around and around. And it wouldn't be much of a scam if he didn't keep the rest, right, would it. If this smells like a Ponzi scheme, you're one hundred percent correct. This robbing Peter to pay Paul scam at the time, though, would not have been known as a Ponzi scheme. Not yet. Charles Ponzi himself was just getting into the game too.
He launched his scam in nineteen nineteen, two years after Leo.
People were really excited about Leo's venture. A group of Chicago business owners were so excited about the deal that they threw him a lavish banquet at the Drake Hotel in the Gold Coast of the city in June of nineteen twenty two. In his book Empire of Deception, author and professor Dean Job describes how at each place setting there was a fine vellum booklet offering a satirical look at the men of the hour. You really can't make
this up. It also included a joke referring to Charles Ponzi, who actually happened to be in a lot of trouble in nineteen twenty two. How funny it would be to compare Leo's solid investment to Charles's defrauding scams, thought the unsuspecting investors. They called Leo our Ponzi, and they quote
roared with laughter. The Chicago Tribune covered the event at the Drake and reported quote, in the center of the flower garlanded table deposed a large plaster cast replica of the Panama Canal zone, symbolic of the scene of operations of the Biano Bonanza. The Tribune noted that the place cards also announced. The party was given for Leo by quote the friends and relatives whom he has dragged from
the gutter. A rousing rendition of for He's a jolly goodfellow was sung, and Leo was the center of thunderous applause. The New York Times would later call him quote the most resourceful confidence man in the United States.
We're going to take a break for a word from our sponsor. When we return, we will talk about what investors found when they visited Panama.
Welcome back to Criminaliat. He tried to talk them out of it, but a group of Leo's investors traveled to Panama to check out their venture. So let's talk about how that went.
While most were celebrating, some investors did worry that the Bayano venture was just too good to be true. A small group of corporate executives, some retired, requested a trip to see the Panamanian oil operations that they had invested in. It's no surprise that a trip to Panama to view non existent oil fields was not high on Leo's list of things to do, so he stalled these investors for a while, but they insisted, and then in nineteen twenty three,
a party set out for Panama. They were trailed by a reporter from the Chicago Tribune. Leo declined to accompany them.
What the fact finding party found was nothing. There was no evidence of Leo's company in any court records, nor was there any development or infrastructure to extract and transport any oil if there had been any trace of some. What the group did report finding along the Bayanu River were alligators and mosquitoes. The Tribune reporter observed quote residents in Panama were astonished to learn that millions of dollars have been subscribed for the Buyanu Trust Company, and the
investigators have returned feeling they have been stung. On December twelfth, the party reported on their findings, and upon their return, the investors, angry that they'd bought into a scam, were interviewed at the State's Attorney's office in Chicago. A list of indictments followed, and Leo was charged with felonies that covered his peddling worthless securities to running a confidence game.
But Leo was not in Chicago to take the heat. After sending investors off to inspect these fake operations in Panama, Leo loved the scene. He announced to his friends and family that he had done quite well on a recent stock sale, and he planned to take a vacation in New York City. He did go to New York. He did not go to Panama. Ever. In fact, he didn't even stay in New York long as if he were
on the run, one might say. From New York he moved to Nova Scotia, Canada, and there he assumed the alias leu keat Lou's fictional backstory was that he was a retired financier turned literary critic, and a Halifax newspaper introduced him to its readers as quote a writer of reputation.
Leo's love of literature was actually long known in Chicago. He'd spent thousands of dollars building a library for himself. Adolf Croach, the proprietor of a Michigan Avenue bookstore where Leo often shopped, said of him, quote, mister Corretz was most sensitive to fine writing. His favorite author was reportedly Joseph Conrad, and he was proud of his complete collection
of the works of Mark Twain. He knew the epigrammatic poems of the rubiyat by Omar Khyam by heart, and claimed Croach purchased a rare edition of the work worth thousands of dollars. British publisher, anthologist and lecturer Temple Scott considered Leo to be quote one of the most interesting men I have ever known.
While he did use an alias while living in Nova Scotia, Leo didn't exactly lay low. He threw parties, and he purchased the Pinehurst Lodge with yes money he had acquired from his fake oil company. He had planned to make what was often described as an ostentatious lodge a quote sportsman's colony.
He was so deep in disguise that many wondered how he ever got There are two versions of the story of his arrest and extradition to the United States, the first which is highly unlikely, but it's a good story nonetheless, so here we go. It claims Leo's real identity was discovered when he took a suit in for tailoring forgetting his real name was sewn inside the jacket, but it's much more likely the Chicago detectives who got him did so in kind of an ingenious way that didn't involve tailoring.
Police detectives and federal agents spent probably about a year running down false leads and looking into anonymous tips. But it was Leo's health that exposed him. The authorities knew something important about Leo. He was diabetic and he needed insulin. During their investigation of his whereabouts, they contacted facilities where the drug was available. That may seem like a huge endeavor today, but at the time, insulin was still really new.
It was discovered by researchers from the universe city of Toronto in Ontario, Canada, and introduced in nineteen twenty two. A Montreal sanitarium, which is just an antiquated name for a medical facility that treats chronic illness, responded to them saying that yes, they had treated a man from Nova Scotia who matched Leo's description.
And authorities moved in on him. But before we get to Leo's arrest, we're going to take a break for a word from our sponsors, and when we return, we'll talk about his extradition to the United States and his trial.
Welcome back to Criminalia. Let's talk about how Leo was discovered by his nemesis, a man named Robert.
Crowe on December thirteenth, nineteen twenty three, the Tribune published
a story about a raid on Leo's eye offices. Quote fake oil well promotions totaling about five million dollars A swindle of proportions unprecedented in Chicago, were disclosed yesterday when State's attorney Robert E. Crowe led detectives in a raid on the magnificently appointed offices of Leo Corretz, an attorney who has occupied the entire third floor of the Majestic building at twenty two West Monroe Street, with spacious branch
offices at the Drake Hotel. So this man, Robert Crowe, you could call him Leo's nemesis, at least within the Illinois justice system. Robert was State's attorney for Cook County and is probably best known for convicting the thrill killers Leopold and Lobe. Leo and Robert knew each other personally. The two of them had started their legal careers at the same time and at the same Chicago law firm. Author Job later noted that quote both would prove willing to do what had to be done to get ahead.
When a Biano Khon went sour, Crow launched the international manhunt to find Leo.
In nineteen twenty four, the Cook County States Attorney informed the Halifax County Sheriff that lou Keat was not who they thought he was. He was really a criminal named Leo Corretz who had built investors to the tune of at least two million dollars in a fraudulent land deal. Of his arrest, the caretaker of Pinehurst Lodge told the reporter from the Chicago Tribune that Leo quote didn't have the breeding a gentleman would have. Lou back to the name. Leo was arrested in late November that year.
Leo's wife and in laws were shocked to hear he was a criminal and had fled to Canada. We were initially surprised that he would allow his family to fall victim to his com but then what turned up in research was a note in the Chicago Tribune that read that he quote made a specialty for years of systematically robbing only his relatives and close friends. Some of his clients who'd lost money with the venture, visited his Evanstone
home in an effort to console his wife. The Tribune covered the scene, reporting quote Jewish folk from the North Chores. Others from Chicago, from Rogers Park to Hyde Park are whispering a veritable Aliel Aliel, my God, my God of lamentation.
Leo waived extradition proceedings and was returned to Illinois, where he pleaded guilty. On December third, nineteen twenty four. Leo stood before a judge. The Chicago Tribune reported of the scene, quote, Corretz pleaded guilty before Judge Hopkins yesterday afternoon to the four indictments presented by State's Attorney Crow, charging him with larceny by Bailey, larceny, operation of a confidence game, and
a general indictment charging him with the three counts. They continued that two of Leo's and a sister were present in the courtroom, but his wife was not. Regarding his wife's absence, Leo asked the judge if he could contact her. Quote, I don't want her to come to see me and be subjected to unpleasant publicity, but I would like permission to telephone her and my mother sometime tomorrow.
Leo was sentenced to ten years in prison. Leo's wife, along with eight other relatives and two friends of her husband, combined gave three hundred thousand dollars to authority to go toward Leo's debts. May, according to job, became committed to making amends to his victims. One of those victims, a dining car steward, invested his life savings with Leo, and then he quit his job to quote live off the
profits he was certain were headed his way. Many people had invested their entire life savings in this scam.
Leo died in prison on January sixth, nineteen twenty five, serving about a month of his sentence. It is assumed Leo took his life to avoid prison time. Leo, as we know, was diabetic. In prison, he was assigned to light duty in the prison yards, but he was soon overwhelmed by symptoms of his diabetes. Though he had properly managed his condition in Nova Scotia, he had not been treated since he had been detained for his trial and during his incarceration. He was sent to the prison hospital
for insulin injections, but his condition worsened. And that's because somehow Leo got his hands on a large box of chocolates, assumed to have been delivered by an obliging girlfriend. He ate every piece of the alleged five pound box, and soon fell into a diabetic coma.
The night he died, a prison guard captain named Michael Leonard sat by his side. Two of his brothers, Adolf and Emil, who had previously been by his side, and his nineteen year old son Mentor sat in the warden's office. Despite her efforts, his wife arrived about an hour after his death, commenting only that quote, I only wish I had known sooner that he was so near death. He was laid to rest at Waldheim Cemetery in Forest Park,
a suburb of Chicago. A rabbi shared a brief prayer as Leo was lowered into a grave.
On January ninth, nineteen twenty five, Chicago Tribune reporter Genevieve Forbes Herrick, who had closely covered Leo's scam, eulogized him, writing quote, Leo Corretz, the two million dollar con man whose lavish pageant of life had piled climax on climax with amazing result, was buried yesterday in a funeral ceremony that was a distinct and perhaps a significant anti climax, an open grave at the immanual Jewish cemetery in Waldheim. A handful of relatives standing about in the snow, waiting
for the body to come from the Juliet Penitentiary. A gray casket in a gray hearse, Bretz's brother and son riding with the undertaker. A bunch of pink roses splattered with clay, A wreath tossed to one side, the widow sobbing over the loss that came more than a year ago. A rabbi repeating the regular service, and it was over.
No crowds, no elaborate funeral cortege, no pallbearers, no heaped up flowers, still fewer heaped up eulogies, nothing but the minimum for the man who always loved the maximum.
Are you ready for some scams?
I could use some.
I think you're gonna love this one. Maybe we'll see what happens. It's a very Maria and Holly drink in terms of like things we love. So in thinking about this, I was trying to think of a way to bookend Leo's life, and particularly his story as it relates to scams, which, in my mind, the imagery that really stuck with me was that it started with oil. Even if it was fake and it ended with roses. So this is called oil and Roses, nicely done, and it is very yummy
in my opinion. It's a really simple drink to put together, and there's no trickery. It doesn't shift gears or anything while you're drinking, and it's just very delicious. It is three quarters of an ounce of lemon juice, three quarters of an ounce of rose syrup, and an ounce and a half of bourbon or your favorite whiskey, and then you shake that, you strain it over ice, and you top it with club soda.
What a delightful drink.
This drink is so good. However, the mocktail like knocked my socks off because all I did was subout black tea, which we often do for a bourbon or whiskey in our drinks, right, and it becomes like this great sparkling, lightly sweet tea delicious drink it all the time that I'm gonna premix it and I'm gonna serve it at everything, because it's so yummy.
Oil and roses. It's got a lovely name, and it's a lovely.
Drink, doesn't it It sounds so romantic. I was trying to think I will say the drink that got away on this one was I kept trying to think about a drink that would honor May, because I feel like his wife is the unsung hero of this people.
I love that she just said that because her she pops up from time to time in history, we don't have a very much information about her, and she's always there for him.
Yeah, so I want to think about May and if we ever get more information about her, maybe she'll get a drink of her own in the future. But as far as I'm concerned, she can be represented by the roses. She seems like she must have been an extraordinary woman when she finds out that this happened, and her reaction was we have to help all of the victims. We will use this drink that is about Leo's life, though to toast to May. I think the oil and roses is really to honor her while we tell his story.
That's the scoop butt, Matt.
I think that's a good way to put it. I do.
I do. Thank you so much for spending time with us. We hope that no one scams you out of anything, and that you will meet us right back here again next week for another story and some more drinks. Criminalia is a production of Shondaland Audio in partnership with iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from Shondaland Audio, please visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.