Reed C. Waddell and the Goldbrick Game

is a term that originates from confidence artists. When a gold coating is applied to a brick of worthless metal, usually lead, it may appear to be a gold bar on the surface, but in reality it's something far less valuable.

And Three. American read See Bottle is credited with one of the most celebrated cons among cons, the gold brick swindle, and you can thank his work with that swindle for the origin of the term gold bricker, which today is frequently used to describe a person who maintains appearances but is actually totally lazy or incompetent. Welcome to Criminalia, So let's talk about gold. I'm Maria tram Marquis and I'm

Holly Fry. Reid Sea Waddle was born to Absalom and Nancy Waddle in Springfield, Illinois, in eighteen sixty, give or

take a year. Absalom was a horse dealer and frequently entered horses in races and shows around the region, and when he died, a brief obituary in the Illinois State Journal described him as quote an old and well known citizen that sounds pretty benign, But his son was a budding criminal, and by the time Reid was seven or eight years old, newspapers had already started reporting on his conduct.

Relieved his misconduct from one report quote, he was known in the neighborhood of Washington at eleven Streets East as about the toughest foulmouthed boy in the section. The gamblers, who all knew him did not care to talk to a stranger about him. All the men here, who ever used to follow the races in the time when the elder Waddle was in business, unite in saying that he was the meanest man they ever knew. In that line,

he had not the first redeeming manly quality. The boy, however, had he dressed well and could on occasion go into any society. But jump ahead a few years and newspaper records report Read was indicted at age seventeen in connection with a confidence game he ran in Carlinville, Illinois. What that game is, though, we don't know, it's lost to history. By eighteen eighty, when Waddle was twenty years old, the Illinois State Register reported on another of his arrest, this

time on a gambling warrant out of Tolono, Illinois. Quoting from the article, Waddle is notorious among police circles here, and they will be glad to hear that he receives the full penalty of the law at his trial in Tolono. Waddle two is mentioned in the memoir of Illinois State Journal history columnist John ey Vaughn, published years later in

September of nineteen twenty one. Quote Commercial Alley. The alley behind the west side of the two hundred block of South sixth Street, Harvard public gaming houses and was a hangout for confidence operators. Read Waddle, who became internationally notorious as a gold brick man, had his training in this environment. Waddle enjoyed cards and horses, but he didn't start his

criminal career as a con artist. He was kind of a jack of all trades hustler, and his repertoire included things like a rigged form of the dice game Bunco. At that time, that was a really popular con, and as any good confidence man, Waddle would have taken part in Bunko. Sometime in the early eighteen eighties, Wattle moved to New York City. He reported they began running scams known as green goods scams, which were common cons in

nineteenth century America. These scams tricked people into paying for worthless counterfeit currency and left them literally holding a bag containing sawdust and a wad of fake currency on top. Actually not too dissimilar to the gold brick con. Really, basically, the gold brick scam really simply put involved selling a tangible good for more than it's worth to a person unaware that the item has been switched to one of lesser value, and Waddle's marks were usually people on the

street who just couldn't resist a good deal. We're going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors, and when we're back we will talk about a man named Robert Pinkerton who refused to give credit to Waddle for the old brick game, and probably for good reason. Welcome back to Criminalia. Let's talk about how the gold brick game works and how Waddle convinced his marks that

his gold was good. Waddle happened to be in the gold business at a time when the United States was reforming the US Mint, and that meant that there were some changes happening with US currency. Here's what was going on around eighteen sixty nine. The Mint Act of eighteen thirty seven, which was enacted, of course, before both the California Gold Rush and the American Civil War, was determined

by the federal government to be outdated. Four years later, a revised act known as the Mint Act of eighteen seventy three, or you'll also see it as the Act of eighteen seventy three went into effect, and it was a general revision of laws relating to the Mint. When it came to gold, it allowed for anyone holding that precious metal to continue to have their bullion made into money if they desired, and the Act created a gold standard, but it did not do the same for other precious metals.

When silver's market price fell in eighteen seventy six. For example, those who brought silver bullion to the mint were turned away. The mint, under the new laws, was no longer authorized to coin it. While this kicked off some major political controversy regarding the gold standard and the belief of free coinage for silver, we won't get into that too deeply because the important thing to know in waddle story is that there was change regarding the United States and people

who lived there and their money and their medals. Confidence artist involved in this game also often tried to best each other with stories of how they encourage their targets to believe that the tables were turned and that they the mark, were actually swindling the sellers into selling something for a price far below it's worth. Greed can get tricky, can't it. The Gold Brick con had a few moving pieces.

It involved printing brochures to sparkle mark's interest in the sale of what confidence artists would call perfect counterfeit money. This really wasn't the kind of con where you would go up to a stranger on the street and say, buddy, want to buy my gold, But it was the kind of Cohn where you wanted to attract some attention to your goods. Buy these bricks now at amazingly low prices. Take them off my hands. You'll never get a better deal.

There would be a story too, as to why these bricks were for sale and on sale, something legit, of course, like someone selling bars that are unable to take on a voyage for whatever reason that might have been. But this scam all so involved non precious metal bars, usually lead, sometimes brass. Wattle fashioned his lead bars into I'm going to go air quoted gold, with layer upon layer of

gold plate coating applied to each bar. His fake gold ingot always included small details that could make or break the scam. He was known to apply stampings with the markings of a bank or the United States government, for instance. Assay offices are set up to essay precious metals, and they're in place to help protect consumers from buying fake items. During successful essays, the assayer typically stamps a hallmark on

the item to certify its metallurgical content. Wattle included such details and that lad Waddle's targets to falsely believe that he was offering bricks that had been evaluated by the federal government and just in case. Waddle also inserted a plug of real gold into the fake bar. One spot on the brick was planted with genuine gold that he could easily remove an offer as a way for a doubting mark to authenticate the bar, like scrape a little piece off and go, oh, have this tested. Little did

the victim know. Waddle always set up an accomplice as his assayer with all of the necessary accoutrement of the trade, including scales, weights, and chemicals, so everything appeared to be on the up and up. The pitch was also aimed at gamblers, but they didn't need all the smoke and mirrors. They were interested in the bricks because they wanted to be using phony money or they wanted to use it up to cover their previous losses. In that scenario, the gamblers,

just as other targets, never got the gold. But for them it wasn't like they could turn to the police for help. Some reports suggest that Waddle was able to sell his gold bricks for thousands of dollars apiece, the first for four thousand dollars. According to some reports, selling gold plated lead bricks for prices ranging from five hundred to seventy five hundred per bar, made Waddle more than a quarter of a million dollars by the end of the decade, and that is not adjusted for today's values.

Waddle ran his gold brick con for years, and no one debates his success using that game. Some people say that Waddle invented it, but others disagree with that. Robert Pinkerton was the son of Alan Pinkerton, who was the founder of Pinkerton's National Detective Agency, and Robert was reluctant to credit Waddle with its invention. In the May twenty eighth, nineteen o one edition of the Los Angeles Herald, he was quoted saying, and bear with me, it's a long quote,

so here we go. The gold brick business is an American institution, but its earliest promoters were Spaniards and Italians. About forty years ago, the game was played with gold dust or gold filings. Among the pioneers were Emil Rodriguez and Adolph Superbello. Their game was to find some man who had a few thousand dollars and then tell him about their having a bag full of gold filings or gold dust which had been stolen. They must get rid of the property and would be willing to sell it

at a great sacrifice. After getting him interested, they would take the intended victim to an essay office, which was a bogus concern, and then they would receive the assurance that the yellow metal was all that was claimed for it, and the man who gave this information would usually make

the owner a liberal offer for his plunder. The bag, securely sealed, was then sold to the victim, who received strict instructions to say nothing about his purchase for a little while until the loss of the gold was less fresh in the minds of the people. In order to be perfectly secure, some of the victims packed up and went abroad, and only when they were ready to enjoy their new wealth they discovered that the treasure bag contained

base metal and not gold. I arrested these men in Cincinnati more than thirty five years ago, and they were tried in Chicago and convicted. So there's a long winded way of saying that. Back in eighteen sixty six, Robert Pinkerton apprehended two swindlers who gave the names of H. Welton and Richard Bishop, trying to run the gold brick game on banks and brokers in Ohio. His point Waddle ran green goods scams and gold brick swindles, but he

did not do it. First, we are going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors, and when we're back we will talk about forres, the world's second oldest profession and an argument that led to the death of a con artist. Welcome back to Criminalia. Before the break, we were talking about a man who insisted Read Waddle could not have invented the gold brick swindle. So now let's talk about a guy who disagrees with him.

A man named Herbert Asbury disagrees with Robert Pinkerton's assessment that Waddle couldn't be the origin of the gold brick swindle. In his research and study of the New York City Underworld while writing the nineteen twenty eight book Gangs of New York and Informal History of the New York Underworld, Asbury gives Waddle credit for inventing the scam. But he's kind of the only one though. See Waddle became famous because of this con game, and it's highly likely that

he really popularized it. Perhaps he was the first to bring the game to New York. Perhaps he was great at this swindle so great it was hard for any of his contemporaries to remember anyone else ever doing it. When it comes to its origin, though, there are reports of the first known use of the term gold brick in a fraudulent way dating back to eighteen sixty five, and in eighteen sixty five, Waddle was still just a

kid growing up in Illinois. While he may have been in the first generation of confidence artists to employ the gold brick game, Waddle worked on and off with four other older and more experienced men who all worked the same scam. They were William Emory Train who went by Bill, John Leary, who went by Red van Buren, Triplet, and

Tom O'Brien. The first known published mention of the swindle dates to a newspaper clipping from eighteen seventy nine where the Khan was conducted in Chicago and possibly Kansas City by two men calling themselves Walker and Thomas A. Lewis, and it is highly likely that these were aliases of one or two of the men Waddle worked with who we just mentioned previously. So, whether you believe Pinkerton or you believe Asbury, we know this one thing from history.

It's assumed that gold and silver coinage was invented around six to fifty BC, and pretty much ever since it appeared it has been tampered with and fake, and as far as we could tell, it was probably the very next day that counterfeit coins were passed on the streets. Real gold bars and coins are made from pouring molten gold into molds. Ancient counterfeiters, just like today's, would use a base metal core such as lead, and then cover it with a thin layer of precious metal such as gold.

This all sounds very familiar so far, and then they would strike it between engraved dyes. A counterfeitter who could produce works with seamless coding and who used dyes of good quality could produce lookalike fakes that felt real in terms of their size and their weight. These types of fake coins, which could often pass as genuine, are known as ferrets, which comes from a French word meaning stuffed.

The idiom, world's second oldest profession, is often used in reference to counterfeiting, and it indeed has been going on for a very long time. Historians have founded base metal bars made to imitate gold ingots that were used as currency before the introduction of coins, counterfeit precious metals were hardly new to nineteenth century America. They were an international problem. Wattle, of course, did not invent any of this, although he may have told a good story or two that he did.

Of course, at the end of the day, it's really not about who invented this type of counterfeiting and when, but rather how much money you could get from a mark who was willing to hand it over. So in March of eighteen ninety five, Waddle was working with one of his New York mentors, a Nanuel recognized from earlier in the episode, Tom O'Brien. Tom had made an estimated half million dollars over a five month period using the

gold brick game at the Colombian Exposition. The Exposition was a world's fair held in Chicago in eighteen ninety three to celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of Christopher with US's arrival in the New World. The fair ended in tragedy when a cold storage structure dubbed the Greatest refrigerator on Earth went up in flames and claimed sixteen lives. But for the con artists who had descended upon the crowds of the expo before the accident, it was an opportunity

to make a whole lot of money. Anyway, back to reading Tom. Two years later in France, the men were running cons in Paris when they had a falling out. There are three versions of this story, so it may have been jealousy over a love interest but probably not. Or it may have been over a loan or loan repayment for reported ten thousand dollars that sounds plausible, or, and this is the most popular telling, it was most

likely overshares of a bunko swindle. Heated words were exchanged, things got physical, and while the men fought in the cafe, American Waddled hit O'Brien over the head with a bottle and fled. The next day, March twenty seventh, O'Brien encountered Waddle at the Gausdun train station and shot him several times, including twice in the back and chest. Waddle died of his wounds. O'Brien was arrested by French authorities, but his trial was temporarily postponed when the United States Department of

State requested that he be extradited to the US. During his subsequent trial, which was held in France. O'Brien testified that he'd killed Waddle, yes, but that it was in self defense. O'Brien's attorney, identified as French jurist Metre Edgar Damanes, argued, according to The New York Times quote that there had been an exchange of shots, which was an ordinary way

of settling quarrels in America. Famous former New York police detective Thomas F. Burns had referred to O'Brien as quote king of the Bunkomen in his book Professional Criminals of America, published in eighteen eighty six, nine years before the argument that ended with Waddle dead and O'Brien in prison. Burns claimed that O'Brien had been apprehended in almost every city across the United States, and he had spent at least

twenty years on and off in prison during his criminal career. Also, according to Burns, O'Brien was perhaps most infamous as a bunco steerer, not as a gold brick swindler. So a bunco steerer is someone who entices a mark into the swimmle. O'Brien could not, no matter how good his acting, smooth, talk himself out of his sentence, though he died in prison in France. By the time he was gunned down in Paris, Waddle had become one of the best known

confidence artists of the late nineteenth century. Nancy Waddle had her son's body returned to Illinois, where he is today buried next to his parents in Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield. Like a little scam sauce, so we can raise a glass to read, I suppose scammer extraordinaire. If we want to toast to him. His demise was terrible, let's toast to him. I went with a very obvious name. But I'm just calling this one the gold brick. But there's a trick to it. It may not be what it

initially appears. And this kind of becomes also a combination of a few drink ideas. It shares DNA with various ones. But the bass drink I wanted to reference the French finish of his life. And the bass drink is similar to, but not exactly the same as, a drink called a monkey gland, which was invented in France in nineteen twenty. Why do I feel like we've had a conversation about

the monkey gland before? Maybe not on the show. Mine is a little different, but that was the drink I started thinking about as a base, and then I went from there. This involves several steps, none of them are hard, but just be ready. There are a few different things going on here. The main drink itself is an ounce and a half of orange juice, an ounce and a half of gin, a splash of simple syrup to taste a little to like half an ounce. You don't need a ton. It depends on the acidity of your orange

juice and what you like. That is going to get shaken with ice so it's nice and cold. Then you are going to take a quarter of an ounce I would say, of absinthe and another quarter of an ounce of simple syrup, and you're just going to combine those and then pour them into your pre chilled glass and glaze the glass with it. So that also is you know how sassare has often made, so you're similar to that, but you just want to get that flavor shift that

happens from the absinthe. Then you'll put your ice in strain that drink over it. The third step though, and also I will tell you at the end, I recommend if you really want to buy into the storyline of it not using a glass but using some vessel that is not clear, like a mug or a like a carved cocktail glass or something. Because your third thing that you're gonna do is take about two ounces of heavy cream and I don't know, like a half teaspoon of turmeric,

and you're gonna blend those together. Like if you have a blendy thing, great, you could throw in turmeric until you get it nice and spoon that on top so it looks like a golden yummy delicious, like perhaps creamy drink. But under it is this like whamity lamb in an absence. Here's the thing though, So I was a little worried. I was like, always this gonna work. Is this I'm

gonna play nice together? And you can also, depending on your flavor desires, add a little bit of simple syrup to that heavy cream and turmeric mixture if you want it to really be whip creamy. But if you then just stir it all together in the glass after your moment of presentation, what no one can tell is the look on her face. Delicious. It becomes like, I don't know, like a creamsicle has a baby with the absinthe Green Fairy.

It's just delicious. It's so delicious, it is unconscionably delicious. I don't even know that maybe my favorite drink description of ever. I loved this drink. It's oh man, now I'm like. My brain immediately was like, we should start working on absentthe milk. I had never really thought about

combining absinthe and a cream in quite that way. There are some absinthe and milk drinks, but like that heavy cream, I didn't know if the cream was going to play nice with the acidity of the orange juice and gin, which sometimes they can bite each other. Dairy doesn't always love all these things. But oh mamma, yeah no, I'm coming over for the absence milk chair. Holy Moses. Yes, I'll space it out so it's not too absence in a row. But to make the mocktail, this is super easy.

You're gonna use an Anna set syrup in lieu of absinthe. If you do that, you don't really have to combine it with simple syrup. You can just use the syrup itself and put glass to make the glaze, and then you're gonna skip the gin and you can sub that out with any of the things we've talked about using for gin, like a camomile tea there with some pepper in it, or you could do another juice. I actually think it would change the flavor profile so much, but

it would also be delicious. If you did pineapple juice and an orange juice with that subtle and a set flavor of the glaze and then the termuric cream on top, that would be like making a tropical like lookout people, this will replace it. Yeah, And that's how I would do the mocktail on this. And that is called the gold brick because it's not quite what you think it's gonna be, but in this case, it's quite delicious and not oh man, I got this instead. I hope, I

hope it's not a bait and switch. I'm gonna bait and switch myself some more of it. This is very yummy. It's so yummy like the Shamrock shake except for adults. Yes, absentthe does sometimes have a subtle mint note, but the licorice flavor is really driving the bus. But I do know from a bar that I love to go to, they took their absentthe cocktail which was kind of a

signature when they opened off the menu. You can still get it, but people that go there will order it thinking it's gonna taste minty, and when it tastes of liquorice, they're like, I don't want this. And they were having to throw out hundreds of dollars of absinthe every day. So a lot of people don't like a liquorice too. So if you get it and you weren't surprised and you're surprised that it's there, you may actually not like

it as well. And I wish I could just hang out and be like, I'll drink your drink to all of those people, because I love absence, love it. I do want to make an absence milkshake. We can workshop that on the side, and somehow we will make it. We will also make more episodes. We'll be right back here next week to share them with you and subsequent weeks, and we are so thankful that you spent this time with us, so we will see you soon with more

scam sauce and more scammers. 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.