Episode #104 - History's Greatest Conmen
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Hi, Janina. Hi, Emma. How are you doing? I'm not too bad. I'm not too bad. How are you? I am. I... I see. I'm sick.

That was, yeah, like that. Yeah. I was feeling fine until this morning and then about lunchtime a cold came on and now I have a cold. I didn't have a cold earlier, but I went to the gym and I think the gym gave me a cold. So there's yet more evidence that gyms are bad for you. Gyms are bad for you. I didn't go to the gym today. I still have not quite got back to a regular gym going after me being sick.

Yes. But which you should, you should take it easy. If you have a respiratory infection and you push yourself too hard, then things can go, things can go bad. This is... Yeah, it can. It's bad for you. Take it easy. Ease back into things. I'm only going to the gym because I over-trained running and hurt my knee and now I can't run currently. So I'm trying to like do...

cycling at the gym instead but I hate the gym and I hate the people at the gym and I hate the mirrors and I hate sweating indoors and I hate all of it this is all fair it's all very fair so now I'm convinced that even though I have not been ill at any other time at the gym it has today made me ill and

And now I triple hate the gym. So I'm glad today that we've got a fun episode. We do have a funny episode. We should probably also every so often front load our pitch. We have a Patreon if you want to support us where we sometimes twice now have done bonus episodes and our second bonus episode is

We'll be up by this point. So if you want to listen to us, we did just a bunch of random questions from our Patreon listeners. Yeah. So if you want to listen to that, you can support us over there. And that would be lovely.

It is lovely. And we appreciate every one of you. People got to ask us questions and did an AMA and we answered them. And yeah, it was good. We got some questions that made us think surprisingly hard. Yeah. About things. And then we got really furious about patriarchy. Yeah. Which, you know, happens from time to time. Yeah. Which is good.

which is good, I think, just to keep you furious. Yeah. Yeah. So you can support us on Patreon. Our history is sexy over there. And you also get a sticker if you support us at three or five pound level. And I will send it to you from my very own house. And some of them Livia has rolled around on. That's extra special. And you also might get some Livia DNA. Yeah.

You can clone your own tiny lip here. Yes, and today we are answering a question from Carmel in England.

Perth, Australia, which is where a lot of my family are as well, the most isolated city in the world. And Carmel Connolly has asked us, as a result of doing some family research themselves and coming across a charlatan that I am going to talk about in a minute in their family, have asked us who are some of history's greatest charlatans and conmen. Yeah, that's a good question. So we're going to talk about...

some charlatans and con men this is some good real fun txt history especially now because currently we're living in an age of cons and scams everywhere you look and they're all so boring and depressing and like i'm looking for work at the moment and you're looking for a job currently it's like wading through a sea of deeply grim scams and i'm sick of it and yeah it sucks and

And so we're going to talk about fun, sexy, historical con men who are much more fun than today's boring internet-based AI grifter con men. We're going to talk about sexier people than Sam fucking Altman, the greatest con man of all. We're going to talk about, yeah, back when people had to do analogue. Analogue scams. People had to put effort into scamming. Couldn't just make chat VT. People who had to look you in the eyes while they conned you. Yeah.

Yes. And therefore did it properly. Did it properly. Yes. Or were just a bit swivel-eyed because the person I'm going to start with is the person who Carmel mentioned in the letter that they wrote in, which is a person who they were very clear married into their family and was not biologically related to them. Yeah.

They wish to make it clear that... And this person does not seem to have had any children, so his line has run out. But I did become quite fascinated by him because he is...

There's like a big gap in all of the biographies online that I could find of him where he basically massively reinvents himself. And nobody seems willing to talk about this big gap. But his name is Johannes von Gompach. And he starts as a... Like the early part of his life is that he is a German guy whose name is like just Johannes Gompach.

And he moves to England and gets married, possibly to two women at the same time. I think it's going to be a theme. Yes. The Wikipedia page for him only has one wife. And then this other article that Carmel linked has a completely different wife. And the guy who wrote the other article is like, I'm unclear as to whether these are the same wife. And there's just some like fudging of dates or...

if he's like, if this is of that era, this is like 19th century. So maybe this is the period where people are like changing their name constantly and somebody just has various, but like the names and dates all over the place and possibly he just had two wives at the same time.

Because their names are not that similar. He lives in England and he is exiled from England, which is not a thing that I thought happened to normal people in the 19th century. I mean, I guess they were doing it and calling it transportation. Yeah.

They were calling it transportation. And that is technically what he was sentenced to. But then that got commuted from transportation to Australia into... He just wasn't allowed to live in England anymore because he embezzled a load of money from this bank that he worked in. So, so far, so basic. Interesting.

He goes back to Germany. He's living in Germany. Then he lives in Guernsey for a bit. At some point, he changes his name to Baron Theodor von Gompach. Very good.

Which is good. And classic. Like, call yourself a baron, declare that you're an aristocracy of a country that you don't live in. Like, brilliant. Classic. But this is where he goes real weird. He turns up in Guernsey and then he moves to China because...

Because at some point in between being exiled from Britain for embezzlement and turning up in China, he has completely reinvented himself as a prolific astronomer who...

fundamentally believes that he has disproved Newton's theory of gravity, recalculated the shape and size of the Earth, and is the world's most brilliant physicist astronomer. See, these are the cons we need. Go all out. Yes. And he's so...

kind of convinced of this and so convinced of his own brilliance that he persuades the governor, like this is when Britain is still kind of running a lot of stuff in China at post-opium wars or mid-opium wars, I guess. And he persuades the British governor in China to hire him as a professor of mathematics and astronomy at

a university in what is then Peking called Tongwen Guan University College which is supposed to be set up as like this first western style university in the whole of China he turns up in China and they don't have an observatory yet so he can't teach astronomy which is good because he's

crackers like he's so fundamentally wrong with all of his stuff that he has come up with he thinks and believes like so completely that the earth is a different shape to what it is so he thinks that

So the Earth is a Newton, like calculated this and the Greeks would write this out. And like everybody has known this for thousands of years. The Earth is not like spherical completely. It's sort of squashed, right? So it sort of bulges out at the equator. And he's convinced that that is not true. It's actually closer to like a lemon shape. And it's actually squashed from not from top to bottom, but from side to side. So it's kind of like.

and thin, basically. And kind of pointier at the top and the bottom and thinner around the middle. And he thinks it's 167 miles thinner around the equator than Newton calculated. And that this velocity

means that 10,000 people a year are dying in shipwrecks. Because they don't realize the world is shaped like a lemon. Yes, because they are trying to travel over distances that are not there. And he's also developed this new theory of gravity, which basically disregards the actual mass of the object in space and is more interested with how much space is around the object. Yeah.

I don't know enough about physics to know why that's crackers, but I believe that it is. Yeah, it basically is. Like the thing with gravity, like is the, I think it's Einstein that did the diagram. Like if you imagine a sheet and you hold the sheet out and then you put like an orange in the middle of the sheet, the, the,

the sheet is going to warp and it's going to like go down into a, like a well basically. And it, the sheet isn't going to stay flat with the thing bouncing on top of it. It's going to like bend and around the orange and that's gravity. Right. Yes. And then if you put a marble on the sheet, it's going to roll towards the orange. Um, and that's how gravity works in effect without using any maths. Um,

And he was like, basically, no, it doesn't. It doesn't depend on how big the orange is that you put on the sheet. It depends how big the sheet is. And everyone was like, no, it doesn't.

Right, good. Yeah, and he wrote tons of stuff, like tons and tons of stuff about this. And he kept calling Newton an idiot. And his maths was wrong and his formulas were wrong and his thoughts were wrong. And as a result, when he got to China and they were like, we can't really do astronomy right now because we don't have this observatory. We're still in the process of building it, but you can still teach the maths because you are the professor of mathematics and astronomy. He said, no. No.

And he refused to teach maths on the basis, I assume, that he did not know any maths. Yeah. And then also refused to learn any Chinese languages. He refused to learn Mandarin. And...

thus just refused to teach basically so they had hired him and he sat there for three years refusing to teach anything writing these bizarre things about gravity and the size of the earth and like getting into massive arguments with the Royal Society and then also writing loads of books about like Chinese culture which I couldn't find anything about but I assume also crackers if he was

He wasn't learning the language. I don't think that I would trust his view on the culture personally. No. I assume... And he also wrote about, like, philosophy and...

and Babylonian history and biblical history, all kinds of things. He was just like... A real renaissance man of nonsense. A real renaissance man of nonsense for a man who can't even be trusted to work in a bank without being kicked out of the country in its entirety. He...

that he had completed the general outlines of an entire new system of theoretical and physical astronomy, which he hadn't. You shock me. Yeah. And he was eventually fired by this university and then he sued them for defamation because they were like, he doesn't know what he's talking about and he won't teach, but he is still insisting upon staying here and being paid. And

And he sued them and he sued the governor of China for defamation. And the court was like, no, all of those things are true. He never returned to the UK or Germany, eventually died in China. He's kind of fascinating because I can't, I think he's definitely kind of a charlatan because I really can't tell that he has any training in what he is doing. And he 100%, like,

Like this gap where he's like kicked out of Britain for embezzlement and then is appointed professor of astronomy for the first Western Star University in China based on effectively his own belief in his own abilities. Yeah. Is impressive. Yeah. But he seems to genuinely have believed in...

And been quite delusional about his own abilities, which I think makes him slightly different from a lot of charlatans who are fully aware that they are conning people. And he gets a lot of letters where he's genuinely furious that people won't take him seriously, even though they're like, you can't just make up maths. Yeah, maths is kind of sick.

Yeah, it's a thing. And also we're pretty sure Newton is very right. And we've got all of these observations about it. And your maths is bad. But he does, he's a kind of an interesting charlatan because he is clearly a real self-belief, shall we say. Yeah.

That took him places. And then, and also turning up, taking a job as a professor of mathematics and then refusing to teach mathematics is A plus behavior, I think. Yeah, this is outstanding.

My first one is kind of a light, there's not much information, but there are apparently, according to a historian called Karen Heltunen in a book I can't actually read because it's like Yale University Press from 1982 and paperbacks cost £60. But is the man from whom we get the term con man. There's a guy called William Thompson.

And he was arrested in 1849. His shtick was that he would just walk up to people in the street pretending that he knew them, like well-dressed men, just pop up,

say, hi, how have you been? Have a chat for a while and fool them into thinking that they were old friends or old acquaintances and then say, do you have the confidence to lend me your watch? Which he would then steal. So he was dubbed by the New York Herald, the confidence man for this repeated con that he played out over and over again. And that's confidence man is what has become con man. So there's not much information about him, but...

He has a term named after him, so that's nice. And I assume that the answer was very often yes. Yes, I have the confidence to give you my watch. Yeah, because they'd put in all that work of like, you know me, we were at university together or whatever, and then you look like a fool if you can't lend an old friend your watch. Yeah. I mean, I can't think of a good reason why I would lend anybody my watch. I can't think of a good reason why someone would need to borrow my watch. No, no.

But that's why it's confidence, man, is that your mark has to have confidence in you as the con man for it to work. Yes. And building that confidence, I think, is the important part. Yeah.

of being a good con man. Yeah. Which is why I think my favorite con man is a guy called Yellow Kid Wheel. And not just because he's got possibly the worst con man name ever, because Yellow Kid Wheel is rubbish. His real name is Joseph. Yeah.

And he called himself Yellow Kid because, like, after he'd got into, like, being a con man, like, he was already a criminal. And basically people were like, oh, you need to have a con man name. Essentially, like, you need, like... You can't just be Joe, right?

Yeah, exactly. It was basically kind of a grifter and it's the early 19th century, it's like 1904, 1905. And everybody is like you... We've all got cool con man names. We're all called things like Doc Merriweather and Fats Levine and Bath House John and stuff.

And you need a cool con man name. And he basically just picked one from a local comic book called Hogan's Alley and the Yellow Kid. Sure. And he was like, yeah, so that's why he's got such a terrible name. But he is one of these people who's like having a job sounds bad. He's not wrong.

Being a perpetual grifter sounds more fun, which I suspect it probably was. He effectively spent his life coming up with very, very complicated grifts and cons. And he wrote this autobiography in which he outlines them all with a real lack of... It's quite dispassionately...

He just kind of goes through them. And then he gets conned quite often as well. And he's like, yeah, fair enough. And he'll outline that with the same level of detail. He gets conned by fake heiresses and stuff. And he's like, you know, fair enough. They put the work in, they con me, they got me. I con people. He's most famous because he...

ran this kind of very complicated betting scam, which inspired The Sting, the Paul Newman film, The Sting, if you've ever seen that, won Oscars, in which basically you would set up a whole fake betting shop, like off track betting.

betting shop and then have various different like co-conspirators, some on track, some off track, and you would trick the mark into thinking that they were getting...

information about who won races faster than the news wires or specifically you would trick them into thinking that you could hold up information getting to the news wires so they would be able to place bets before like when they knew the outcome but before the outcome was known right sure and then you get them to do this repeatedly and then when you've got their confidence you get them to do a massive bet and

And then they obviously lose that bet and you take all of their money. Yeah. It's one of these things where you're like, sure, having a job doesn't sound like much fun, but it sounds like less work than this. Yeah, this sounds like a lot of effort. And the consequences for fucking it up are way worse than making a mistake at your normal job. Yeah. But he then...

He then has like a million different grifts. Like he has this grift about selling a talking dog where he would go into bars and persuade people that his dog could talk. He allegedly, although I could not find that much like specific information about this, but he had this thing where...

And loads of people had this period of scamming people doing this. During what we were talking about last week, the period of Western expansion, he would claim to have the right to mines in the Western states of America and would sell those rights to various people. But it was just a lie.

And one of the people that he allegedly, he sold him the rights to a fake mine in Colorado was Benito Mussolini. That just gets you a blank slate. That gets you no more, no consequences, no punishments for anything. You scammed Mussolini, you win. You win. Yes.

There's also quite a long thing in his autobiography about he's scamming a woman in like Virginia who does own a copper mine and he has persuaded her that he is going to sell the rights to Hitler.

And so he persuades her to pay for him to go on an all expenses paid trip to Europe. And he just travels around Europe for ages. And then what he does while he's there is he writes like a

letters to Hitler gets responses on Hitler headed paper then edits those responses so it looks like Hitler is interested in her copper mine and then sends her the letters but he's just writing like you know nonsense like anything that will get a reply basically like asking for Hitler's like autograph or whatever and then sending them back to her and being like oh yeah he's well interested keep sending me money and

Meanwhile, he's just spending all of his time just betting and buying himself fancy suits in London. But the best thing he did, my absolute favourite, is that he built a money printing machine, which is just like a box with kind of a spring and a roller in it. And he had this whole setup where he would...

He convinced the mark that this machine would print whatever. So he wasn't counterfeiting money himself. He was selling a machine to others, telling them that they could use it. Exactly. And so obviously the setup is that he would put a $50 note in there and then he would do this whole spiel about how this machine

machine would photocopy basically any dollar any amount that you put in there you could put a 50 bill in there and it would just photocopy and then he would demonstrate that this would happen um he'd be like look i'm going to put this 50 in and then it's going to print out a new one and now you have 250 and they would buy this because he was so good at selling this shit but again seems like more work than just having a job but sure and then when they would

They would go off and buy it and 99% of them would just be like, okay, I got scammed. This is embarrassing. But one who was a police sheriff from Texas came back and complained and was like, this is not a real thing. You've scammed me. And he just convinced this guy that he was using it wrong. Yeah.

Look, look, that's the scan the diet industry has been running for decades now and it works for them. Exactly. Exactly. And that he's using the exact same thing like, oh, you're just not doing it right. And somehow managed to get away with it and then got the guy to pay him again for lessons on how to work it. Yes. This guy wins. You know, no consequences. You won at life. Yes.

and he, he claims how far this is true, um, is obviously a matter of opinion, but he claims that he never scammed anybody who wasn't trying to get something for nothing. Like he was always offering them something that, um, like they were always people who were trying to get something for nothing essentially. Um, and he said, um, they're always trying to get something for nothing. So I, uh, take everything. I respect that.

Yeah. It's like, you know, if people were ever worked out that they couldn't get something for nothing, then crime would probably just die out. But they don't. So and I work pretty hard at this. So fuck you. Yeah, I actually think he's got a point. I think this guy rules. I love him. Yeah. But and the effort that he put in, like there's a whole situation with a fake bank at one point where he swindles this Canadian millionaire into buying fake mine stock where

where he sets up a fake branch of a fake bank with like tellers and everything so that the guy can because the guy's insisting upon like paying money in like physically you won't just write him a check so he sets up a whole fake bank and you know if you're gonna work that hard usually you've given yourself a job it'll probably be easier to just have a job but sure yeah that rules

My next one is Charles Ponzi, who is not the most exciting, but like, again, he's got a scheme named after him. So he, I think, you know, you have to pay some sort of, some sort of recognition. So he was an Italian immigrant to the US. He had, he is the sort you read about his early life. And like, this is a man who was invented to, to do demonstrate the meaning of the word shiftless, you know?

He bummed around as much as he could. He moved to the US to try and get rich. There had been a bunch of Italian...

Immigrants who moved to the US and then came back rich, so he wanted to do that. His early years are like he gets fired from a job as a waiter for changing the customers and for stealing and all these sorts of little petty crimes. For a while, he lives in Montreal and he gets a job as a bank teller at a bank which was promising double the interest of everyone else. And he got promoted and he realized that what was happening is that the bank was paying out that interest to

via newly opened accounts rather than via investments, the way that banks are supposed to work, right? Banks invest your money and that's how you get interest is from where it's invested. Eventually that bank failed and the owner fled to Mexico with the money.

And Ponzi is left alone and he wanders into, he does things like wander into a former customer's house, customer of the bank's house, and just forges himself a check. He gets arrested for that, he serves three years. After he's released, he smuggles illegal Italian immigrants into the US, serves another two years for this.

and befriends a Wall Street speculator. And then he comes up with this scheme in 1919. There was the situation with postal coupons where you could essentially in one country pay for the postage of someone else in another country. And because of the way exchange rates worked, that meant that...

the same value of postage would be cheaper in one country than another. So he could buy postage in Italy, sell it in the US and make a profit, essentially. So he decides to set up a company doing that and he looks for investors and he promises that he will double investments within 90 days.

And the first round of investors, he does that. They get paid really promptly, they make a lot of money, and that word starts getting out and so more and more people want to invest. So he starts doing what he saw happen at the Bank of Montreal. He starts paying off early investors with the money of later stage, of newer investors. And it snowballs, right? Because everyone is making so much money and he's living large. He's suddenly a millionaire.

And no one wants to look too closely because it all seems really, really good. But none of this is coming from the actual business. It is all just robbing Peter to pay Paul. A financial writer pointed this out, saying that you couldn't possibly get that rich that quickly doing something legal. So Ponzi sued him for libel and won half a million dollars in damages. Yeah.

And which quieted things down for a while. But then financial journalist Clarence Barron did a series on him, noting that he, A, he did not invest in his company himself. And B, that for the postal coupon scheme to work, at the scale that he was claiming, there would need to be 160 million coupons in circulation, when in reality there were only 27,000.

And he confirmed with the U.S. Postal Service that there were no bulk purchases of postal coupons happening anywhere. So none of this money was being used in the way that he was claiming it could be used. The maths didn't... There were some evidence that he had been trying to figure out how he could make it work. You would need to have entire ships full of postage coupons.

for it to be working. So there was a run on the company and Ponzi hired a publicist to try and cool things down. The publicist started working for him, realized exactly what was going on, went straight to the press, said that Ponzi was an idiot who didn't know how to add. And so there was another run and he started paying people off. He pulled so much money out of Boston's banks in one time that six banks went down because

Banks can't cope with too much money being withdrawn at once. And his investors lost $20 million, which would be more than $300 million now. And now he has a whole scheme named after him. The most famous person to run a Ponzi scheme, obviously, is Bernie Madoff, who defrauded people out of billions of money and defrauded lots of famous people, which is why, you know, Kevin Bacon has to do ads for EEE because he lost all his money on Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme. Yeah. Yeah.

Yes, which is why never believe anybody who's telling you something that sounds too good to be true. Nothing is too good to be true. You can't sell iPhone photos for £20,000 a month on stock websites. You can't. Don't listen to TikTok. No.

don't listen to tiktok they're lying yeah anybody who's telling you you can you know make money for free is is telling you a lie my next one is um one who was so invested in his grift um that i feel like he maybe convinced himself that it was true because the amount of effort that he put into it was genuinely genuinely quite impressive and suggests that

Well, it's unclear what he thought was going to happen, but I do think that sometimes people are quite stupid. And it is a guy called Conor McGregor, called Gregor McGregor, not Conor McGregor, although he's his own kind of scam artist. Gregor McGregor, who was a Scottish guy who became a general in the British army and went out and ended up joining, went out across the Atlantic and ended up joining the Venezuelan War of Independence. And...

then like kind of fought as a sort of mercenary kind of person all around fighting against the Spanish to be fair in everything around like New Granada and Venezuela and in Florida's and then kind of lost his mind a little bit and became kind of

convinced or developed an intense desire to rule his own country and it began with an attempt to invade and take over this little island called Amelia Island just outside kind of off the coast of Florida and set up a thing called the Republic of the Floridas and this

this did not last very long because nobody else other than him was particularly into it. Like, no one else was... Like, he just kept being abandoned and then sometimes his troops would abandon him and basically it lasts for like a couple of months whereby he has this little island that is his. That doesn't go very well. He then...

like a big swathe of the country of what is now Honduras in Central America. A big, massive part of

untouched jungle, basically, that he buys from the Spanish king because the Spanish have given up on the idea of colonizing it. They think that it is uninhabitable. And so he buys this and declares himself basically the king of it and then returns back to Europe where he spends 15 years selling this

that he has bought as a fictional country that he calls Poyais. And he has pamphlets made. He writes books about it. He invents an entire pretend country in his head with drawings of this, like, in his imagination, this country is a beautiful, Europeanized city. Yeah.

which has like, it looks like Paris. Like it's got all of these beautiful buildings. It's got state. It's got a government. He has, he claims that there's like 20,000 people that live there. It's got a theater. It's got an opera house. He has, he's got a coat of arms.

He designs uniforms for a whole army that does not exist. He's doing all the fun things. So it's got like... Yeah. And so the whole army... So he's got the general's outfit looks like this and then the sergeant in an arms outfit looks like this. He...

is selling plots of land in this country that does not exist. He gives out honours in exchange for money. Like, he's selling people lordships of this country that doesn't exist. He's writing books. He's giving interviews to all the newspapers. Like, if TV had invented, he would have been on the telly. He persuades, like...

the king to get involved and he's selling like everybody stuff he makes so much money off of this and causes like so much in the way of like he really convinces that people that this this exists and he gets so many people to give him money that when it is revealed because people go there and try to live there and then they get there and are like what the fuck is this

And people keep dying. Like quite a lot of people don't come back because they just, they get to the jungle and they die of like malaria or whatever. But they're just getting there and finding Central American jungle. That it causes like basically this kind of,

enormous stock market crash because the people lose so much confidence in investments that they have made in south and central america as a result of the the learning that that gregor mcgregor has been lying to them and then they're like what if everybody is lying to us what if honduras doesn't even exist i mean these are questions they should have been asking them earlier that

Yeah, that in 1825, there is just this stock market crash that like just almost collapses the entire Bank of England. It's considered to be like the first modern economic crisis that is caused by confidence rather than being caused by like an actual event. Just because he builds up for, literally he turns up in England in like 1820,

And he's there for like a decade, like convincing people that this is true. And yeah, it causes like a massive, a massive crisis. And he has to flee Europe and go back to Venezuela where he eventually dies. But yeah, it was just such an impressive. See, this is the thing. Con people with a bit of imagination. I think it's fine if it's funny. Yeah. Yeah.

It is pretty funny, apart from the people that die. I mean, sure. Yeah. But that was ages ago. So. Yeah. But he's just like writing books about a country and just being like, please come to my country. It's so good. You'll love it.

And everyone's like, yeah, cool. Hang on. That's fantastic. Yeah. Like, and the drawings really are like, look at my beautiful, like there's so much detail in them of like, everything is amazing. Everything is so great. You will love everything about it. I mean, I feel like if you didn't see...

drawings of a beautiful european parisian looking place in the middle of a recently discovered central america recently settled part of the world and you didn't ask how did they do that that quickly then maybe you should you only have yourself to blame maybe i mean i do feel like that is a bit of a

Again, it does sound too good to be true. Like if everything about it is perfect and it's got a theatre and... I guess. I suppose if you don't really know. I guess. Yeah.

But still, you've got to, I think, again, respect the amount of effort you put in. I do like the idea of him sitting around drawing his little uniforms and writing a national anthem and coming up with all of the admin, the fun little arty admin stuff of starting a country. It's like the kind of thing that you do when you're 11 before the internet existed. When you don't want to do any of the hard parts of running a country, like...

Yeah. I feel like he probably did want to do the hard parts of running the country. It's just that no one would let him because he was clearly crackers. I mean, if you want people to move there, you do have to have some infrastructure in place for them to...

Yeah. Anyway, my next one is Mary Carlton, who returns us to bigamy. She was just getting married all over the shop. So she was tried for bigamy in Kent initially after marrying two dudes. And she ran away to Cologne where she had an affair with a nobleman who was like in the middle of planning their wedding.

when she skipped out, took all the jewels and fancy presents he'd given her, as well as most of her landlady's money. He must have been grim, because why wouldn't you just marry him? He's a nobleman who can afford to give you lots of lovely things. Yeah.

but yeah, so she skips out on him and goes back to London where she claims to be from Cologne, um, and to be the orphaned princess von Wolway. And under this name, she marries a surgeon called John Carlton. She's exposed by an anonymous letter and, uh, is charged for marrying under false claims. But she says that he had also claimed to be a Lord, um, and was just trying to leave her because she had no money. Um,

She was acquitted at that time and then wrote a play about herself, which she performed in, which got her a real field of admirers and fans who started also giving her lots of lovely, valuable presents. She marries one of them and then takes all his money and valuables and leaves. She then pretends to be an heiress, running away from an arranged marriage. She has someone send her letters containing, like,

family news to convince people she is who she says he is. So her landlady is sympathetic and sets her up with her nephew. She stole his money and left. But she basically kept doing this for 10 years, just meeting the guy, stealing his money and leaving. And she finally, she steals a silver tankard and that gets her arrested and transported to Jamaica.

But she then cons her way onto a ship within a year and comes back again, does it again, marries an apothecary, pretends to be an heiress, left with his money. It worked for her. I mean, conning your way onto a ship and getting yourself... It's pretty good work. She ultimately was arrested and hanged in 1673 after a really good run of just, like, tricking dudes.

That is one way to stop a con artist is to, like... To be fair, they tried transportation once and it didn't take. Yeah. Some people you just cannot stop. Some people you just can't stop. No, I don't. Personally, I wouldn't. I wouldn't. I am largely against it. You know. Yeah. Um...

I am going to do a Roman one just because I like the gumption of this guy. And this is an anecdote. We only know one thing about this person because he's Roman. Obviously we do. And we know a story from Pliny the Elder's Natural History, one of the best books ever written of all time. And it is about a guy called Tyrannus who is already a bad guy.

because he is a slave dealer so his job is um and specifically he seems to work in at like high-end um like luxury slaves basically so not people who are doing any kind of job but people whose job is to look pretty and largely are being sold into sex slavery

This is the book that I'm writing right now. So look out for this. Because sex slavery, specifically the selling of young boys into sex slavery is very, very common in the Roman world. And having handsome young boys who exist specifically to be very beautiful sex toys is very, very common.

And really something that we don't talk about enough. But this specific incident is a time that Tyrannus scammed Mark Antony, who purchased two very, very beautiful boys from him who he claimed were identical twins. They are very pretty and Pliny is very...

insistent on pointing out how beautiful they are. He gets these boys home and talks to them and discovers that not only are they not twins, they are not related and they do not come from the same country.

They do not speak the same language. They are, in fact, utterly, they're just two random boys who have been picked out of nowhere and on his way, on his kind of trips around the slave markets of the Roman Empire, of which there are many, Tyrannus has come across these two boys, been like, oh my God, they look so similar. They're so pretty. I can make a fortune off this, which he does. He sells them for a huge amount of money to Mark Antony.

Mark Antony, who is a scary man, who does and has chased people around with swords fairly regularly, goes back and makes a complaint and is like, what the fuck? You told me they were twins. I'm supposed to be having sex with unrelated boys now? Yeah.

And Tarnius basically says, and this is the gumption part that I find astonishing. It's like, I'm not giving you your money back because when you think about it, it's more amazing that they look so alike when they're not even from the same country. So what you've got there, my friend, is a story. I mean, I buy it. You know, he's not wrong.

it is if anything even more amazing that they are not twins but they look this much alike kept the money and presumably I don't know maybe Mark Antony cut his throat but like very much a bad guy on like 10,000 levels but you do have to respect the grift in that and the total lack of backing down in the face of Mark Antony a man that I would absolutely back down in the face of that's very good yeah my next one is False Dimitri the First the

The real Dmitry was Dmitry Ivanovich of Uglik, who was the youngest son of Ivan the Terrible and was the heir apparent of his older brother, Theodore I. So under the reign of Theodore I, he was very sickly and ill. So the country was run by a regency council that was led by his brother-in-law, Boris Godunov I.

who seems to have been a bit of a power-hungry nightmare. So Godunov sent Dmitry into exile into Uglitch, which was a territory Dmitry owned or ran. It was part of his sort of as a royal thing. But he was sent away to live there and he died in 1591 mysteriously, either assassination or accidentally, but you can't really be sure. And following his death, multiple impostors

claims to be him. There are a total of four false Dimitris, although the fourth and the third maybe are the same guy. It might just be records. I don't know. But I'm only going to talk about the false Dimitri the first because he's the only one who actually managed to reign as the Tsar for almost a year. Yeah.

So, yeah. Damn. So he claimed that his mother had heard that there was going to be an assassination attempt made on him and he had escaped to a monastery and then sort of popped around monasteries keeping himself alive for several years and then Boris Godunov, who was by the way

by this point the Tsar himself had heard that he was going to where he was and come after him so he then fled to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. There a bunch of nobles supported his claim to the throne without necessarily believing him. So he invades Russia with a private army, goes to war, doesn't go particularly well, his private army is not big, it's only I think like 3,000 people, but then Godunov dies.

And his son, the Lord II, ascends to the throne. But the nobility stage a coup against him. He's strangled inside his home with his mother. And the Russian soldiers join false Dmitry's claim. They march to Moscow and he is crowned.

He consolidates power very quickly, including by visiting the real Dmitry's mother, who was living in a convent, and she accepts him as her son. He kills the remainder of Godunov's family except for one of his daughters, but then he kind of goes a bit too far and marries a Catholic woman. And rumors start spreading that she's not going to convert to the Russian Orthodox Church, which was tradition at the time, and that Dmitry was planning to reunite the Russian Orthodox Church with the Holy See.

He also was doing things like allowing Catholic soldiers to pray in Russian Orthodox churches, which upset people. It is that classic Russian thing, right? Where they're just terrified of any Western influence. Yeah, unless it's the French for that time when they got really... But this is what you see when we looked at... We did our series on Rasputin. The Tsars leading up to Nicholas were...

constantly swinging between the West and Russian tradition and it's very contentious. So he starts speaking to Weston and the Prince Vasily Ivanovich Shuski starts spreading rumors that he's planning to lock the gates to the city and massacre the people of Moscow which starts up a riot and

And on the 17th of May, 1606, nobles and commoners storm the Kremlin and he is killed. He tried to escape. He jumped out a window, but broke his leg. He is his, so he's killed. He's hacked to pieces. His body is burnt and his ashes were put in a cannon and fired towards Poland, which I think is great.

And then another couple cropped up. False Dimitri too crops up and False Dimitri, the first wife, identifies him as her husband. She's like, oh yeah, no, this is the guy I married to allow him to sort of carry on the con.

But no one else manages to quite get to the level of power that false Dimitri I did. And he was, like, properly ruling, you know? Like, he made some moves. He made it. He reinstated a law that let serfs change their masters every so often so that there was a little bit more freedom among the serfs. He was preparing to go to war with the Ottoman Empire. Like, he was on it. But he...

he was not Dimitri he was false he was just a guy he was just a guy that's pretty good I have to say like I also love the putting his ashes into a thing I know just go back to Poland that's almost as good as like digging up a pipe in order to put them on trial I love it when it's petty just that's being real mad like petty I enjoy pettiness me too

Okay. My next one is Alessandro the Count de Cagliostro, who is Italian, well, Sicilian, occultist, psychic healer, magician, Freemason, who got called the King of Liars by Thomas Carlyle and got written about by everybody from Goethe to Thomas Carlyle. And the Empress Catherine the Great wrote two comic plays about him.

because he was such a grifter all the way around Europe during the late 18th century. He had...

He has a whole story about himself, which is very Count of Monte Cristo, which is a story that he had been born to a noble family who had, for reasons unclear, abandoned him in Malta. And he had grown up as an orphan and had traveled around. And he had traveled all around and learned alchemy and magic and Kabbalah from traveling in the...

quote-unquote orient as a child. But really, he's just a kid from Sicily who was great at forgery and grifting, basically. And he starts life by selling fake Egyptian amulets as, like...

medicine, essentially, like he's just making. And he seems to get really into this idea of Egypt as a place of mysticism and occultism. And one of the things that he is credited with is starting what is called Egyptian Freemasonry, which is this kind of particular...

branch of Freemasonry which is based on like ancient Egyptian symbolism basically it's also called the Rite of Memphis Mishraim and

And it's like lots of pretending to be a pharaoh and using kind of fake ancient Egyptian made up words and imagery in order to, I don't know, whatever it is that Freemasons do, hang out with boys and be normal. Yeah.

He's massively into Freemasonry and sets up loads of Masonic lodges all over the show and loves the kind of ritual and pageantry and everything of it. He has this wife who's called Serafina. That's not her real name. That's just what everybody calls her, who he meets when she's like 14 and they seem to get married, I think, when she's like 16. Yeah.

which is fine. And then he basically spends his whole life traveling around Europe, setting up Masonic lodges, and then setting himself up as a healer. And he works his way through all kinds of occult and esoteric forms of magical healing that he mixes together with chemistry and an actual...

But he is very big on theatrics. The reason that Catherine the Great writes a thing about him here is because he turns up in her court at one point and tries to become like her court doctor. And she just thinks he's quite funny. And he...

Thomas Carlyle wrote this whole thing about him and calls him all kinds of things, like really took against him and says that he sells beautifying water that can smooth wrinkles. He repeatedly mentions this thing that he sells called the Wine of Egypt.

Which, as far as I can tell, he is claiming lengthens life or will make you live longer. But he has this thing. He's doing dowsing and claims that he can use dowsing to find gold. He has love potions and all kinds of magical potions for winning over somebody and...

like seducing people he sells something called thematurgic hemp silks which I refuse to look into and

and phosphorus boxes, which I have a feeling might be poisons, but I'm not 100% sure on that. He sells like lottery numbers. He's very big on prophecies, like doing prophecies, and he seems to be quite good at cold reading and telling fortunes, but he does this kind of very theatrically. And Thomas Carlyle also mentions blue flames a lot and like silks, and he is like selling himself as like this...

occult wizard basically who can tell the future and does everything um he gets embroiled in something i think you're going to talk about which is the affair of the diamond necklace yeah in france and is arrested for it but that does actually seem to be something that he has absolutely nothing yeah he's just like tacked on at the end as someone who also was arrested for it and it's not clear i couldn't really figure out why people thought he was involved that

That he was just so famous or so well known in Europe and in the European scene as a guy who was a charlatan. LAUGHTER

And who was like constantly scamming people and was like swooshing about and being and like claiming to have ancient secrets and obviously selling people nonsense. That when something really big and scammy happened, everyone just kind of assumed he must have been involved. There can't possibly be more than one scammer in France at one time. Yeah. Yeah.

just kind of constantly turning up everywhere, like claiming to be able to heal people with the power of ancient Egypt, basically. And so, yeah, whenever something happens, everyone's like, well, I guess he's involved, like Alessandro. Like, we all know he's not a count. We all know that he's like swooshing around with his silky turbans or whatever. We all know that he's selling beauty waters that are nonsense and phosphorus boxes. So I'm like, just...

probably just pull him in just seems like something that he would be involved in is this he is eventually arrested in Rome not for scamming but for heresy and apostasy and witchcraft because he tries to set up a masonic lodge in Rome and

And at the time, the Roman Inquisition is occurring and they are really cracking down on this stuff. So he is arrested and he is initially sentenced to execution, but he eventually is just given life in prison, basically for not...

being Catholic or being too much of a Mason. And that is how he dies. So he's never really punished for any of his like weird scams because his weird scams are kind of so dramatic. And now he's sort of remembered as a bit of a like hero of the occult.

cult world. Yeah, there's kind of a folk hero thing around him and there are things like the, I feel like it's just the name Cagliostro is so evocative. It is a very good name and he was very big into Masons so he, and like he is certainly associated with the setting up of Egyptian Freemasonry and

And then like later 20th century, like occult people are really into him and think that he's like, like Anton LaVey and people like that are really into him. So he has this kind of air of like, oh, but what if he was an esoteric magician? Like, no, he's a scammer. He's selling you like water and wine with cloves in it. And you're like, cool.

And Thomas Carlyle's thing that he wrote about him is so funny because he, it's like pure 19th century writing where everything is capitalized. I mean, he's like, he's the king of liars. He is the count of calumny. He's like,

It just keeps going for ages. It's really fun. It's very good. Okay, the last one I have is, yeah, the affair of the diamond necklace. Jeanne de Voilois-Savremy, which is, I'm pretty sure, a completely accurate French pronunciation. So she grew up in an impoverished noble family. She was descended from an illegitimate son of Henry II, the French Henry II, not the British one.

She married a guy called Marc Antoine Nicolas Delamotte and they styled themselves as the Comtesse Delamotte.

which appears to just have been completely made up. She wanted more generous pension from the royal family. Like as nobility, they got a pension. She wanted a better one. So she started hanging around in Versailles, hoping that Marie Antoinette would be nice to her because they were both, you know, women. She could appeal to her sympathetic nature. But Marie Antoinette had heard of her and didn't want to meet her. So just turn it down. Just straight up didn't want to hang. Look, we're both women. Yeah.

So in 1783, she begins an affair with Cardinal Prince Louis de Rohan.

who was desperate to get back into Marie Antoinette's good graces. He had just been gossiping about her and also was a bit of a dipshit that she just hated him. She didn't like him. He was hoping to get a better position. King's court as one of the king's ministers. So he wanted to get back in good with Louis and Marie Antoinette. And so Jean-Claude,

tells him that she and Marie Antoinette are like best friends and she can advocate for him and try and get him back in there and she fakes a lot of letters basically so that the cardinal will write a letter to Marie Antoinette and she gets forged letters done by another guy she was boning who's just really good at forging building up this this false relationship between the cardinal and the queen she even arranges a meeting where she finds a prostitute who looks like

Marie Antoinette and gets her to pose as the queen and tell the cardinal that everything is fine between them and anything any bad blood from the past has been forgotten in the meantime there's this necklace

that was made by a jeweler called Charles Auguste Boehmer. It was commissioned by Louis XV for his mistress, Madame de Berry, and it was intense. It had taken years and years and a massive amount of money for the jeweler just to get the amount of diamonds needed to fill this commission. And by the time the necklace was finished,

Louis XV was dead and Madame de Barry had been banished from court. No one outside of the royal family could ever have afforded this necklace. There was no one else that he could sell it to and he had spent all of this money making it. So he basically was on the point of bankruptcy and needed to sell the necklace in order to stay afloat. So he tried to sell it to Louis XVI for Marie Antoinette but they didn't want it. There's a lot of different claims about why they turned it down but...

Part of the reason was obviously because it would not have looked good in a time when people were already a little bit frustrated with how much money and extravagance there was going on. And how much grain was costing. Because again, there'd been that volcano that causes all social change. So he tries a bunch of times to sell it to them. They refuse. He tries to sell it outside of France, but that fails. So he tries again. And then he hears...

of this woman who's best friends with Marie Antoinette because Jean de Voile-Oise-Saint-Rémy has not just been claiming to be friends to the cardinal. She's just been...

splashing that around. Like she's living a lot better now because the Cardinal is giving her a lot of money because he thinks that she's friends with the Queen and is going to get him in good with the Queen. So she is just splashing it about that she has this special relationship with Marie Antoinette. So the jeweler asks her to be a go-between, commissions her to sell the necklace for him to the Queen. So she does that via the Cardinal. She fakes a letter from Marie Antoinette to the Cardinal saying...

I want to buy this necklace. I don't want the public to know because it's so extravagant. So can you please arrange this for me? And he takes the necklace, the letters as proof to the jeweler and says, I'm authorized to arrange this. You're going to be paid in installments. So I'll just take the necklace and get it to the queen. And she will start sending you installments via me in the slow way that won't arouse suspicion.

He takes the necklace to June's house. She immediately takes it apart and sells the diamonds on the black market. And the jeweler, Boma, eventually is like, I've not been paid. And he goes straight to the queen and complains directly to her. At which point the whole affair is exposed. The fair she said of it. Yeah. And there's this whole thing about when they have a trial and all the forged letters have signed her name as Marie Antoinette

De France, which is incorrect etiquette. Like the royals just sign their name and you know who they are because it's the king and queen. And they use this as evidence that the cardinal knew what was happening because he should have known that she would never sign her name like that. Louis and Marie Antoinette

decides to have a public trial for this because they want everyone to know that they had nothing to do with it. It kind of backfires. It's a bit of a Streisand effect on that one. And it does not, it just continues, it contributes to people's minds being poisoned against them. Jeanne is condemned to being whipped and branded and imprisoned for life. She does escape the following year disguised as a boy and she runs away to London. She's

where she published her memoirs and then dies falling from a hotel room window while hiding from debt collectors oh so didn't didn't turn out well for her that's eventful at every point though isn't it eventful at every point yeah yeah and falling out of a window it's

like feels like such a low-key way to go yeah you kind of want to go out like a silly way to die in a fun way but no yeah but yeah what a scam I mean as scams go like really contributing to the downfall of the entire French government yeah I mean it's it's pretty it's interesting how many of these have had

had these really outsized consequences. Like there's a stock market crash because of a fake country. Six banks folded because of Charles Ponzi. Yeah. It's impressive, really. It is. And that is why they get to be... Little do you know when you start out the impact you can have on your world. You could just be scamming like seven people, but no. If you have some gumption,

have some real dedication to the cause of scamming, then you too could bring down six banks and a government. You too could lead to the terror by accident. LAUGHTER

Maybe this is what we need to start really fighting against the billionaires is for someone to do something like this. Just really scam them. Yeah. Or scam someone near to them enough that it turns public opinion enough to actually start doing something about it. Maybe one day. We can't but dream. You've got to inspire people to eat the rich. Yeah. Eat the rich.

And spit out the poison. Right. I think that's probably a good place to end. Like, I don't know that you can get much, much of a bigger scam than that. Than getting, than toppling the French monarchy. All the diamonds in France out of a guy and then collapsing the French monarchy. Yeah.

And then falling out of a window. And falling out of a window. I'm glad we had somebody disguised as a boy, though. I think that it's only a good, like, 17th, 18th century adventurer

adventure if someone has disguised themselves as a member of an opposite sex in order to escape from somewhere I think I expect more the other way around because it is easier to scam people when you've got a pair of tits I think yes people boys will fall for that immediately yeah next time Janina you're not here I'm not here you'll be swimming in the Pacific I will be underwater in the beautiful Pacific

Yes, but good friend of the pod, HR Owen, is going to be here. And their favorite thing to do is to send me just real weird shit from Tumblr, a platform that I am not on and have never been on. It's the only platform that's still weird. Is this true? Question mark, question mark, question mark. And they have been doing this for a long time. And I now have like a bank of, is this true? And some of them send me down some real weird rabbit holes.

And so we are going to address some Tumblr, the weirdest Tumblr history myths that Hero has managed to find in their time, which it really covers the whole of history because some of them are

about the time before humans even existed. So that is what we are going to be doing next time. And if anyone would like to ask us a question or join the Patreon or buy some merch or see show notes or anything along those lines, where do they do that, Janina? You can do that at historyofsexy.com. Historyofsexy.com. Everything is there and it's delightful.

Yeah. And so, Janina, until next time, not next episode, but your returned. I will be back. Refreshed and full of south of the equator sun. It's going to be so beautiful. Hopefully by the time I get back, there's some sun here. Maybe. Maybe. We'll see. Maybe. With a bit of luck, there'll be some sun in April time. Yeah.

Until then, Janina. Bye, Janina. Bye.