King Con: Man successfully impersonates Indigenous leaders his whole life, acquiring riches and fame |
DC: Hi I'm David Common and you're listening to the Friday edition of The Current.
"Tom longboats was born on Six Nations land. His course was steeper than most. But Longboat was put on this earth to run, destined to become the greatest distance runner of his era."
DC: That's a 2005 Heritage Minute that documents the life of one of this country's greatest athletes runner Tom Longboat.
"As a professional, he ruled the match race circuit. His Madison Square Garden showdown with British champion Elfi Shrub was the marathon of The Age. Longboat prevailed. He retired at 25 with 17,000 in the bank. To this day he stands as the greatest native athlete in our history. Tom longboats of Onondaga Ontario, an indelible footprint on the playing fields of Canada."
But Tom Long Boat was not just a Canadian hero on the track he was also an international celebrity. So great was his fame that one American grifter decided to steal his identity. That man was an American, a French Canadian Heritage named Edgar Laplante and if the Olympics had a category for best con man, well he would have been a multi gold medal winner. The Crazy Life and Times of Edgar Laplante is told by Paul Willett in his new book King Con: The Bizarre Adventures of the Jazz Age's Greatest Impostor. And Paul Willits joins me from Norfolk England. Hello.
PAUL WILLETS: Hi afternoon. Oh it's afternoon here.
DC: It's afternoon there, morning for us here. We have to start at the beginning here the beginning of what appeared to be Edgar Laplante's Cons. Give me a sense of his background. Where did he come from?
PAUL WILLETS: Well he came from Rhode Island as he mentioned in the intro. His parents were French Canadian. He was a white working class guy growing up in a family where his father was a carpenter. Like a lot of French Canadians who'd moved down to that part of America. I've got evidence to show that his father found him a source of great frustration in that he wouldn't just knuckle down to an ordinary job. It would never be enough for him. And the earliest record I have of Edgar Laplante criminal activities goes back to when he was 14 years old and it's in this little record informs you will provide a lot of information about his motivation, because he was a con man but not in the sense of of that we knew only understand it. Money was never really his prime motivation. It was something very different. That's evident in this con he pulled as a 14 year old that ended up getting him sent to a reform school that he would trot round in his hometown of Central Falls Rhode Island. He was trotting round the High Street or the main street as they'd call it. And he was going into shops saying I've been sent by Mr. Sun so down the road, another shopkeeper, who will need some spare change and he would go away with a bag of spare change. But instead of doing what a normal con man or apprentice con man would have done and just spending it he just handed it to his dad and said, this is my earnings from my part time job.
DC: So in so many ways it wasn't about the money it was about the con, about the rush of having pulled it off.
PAUL WILLETS: Yes clearly and he, much later in life, became addicted to morphine and cocaine. You could draw or a drug analogy to the way his attitude towards these these calm tricks he was pulling because he the rush was obviously never quite enough so he didn't tend to repeat. I mean he led quite a repetitive life in some respects but he was always after a bigger and bigger thrill. So that for someone like me writing this type of nonfiction it has a trajectory of escalation. That's a bit like the sort of thing that screenwriting gurus will try to instil in their acolytes.
DC: He's still quite young when he begins posing as indigenous personalities people like Tom Longboat, this famous Canadian.
PAUL WILLETS: Yes yes. He is. The earliest record I can find of this particular subplot within his overall story is in late 1916 when he surfaces in Arizona, I think it is where. He gets to know the soldiers as a U.S. Army [unintelligible] very close the Mexican border and he gives tuition to them about running and keeping fit. He's sufficiently athletic himself to beat them in a running race. And he's got a tremendous good looks I should say and charisma. So he's perfectly equipped for this trade.
DC: But here he is portraying himself as a famous Canadian, as an Olympic level athlete, as someone with indigenous roots and playing off the mystique around that at the time. But the real Tom Longboat is in Canada and then ends up fighting in the First World War. What did he make of all of this?
PAUL WILLETS: Well longboats, he writes a letter that gets published in all sorts of newspapers explaining that he was 'last night I was scrambling out of a muddy shower hall' and he was enduring this kind of hellish trench warfare experience when he discovers that this guy is in America or is on the West Coast of America trading off his good name and enjoying the high life as a result of it. And he's furious and threatens to come back.
DC: What was it in particular? Because Tom Longboat is seemingly the first Indigenous person that he steals the identity of. But it's not the last. He goes on to call himself Chief. He connects himself to to the Cherokee's of present day United States and continues this going. What is it in particular about Indigenous people at the time that that fueled that celebrity culture?
PAUL WILLETS: Well I think in Edgar Laplante's case the interest in Native Americans goes back quite a long way. As a tiny child growing up in Central Falls marching past his family's front door, where regular marches by a very strange group, and particularly strange to us looking back on it, called the Improved Order of Redman which was a fraternal Masonic-like organization which staged these marches. And as part of the ceremonials they would dress up in their interpretation of Native American attire. So from a very early age Edgar would have seen white people dressing up as Native Americans. And he may also have seen them all on the Vaudeville stage. He probably saw them at the local Nickelodeon in early cinema showing very very short silent films. And until I started researching this whole story I didn't realize that there was a flourishing genre of silent movies depicting Native Americans as heroes, movies made by the likes of D.W. Griffith, movies that tended to use white actors in the Native American role so that in future Ed Geller plans fraudulence would be endorsed - for white audiences that maybe hadn't seen real Native Americans they think, 'Oh that man in front of me looks very much like the Native American I saw on the cinema screen'.
DC: The white guy portraying the Aboriginal person looks less like the Aboriginal people I know.
PAUL WILLETS: Yes but I'd get the plan professionalized the impersonation of Native Americans. When he finally left home in his very early twenties, his dad was frustrated that he wouldn't knuckle down to an ordinary job. Edgar Laplante to be working as a labourer, and obviously found that dreary and not to his taste. And he moved to Coney Island and he got a job on Coney Island, one of the amusement parks a Park called Dreamland and there he started working as what's known as a ballyhoo man outside an animal circus who bought stocks animal arena. There was a tradition of these man who would stand on the podiums outside the auditorium, In this case [unintelligible] Animal Arena and they would dress in what was perceived as exotic attire. It might be the clothes of a Native America or someone from Borneo and they would do whatever they needed to do to attract a crowd of these people flowing past along the boardwalks. And Edgar Laplante was paid to dress up as a Native American. I'm not sure what he did to attract people's attention but he once he'd attracted their attention. He would pass over to the so-called Barker who is the sales guy. He would then try and coax the crowd into the auditorium buying tickets on route. But Edgar Laplante during the summer of 1910 when he worked there was talent spotted by a medicine show manager for a medicine show called Dr. Long's Indian Medicine Company which is one of a number of these medicines Show's which toured America. It was a source of subgenre of Medicine Show which the so-called Indian Medicine Show was traded on a very widespread notion in America at that point, that Native Americans enjoyed superior health to white people due to all sorts of traditional remedies that were passed down from generation to generation and held back from the white man. So these medicine shows which really provided a very cheap form of entertainment, a vaudeville of two hours or more of all sorts of shows, where there's juggling, singing, dancing interspersed by sales pitches. And in this case, in the case of the show at [unintelligible] was touring with, there were sales pitches for these supposedly traditional Indian, as they put it, remedies. There would be the miracle Indian hair grower some of which I could do with.
DC: So let's fast forward here a bit because it is remarkable that Edgar Laplante has all of these talents. He can sing. He can run well enough to impersonate that famous Canadian Tom Longboats who was an indigenous Olympian. But this at a certain point kind of falls apart that even in the era of 1916-17-18 people catch on to this and Edgar Laplante has to start moving from town to town. What does he do when the masquerade falls apart?
PAUL WILLETS: Well he moves from town to town. He benefits from the technology really of the period and the fact that the highway network hasn't developed that there isn't national media. And that there also isn't the forerunner of the FBI that's hunting him, the Bureau of Investigation that's quite fragmented. So that the hunt for him is proved to be rather futile and he can shift from place to place. He ultimately, when he abandons the long boat persona and decides to leave the country and finds a job as a civilian crewman on a U.S. Army transport service ship - This is 90 late 1917 ferrying American troops to fight in France - but in one of these old twists that not occurrences that would seem implausible in fiction. When Edgar Laplante rolls up at the dockyards in Hoboken he is recognized by soldiers from the garrison near Mexico that he had met the previous year when he was early in his career as an impersonator of Tom Longbows and they obviously greet him saying, 'Great to see you Tom Longboat'. And very soon word gets into the papers that Tom Longboat has registered with the U.S. Army transport service. That has comic repercussions in a sense because his photo then appears in the papers. And when some time later Tom Longboats, the real Tom Longboat is mistakenly declared dead, those stories are illustrated with photographs of Edgar Laplante. In another rather farcical elements of the story, while Edgar Laplante, posing as Tom Longboat, is aboard this U.S. Army transport ship, the S.S. Antilles heading through haunted waters to France. While he's there a debate brews up in the Brooklyn Eagle about whether the man aboard the S.S. Antilles is the real Tom Longboat or whether the guy in France is the real one. The Brooklyn ego comes down on the side of the man on the S.S. Antilles namely Edgar Laplante. So they accuse the real Tom Longboat of being as being in the impostor.
DC: It's just completely remarkable and that boat that he's on, the Antilles, they figure out who he is. He gets kicked off of that when he returns to the United States but it's not his last time across the Atlantic. He then changes his persona, becomes chief White Elk impersonating yet again this time a fictitious indigenous personality, heads back over to Britain. And on the way on the ship decides that he wants to meet the king but is associating with people on that vessel enough that it seems possible he's going to get that visit. What happens?
PAUL WILLETS: He arrives in Liverpool. He's greeted by paparazzi. He's seen as this celebrity, the leader of his people. He's posing as a Cherokee. He declares to the press that he is visiting England to seek an audience with the king in order to plead for better educational opportunities for the youth of his Canadian people. And he is actually granted by Buckingham Palace the audience but he's only rumbled at the last moment by a British national newspaper, the Daily Mail which still exists. But in another one of these inherently comical elements to this story, the Daily Mail doesn't rumble him as a fake native person. They rumble him as a fake candidate. And in this particular instance the Daily Mail reporter quizzes him and says, 'Well so you're coming to see the king on behalf of your Canadian people. Well how come you're doing this because you're not Canadian?' And he with amazing speed of thought, he just talks himself out of it and said, 'yes but my people were here before the white man. We know no boundaries'.
DC: It is remarkable the number of times that he comes so close to having it all fall apart and then somehow survives or survives enough to escape to somewhere else, to move on to somewhere else. The next place after Britain ends up being Italy where your book is called King Con. This has to be the king of the Cons. What is it that brings them to Italy and what does he do when he's there?
PAUL WILLETS: Well he's gone to Italy via Paris where he's landed a job with Paramount Pictures promoting what would now be termed a blockbuster movie, Western, called The Covered Wagon. He is sent down from Paris to the Riviera where he meets this fabulously wealthy Austrian Countess and her glamorous stepdaughter. He persuaded them much in the manner of one of those e-mail cons of today where someone posing as a Nigerian saying, 'I just need a bit of money to get my fortune out of the country. And I will reward you amply'. He tells the countesses that he owns enormous amounts of land in Canada and the land contains oil wells but the British Government delaying payment of his income from the oil wells. They, being the sweet people they are, these two can taxes start lending him money. And the older Countess actually bankrolls. But she sees him as the equivalent of European royalty and she bankrolls what she sees as a royal tour around Italy. She rents a steam ship for him, a large steamship. It stops at all sorts of Italian ports such as Bari, Naples and he also ventures in land, visits Florence and other cities. In Florence for instance his hotel is just besieged. It's almost as if Beatlemania has hit Italy. So Elk-mania. In keeping with his role he starts a lot of the people who want to meet him, well it's a mixture of fascist officials. This is the early days of Mussolini's government and it's very convenient for him to be for them rather to have someone so distracting from a scandal in which a political scandal that Mussolini is involved in that could bring Mussolini's government down. There were a lot of poor people attracted to him. He starts handing out money to them. So it's a Robin Hood situation and he dishes out bundles of currency and he mingles with the crowds. I worked out that in the course of a few months he fritters away and gives away in most cases the equivalent of it could be as much as in US dollars 58.9 million Dollars.
DC: What?
PAUL WILLETS: Yes it’s extraordinary. He gave it away quickly enough. He goes out with a bundle a high denomination bank note, pockets, laden down with them and he'll be besieged on his way to a waiting limo, for instance in Florence. He'll get just empty his pockets on route. He feeds the obsession.
DC: And he has just been building this over years and years and years. None of this is his money. Whether it's taking the money from the asks and handing it out to these crowds in Italy to just years before having stiffed hotel owners of their money when he runs away in the middle of the night and doesn't pay off his bill. It just keeps growing and growing and growing. He seems to keep getting away with that over and over and the times that he does get caught, it's so minuscule he's able to somehow get out of that. But Italy does seem to be the place where things begin to unwind. What happens?
PAUL WILLETS: Yes this is where the beginning of his comeuppance that he's ultimately, the countesses’ steps on smells a rat. And in the typical kind of luck of the devil it hinted for Edgar Laplante He initially just through sheer amazing luck, the countess his stepson approaches the British consul in one of the Italian cities and asks about Chief Elk the supposedly Canadian wealthy man and the consul said yes of course he's a wealthy man and he's legitimates and that puts off the step some for a while. But then the stepson goes back as a chief White Elk and he encourages his sister, the step daughter of the Countess to start investigating Edgar. And as it unravels. Eventually Edgar's is forced to give a date on which he will repay the supposed borrowings and of course he didn't have any of this money at all. And he ends up in jail. He flees to Switzerland where he's briefly jail but they can't charge him for any crimes that haven't occurred in Switzerland and he's deported to Italy where he spends a fair few years in an Italian jail. And from Italy he's again deported. But the Italians won't pay his fare home and neither will Edgar Laplante's long suffering father. And Edgar has to work his way back to America as a steward and he returns to America and he [unintelligible] to the waiting press, because he's become world famous. There are press stories from Australia to California about chief White Elk and his joy ride around Italy and he declares to the press that he's a changed man, that he will go back to a normal life, that he will find a job in a factory. And of course that's all nonsense. He's soon back to his old old ways and he's just unstoppable.
DC: How did it actually end?
PAUL WILLETS: Well it ends on a paradoxical note really because although he dies as a poor guy, he gets his wish in some respects because the authorities in Phoenix they record his death as if he is a native American.[unintelligible] I think they put in the appropriate column he's down as Indian and his name is Dr. White Elk. So in some ways his wish came true.
DC: Which he is not. He is not a doctor. He is not indigenous. He's not any of this. In the end what was it that motivated these cons?
PAUL WILLETS: It was attention. It was really attention because as we've touched on a bit earlier, he could have had stardom. He obviously got an amazing singing voice and he enjoyed vaudeville stardom of a sufficient level to fill 2000 seat auditorium. But that just wasn't enough. The applause from huge crowds and he could have worked his way up to Broadway, I'm sure given enough patients. But he wanted more than that much more than that. So that was really the motivation it was attention. I think he wanted to feel special and to feel that he'd be the joys that he achieved spectacular things. So he would make up achievements such as winning in the Olympics but then that wouldn't be enough and he'd start telling people even in his Tom Longboat guys that he was also a doctor of medicine and then he'd add to that he'd speak 21 languages. And there was, as I might have mentioned earlier, there's something intrinsically comic about a lot of these escapades. There's something tragic too the people that become involved with him. But he at one point one of the things that really tickled me was he's in Canada. He's stopped by someone saying asking him in a small town, who's read coverage of him saying he really speaks 21 languages. The guy challenges Edgar and he says 'So you speak 21 languages, do you speak scotch?' And Edgar very quickly replies 'No but I can drink it'.
DC: Paul thanks so much.
PAUL WILLETS: Thank you.
DC: Paul Willetts is the author of King Con: The Bizarre Adventures of the Jazz Age's Greatest Impostor. He was in Norfolk England. I'm David Common and you're listening to the Friday edition of The Current.