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Drake's Fortune: The Fabulous True Story of the World's Greatest Confidence Artist
Over the course of twenty years, from 1914 to 1933, Oscar Hartzell conned millions of dollars from tens of thousands of trusting, innocent people. And when he was caught, they gave him more.
There are no folk heroes more all-American than con artists. Though we may openly condemn them, deep down we admire their brazen bravado, their cleverness, their shrewd understanding of how to rouse ambition and greed in their hapless victims. They offer the American dream on the quick, and, after all, don’t suckers get what they deserve?
Oscar Hartzell was born in 1876, on the Illinois prairie. Rising from humble origins, he worked hard as a farmer and then as a rancher on the grand scale in Iowa and Texas. But his flair for business didn’t match his ambition, and his dream of success foundered. A bankrupt, he was in his late thirties when in 1915 he met a couple who promised to turn his mother’s six thousand dollars into six million by delivering to her a share of the long-lost fortune of Sir Francis Drake. Hartzell joined their operation, apparently believing in it, before realizing it was a fraud and then boldly stealing it from under their noses and turning it into an enterprise that netted him millions.
Hartzell moved to London, out of the reach of frustrated American lawmen, restyling himself as an English aristocrat. While living a life of hedonistic grandeur, he played the hayseed for the folks back home, selling as many as a hundred thousand Midwesterners on a get-rich-quick scheme that seemed every bit as reasonable as the wildly speculative investments being touted on Wall Street. The year 1929 came, the stock market crashed — and then his life began to get very strange. His victims turned him into a messiah.
The extraordinary story of Oscar Hartzell has been all but forgotten and never told in full until now. Richard Rayner employs a wealth of original research and previously unseen documents to re-create a saga that stands out both for the sheer longevity and outrageousness of Hartzell’s con and for what its amazing twists and turns tell us about the tens of thousands of solid American citizens who, crushed by the Depression, believed to death in the most outrageous of frauds.
There are no folk heroes more all-American than con artists. Though we may openly condemn them, deep down we admire their brazen bravado, their cleverness, their shrewd understanding of how to rouse ambition and greed in their hapless victims. They offer the American dream on the quick, and, after all, don’t suckers get what they deserve?
Oscar Hartzell was born in 1876, on the Illinois prairie. Rising from humble origins, he worked hard as a farmer and then as a rancher on the grand scale in Iowa and Texas. But his flair for business didn’t match his ambition, and his dream of success foundered. A bankrupt, he was in his late thirties when in 1915 he met a couple who promised to turn his mother’s six thousand dollars into six million by delivering to her a share of the long-lost fortune of Sir Francis Drake. Hartzell joined their operation, apparently believing in it, before realizing it was a fraud and then boldly stealing it from under their noses and turning it into an enterprise that netted him millions.
Hartzell moved to London, out of the reach of frustrated American lawmen, restyling himself as an English aristocrat. While living a life of hedonistic grandeur, he played the hayseed for the folks back home, selling as many as a hundred thousand Midwesterners on a get-rich-quick scheme that seemed every bit as reasonable as the wildly speculative investments being touted on Wall Street. The year 1929 came, the stock market crashed — and then his life began to get very strange. His victims turned him into a messiah.
The extraordinary story of Oscar Hartzell has been all but forgotten and never told in full until now. Richard Rayner employs a wealth of original research and previously unseen documents to re-create a saga that stands out both for the sheer longevity and outrageousness of Hartzell’s con and for what its amazing twists and turns tell us about the tens of thousands of solid American citizens who, crushed by the Depression, believed to death in the most outrageous of frauds.
240 pages, Hardcover
First published May 21, 2002
4 people are currently reading
79 people want to read
About the author
Richard Rayner
53 books17 followersRichard Rayner is a British author who now lives in Los Angeles. He was born on December 15, 1955 in the northern city of Bradford. Rayner attended schools in Yorkshire and Wales before studying philosophy and law at the University of Cambridge. He has worked as an editor at Time Out Magazine, in London, and later on the literary magazine Granta, then based in Cambridge.
Rayner is the author of nine books. His first, Los Angeles Without A Map, was published in 1988. Part-fiction, part-travelogue, this was turned into a movie L.A. Without a Map (for which Rayner co-wrote the screenplay with director Mika Kaurismaki) starring David Tennant, Vinessa Shaw, Julie Delpy, Vincent Gallo, and, in an uncredited part, Johnny Depp.
(from Wikipedia)
Rayner is the author of nine books. His first, Los Angeles Without A Map, was published in 1988. Part-fiction, part-travelogue, this was turned into a movie L.A. Without a Map (for which Rayner co-wrote the screenplay with director Mika Kaurismaki) starring David Tennant, Vinessa Shaw, Julie Delpy, Vincent Gallo, and, in an uncredited part, Johnny Depp.
(from Wikipedia)
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
April 3, 2011
An absolute gem. Rayner combines astute reportage, witty writing and his own shady past to both show and explain how a single glib grifter could rip off thousands of Midwesterners during the Depression.
February 21, 2022
Having finished Will Ferguson's book Spanish Fly, I wanted to learn more about The Drake Fortune and found this book. What a read! How people were captivated and gave their money to Oscar Hartzell and his associates just boggled my mind....and how they kept sending him money when he was arrested. An interesting note is that the author was a petty criminal for a short time before becoming a writer, and his father was a con man.
February 15, 2013
This is a very involving account of Oscar Hartzell, a wildly successful Depression-era perpetrator of the long-established "Sir Francis Drake Estate" scam. What amazed me was not so much the scam itself (which was absolutely brilliant), but instead the god-like status that Hartzell's "investors" conferred on him. "Drakism" was practically a cult, with believers who were virtually evangelistic in nature. Another interesting thing is that while Hartzell was living the high life in England, he was fully aware he was perpetrating a fraud, but at some point (probably once he was deported to America, where he was unexpectedly adored -- not lynched -- by his followers) he started to believe in his own con. He thought the scam was real, and that once the Drake estate was settled he would become the richest, most powerful man in the world. Not surprisingly, he was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic and eventually died in a prison mental hospital. A really interesting story. Reading it, it's not so surprising that investors in the 90's threw good money at every Internet venture that came along. It's just something inherent in our nature.
February 13, 2013
An amusingly written tale of the greatest con man in American history. That's a bold statement, but the manner with which he amassed money, the way he lived, and the reverent devotion his supporters paid had for him even after his conviction and incarceration is nothing short of unbelievable. One man lived a life of supreme luxury and maintained the con for decades through smiles, brash confidence, and coming to believe his own fiction.
March 4, 2014
One of my favorite books ever. Incredibly well written and intensely fascinating
October 8, 2014
The true story of one of the most successful pre-Madoff confidence games ever played, and the strange man who played it.
December 18, 2018
Liars and Believers; what a convoluted mess.
May 8, 2020
Interesting read about a little publicized con of the early 1900's.
April 16, 2024
DNF 35%. I love the IDEA of this book. But I am done.
March 21, 2021
A great read about a true confidence scam a century ago in which people named Drake are supposedly heirs to Sir Francis Drake’s fortune lying at the bottom of the sea. With just a little investment, you could be part of it. People still believed in it, even after the perpetrators went to jail. There is no underestimating the credulity of Americans
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews