Edwards, Herbert H., prom. 1880s, U.S., fraud. In the 1880s a Cleveland, Ohio, doctor, Herbert H. Edwards, claimed to be descended from Robert Edwards. The ancestor assumed by Dr. Edwards was alleged to have owned, in 1770, sixty-five acres of Manhattan Island, including the site of the Woolworth Building. The Cleveland doctor founded the Edward Heirs Association, continued by his son, with the intention of recovering the family's property, which he said had fallen out of their hands through legal trickery.

Egan, James, See: Berry, John

Engel, Sigmund (AKA: Eugene Gordon, Carl Arthur Laemmle, Jr., Paul Marshall, H. Paul Moore), b.c.1874, U.S., fraud-big. When asked why he had committed bigamy 200 times, the smooth-talking Sigmund Engel replied, "...womenania...Surely they can't punish me for enjoying lovely women...I go for the fifty-seven varieties," he told journalists. Sigmund Engel was the acknowledged master of the matrimonial con. He practiced it with amazing success across two continents and a half-dozen nations. Engel married at least 200 women, taking them for $6 million by his own estimate. He lived in Europe in the early years of the twentieth century. He first married in Vienna and continued on a dizzying pace through the capitals of Europe in search of widows with $5,000 or more. His name first appeared on police rap sheets in the U.S. in 1917. By the time of his final arrest in 1949, Engel had been arrested twenty-two times and had served four prison sentences. It was estimated that he had married at least forty women in the U.S. before 1927. With a glib line and persuasive charm, Engel would meet his intended victims in some public place and say, "Why, you look just like my wife! I mean my former wife, God bless her, she's dead these last four years." Within minutes the charmer would convince the woman to have lunch with him.

At various times Engel passed himself off as Carl Arthur Laemmle, Jr., of Universal Studios. Engel would suggest to the woman that they have lunch together, as he looked at his watch and muttered under his breath that he would shortly be placing an important phone call to Hollywood. Engel would remark on his companion's fine appearance and ask her to appear in his next film. Few were able to resist. On other occasions, he was an oil baron, Lord Beaverbrook, Howard Hughes's attorney H. Paul Moore, or a shipping magnate. He always flashed a big bankroll to convince his target that he was a man of means. Courtship and then marriage inevitably followed, after which he usually succeeded in convincing the bride to sign over her savings account to him to "avoid problems later." With the victim's money in hand, Engel would depart, with the explanation that he was off to purchase some new luggage. Of course he never returned.

By 1949, Engel had earned a vast, illegal fortune, and one reason for his success was that he never stayed too long in one town. His violation of this principle proved his undoing. In Chicago in June 1949, he met Reseda Corrigan, a 39-year-old widow had just left a singing lesson. A whirlwind courtship followed during which Engel took Corrigan and her daughters to Milwaukee to see a grave he falsely claimed to be his mother's. Placing flowers next to the tombstone, he said: "Mother, this is the little girl I am going to marry."

The wedding was set for June 7, but the day before the event Engel vanished. He sent his fiancee and her daughters to a beauty parlor and left them. A week later, Corrigan received a phone call. Engel asked her to take the first train out of Chicago and meet him in New York's Grand Central Station. Corrigan went, but Engel was not there. Broke, she lived in the station for eight days, sleeping in the washrooms and on public benches. When she returned home, Corrigan filed a complaint with the Chicago Police Department and a picture of Engel was published in a newspaper shortly afterward.

By this time, Engel had moved on to his next victim, 59-year-old Genevieve C. Parrot, a widow with six sons. She had met Engel at the Palm Grove Inn, but knew him only as "Paul Marshall," a rich banker who lived at the Blackstone Hotel downtown. But Parrot had seen the picture of Engel in the paper. Alarmed, she asked her sister-in-law Marianne Hagen, a Chicago policewoman, for advice, and was told to play along with Engel. After agreeing to marry Marshall, Parrot asked him to purchase some new luggage for their honeymoon. Engel agreed, and went downtown on the afternoon of June 24, 1949, to the Charles Wilt luggage store on Michigan Avenue, unaware that the sales clerks and customers were actually police.

As Engel tried to leave the store with his luggage, he was nabbed by police officers and taken to the Town Hall station. The 73-year-old swindler quickly became a cause celebre. A piano was provided for his amusement, and police personally escorted him to dinner. Within the next few weeks, a number of Engel's former wives and swindled girlfriends came forward to tell their stories. They were present when the trial finally opened before Judge George M. Fisher in October 1949.

Reseda Corrigan gave the court an amusing inside look at Engel's "technique." "I first met him on South Michigan Avenue, just after I'd left a singing lesson, and he came up and grabbed me by both hands. He said "It's amazing, amazing, amazing. You look so much like my dead wife I would have thought she had walked out of her grave." The widow blushed, and then went on with her story. "I said, "Unhand me, you villain"...But he was so gentlemanly, so refined...He told me he liked petite women and I am only five feet one inch." The bigamist was freed on bail after the first day of hearings. One woman pushed her way toward Engel for an autograph. He smiled and signed the book: "Sigmund S. Engel, Lover of 1001 Women." Defense attorney J. Edward Jones threw up his hands in frustration. "I'm trying to prove you're not that!" he said.

Some of the most damaging testimony was provided by Annette Kubiak of South Bend, Ind., who met Engel in October 1948 in front of the Oliver Hotel. He introduced himself as H. Paul Moore, a rich California attorney, and a week later they were married in Michigan City. Returning to South Bend, Engel threw a lavish party at a posh country club. At her husband's urging, Kubiak sold her home, valued at $22,000 for only $12,500. The buyer's $5,000 earnest money wound up in Engel's pocket. Kubiak never saw it again. The couple traveled to Chicago, where they checked into the Stevens Hotel before Engel fled. When these facts came to light at the trial, defense attorneys objected that a wife could not testify against her husband. Judge Fisher eventually decided Engel's legal wife was 64-year-old Corrine Perry of Los Angeles, who surrendered her entire life savings of $2,673 to the con man who called himself "Eugene Gordon." In the face of all the evidence, Engel still had some admirers. Pauline Langton of New York City said that she forgave the scoundrel for stealing $50,000 in jewelry and abandoning her. During the trial, Langton moved in with Engel at his Chicago hotel. The state's attorney objected to this arrangement, and issued an order banning Engel from living with Langton. As the couple left the courtroom arm in arm, Engel smiled at reporters and said: "But you can take it from me--she's the only lady in the lot." Engel's jocular attitude slowly began to change as more women appeared on the stand and repeated essentially the same story. "It's like playing the same record over and over, the way they say I made love to them," he said. "...I wouldn't be seen dead in the hotel with them," he shouted. "They are all gold diggers who
tried to get my money...I'll show the state. I'll rip hell out of their case."

But after eight days of deliberation, the jury returned a Guilty verdict, and on Nov. 9, Engel was sentenced to prison for two to ten years. Reporters pushed for interviews. Engel explained, somewhat modestly, that he had been inspired by the king of the conmen, Joseph "Yellow Kid" Weil. Weil, who was living in Chicago, bristled. He called a press conference where he denounced Engel. "There isn't a day that someone doesn't abscond with a woman's money. Preying on the love of a woman for money is one of the most despicable ways of making a livelihood I ever heard of," Weil said.

Before he entered the prison compound, Engel gave reporters some advice about conning women. Among his points:

1. Always look for the widows. Less complications.
2. Establish your own background as one of wealth and culture.
3. Make friends with the entire family.
4. Send a woman frequent bouquets. Roses, never orchids.
5. Don't ask for money. Make her suggest lending it to you.
6. Be attentive at all times.
7. Be gentle and ardent.
8. Always be a perfect gentleman. Subordinate sex.

Enricht, Louis, b.1846, U.S., fraud-theft. In 1916, Long Island inventor Louis Enricht convinced a skeptical press and even Henry Ford that converting water into engine fuel was possible. Before Enricht's scheme was debunked, President Woodrow Wilson promised U.S. consumers penny-a-gallon fuel.

Enricht summoned the press to his Farmingdale, Long Island, residence on Apr. 11, 1916, to demonstrate his gasless flivver. He asked reporters to examine his engine and see that the gas tank was devoid of fuel. Enricht produced a white china pitcher filled with water into which he poured a vial of greenish liquid, and deposited the mixture in the tank. After a few wheezing sputters, the automobile kicked into gear and everyone went for a ride. The reporters were apparently satisfied that Enricht had achieved the seemingly impossible. Publisher William E. Haskell of the Chicago Herald visited Enricht, and satisfied with the truth of Enricht's claims, returned to Chicago to announce the coming "automotive revolution."

Henry Ford also examined the car and arrived at a similar conclusion. He gave Enricht a $10,000 check for exclusive rights to the invention. Enricht was not content to deal with Ford alone and began negotiations with Hiram P. Maxim, son of the inventor of the rapid-fire Maxim gun who offered Enricht a $100,000 down payment for the formula to the cheap gasoline substitute.

Railroad tycoon Benjamin Yoakum was the next to take an interest in the project. He promised President Wilson that Enricht, with whom he had formed a partnership known as the National Motor Power Company, would deliver the secret formula to him. When Enricht began stalling, Yoakum hired Pinkerton agents to follow him. In 1917 Yoakum accused Enricht of consorting with Franz von Papen, German military attache in Washington. Yoakum charged that the meeting took place on a German submarine moored off Baltimore Harbor on Aug. 3, 1916, and accused Enricht of giving his formula to the Germans. Police confiscated Enricht's safe deposit box, but found only twenty liberty bonds.

The government lost interest in the matter until Enricht announced in 1920 that he could manufacture 460 gallons of gasoline from one ton of peat. The Patent Office ridiculed the claim, saying it was contrary to all known laws of chemistry. Enricht organized a new company, and managed to bring in $40,000 of new investments. A year later, he was indicted for grand larceny. On Feb. 28, 1923, Justice Lewis J. Smith of Nassau County sentenced Enricht to a three to seven year term in Sing Sing after the inventor failed to return the money to his investors. In April 1924, Enricht was released from prison. He died a short time later without divulging his secret. It was believed that acetone and liquid acetylene mixed with water caused the car to move. However, the mixture is much more expensive than ordinary gasoline and corrodes the engine after prolonged use.

Equity Funding Corporation of America, See: Goldblum, Stanley

Estes, Billie Sol, 1925- , U.S., fraud.

The crooked machinations of Billie Sol Estes were performed in the garb of a checked suit, ten-gallon hat, and ornate cowboy boots coated with fertilizer. Estes was the first, but certainly not the last, of the "good old boys" from Texas who managed to build a multimillion-dollar fortune based upon the gullibility of finance firms, government allotments, and high-level contacts
within the federal government.

Before he was thirty, Estes, the son of a country preacher from Clyde, Texas, was named by the U.S. Junior Chamber of Commerce as one of America's ten outstanding young men of the year. In accepting his award, Estes told one and all that the reason for his success was good living. He explained that he did not drink, smoke, or dance that he followed the dictates of the Lord.

But the dictates Estes truly followed were his own inner voices of deceit and greed. He had, in the late 1950s, acquired thousands of acres of land in and about Pecos, Texas, calling himself a cotton farmer. He appeared to be as rich as the oil barons of his native state. He shared his wealth, spending freely, giving lavish gifts to local bigwigs, and contributing mightily to the
political campaigns of those who might someday overlook the rough corners of his landed empire. This included Senator Ralph Yarborough and Congressman J.T. Rutherford, who represented the Pecos area.

When John F. Kennedy became president, Estes, who thought of himself as a pioneer, moved in on the New Frontier. He purchased $6,000 worth of tickets, at $100 a ticket, to the presidential birthday party celebrating the New Frontier in 1962 and made a beeline for Washington. His aim, really, was not the office of the presidency but the Department of Agriculture, which, through clever manipulation of crop allotments and a few gifts to officials, he had managed to con into naming him as a board member to the National Cotton Advisory Committee, although he had little or no cotton.

What Estes did have was a monopoly on grain storage. He had bought up a great number of grain storage elevators during the mid-1950s on credit, of course, when he realized that the government paid handsomely for grain storage. For three years alone, 1959-1961, he collected $8 million in storage payments from the federal government for storing more than fifty million bushels of grain. This lucrative enterprise did not appease the entrepreneur's greed, however, and he hit upon a scheme to further enrich himself, knowing that government subsidies in cotton were ridiculously high.

The government had set high prices for cotton allotments, but these allotments applied to only long-established cotton acreage.

Estes' Texas land, however, was mostly barren of cotton; he had never grown the crop and was therefore not entitled to allotments. The Texas promoter decided that he would merely go out and buy land that did have allotments for cotton crops. This proved to be somewhat difficult, but Estes solved the problem or, to nervous government inspectors, appeared to have solved it. He and his agents roamed through Georgia, Alabama, Oklahoma, and Texas, locating farmers who were about to lose their lands to the government.

The proposition was simple. Estes found more than 3,000 acres that had existing allotments, and went to the farmers about to lose this land. Under a special proviso, the government would allow the transferring of allotments by farmers who bought new land. They could transfer the cotton crop allotment to new tracts of land from old acreage having the existing allotment. Billie Sol said that he would sell them his land so that the allotments could be transferred to that acreage. Through his financial contact, he would arrange for mortgages to be taken out for them so that they could ostensibly acquire his property, but they would have to agree to default on the mortgage payments so that the Estes land would revert to its original owner, Billie Sol, who would then have his original land and the federal allotments transferred to it. Of course, the Texas boy wonder paid the farmers under the table for their trouble.

The scheme worked well. Even though certain government officials in the Department of Agriculture going over these deals found them suspicious and wrote unflattering reports about Estes' methods--reports that were filed in the offices of Under-Secretary Murphy's minions--the under-secretary steadfastly approved of the allotments to Estes, saying that Billie Sol was an upstanding citizen who was greatly helping the economy to flourish.

While the allotment scheme was flowering, Estes embarked on a new adventure in economic swindling, a strange and bizarre scheme dealing with simple fertilizer. Anhydrous ammonia, a liquid fertilizer which was easily applied to crops and proved to increase crop production almost overnight, was much in demand by farmers throughout Texas. Estes, knowing this, approached hundreds of farmers and offered to sell them the fertilizer at between $40 and $60 a ton, which was $50 less per ton than the going retail rate. They leaped at his purchase price which was, of course, designed to corner the anhydrous ammonia market. He would lose great sums, but in the end he would reap new fortunes when complete control of the product was his. He made up the losses through the income generated by his grain storage business.

There was one big problem--the fertilizer had to be stored in expensively manufactured tanks. Billie Sol sold these tanks through a labyrinthine mortgage system to farmers and businessmen in West Texas, assuring them that he would take full responsibility for any problems with the tanks. The profits from such an investment, Billie Sol demonstrated on paper, would be enormous. Thousands of mortgages were taken out for the tanks, and Estes took these to finance companies who bought them at a discount. Billie Sol's bank accounts swelled. He was the king of the grain storage business, reaped fortunes on cotton crop allotments, and had moved into the fertilizer business so successfully that he appeared to have gotten complete control of the market. Though there were murmurs about his odd techniques by bureaucrats in far-off Washington, Texas authorities greeted the success of their native son with backslapping pride.

Doubts about Billie Sol did form in the minds of some local Pecos businessmen, who went to Oscar Griffin, the young editor of the tiny Pecos Independent & Enterprise. The newspaper editor listened to the suspicions cast upon Billie Sol's methods and was astounded to learn that he had, within months, cornered the anhydrous ammonia market.

Griffin began a tedious investigation into Estes' fertilizer scheme, a probe that would later earn him the Pulitzer Prize. His research provided eye -popping figures. The Texas wonder boy had sold, through a series of involved mortgage arrangements, more than 33,000 storage tanks, which were listed as being located throughout West Texas. The editor, after consulting with fertilizer experts, quickly learned that such a vast number of tanks could not possibly dot the broad stretches of land around Pecos.

The large financial institutions in New York and Los Angeles which had arranged for millions of dollars in mortgages for the 33,000 storage tanks were contacted, but representatives of these institutions were cautious. Billie Sol was a V.I.P. client with powerful friends in Washington, D.C. His business involved vast amounts of money, and they did not intend to annoy the Texas genius. Investigators were sent out to make polite inquiries about the storage tanks.

Initially, investigators thought the whole procedure was senselessly repetitive. They had already checked a number of Billie Sol's storage tanks, and had checked the serial numbers on the tanks built by the Superior Manufacturing Company of Amarillo, Texas.

Dutifully, the investigators went about their work, going first to Billie Sol's office where the affable tycoon went over lists of storage tanks and their locations and corresponding serial numbers. The investigators then drove to the sites, checked the serial numbers, and reported back to the home offices that everything was in order. One investigator, however, Frank Cain, a lawyer for the Pacific Finance Company in Los Angeles which had invested heavily in buying up the storage tank mortgages, did not go to Estes' office first.

The lawyer, working out of Dallas, went to Pecos, Texas, unannounced and conducted a private investigation. He could not locate a single storage tank bearing the firm's corresponding serial numbers. Next, he went to Amarillo and inspected the premises of the Superior Manufacturing Company, which constructed the tanks. He learned that two of Billie Sol's close friends operated this firm. Moreover, he quickly realized that this company could not have produced 33,000 storage tanks with its limited facilities. As it turned out, the firm had not manufactured more than a few hundred tanks.

What the Amarillo firm had produced was thousands of plates with serial numbers on them--more than 33,000, in fact. Normally, such plates were welded onto a tank, but those used by Estes were interchangeable, and could be slipped into brackets so that the switching of plates was a simple matter. And this is exactly what Billie Sol had been doing. Whenever an investigator appeared, he would direct him to the location of a storage tank but send ahead of the investigator a crew of men who would switch the serial number plates so that they corresponded to those on the investigator's list. The system was so streamlined that Billie Sol would supervise the operation via short-wave radios installed in his office and in the jeeps being driven by his plate-switching crews.

When the finance companies learned, to their great dismay, that they had been gulled in one of the oldest Peter-to-Paul scams, a full-scale state inquiry ensued. Those involved in Estes' storage tank scheme began to talk. J.S. Wheeler, who operated a Pecos fertilizing company, told Texas officials that he saw through the Estes scheme early on and confronted Billie Sol, who merely laughed and told him that the finance firms were easily hoodwinked. "They'll never catch up with you," Estes had chuckled. "These people are stupid."

It was all a clever game to Estes, who then went on to tell Wheeler how ranchers had employed the same technique in falsifying assets when getting huge loans on their ranches. They would merely put up their cattle as collateral, then drive the banker around and around on their vast tracts of land so that he could get a general count of the livestock available. The easily fooled banker would really be counting the same cattle over and over again but from a different vantage point on the same ranch. "It's the same thing with the tanks," said Billie Sol reassuringly. "We'll starve them to death looking for equipment."

Cain's investigation proved out-and-out fraud; it was the end of the Texas Tycoon. Following the storage tank revelations, the federal government inspected the allotments given Estes for his cotton lands. It was learned that Under-Secretary Murphy and other officials had visited Estes in Texas and had been taken to swanky stores, such as Neiman-Marcus, where expensive wardrobes and other items were bestowed upon them. Murphy and the others were asked to resign their posts, which they did. The cotton allotments were revoked.

Estes himself blithely faced prosecution, perhaps never believing until it was too late that he would actually be convicted for his schemes. His attitude did not change, even when Frank Cain first confronted him with the truth and told him: "You realize that you are subject to criminal penalties?"

At that moment, Estes shrugged and lamely admitted that the millions he had scammed through the storage tank scheme was "penitentiary money." Billie Sol's unshakable belief in his own immunity seemed, at first, to be justified. Although a Texas court convicted him of fraud and sentenced him to eight years in prison, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned this ruling and sentence, stating that Estes' trial had been televised and, because of the press coverage, Billie Sol had been denied due process of law.

Jubilant in this decision, Estes made plans to go back to his bilking operations, but was shocked to find himself again on trial, this time for mail fraud. A U.S. District Court found him Guilty and he received a fifteen-year sentence. The Supreme Court did not overturn this conviction, and the swaggering Estes went to prison, his crazy dreams of empire shattering with the clank of his cell door.

Yet, today in West Texas, the sharper is still held in high regard by some residents who thought of the Estes schemes as merely shrewd business mores. Of course, these admirers lost no money in Billie Sol's $22 million storage tank scam. Said one during the trial of the Texas wonder boy: "Hell, the man was only trying to make a living!"

Estes served six years on the mail fraud conviction, entering prison in 1965 and emerging in 1971. Promising to stick to the straight and narrow, Estes took a job as a truck dispatcher for a petroleum firm in Abilene, Texas, and regularly reported to his parole officer. He pointed out to his parole officer that he had learned his lesson and that nothing was then beneath him, including manual labor, where he "even washed trucks and fixed flats." To make a few extra dollars, Estes explained, he worked as a straw boss on his brother's cattle ranch.

But the habitual criminal in Billie Sol Estes was hard at work on yet another swindle. This time, Estes' scheme involved the purchasing and leasing of nonexistent steam-cleaning machines used to wash equipment in the oil fields. Knowing the hustler's old techniques of claiming equipment that did not exist, officials inspected the Estes operation and quickly proved fraud. This time, Estes was allowed to plead guilty to one charge only, tax evasion. He went back to prison in 1979 to serve a five-year term. Estes was released in 1983, and again he claimed that he would follow only the honest path and that his name would never again be involved with crime.

Yet the world heard from the hustler once more in the following year, when he came forward to clear up an old murder as a favor to a U.S. Marshal, Clint Peoples. Before entering prison in 1979, Estes had promised Peoples that he would solve the death of Henry Marshall, who was found shot and poisoned on his small West Texas ranch in 1961, and whose death had been originally labeled a suicide. Estes, in 1984, went before a grand jury and claimed that Marshall had gotten on to his cotton swindles and, as an official of the Department of Agriculture, was about to expose Estes' far-flung operations.

The hustler then met with Lyndon Baines Johnson, who was linked to Estes' cotton swindles along with some Johnson aides, according to Estes. Following a meeting where Johnson concluded that Marshall would ruin them all, Estes claimed, the newly inaugurated vice president ordered Malcolm Wallace, a family friend (who had once been convicted of killing a man), to execute the troublesome Marshall, which he did. Most authorities utterly dismissed this Estes tale, although the grand jury Estes addressed on the matter, along with a judge hearing the old case, ordered that the Marshall death be changed in the records from a suicide to a homicide. A short time later, Billie Sol Estes was charged with sexually assaulting his housekeeper. He was then sixty.

From the World Encyclopedia of Con Artists and Confidence Games