Complex Numbers

A Bridge Too Far

Given the proliferation of confidence schemes these days—business, political, religious, and otherwise—I wanted to save and share this article about the con artist to whom every other grifter is compared.

    ‘I’ve Got a Bridge to Sell You’: The Con Artist Who Peddled the Brooklyn Bridge  
Dean Jobb on John McCarthy, the "last of the old-time crooks."

It's kind of a long read, and I won't be quoting much.

The New York police considered him “an aristocrat of crookdom.” In the press, he was crowned the “dean of confidence men” and “the biggest of the big-time” swindlers. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle hailed his signature fraud as “the epic of the confidence world.”

His real name appears to have been John McCarthy. And he was the con man who sold the Brooklyn Bridge.

Well, not really, as the article goes on to point out. I'd always wondered about that. No, he sold fractional shares of the thing (at the time, it was a toll bridge), like a stock trader or banker selling collateralized debt obligations—the latter of which may not technically have been fraud, but turned out to be a Bad Idea anyway.

It was hailed as the Eighth Wonder of the World. The Brooklyn Bridge was “the greatest work wrought by the hand of man” in the nineteenth century, Brooklyn’s Daily Eagle proclaimed on the day it officially opened in May 1883, a “monument to human ingenuity, mechanical genius and engineering skill.”

As an engineer myself, I was always fascinated by bridges. Of course, by the time I hit the scene, many bridges had surpassed its superlatives, but as with other massive public works projects, we had to start somewhere.

The bridge was also a magnet for crime. Allegations of fraud, graft, and political corruption dogged the massive project during the construction phase.

Come on, now, that's just New York.

New York police estimated McCarthy reaped as much as a million dollars during his swindling career.

And this was back when, as Tom Waits put it, "a million was a million."

McCarthy’s swindle has become the ultimate con, synonymous with gullibility and blind trust. The catchphrase, “if you believe that, I’ve got a bridge to sell you” has been around almost as long as the bridge has been standing.

Did you know "gullibility" isn't in the dictionary?

And if you just went to look it up, I have some land in Florida for you to buy.

When New Yorkers celebrated the bridge’s one hundredth birthday in 1983 with parades and fireworks, the structure went on sale for real. Bits of wooden walkway and slivers of cable salvaged during repair work were sold as souvenirs, and ten dollars bought a certificate purporting to be the deed to the bridge, signed by Sid E. Slicker.

I was there for part of that year, though I didn't attend any of the celebrations. But the selling of souvenirs from it strikes me as something also ripe for cons, like churches having a saint's knucklebones or a sliver of the True Cross. I used to have a chunk of the Berlin Wall, sent to me by a friend in the Army stationed there at the time. Just a hunk of concrete, really. Could have come from anywhere. At least I didn't pay for it.

Mostly, though, I find the name "Sid E. Slicker" disproportionately hilarious. (Of course it's made-up, but it harks back to the many aliases used by McCarthy.)

Unlike some people, I don't really find this sort of thing fascinating. But it did occur to me that con artists serve an important function in society: they keep us from trusting too much. Skepticism is good. Would I prefer to live in a society where there isn't a thief or scammer on every corner? Of course. But as it is, at least it makes me know better than to buy naming rights to a star, or an extended warranty for my car.