Americas Greatest Con Artist You Never Heard Of
b'With\\xa0T.D. Thornton, Author of My Adventures With Your Money: George Graham Rice and the Golden Age of the Con Artist
T.D. Thornton explores the glorious underbelly of America in his new book, My Adventures With Your Money, that takes us into the lurid, imaginative and brilliant world of G.G. Rice, one of America\'s most notorious and colorful con artists.
Master swindler George Graham Rice (\\u201cGG\\u201d) operated at the zenith of America\'s golden age of con artistry with plenty of illicit competition, but he stood apart from everyone else due to the sheer audacity, pure nerve and nefarious brilliance of his scams. Against the dark rise of American greed in the early 20th Century into the Roaring Twenties, the dapper but devious "GG" feasted on a nation of gullible prey with the flair of circus showman P.T. Barnum and on a financial scale comparable to modern fraudster Bernie Madoff.
GG Rice developed carefully planned and efficiently executed schemes\\u2026 techniques that are now core to many of today\\u2019s modern marketing tactics such as celebrity endorsements, telemarketing, customer profiling (his \\u201csucker list\\u201d), data mining, etc. He was a brilliant man who chose to apply his talents to being a con artist. But had he applied his talents within the rule of law, perhaps history would have held him in higher esteem.
Thornton walks us through some of Rice\\u2019s biggest cons and his ability to bounce back from adversity and being broke \\u2013 all very fascinating, albeit with a strong dark side to them. For example, with only seven dollars to his name, GG parlayed a chance horse racing tip into millions, lost it all to pride and ego, then won it back many times over. He also engaged in shady Wall Street practices. Securities regulators called hime the "Jackal of Wall Street," and he sparked riots in Manhattan\'s financial district by perfecting the art of "bucket shop" trading with the sole purpose of bilking the public blind on worthless penny stocks.
From the lawless frontier of the Gold Rush to his lust for dizzying riches on Wall Street, GG\'s supreme knowledge of "sucker psychology" empowered him to orchestrate everything from street corner rip-offs for pocket change to elaborately scripted gambling hoaxes for hundreds of thousands of dollars, all while being vilified by old-guard profiteers like J.P. Morgan and befriended by gangsters like Arnold Rothstein.'