I came across Oscar Hartzell in “Hustlers and Con Men,” a history of swindles published twenty-five years ago by a crime encyclopedist named Jay Robert Nash, which briefly brought Hartzell and his con, the Sir Francis Drake estate, out of obscurity. Nash’s seventeen-page telling of the Hartzell story—of an Iowa farm boy who restyled himself as a British lord in London while swindling seventy thousand or more Midwesterners—drew me in at once, because it seemed so rich and extravagant, the story of the manufacture and doomed pursuit of an illusion, like “The Maltese Falcon.” At the same time, Nash’s version was sketchy, relying largely on secondary accounts, and I wondered what might exist in the way of primary sources.
My own father was a con man, a charming rogue who, among other crimes and deceptions, some petty, some more ambitious, contrived to sell a large number of motor cars that did not belong to him and then fled with the proceeds, vanishing abroad (to South Africa, I later learned), where he bought himself a new identity that lasted until the money ran out. This was in the late nineteen-sixties and early seventies, when I was a child in England, and I knew that such a life leaves more evidence and wreckage than Nash needed for the purposes of his book. There would always be a paper trail.
In time, I discovered that Scotland Yard had a file on Oscar Hartzell, which had been closed under the British Official Secrets Act. I applied to have it opened, and was eventually handed three big folders, bound in ribbon, that contained detective reports, witness statements, newspaper clippings, and a chronology of Hartzell’s life in England. In America, there was even more material: transcripts of two trials, running to thousands of pages, several boxes of State Department papers, transcripts of Post Office hearings, and court records of disbarment and bankruptcy. His Bureau of Prisons records were filed under the pleasing category “Notorious Offenders” in the National Archives at College Park, Maryland. They contained several weeks’ worth of psychiatric interviews and, most remarkable, an autobiography that a prison psychiatrist had encouraged Hartzell to write in 1936.
“Lincoln or any prominent man you’ve ever heard of has got nothing on me as far as starting at the bottom. I’ve had quite a career, doctor,” Hartzell told the psychiatrist. Reading these crumbling, typed pages, I had the sensation that Hartzell had walked through the door. I began to think I’d stumbled upon a lost saga, a tale of romantic individualism and capitalism gone awry, of money and duplicity mixed together to the point of madness.