Behind the Scenes Minis: Jack and Ponzi

Tracy and Holly talk about the folklore aspects of Jack Sheppard's story, and how a mustache drawn on a photo of Charles Ponzi was part of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism about that case.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Tracy D.
Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. This week we talked about
thief and serial prison escape artist Jack Shepherd a K

(00:22):
A John Shepherd a K. I really don't know how
much of what we said in this episode was actually factual,
and how much of it is like the same in
Bellish story being crept from different authors by other authors
and printed as new books, which was a thing in
the Lite in the eighteenth century. Yeah, the sensational folk
tale of Jack Shepherd. We I mean, we do know

(00:45):
for sure real person there. There's old Bailey records. They
are also you know, written records of the time. But
in terms of a lot of the details that are
pretty consistent from one account to the other, I don't
feel fully confident over whether that consistency is because those
were the correct details, or whether it's just because everybody

(01:06):
was lifting from everybody else's account, because some of those
came out before he died, So after question marks, questions,
but very fun ones. Yeah. I had said in that
Six Impossible episodes that I was really focused on the
escapes that seemed really ingenious and not ones that seemed

(01:27):
like horrifying or violent in some way. And the list
that I had been compiling of which six things I
was going to talk about, had included Jack Shepherd. And
as I started taking notes about Jack Shephard, I was like,
I think this one is its own thing, though, And
that helped me narrow down from a list of things
that had been I had had like, uh, seven or

(01:49):
eight or nine potential topics that I had to narrow
down to six. And Jack Shephard moving into it an
own standalone episode. Uh, it was part of that. Well,
will say his his escape seem less ingenious and more
just determined as hell. Yeah. And I there was one

(02:09):
point as I was taking the notes where I just wrote,
who keeps giving him a saw? You gotta get some
better security if you want to stop having the guy
have a saw to saw out some bars and squeeze
through them. Right where do these nails keep coming from? Yeah? Uh?

(02:32):
I tried to get to to some of the social
and economic and other factors that were like leading to
a both crime, the fear of crime, like the perceived
the perception that there was suddenly a ton of crime,
also people's fascination with crime. Um. And you know, there

(02:52):
was definitely crime happening in the nineteenth century when there
was the big resurgence in Jack Shepard fame. But like
the idea that books about Jack Shepard were causing suddenly
there to be this giant It just reminded me of
so many things, like violent video games, heavy metal music,
like dungeons and dragons causing all the problems. Yeah, that's

(03:19):
all bless their hearts moment for me. Yeah, bless your
heart ards crime. Yeah, so many things going into crime.
Do you know what they were planning to do with
a hundred and eight yards of wool, because I'm like,
I have idea. I think they were probably just planning

(03:41):
to sell it. Yeah. I found some number and I
didn't know how accurate the number was or how it
was arrived at. That was about how many people in
London around the seventeen thirties were basically supporting themselves through crime,
and it was stuff like stealing small items from one

(04:02):
place and selling them at a pawn shop or somewhere else.
Um And so I I imagine the plan had been
to sell that, although you know he could have made himself,
some ropes to climb out the prison next time he
got captured, or a fancy pair of pants that would
be a lot of pants, Maybe a disguise since he's

(04:26):
basically going to just go next door and try to
pretend to have a regular life. Yeah, the um there
was one thing that I had read that was the
account of somebody that that was living at the time,
and I didn't put this in the episode, but it
it had some kind of snide comments about uh, the

(04:47):
fact that then like then he went to just hang
out right down the road from the prison and also
like commit some more small crimes in full view of
the prison. And how maybe if he had wanted to
remain not in the prison, that some different choices could
have been made. I do love how um, his choices

(05:09):
are never questioned. It's always other people that just led
him to these things, where got him the tools to escape.
Right again, he was twenty when he started stealing things,
and sure he was an apprentice, he didn't have any money.

(05:30):
That was, he was living in a time when it
was very hard for a lot of people to get
by financially. But still, like Elizabeth Lyon, did not make
that choice for him. He made that choice his own self.

(05:52):
We talked about Charles Ponds Ponzi schemes this week, Holy Moses.
I read a lot of old articles in the Boston
Post for this research. The Post was not the only
Boston paper reporting on at the Globe had reports to
other newspapers, and other cities also had reports. But I

(06:14):
stuck with a lot of the Post reporting because the
Post didn't win that Pulitzer Um. One thing that I
had in the outline that I wound up taking out
because I just did not have a great place to
put it. On the twelfth, on the day that the
Post had like printed all of this stuff about. It
was a bunch of stuff that was related to Charles
Ponzi having been arrested and incarcerated in Canada. They printed

(06:37):
photos from his nine eight arrest and at that time
he had a mustache. He was no longer wearing a mustache,
so it printed these photos of his like nine eight mugshots,
and then below that there was a photo of him
from nine twenty, like a current photo um and it
was next to one that was captioned how Pons would

(07:01):
look with a mustache, and then below that was quote
the photo of Ponzi without the mustache that he wore
at the time of his arresting Canada was taking recently
for the purpose of comparing it with his Canadian pictures.
The posts artists painted one in. I found this so
hilarious that I stopped what I was doing and laughed

(07:24):
out loud for like a meaningful amount of time. And
I was like, I know, I knew already that the
Post had won a Pulitzer for this reporting, and I
was like, I know, y'all got a pulitzer for this,
but this drawn in mustache on the photograph is funny. Um,
it looks funny on its own. The wording of the
caption was very funny to me. Uh, it brightens my day.

(07:53):
It makes me wonder if that isn't the start of
people drawing mustaches on picture, maybe as a form of graffiti. Yeah, yeah,
if a pulitzer comes out of it, sure. Yeah. I
didn't put this in either. But one of the other
things that had been mentioned in some spots, but it

(08:14):
was kind of an aside, was that the like the
specific pulitzer that the paper was awarded was related to
service for having done this reporting. That led to arrests,
and then like, that's not an award that's given regularly.
It's given when something has happened specifically that seems to
warrant it. And according to various sources that I did

(08:35):
not have time to like go comb through Pulitzer records.
The next time that particular UM award was also granted
was also for a Boston paper. It was for the
Boston Globe, for the Boston Globes reporting on the sex
abuse within the Catholic Church. And it was similarly like

(08:56):
this reporting that led to some arrests of the people
who were involved, which I thought was an interesting connection.
The Boston Post does not exist anymore at the Boston Globe,
Does I UM have the reaction to this story that
I have to so many stories of people who are

(09:16):
engaged in somewhat complicated criminal activities. Is this really easier
than finding a legitimate way to make money? Yeah? I
think for the very brief window of time when Charles
Bonds he had millions of dollars, that probably did feel
pretty easy, but also probably incredibly stressful because like he

(09:40):
knew right, he knew he was lying. Yeah, And I
think he might have thought that he could maybe transition
this into something that was like on the up and up,
like he could get to a point where he had
enough money to be seed money for something that would
not be a criminal enterprise. But like that, it didn't uh,

(10:04):
And a whole lot of people lost their money, and
a lot of the people that lost their money lost
like their whole life savings. A lot of the people
that he had targeted were like other Italian immigrants, a
lot of whom had just come to the United States
hoping for a better life and then lost all their money.
I am most fascinated in this story though by Rose.

(10:27):
She is very interesting to me. I would love to
know more about her, and I'm sure there's almost nothing
available about her, but yeah, I think there are some
letters and and things like that. It does seem like
she really genuinely loved him, And I'm not totally clear
on whether she loved him and that was enough to

(10:48):
offset the fact that he had committed this huge crime,
or if that she more continued to believe that he
had been like just the victim of some kind of
hapless misadventure rather than having perpetuated a huge crime, or
that she was cool with crime. Yeah, I don't know.

(11:12):
I mean, she knew he was troubled from the outside.
When someone's mother goes, I know you love my child,
but for real they are yes, and you go, I'm
fine with it all right. Um. One thing that I
did notice we talked about, um, some of the other

(11:33):
people who had perpetuated Ponzi schemes before Ponzi, and one
of them was Sarah Howe, who had like just she
had established these banks in quotation marks. They were not
really banks, but they were specifically for women, and she
had done them in all these different places. I know
somebody who works specifically as a forensic accountant and investigates fraud,

(11:56):
like that's their whole job, is investigating people who do
this kind of fraud or sometimes people who have done
some other kind of a crime, and she is investigating
like their financial paper trail of this crime, that kind
of stuff. Um. And one of the things that they
have expressed frustration about is that us a person will
like defraud an elderly couple, get caught, be tried, convicted,

(12:23):
serve their time, get released, do the exact same thing again,
and that initial conviction can't be part of the next
trial because it's considered to be prejudicial, which is incredibly frustrating.
And uh, and I like, I know people who have
been the victims of pretty serious financial fraud that just

(12:48):
nothing ever came of any kind of like criminal trial
for the person who perpetuated it, And it sucks. Yeah,
I mean, it jeopardizes people's into your futures. Yeah. Yeah.
And there's not a lot of recourse really in many cases. Um,
I feel like in some cases there's a focus on

(13:09):
like financial literacy for people to protect themselves from being defrauded,
but not as much focus on preventing the fraud from
being carried out in the first place, which I mean
the same thing is true from other categories of crime
as well. But still, um, a lot of the people

(13:31):
who are targeted are like people who are getting older
and like maybe their decision making is not as clear
as previously that kind of stuff, So it sucks. Uh.
And Charles Ponds he was one of those people who
was like so charismatic and so charming in a lot
of ways that like that may have been one of
the reasons that Rose still supported him, is that, like

(13:53):
he came off, it's just affable and kind and eager
to be friend. No, no, but I'm donating so much
to charity. That's the thing that always gets me, Like
the misdirection of like, I'm starting a fund for orphans. Uh,
this is all It's gonna be fine. I'm gonna did
I mentioned that I donated a bunch of money to
this cost like I'm gonna run for office. The fact

(14:17):
that his PR guy sued him for not paying the bills.
I was so excited about that detail until I learned
about like his counter suit and that that Ponsy won
both of them, and I was like, I was really
hoping that the guy that informed on him to the
Boston Post was then going to get to sue him
for the four thousand dollars and get it. But that's

(14:39):
not how that went. Nope. So anyway, that's our Charles
Palsy episode. Uh. If you want to send us a
note about this or any other podcast history podcast that
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(15:02):
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(15:24):
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