National Affairs: Dupes & Drake

Last week a racket of incredible proportions came to light in Chicago, where slickers used to bilk hayseeds by promising to let them see the Masonic Temple revolve on its invisible axis. Scene was the U. S. District Court, Judge Philip L. Sullivan presiding. Cast consisted principally of 41 defendants on trial for using the mails to swindle an estimated $1,350,000 from some 70,000 Midwesterners. The fantastic fraud on view was based on the assumption that Sir Francis Drake had left a huge and as yet undivided fortune. Some 27 billion dollars would be split as soon as costly litigation was concluded. Benefactors were divided into two groups: those who had the name of Drake somewhere in their family tree and those who were merely putting up money to help a “rightful heir,” who would divvy up later.

For two centuries the Drake racket has flourished on both sides of the Atlantic. In the 1880’s Robert Todd Lincoln, U. S. Minister to the Court of St. James’s, officially warned his fellow countrymen that “shares” in the fortune of the celebrated British seaman were nonexistent. Three years ago Postmaster General Walter Folger Brown broke a precedent by making public the names of seven citizens to whom the use of the mails had been denied because they had accepted “donations” from aspirants to the Drake heritage (TIME, Jan. 23, 1933). At that time the Solicitor of the Postoffice Department announced: “There has never been any record of any unsettled or undistributed

Sir Francis Drake estate. . . . His property has continued in unbroken succession in the possession of his legitimate heirs.”* From London, Counselor of Embassy Ray Atherton reported that letters from Drake dupes were one of his office’s greatest cares. “We have,” he said, “prepared mimeographed letters to answer them.” Immediate result of this double warning: 100 letters to the Postoffice Department denouncing the “persecution” of Drake Estate agents.

For a time the racket was taking $6,000 per month out of Iowa alone. There were said to have been 2,000 victims in Quincy, Ill. Missouri, according to one faction of this huge gullery, was the home of Sir Francis’ “rightful heir.” Delay in the inheritance’s division was explained by the promoters in many ways. One story was that a British “ecclesiastical court”—sometimes a “secret court”—was holding things up, waiting for the King to put the “golden seal” on the right papers. Two decades ago, Woodrow Wilson was reported to have been driven insane by the threat of shattering international disclosures concerning the Drake Estate. Later the story was that Messrs. Hoover, Mellon and Mills, “representing the Interests,” were keeping the Drake money out of the country. Recently, Drake Estate agents have passed the word along that just as they got the Hoover Administration soaped up to let the fortune through, Franklin Roosevelt and his Democrats popped into power.

Because of the intense loyalty and faith the duped give the dupers, the Government has had a hard time running the fraud to earth. Two years ago at Sioux City, Iowa, Oscar Merrill Hartzell was convicted of using the mails to defraud Drakesters, was given ten years in Leavenworth. Hartzell started out as an Iowa farmer as dimwitted as the rest of the Drake Estate “contributors.” After he had put up $6,000 of his mother’s money, he made a trip to England in 1922 to see how it was being spent. There he promptly switched from the giving to the receiving end of the business, drew an income of $2,500 a week and became known in London’s night clubs as “The Baron.” In 1933 England shipped Baron Hartzell back to the U. S. and fortnight ago he took another trip, at Government expense, from Leavenworth to Chicago, headquarters of the racket for the past two years, to face a second fraud trial. In Chicago he and Otto G. Yant, bank cashier from Mallard, Iowa, who took over the enterprise after Hartzell’s imprisonment, were chief defendants of the 41. Yant had been picked up by a detective from Chicago’s confidence game detail who posed as an impatient “investor,” got a thorough picture of the whole headquarters operations. When police and postal inspectors finally pounced last April, they impounded $60,000 in cash, $40,000 which was being transmitted to Chicago by express from suckers who had been warned against using the mails to send in their money.

In short order a jury of twelve, with two alternates, was chosen, largely because none of them had ever heard of the master of the Golden Hind. One venireman was passed over because he lived in Chicago’s Drake Hotel. Defense Counsel Edward J. Hess, once an assistant U. S. attorney and an authority on postal law, set out to save those of his twoscore clients whom he could. It was soon clear that he did not hope to save them all. Passing up Hartzell and Yant, he pointed at some of the others, pleaded: “Whatever may be the truth about the Drake Estate, these people not only believed in it, almost as in a holy cause, but they put their own money in it. Take the case of Charlie Jones. He put in from $3,000 to $5,000 which he inherited from his father. Can he be guilty of fraud? Take the case of an engineer in Wenatchee, Wash, and a barber in Texas. The Drake Estate was a matter of social interest in their communities. It was talked of at picnics, church socials, bridge parties. People were convinced it was the way to wealth. . . . They got these people to pool their money and ship it by railway express to Chicago.”

Prosecutor Austin C. Hall, with a Scotland Yard detective at one elbow and an expert on 16th Century British law at the other, seemed to have thoroughly deflated the historical pretense behind the Drake case when his initial address concluded: “Every representation of the defendants was false, and they knew it.”

But the faith of Drake Estate “heirs” knows no bounds. The Chicago mass trial had not got well under way before the Chamber of Commerce of Madison informed Postal Inspector Robert E. Lewis in Chicago that the racket was still going great guns in Wisconsin, was apparently unquenchable.

*First Drake heir was his nephew Francis. Edward Thomas T. Drake, present occupant of the family estate at Amersham, lately ascribed the fact that he has four daughters, no son, to a curse imposed by the mother of a cabin boy whom Sir Francis killed in a fit of rage.