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The Death Row Baseball Team and Other Odd Episodes in History

Khalid Elhassan May 18, 2020 34 min

Death Row All Stars: A Story of Baseball, Corruption, and Murder - State Penitentiary — Alston's All Stars. Daily Mail

3. Rooking a Robber Baron

Erie Railroad Company stock. Collectible Stocks and Bonds

Lord Gordon-Gordon’s most famous victim was Gilded Age railroad tycoon and robber baron Jay Gould. In 1872, His Lordship convinced Gould that he controlled over 600,000 shares in the Erie Railway. That got Gould’s attention: at the time, he was in a desperate fight with other tycoons to gain control of the Erie Railway.

So Gould bribed Lord Gordon-Gordon with $200,000 in cash and $1 million in stock to assign him those shares. By the time Gould realized that he had been conned, Gordon-Gordon had disposed of the cash and sold the stock. The fake lord was put on trial in 1873, but the court granted him bail. He promptly fled to Canada.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.