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The First ‘Confidence Man’ And Other Historic Cheats

Khalid Elhassan November 18, 2019 28 min

Orson Welles - H. G. Wells — Orson Welles defending himself to journalists after the War of the Worlds panic. Corbis

18. Lord Gordon-Gordon Was No Lord

Lord Gordon-Gordon was no lord, but a successful 19^th century British con artist who rooked large sums from the unwary rich. His real name and identity are unknown, but he first appears in the record in 1868, when he posed as a “Lord Glencairn” in an attempt to secure an estate in Scotland. He did not get the estate, but he did get £25,000 from some London jewelers before fleeing to the US. He ended up in Minnesota, where he posed as Lord Gordon-Gordon, and convinced the Northern Pacific Railway that he wanted to buy a huge tract of land to settle tenants from his over-populated Scottish estates. The Northern Pacific’s land commissioner ended up spending about $45,000 courting and securing the Scottish Lord as a client, in the belief that he would invest millions in return.

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. Gould, who was in a desperate fight with other tycoons to gain control of the Erie Railway, 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 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.