Welcome back to another exclusive sneak preview of the Hue Jackson School of Scam Artistry!

As a scammer, appearances are everything. Substance is always, always secondary to style. If you look good out there, you’re gonna feel good out there. And when you feel good – you’re gonna make it bigtime. Let’s take a look into someone who knew how to lean into that better than just about everyone else in all of human history. As Santana Moss himself once said, “bigtime players make bigtime plays.”

WILLIAM CHALONER: COUNTERFEITER, DILDO CRAFTSMAN, QUACK, AGENT PROVOCATEUR

BORN: 1650, Warwickshire, England

DIED: 1699, Tyburn, Middlesex (London), England

Imagine being so good at counterfeiting that you had one of the smartest men in the history of the planet put on the trail of trying to hunt you down and bring you to justice.

Such was the colorful life of William Chaloner, one of the seventeenth century’s greatest con men.

Born into poverty, Chaloner had a rowdy childhood, with parents who struggled in dealing with his behavior. As a boy, he was sent to Birmingham to apprentice as a nail maker, but he found the work to be quite dull. As his luck would have it, the city of Birmingham was one of the biggest hubs of counterfeit coin minting in England, with silver groats (worth about four pennies) making up the majority of the scam. Enthralled by the craftsmanship, and by the financial prospects, it didn’t take long for William to become an expert in counterfeit coin production.

In 1662, the Royal Mint began minting coins with a machine, rather than through the traditional process of hand-stamping metal to cast each coin. Their reasoning was that the hand-minted coins would often get “clipped” – which is to say have their edges shaved down so that the weight and value of the silver would no longer be equal to the stamped value of the coin. By casting coins with a machine, which included a milled, decorated edge, it became much more difficult to counterfeit coins, as the clipped edges would now be extremely obvious. Chaloner, through his knowledge of metallurgy, mechanics, and counterfeiting, was more than up to the task of producing elaborate fakes.

At some point in the 1680s, Chaloner wanted to go legit and establish himself in London, but the craftsmen’s guilds, which tightly controlled the city’s industry, made it exceptionally difficult for him to find work. With few prospects to turn to, he eventually began manufacturing and selling handmade tin watches… with dildos inside them – which were indeed designed for usage by the owner. Between his skill as a craftsman and as a salesman, writings reference his knack for “tongue-pudding” – the slick-talking skills possessed by all of history’s greatest con artists.

When the dildo-watch schemes eventually fell by the wayside, Chaloner next turned to quack medicine. As a fake doctor, he sold miracle cures, told fortunes, and determining the location of stolen goods. The stolen goods angle was arguably the most successful of all of these – in part due to his extensive personal relationships with the thieves in question, who shared a cut of the payment with him. Somewhere along the way, William Chaloner even got married and started a family – though he permanently abandoned them after being accused in a burglary and fleeing the city to avoid arrest.

Later, Chaloner became a “japanner”, a trade with origins in Italy. With trade to the Far East growing over the centuries since Marco Polo’s journey to China, the import of precious Asian furniture and metalwork resulted in a need for good lacquerwork, in order to preserve the items being sold. This lacquerwork is typically combined with gilding metals in order to create a beautiful finish on the item. Following typical traditions, the legitimate japanning process is quite expensive and time-consuming… but it was also fairly easy to produce an imitation version both quickly and cheaply. While nowhere near as durable, counterfeit japanning allowed Chaloner to further develop some skills that would become very useful in his return to the counterfeit coin business.

While an incredibly lucrative business if done properly, the penalty for being caught making counterfeit coinage was a death sentence – it was treason to tamper with a country’s money supply. Despite the risk, Chaloner rose to great heights upon his eventual return to the industry; his success minting French pistoles and English guineas allowed him to become quite wealthy. In fact, Chaloner became rich enough to buy a house out in the Surrey countryside, where his coin-making machines could churn all night and all day, far away from where law enforcement could hear the noisy racket. Despite a few close calls, Chaloner remained a free man, and his wealth and prestige as a counterfeiter continued to grow.

By 1693, William Chaloner decided he wanted to try a few bigger and better scams – the most elaborate one involving a fake Jacobite uprising. He paid four sympathizers of recently-deposed King James II (a filthy Catholic, according to most Protestants in the country) to print some propaganda that was to suggest that James wanted to declare war upon the current King William and Queen Mary. When the publishers came out with the bulletins and prepared to post them, Chaloner was waiting with the cops – who arrested and hanged the publishers. William got a nice thousand-pound reward for his trouble. From there, he grew even bolder, creating a list of fake Jacobite sympathizers – the government then hired him, for a steep price, to track down each and every name on the list! Still later, Chaloner almost got got when his accomplice, a young man by the name of Coppinger (with whom he co-wrote a pro-Jacobite satire to ensnare more publishers) tried to rat on him for his coining enterprises. Thanks to his world class “tongue-pudding”, Chaloner managed to talk his way out of it – and ended up having Coppinger hanged instead.

In 1694, Chaloner tried to go legit with his coining business, as some pamphlets he wrote that denounced the state of the Royal Mint caught the eye of the Earl of Monmouth. Lord Monmouth had recently lost the position of Lord of the Treasury, and feeling bitter and petty towards his successor, the Earl of Halifax, tried to get Chaloner to come in and make some major reforms to the minting of coins in order to make counterfeiting much harder. Not only would Chaloner help the country, but by gaining inside knowledge of the specific minting processes of legit coins, it would have allowed him to improve and refine his counterfeiting operations even further. Unfortunately for both Chaloner and Monmouth, the Mint caught wind of his ideas – and beat him to the punch in implementing them.

In 1696, the Royal Mint hired all-time genius Sir Isaac Newton as its new warden. Among his myriad responsibilities, it also became his job to hunt down William Chaloner – who, despite his high profile, remained quite slippery. Leave it to Newton to be the man who would eventually bring him to justice. By dressing in disguises and hanging out in seedy bars and boarding-houses, chatting with the criminal underbelly of the city – many of whom could establish very clear ties to Chaloner’s counterfeiting – Newton started pulling threads, bit by bit, hoping to find the evidence he needed.

All the while, William Chaloner continued to run scams. In that same year of 1696, he managed to print his own fake hundred-pound bank notes by acquiring a ream of specially-patterned paper that matched the official one used by the Royal Mint. All the stranger, despite this clear forgery, it was not considered a crime to print your own bank notes until 1697 – and Chaloner would even turn a £200 profit by ratting out an old associate, Aubrey Price, who wrote forged cheques and would be hanged for it. What a dick.

Despite this impressive run of successes, William Chaloner’s luck wouldn’t last forever. When he got arrested in early 1699 on a charge of lottery fraud – he’d been busy printing counterfeit lottery tickets, which was a much more minor charge than his counterfeiting operations – Newton finally pounced. Chaloner was slapped with two counterfeiting charges, one for the minting of French pistoles years back in 1692, and another for minting fake crowns and half-crowns. He tried everything to get out of it – he pretended to go insane while awaiting trial in Newgate prison, and when on the stand in court at the Old Bailey, later viciously and brutally attacked and insulted all the summoned witnesses, including accusing them of perjury to try and confuse the jury. No matter – he was found guilty, and sentenced to death. Some final, rambling, accusatory, and unapologetic letters asking for leniency from Newton and from the judge, Sir Salathiel Lovell, went unanswered. William Chaloner was hanged by the neck on the morning of March 22nd, 1699 – and then publicly disemboweled. A gory end for a man responsible for so much suffering and death himself.

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Remember, folks – the point of the game isn’t to win. It’s just to make everyone else lose. And once you’ve secured that next head coaching gig for yourself – everyone else, especially your own team – is going to lose bigtime. If my run with the Browns hasn’t taught you that, I don’t know what will. Thanks for listening – and don’t forget to order my tape series. Special this week – ten percent off if you pay by cash!* Call 1-900-FAST-BUX today.

*Twenty percent if you’ll trade for some of my BitCoin with your cash. A win-win scenario! Especially for me!

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Information from this article taken from here, here, here, here, and here. Banner image by The Maestro.