Hue Jackson’s Hall of Fame Scammers: Cassie Chadwick

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

I hope Eddie George comes through with this Tennessee State OC offer – I really need to get back out there into the action. The shadows are great for scams, but the bright lights are where the magic happens on the field. I just hope that Eddie’s a little more clever than the average Ohio State graduate… as you’ll see in this week’s featured Hall of Fame Scammer EXCLUSIVE AUDIOTAPE LESSON, the state of Ohio does not have a great track record of being particularly intelligent. Listen on!

CASSIE CHADWICK: THE MANY-NAMED CARNEGIE “HEIRESS”

BORN: October 10, 1857, Eastwood, ON

DIED: October 10, 1907, Columbus, OH

Being a Carnegie was pretty sweet in the Gilded Age of America. Unfathomable wealth, lack of 24/7 media coverage, and hobnobbing with the elitest of the elite. For those who still believe in the virtues of the American Dream, Andrew Carnegie was one of the most shining examples of the possibility of the rags-to-riches story so embodied in our nation’s psyche. Who wouldn’t wanted to have been part of that?

Fitting that one of our nation’s greatest scammers wanted to be a Carnegie so desperately. This week’s featured scammer was born Elizabeth Bigley in the small Canadian town of Eastwood, Ontario, about an hour’s drive outside of London. She got her start in the scamming game from a young age – at just 14 years old, she opened a bank account in nearby Woodstock thanks to a “letter of inheritance” from some (likely fictitious) uncle in England. She would later be arrested for forgery on several bad checks, but found not guilty, “for reasons of insanity”. Later, upon her return to Eastwood three years later, she found her sister had married Bill York, a Cleveland carpenter; Betsy tagged along with her sister to Ohio soon afterwards.

Upon arriving in Ohio, Bigley took on the persona of a clairvoyant, and embarked on a series of fairly elaborate scams. She set up her workspace in a rented house, using money she’d gotten from a loan obtained on sister and brother-in-law’s furniture in their house. Working as Madame Lydia DeVere, in 1882 she would go on to marry Doctor Wallace Springsteen in a ceremony in Cleveland.

Unfortunately for the newly-named Mrs. Lydia Springsteen, the coverage in the Cleveland Plain Dealer paper announcing their marriage attracted a lot of attention from creditors – including Betsy/Lydia/Cassie’s sister, as well as a number of unpaid tradesmen who’d done work to our scammer’s old house. When Dr. Springsteen learned of her sordid past, he quickly threw her out of the house and divorced her after only eleven days of matrimony.

Many less ambitious scammers probably would have given up here, and likely would have returned home with their tail between their legs. But that’s the difference between our scammer du jour and the average criminal riffraff – like the difference between a practise squad guy and a Pro Bowler, you can’t crumble in the face of adversity.

Despite her financial, legal and marital difficulties, our scammer re-invented herself yet again… this time as a clairvoyant named Madame Marie LaRose. In 1886, she married John R. Scott, a farmer from Trumbull County, Ohio… and, having learned from her previous mistakes, had her new husband sign a pre-nup this time. She would later leave him after signing a statement confirming she’d committed adultery a few years later.

In 1889, our many-named scammer was convicted of forgery and sentenced to nine and a half years of prison time in Toledo; she was paroled in 1893 after serving only four. She returned to Cleveland once again and reinvented herself for a third time, taking the name Cassie Hoover.

Rather than clairvoyance, the new Miss Hoover chose this time to open a brothel instead, becoming the madam of the establishment. It was here where she met her third and final husband, a widowed doctor by the name of Leroy Chadwick. The two would marry in 1897, though it seems fair to say that  their relationship was really weird – he seemed to spend all his time practising medicine as one of Cleveland’s most respected physicians, and, according to some accounts, almost seemed to forget that his wife even existed. If that was a problem for the yet again renamed Cassie Chadwick, it seems unlikely – she appears to have given birth to a son, but it may not have been his – and the doctor certainly didn’t know the boy was being looked after by one of his wife’s prostitutes. Cassie, meanwhile, spent money like it was going out of style – with some of the most extravagant and mismatched tastes that the world has ever seen. She bought thousands of dollars of terrible artwork, mismatched silverware, multiple pianos and pipe organs, rugs and furniture, not to mention the clothes, jewelry, and extravagant trips to Europe with multiple friends in tow – and footing the bill for all of it. All the same, being such a peculiar person, she never truly fit into the high society scene in Cleveland – she was still consistently invited to social events, but more out of respect for her husband rather than for anything of her own merit.

Where did all the money come from for all of this wealth? Dr. Chadwick undoubtedly did very well for himself, yes, but the kind of money that Cassie was spending had to come from some other source. Our Carnegie connection finally enters the story here… as it turns out, Cassie, having already established herself as a talented forger, lucked into a spare scrap of paper with Andrew’s signature on it while on a trip to New York (She had claimed to be meeting specifically with him to some friends, but rather met with his housekeeper instead.). Using this knowledge of Carnegie’s signature, she went on to craft her most elaborate scam yet – Cassie L. Chadwick, the woman of infinite names, was in fact, secretly, Andrew Carnegie’s illegitimate daughter!

Chadwick crafted a series of documents – specifically promissory notes, ostensibly from the steel heir himself – that allowed her access to two million dollars of bank loans that otherwise would have been completely inaccessible to her. Even as a married woman, she would have faced difficulty in handling financial matters without her husband’s help… but to banks across America, and even in Europe, Carnegie’s name was like gold. These millions of dollars kept her lavish lifestyle going for years.

Finally, in 1904, everything fell apart. In November, a Massachusetts banker named Herbert B. Newton called in a loan of $190,000 to Chadwick; when she defaulted, he sued. The dominoes began to fall, and she fled to New York but was arrested. Andrew Carnegie was shocked at the news, and insisted upon attending her trial in Cleveland in March 1905, in order to fully understand all the damage she’d caused. (Carnegie hadn’t signed a promissory note in almost 30 years and was outraged that Chadwick had, of course, stolen his signature.) She was sentenced to 14 years in prison, as well as a $70,000 fine for all of her fraud. Her husband, Dr. Chadwick, quickly divorced her and left for Europe for an extended holiday in order to let the situation play out without him.

It’s quite remarkable that Cassie Chadwick was so talented – by all accounts, she was not particularly attractive (5’5″ and apparently quite dumpy) as well as being almost completely deaf – but clearly she had charm enough in her to pull off these feats. She died in prison at the age of 50 on October 10, 1907; she was buried in her family plot in Woodstock, Ontario.

There’s a somewhat happy ending to this whole story; as part of Chadwick’s bank loans, the Citizen’s National Bank of Oberlin, Ohio, ended up going bankrupt when customers went on a run due to Chadwick defaulting on an $240,000 loan. Many people lost their life’s savings, including many Oberlin College students. In the aftermath of the Cassie Chadwick scandal, Andrew Carnegie, consistently known as one of America’s greatest philanthropists, donated $15,000 to cover the tuition and living expenses of students affected by the financial crisis, as well as another $125,000 to build a library on campus. The Carnegie libraries, many of which continue to exist today, are one of his greatest legacies, and without the nefarious dealings of Cassie Chadwick, Oberlin College, city of Cleveland, and the state of Ohio likely would look a lot different today.

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God, am I ever glad I got the fuck out of Ohio. You can too, with just one easy phone call! Dial 1-900-FAST-BUX now and get a free Greyhound ticket* with your audiotape subscription.

*Greyhound gets you to the state line and no further. And yes, it’ll be one of the bad states.

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