The Pirates of Park Row
Read Last Week's Piece: Larceny in Laramie
By this time, Pattee had returned to New York, where there was less danger of getting shot. The wary 53 year-old now worked only through partners or designated criminals who would take the fall if there was trouble—and they had to be reliable.
One such person was his brother-in-law N. Sherman Read. A tiny man known to friends as “Nate,” Read had run a New Jersey resort at which Pattee and his family had summered, then worked for his older in-law in Philadelphia. Read moved to the New York area early in 1876 and with Pattee's backing opened a lottery office on Nassau St. near Park Row.
Flanked on one side by City Hall, Park Row was home to newspapers and advertising agencies, and there were dozens of lottery shops in the vicinity. “Entering the office of any one of these so-called firms, the inquirer finds himself surrounded on all sides by a ground-glass partition,” a reporter wrote. And each one had a “hard-featured man peering through a wire netting under the sign ‘Cashier.’”
These offices sold lottery tickets on the premises, but they also sent quantities of junk mail, and they were in a convenient area for doing it. The city’s best printers and engravers were two blocks south on Maiden Lane, and the largest post office in the country, a five-story granite block known as the "Whale," stood on the triangular lot bordered by Park Row and Broadway.
Pattee made full use of these facilities, not only for his lotteries but for enterprises like the Bullion Gold Mining Co. and Carburrus Gold Mining Company. And he had plenty of company.
One large competitor, the Louisiana Lottery, was a product of Reconstruction. Louisiana was in 1868 run by corrupt Republicans, “strangers to our interests and our sentiments,” one Southern editor wrote. Among the newcomers was a 31 year-old Baltimorean named Charles T. Howard.
Some people said Howard inflated his record as a rebel soldier, but it didn’t matter, for he had something in short supply in Louisiana: capital provided by a gambling syndicate. He liberally dispensed it to legislators, and they rewarded him with a 25-year lottery charter, exempting the company from all taxes except for a modest annual contribution to the state education fund.
At first, the Lottery sold chances mostly through policy shops in Louisiana; the daily drawings were, as one writer put it, “the special curse of the colored population.” But this was a limited market. In 1873, Howard appointed Dr. Maxmillian A. Dauphin, of Alsace Lorraine, as president. Dauphin placed the drawings under the “personal supervision” of two venerated Confederate generals: Jubal T. Early, who had torched Postmaster Montgomery Blair’s house in Maryland, and G.T. Beauregard. They appeared onstage dressed in Confederate regalia, and they seemed not to care that unpurchased tickets were thrown into the cylinder so that the fools down front were playing were against the house.
But Dauphin also went after the Yankee trade by mail. “No seed, no harvest,” said one piece mailed to New Yorkers. It claimed: “The Post Office Department has decided that the Mails of this Company cannot be interfered with.”
Then there were Ellis and William Elias, who were driven out of Cincinnati for swindling, then made a fortune in New York running “dollar stores”—stores in which the shopper never knew what he was buying. Visitors to their flagship outlet, the Centre, would buy sealed envelopes from a cashier—the enclosed sheet would tell them what they had purchased. But few got the jewelry displayed in glass cases—most received merchandise that was not worth what they paid for it.
The brothers also sold via the postal system. A visitor to their mail room found a “gaslit room in which men and girls sat at two rows of tables shaped in the letter ‘L,’ addressing envelopes.” Among the many letters churned out was one signed by William Elias. “We have arranged with a large number of manufacturers, importers, and jobbers in this country and Europe to dispose of $4,000,000 worth of their surplus stock of goods annually on the general average plan,” it said.
How did this work?“When orders are received for boxes, we simply go to the department they are ordered from and put the address on them, then they are sent by express, so we do not even know what the boxes contain when they are shipped,” Elias wrote. The customer thus had a “proportionate chance” of getting the most valuable articles.
People fell for schemes like this. “Aman who came in contact with the senior member of the Elias firm used to tell of seeing him exhibit a roll containing sixty one thousand dollar bills, one day, and when putting it back in his pocket heard him remark, pleasantly, that that was some that came in after he had got done expecting to make any money,” wrote George Rowell, whose ad agency was located at 41 Park Row.
And though they were competitors, Pattee started working with the Eliases on a matter that would benefit them both: The trading of names and addresses. But they weren’t the first, for criminal minds had long since figured out how to generate a mailing list.
Some frauds wrote to small-town postmasters offering a dollar for the names of “all men (no women) as herein provided, who are permanent residents and who receive mail at your office.” Others asked customers for the names of their friends. “Any person, who will send us the Address of ten persons of their acquaintance, we will send free post-paid, a beautiful Chromo for their trouble, and Wholesale Price-list of Jewelry,” the City Novelty Co. promised in 1873.
Still another way was to copy the names out of a city directory. But this was too much work for the average thief—an easier method was to sell or rent names from each other. Pattee had 300,000, and he handed some to the Eliases for a consideration. Why did the brothers want his names? It was simple: By sending money to Pattee, these individuals had shown a propensity for being swindled.
Not that Pattee and the Eliases traded “lists”—they shared letters and order forms mailed in by their victims. Order forms were a fairly new invention, judging by one sent by the Louisiana Lottery. “To avoid writing a letter, fill out this order, and enclose remittance as instructed below,” it urged.
This bartering of names quickly grew into a business. L'Orient Chemical Company of Bristol, Rhode Island, offered its letters to all comers in 1875. And by 1880, middlemen like H.H. Hull made their livings by buying letters and renting them to circular mailers. Hull, it was said, had “a million letters and 50 million names.”
Not everyone approved. “I have known a person receive ten copies of the same issue of a periodical that was sending out large numbers of sample copies,” wrote E.C. Allen, whose Peoples’ Literary Companion had 8 million readers among the “better classes of the rural masses.” It happened because the publishers acquired names from their advertisers, and “the person who received ten copies had answered ten of the advertisements.”
In addition, most names were from “one to two years old,” Allen argued. “Now, what is the result of sending out 100,000 sample copies as above? Thirty thousand to forty thousand duplicates. Moved away and dead, 10,000. Number of families actually reached, 50,000 to 60,000.”
Then there were the comments by people annoyed by unwanted mail. In 1875, a Manhattanite complained his mailbox was filled every single day with “a lot of envelopes, which he is put to the trouble of opening, and which he finds contain only advertisements of articles that he does not want to buy.” And in time, critics wrote scathing commentary about the mail order papers. "These disgusting prints thus force their way unsolicited into the homes throughout the country and their demoralizing influence it would be hard to overestimate,” said one.
Pattee, in the meantime, awoke on August 21 to find a story about himself in the New York Times. He had, it reported, “made a large fortune from the sale of tickets which returned no prizes." Days later, the New York Tribune reported that he had “defied the police” by opening the shop on Nassau St.
But this didn’t stop him from proceeding with his next creative projects.
First, he went into the stock brokerage business with a Louisiana felon named J.F. Barrett, using Andrew Simpson, his Maiden Lane printing foreman, as a front man. They mailed a newspaper called The New York Stock Exchange.
“The probabilities of profit are far greater by their system than any other, while the risk is diminished to the very lowest point, and limited to the amount invested by the combination method with pools, that combine the orders of thousands of customers and operate them as one immense whole,” they wrote. “The advantage of this can be seen at a glance.”
They added: “The confidential relations between us and our customers, and professional brokers alike, debar us from discussing or disclosing any of their secrets without previously obtaining their consent.”
Next was an outfit called Heath & Co., The office was located a few doors away from a legitimate brokerage—Wm. Heath & Co. Victims received stock certificates and regular reports on how their investments were soaring, but requests to redeem the stock were never answered.
Then Pattee created his masterpiece—the Silver Mountain Mining Co. For this, he hired a former postal agent named William R. McCall, who had also worked for the Eliases—some people believed that the Eliases were partners. And the printer Andrew Simpson was a board member.
“Persons who invest a few dollars to develop the Mine may realize a fortune,” said the prospectus, which featured a map marked in several places by the word “ore.”
Those gullible enough to buy shares received monthly reports and requests for more money to keep the mine running. Said one: “The Indians made their appearance last week, but have all but disappeared.” The investors got nothing in return.
It was the summer of Custer’s last stand and the lead-up to Hayes-Tilden presidential contest. The Brooklyn Bridge was being built—the noise could be heard on Park Row. And Pattee, like any other businessman, coped with problems beyond his control. The Pennsylvania and New York Central Railroads stopped hauling mail cars because the post office had reduced their compensation by 10%. This was followed by a nationwide rail strike. Meanwhile, he feuded with the Eliases. None of it stopped him from reaching the “zenith of his prosperity.”
But he was being watched.
NEXT WEEK--Anthony Comstock: Junk Mail Justice
