The Great Junk Mail Chase
New Yorkers were awakened at dawn on Friday, March 9, 1877 by the sounds of a severe gale. The 60 mile-per-hour wind broke windows and tore signs from their moorings.
Nate Read, knowing that there would be few lottery customers that day, put his staff to work addressing envelopes for a mailing. They were engaged in this at noon, barely noticing that the wind was dying down, when the door slammed open and another storm blew in: Anthony Comstock accompanied by police and federal marshals.
Just what was going on here? The vice crusader demanded to know. With no reply from Read, the raiders tore the place apart and found “quantities of lottery tickets, and plans, circulars.” Then they arrested everyone in the office.
Within an hour, Read, Isaac Ludlum and William Casey (age 14) were seated in the 26th Precinct, watching as a score of other lottery men were brought in, most but not all associated with Pattee. Police followed with boxes of envelopes and circulars.
This “wholesale descent on lottery and policy agents,” involved 200 officers, but Comstock personally handled the interrogations. When it was his turn to be grilled, Ludlum claimed that he only rented space in Read’s office, and that his real employer was the Bullion Mining Co. Comstock took note of that.
And where was the mastermind?
Either at home on 56th St., or in one of his non-lottery offices around Park Row.
He was insulated from arrest—even from scrutiny, he thought. But he was worried, and he would have been more so if he had known what Comstock wrote that night, however inaccurately:
“John M. Pattee. Age: 55. Nationality: American`Religion: Protestant.
Education: Common
Married
Children: 4
Then there was this: “The aliases and fraudulent schemes of this man are almost legion.”
Thus began Comstock’s crusade against lotteries and the force behind them. “So far as can be learned, one man controls the bogus lottery and mining schemes that are now being advertised through this country and Canada,” the New York Times had reported in December. “He is possessed of great wealth, all of which he has acquired, it is said, by fraudulent practices, and by its use he keeps in his service the most skillful rogues that ever avoided State prison. The name of this man is J.M. Pattee.”
Comstock doubtless read this account. But his own sources had confirmed that Pattee was the backer of Tiffany & Read, Henry A. Read, the Mercantile Prize Association, J.G. Hutchins & Co. and many other enterprises. And he sent decoy letters to all of them.
A grand jury served up indictments two weeks later, and this put a damper on the lottery business for a time. But “the failure to convict a single one of the arrested persons, or even to secure a full hearing, is said to have emboldened the proprietors of the numerous ‘exchanges’ and brokers’ offices, and, in the words of one of Mr. Comstock’s assistants, ‘there are more lottery shops in the city now than there were before the arrests were made,’” the Times reported.
But Comstock wasn’t through. He made another sweep in December, and continued the raids in 1878, a year marked by “severe industrial prostration and financial trial.”
One rainy morning , he showed up at the 19th Street mailroom of the Elias brothers, and arrested H.P. Jones, a post office employee who had been fired for embezzlement and now worked for the brothers, lending his name to several disreputable promotions. Two months later, the Eliases assigned the business to a receiver and walked away from $40,000 in debts.
Then it was Pattee’s turn to face the law, although Comsotck had little to do with it. A federal grand jury in Wyoming indicted him for sending false advertisements from the territory for the Seminole Gold and Silver Company, and a warrant was issued for his arrest.
Pattee surrendered in New York, accompanied by his lawyer, Col. George Bliss. The Harvard-educated Bliss had organized several black regiments during the war, and as a U.S. attorney under Grant had prosecuted dishonest customs officials. In a hearing, Bliss described Pattee as a "man of wealth and reputation," and said that his client was only a shareholder in the venture. He then argued that Pattee had never been in Wyoming. The court released Pattee on $2,500 bail.
But Pattee knew that he was being chased, and this brought out his craven side. A few months later, vacationing in Saratoga Springs, he turned and fled when he saw Comstock entering the hotel, not realizing that his tormentor was there to give a speech. “He is a remarkably nervous man, and seems to be always in fear; having at times a wild, frightened look, as though he expected to be arrested every moment,” Comstock wrote in presenting this account.
And having discovered that he unnerved Pattee, Comstock tried to do it as often as possible. He next confronted his prey at the Simpson & Co. brokerage. A side door opened, and Comstock saw “a little gray-haired old man with gold spectacles on, bob out, and then instantly dodge back into the dark room, and attempt to quietly close the door, as to attract no attention.”
Pattee “reached out his hand to shake hands, and becoming very much excited, repeated over and over again, how glad he was to see me, stuttering out, ‘Well—I—am—devilish—glad to see you,’” Comstock wrote.
In Comstock’s account, Pattee denied that he had any business in the office.
“You certainly don’t expect me to believe that you have nothing to do with this place?” Comstock answered.
“Well, well, I only have an office room here,” Pattee allegedly responded.
Comstock entered a back room, and saw several employees stuffing envelopes. Days later, he closed the place by forcing Simpson, the titular head of the company, to surrender his right to incoming mail (George Bliss wasn’t present). Comstock wrote that “Simpson & Co. has a large stock of circulars on hand for waste paper.”
Meanwhile, Comstock had staged yet another raid against Nate Read (“American, Protestant, Married, Swindler”). He seized “900,000 names & P.O. addresses, 500 1/40 tickets, upwards of 10,000 circulars and about same no. of envelopes,” he wrote.
But George Bliss was on the case. “These circulars were put in property clerk's hands and afterwards returned to J.M. Pattee through Geo. Bliss by order of Police Commissioner,” Comstock fumed. Worse, Pattee boasted about it.
And Pattee had a surprise in store for Comstock. Read, using his health as an excuse, left for St. Stephens, New Brunswick , and Pattee shipped the list to him.
They used it to start the Royal New Brunswick Popular Monthly Gift Soiree, “the only legal Gift Drawing in the whole Dominion of Canada." Mailed over the border to people who had fallen for Pattee’s earlier schemes, the light buff envelopes instructed postmen: “If not delivered in 20 days, return to Box 290, St. Stephens, N.B.”
The enclosed letters painted an inviting picture: “Hundreds of clerks, working-men, merchants and farmers have paid off a mortgage on a house or farm—may have added to his mercantile stock or bank account—may have settled a number of old debts or refurnished his house, making happy and comfortable his family—all through a lucky ticket bought from us, unknown to even his nearest neighbors. You may do the same. The cost is trifling.”
Comstock was outraged that Read and Pattee could mail these pieces with impunity, and he felt that he had been outwitted. “Repeated appeals were made by U.S. Govt. to Canadian Authorities to stop this swindle,” he fumed.
But Pattee was tired by this time. Comstock had hounded him without mercy, and vilified him in books like “Frauds Exposed.” ("I have yet to find the first person who ever received one dollar from him in return for money sent.") In 1880, beset by legal bills, Pattee sold—or lost—his town house in New York, and started residing in hotels in the east 40’s.
Then the press started denouncing the cross-border lottery. “The Dominion Government say they have no power to stop it,” the New York Times wrote. “Be this as it may, postal receipts from circulars sent out to the United States by the concern add nearly $40,000 to the Dominion revenue, which may account for the Government showing no disposition to interfere.”
Such articles had their intended result. Read was arrested in St. Stephen in December 1884. He jumped bail and returned to his homeland. And Comstock was eager to see him. But the moralist had other things on his mind. There were abortionists to root out, and obscene works of art.
The fight against lotteries continued with and without Comstock. Congress passed a law in 1890, making it illegal to operate or even patronize a lottery by mail. And in 1893, after a legal challenge by the Louisiana Lottery, which had once tried to bribe Comstock, it was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.
That didn’t stop the men from Louisiana—they relocated to Honduras, and started sending pink circulars for the Honduras National Lottery Company, delivered by express mail. “We use the express companies in answering correspondents and sending lists of Prizes to the U.S.A.,” they said. “Reply by Express only.” But the game was over—they were out of business by 1900.
It was the same with the green-goods business. When Tony Martin, the reputed Prince of Green-Goods Men, was shot to death by a victim, Comstock went to the funeral and denounced the dead man to a reporter. “The woman he lived with was another man's wife,” he said. “And he was a confirmed opium fiend.”
But there were other forces at work. As with lotteries, Congress passed a law making it illegal to offer or purchase green goods by mail. The operators got around it at first by conducting the swindle in person—as one writer put it, the victim would find himself alone in a hotel room, his money gone, the idea slowly dawning on him of just what a fool he had been. But this was dangerous, and the business suffered.
Along the way, Comstock apparently changed his opinion about direct mail. The man who wrote that circulars are sent “for the purpose of obtaining money from the recipient,” sent them himself, or at least his organization did. In 1894, the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice mailed this letter: “During the summer months…there is no cessation of those who seek to destroy public morals by the dissemination of degrading matters,” it said. “Since the ‘World’s Fair’ closed in Chicago, we have found upwards of twenty new varieties of obscene publications in circulations. The Fair called together great masses of people in Chicago, and made a ready market there for this vile stuff; while the crowds were there, there was no occasion to seek patrons outside of Chicago.”
The letter asked he reader for “sympathy, co-operation, and such financial assistance as you may be disposed to give,” and listed the recipient’s previous donation.
But some things never changed. In 1906, 38 years after their first encounter,
Comstock again oversaw an arrest of Charles Conroy, the smut dealer who in 1874 had cut open his face. The ledger tells it all: age 66, Irish Cath., Scheme to defraud by mail. Tombs in default of $2,500 bail.
Many people viewed Comstock as a crank, and an enemy of the First Amendment. “The fight for the young!” Heyward Broun wrote. “The phrase was always on Comstock’s lips…But, with the passing years, may it not have become a formula with which he sustained himself, unconscious that its relation to his work was growing increasingly remote?” But even his critics gave Comstock credit for battling mail fraud, and he was memorialized for it when he died in 1915.
And what became of Pattee, who had discovered the most basic law of junk mail—that a person who had fallen for one scheme was ripe for another? He moved to St. Louis, and set up an office on Olive St. But his business, whatever it was, was short-lived, for he died in 1888 at age 65, leaving as his epitaph a statement he allegedly made around 1872: “The people wanted to be humbugged and it was my job to do it.”
END OF SERIES
Copyright 2008 by Ray Schultz
