People actually have "sold" the Brooklyn Bridge.
Gabriel Cohen told the story of attempts to sell the Brooklyn Bridge a few days ago in the New York Times: For You, Half Price. (Nov 27):
Since the bridge was completed in 1883, the idea of illegally selling it has become the ultimate example of the power of persuasion. A good salesman could sell it, a great swindler would sell it, and the perfect sucker would fall for the scam...
But this was not just a rhetorical or a fictional conceit. A turn-of-the-century confidence man named George C. Parker actually sold the Brooklyn Bridge more than once. According to Carl Sifakis, who tells his story in "Hoaxes and Scams: A Compendium of Deceptions, Ruses and Swindles," Parker - who was also adept at selling the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Statue of Liberty and Grant's Tomb - produced impressive forged documents to prove that he was the bridge's owner, then convinced his buyers that they could make a fortune by controlling access to the roadway. "Several times," Mr. Sifakis wrote, "Parker's victims had to be rousted from the bridge by police when they tried to erect toll barriers."...
For the scam to be worthwhile, you needed people with enough money to make it worth while, but who were credulous enough to fall for it:
And there were plenty of marks. "The oddity of the thing today," said Luc Sante, author of the book "Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York," "is not that there might have been con artists ready to sell the bridge, but that there would have been suckers both gullible enough and sufficiently well-heeled to fall for it."
You found them among the immigrants:
By all accounts, the bulk of the suckers were greenhorns, fresh off the boat. Swindlers used to approach the stewards of international vessels docked at Ellis Island and pay them for information about passengers who might have money and be interested in buying property. "They didn't understand the country," Mr. Nash said of this population. "They didn't understand the law. But they understood that this was supposed to be the land of opportunity."
Comments