DEAR FRIEND: The Rascals, Rogues and Roues Who Made American Junk Mail, Chapter 10: Green Goods

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By Ray Schultz

In 1875, in a article titled, “Fancy Advertising,” the New York Times reported a man whose letter and Post Office boxes were “daily ‘made the recipients’… of 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, or of companies or professional persons that he does not wish to employ.”

Some of these doubtless came from the City Novelty Co. of Philadelphia, established in 1860. At the height of the Depression in 1873, it mailed a brochure in a hand-written envelope. “The Crisis that has so suddenly burst upon the Country and so rapidly extended to every branch of Business, has particularly affected manufacturers of Jewlery, and we find ourselves carrying a very etxensive stock of FINE GOODS for LADIES’ AND GENTLEMEN’S WEAR, And have determined to dispose of our Stock on the following plan, which is PERFECTLY LEGITIMATE, AND NOT A LOTTERY.”

And the plan? “We do not sell any tickets to tell you what article you can have for a dollar, but we sell you a box of very extra quality of Writing Pens, twenty-four in a box, for twenty-five cents, and warrant them to give entire satisfaction; will not corrode—and are adapted to any hand that can hold a pen. In this box we put a sealed envelope, that has in it a slip of paper with some one of the above articles named on it, which you can have if you desire it, by paying one dollar.

“We also sell the Ladies’ Casket for fifty cents, which contains the following articles, (whih are worth separately at retail $1.15) viz: four papers (100) of Cole’s Celebrated Duplex Silver Spring Steel Needles, Nos. 5 to 10, (Sharps); one Patent Button-Hole Cutter, twelve Yosemite Pens, one Silver Plated Pen Holder. The Casket opens like a book, with gold edges and clasp. In this Casket you will find two envelopes, each contaning a slip of paper, naming some article in this list which you can have, if you desire it, upon paying one dollar.”

Anthony Comstock had overlooked the City Novelty Company, but there were bigger bigger frauds being perpetrated. One was the so-called Green Goods scam. Having divined that most people were as dishonest as they were, rogues like Ed Parmalee and Tony Martin prospered by sending letters like this one:

“Dear Sir: — If you have no conscientious scruples regarding how men get money, I write to say that I am in a position to supply you with an ‘article’ that — for commercial purposes — is as good as gold.”

If the reader was too dense to grasp what he was being offered, the attached clipping, looking like it came right out of a New York newspaper, would set him straight:

“A COUNTERFEITER GOES FREE”

“The country flooded with $2,000,000,000 of counterfeit money in the past year, and pronounced by Government experts to be as good as the genuine greenback.”

Yes, counterfeit money. Most people got little mail of any kind, let alone letters from a stranger inviting them to commit a crime, but the note stated a truth obvious to many in that age of robber barons: “People are growing rich around you every day (no one knows why), why not you?

Another wrote, “My Dear Sir: I am desirous of obtaining a good shrewd agent in your locality to handle my ‘goods.’ If you have been unsuccessful in your business, I can supply you with goods with which you can pay off all your debts and start free and clear again. You can purchase mortgages, etc.”

Of course, most green-goods operators apologized for the intrusion. One said, “This communication may be somewhat startling or probably unwelcome. If so, I trust you will be good enough to destroy the same as no harm or insult is intended.”

The actual sale took place in two stages. If he responded, the would-be millionaire would be sent a free sample — usually a genuine $1 bill. After examining and spending it, he would send a sum of money for 10 times that amount in counterfeit notes (there was a sliding scale through which the customer received a better percentage the more he paid). On the happy day that his order arrived C.O.D., he would open the box to find not the greenbacks he had ordered, but sawdust or green paper.

Few victims griped because they feared “the odium that is attached to their being willing to be a party to purchasing and putting into circulation counterfeit money,” according to the Pinkerton Detective Agency. And they needn’t have expected any sympathy from Comstock. “Any person who sends money for counterfeit money should lose every cent of it,” he wrote.

Some green-goods artists ran industrial-strength enterprises (one group had free run of Jersey City city hall). Others operated out of saloons on Hudson Street in New York City, many of which had private mail boxes. They would come in for a beer and the mail, and quietly slip out if they saw anyone asking questions.

As for printing, some lottery men used processes that allowed them to mimic handwriting or typewriting. In 1883, a tip led Comstock to the back room of Eugene Marvin’s print shop on Eighth Ave., where he found two big cylinder presses, cutting and numbering machines, 875,000 green-goods circulars and phony Western Union telegraph blanks.

In 1890, Congress passed a law making it illegal not only to offer green goods by mail, but also to order them. (Ditto for “green articles,” “green coin,” “United States goods” and “green cigars”.) So the perpetrators returned to the practice they’d followed earlier: Conducting the swindle in person.

Invited to New York or to a smaller town (after the initial direct mail letter, all communications would be by telegraph), the mark would be plied with food and liquor by his hosts, and the party would retire to a hotel room to finalize the deal. Then one of two things would happen. In the first, men posing as police would barge in and threaten to arrest everyone for counterfeiting; the only way out would be for the one man with actual legal tender in his pocket to bribe the officers. In the second, the swindlers would switch a suitcase filled with cash for one containing sawdust. As one writer put it, the victim would find himself alone in the room, his money gone, the idea slowly dawning on him of just what a fool he had been.

Occasionally, this would backfire. Tony Martin, known as the Prince of Green-Goods Men, was shot to death by an outraged rube from whom he had euchred $650. Comstock attended the funeral, hoping to catch Martin’s Comstock. Failing that, he used the occasion to denounce 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.”

Chapter 11: The Crooked Road To The End

DEAR FRIEND: The Rascals, Rogues and Roues Who Made American Junk Mail, Chapter 6: The Postmaster

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By Ray Schultz

The U.S. Post Office was then headquartered in a two-story building near the War Department in Washington. Opened during the Franklin Pierce administration, the structure was finished with white marble from Maryland and New York, none of which stopped the roof from leaking. Into this setting in 1861 came Montgomery Blair.

Abraham Lincoln had become President in March of that year. In May, partly to pay off a political debt, he appointed Blair, a border-state moderate whose family had a house across the street from the White House and another in Maryland, as postmaster general.

A former U.S. attorney who represented the fugitive slave Dred Scott, Blair was reviled by radical Republicans for his moderation on the slavery issue. To add to his woes, his house in Maryland was burned down by the Confederates led by General Jubal A.Early.. But Lincoln wrote of his service as postmaster that “I remember no single complaint against with you in connection therewith.”

Blair’s first problem was getting the mail to its destination. The dying words of a wounded Pony Express rider—“Get out of the way—of the—United—States—mail,” in no way implied certainty of delivery. In many areas, service was only nominally better that it was in Franklin’s time, when the main conveyance was the horse. Some rural towns got no mail at all during high water.

Things were worse out west. Jefferson Davis, the secretary of War for Franklin Pierce, had tested camels in the Southwest, but they proved unsuitable, being used to the soft desert sand of the Middle East, not the hard-scrabble ground in the West. All this bred a certain cynicism: Mark Twain expected the stage driver taking him to Utah to “unload the most of our mail matter somewhere on the Plains and leave it to the Indians or whosoever wanted it.”

In 1862, largely thanks to Blair, the post office started operating mail cars on the growing national railroad system. Crews of men, “eyeshaded gnomes in shirt sleeves,” stood on their feet overnight, sorting mail by destination and dropping it into pouches.

One year later, mailmen started delivering to the door in the 49 largest cities. “Little can I tell how my life has been interwoven with those to whom I have carried mail,” said Morris Church, of Worchester, Mass. when he retired decades later. “Their joys and sorrows have taken a deep hold upon my life.”

And in November 1864, the post office started selling money orders so that families could send money to soldiers at the front without fear of theft. (Registered letters had been around since 1855, but the New York Times had argued that the system facilitated “fraud on the part of Post office officials, by pointing out the letters which contain money.”)

Finally, postage was now affordable. Advance payment had been mandatory since 1855, but Congress now sweetened it by lowering the rates and dividing mail into three classes: First class (regular letter mail); second class (periodicals); and third class (circulars).

The lottery men noted all this. And by the time Blair, who had offered to resign when it suited the President, was told by Lincoln, “The time has come,” they were taking full advantage of it.

Chapter 7: Ode To A Crook

DEAR FRIEND: The Rascals, Rogues and Roues Who Made American Junk Mail, Chapter 5: Show The Money

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By Ray Schultz

William France was a “common drunk” who rigged a lottery so that he won the grand prize himself. When he used the name of a competitor, Murray, Eddy & Co., on some of his envelopes, that firm complained that it was “being daily robbed by a man who, at the same time, swindles the public and makes the Post Office Department the innocent accomplice of his guilt.”

Murray, Eddy & Co. wasn’t any better. Its main offering, the Kentucky Lottery, had been chartered in 1838 to improve the water supply in Frankfurt, Kentucky—a project long since completed.

France and others like him invented devices that would later become standard in the trade. In 1861, Schoofield & Co., of Baltimore, sent a mailing for the Delaware State Lotteries. It went in a small brown envelope with Schoolfield’s name and post office box stamped on it—one of the first return envelopes. The note that went with it implied that a prize was a sure thing.

“Dear Sir: From what we can learn of Public Sentiment we are satisfied that there exists a strong feeling against Lotteries in Your State – and desiring to remove all such prejudices by selling a good Prize to some influential person in your locality who will give it publicity, – we take the liberty to enclose you a Scheme of the Consolidated Lottery of Delaware Drawing April 24th – Class 68.”

Another agent said that he was “anxious to sell you a prize and create an excitement in your neighborhood.” That evolved into this: “We are confident that if a good Prize was sold by us to some person in your neighborhood who would show the money and give it publicity that it would greatly extend our business and add to our reputation as Prize sellers. For this purpose, we have thought proper to tender you the Prize upon condition that you will use your influence among your acquaintances in our favor.”

Not all these letters explicitly stated that the person would win. But they inferred it, and by 1865 the mails were flooded with letters offering prizes to people who would show the money.

Chapter 6: The Postmaster

DEAR FRIEND: The Rascals, Rogues and Roues Who Made American Junk Mail, Chapter 4: Gospel Mail

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By Ray Schultz

One morning in 1855 or thereabouts, in a church in upstate New York, a minister of the Gospel opened his mail and, according to Postal Inspector J. Holbrook, found the following letter:

“Brother P —

“I heard you once, while passing through your place — a sermon that has many times recurred to my memory, though its calm piety and deep perception of human nature may be weekly occurrences to your congregation.

“I have several times thought it would be well for our church to call on you for a trial here. Our house is wealthy, and ‘up town,’ though that is no matter.”

The writer mentioned that he had seen “a notice of you in the new publication of travels through the states; in which I see the writer has heard you, and was so impressed that he gives a strong description of your and your style…” And there’s the rub: The minister could have a copy of the book for $1.50. Pastors who fell for it soon learned, according Inspector Holbrook,  that “the dollar and a half went to the ‘bourne from which no traveler returns.’”

One minister wasn’t fooled, and his answer showed a clear understanding of the direct mail art, such as it was at that time. He wrote: “I am in receipt of a communication from you, of whose flattering contents I have reason to believe that I am not the only recipient; as I am not ignorant of the fact that the art of lithography can be employed to multiply confidential letters to any extent.

“If, as you state, you have at any time heard a discourse from my lips, I regret that the principles which it has inculcated have produced so little impression upon your actions, especially as it has ‘many times recurred to your memory.’

(Perhaps the minister also noticed that the word “brother” was lithographed, and that a blank space was included for his own name).

“If you ever happen to pass through this place again, and to be detained over the Sabbath, your name, mentioned to the sexton, or indeed, to any member of my congregation, will secure you as good a seat as the house will furnish: And if you will inform me of your intended presence, beforehand, I will endeavor to suit my discourse to your wants, if not to your wishes.

“‘Not what we wish, but what we want Do thou, O Lord, in mercy grant.’

“If, however, circumstances like some that I can foresee, if you continue in your present course, should prevent a visit to our place, I hope you will manage to be satisfied with the ministrations oef the chaplain at Sing Sing, who, I understand, is an excellent, talented man.”

That was once instance where the intended victim avoided harm. But it was a rarity.

Chapter 5: Show The Money

The Last Rebbes: Life among The Hasidic Jews, Part X

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By Ray Schultz

The war ended with a fragile ceasefire, and the sides disengaged as Henry Kissinger barnstormed the Middle East. If the war were not enough to worry about, there was tension in the U.S. Nixon’s presidency was unraveling, the Hasidim feared instability, but were wary about saying so. I had once tried to engage Albert Friedman on the subject.

“How do you look at Watergate?” I asked.

“It’s none of our business,” he said.

“Would you support Nixon again?”

“Is he running again?”

“Did you vote for him?”

“We supported him in 1972. It was between Nixon and McGovern, and we felt the choice was clear.”

The Satmar’s Rabbi Stauber had explained their position in an article on Nixon’s most recent speech in Der Yid. It stated that while Nixon “has not answered questions, still, it’s a valid point that we should look to the future now, not the past, not let things undermine his administration,” Stauber said.

On top of Watergate, there were increasing stresses in the Hasidic neighborhoods bordering on African-American and Hispanic communities. Many of the disputes were political—over resources and influence. “They want to control the area,” charged Angel Reyes, a local activist in Williamsburg. “They try to push the Spanish out, offer them money to buy their house. Sometimes they abuse them to move out.”

That was in Williamsburg. For their part, the Lubavitchers settled in Brownsville, a rough neighborhood filled with declining housing stock. They then starting moving to the better area to the West: Crown Heights. Shrage laid out the sequence. “When Hasidic Jews move into fancy Jewish neighborhoods, the fancy Jews move out. And as the fancy Jews move out, more Hasidim move in. Then the goyim move out, then the blacks move in. That’s the way it changes. When blacks began to move into Crown Heights, to tell you that the Hasidim were delighted by that—of course, they weren’t. Not for dislike of blacks, not for that, they wanted to have a Hasidic community.

“A Hasidic Jew is at least liberal in that he feels the same way about all goyim—to him, there’s no difference. He remembers what happened in Europe, and he figures he’s got to be careful with all of them. No matter what you say, I know a lot of people who believe very strongly that it could happen all over again right here in the United States. Because they’ve been through this. They don’t want to be with goyim., they want to be with their own. I don’t care, a schwartze goy, a weisse goy, Puerto Rican, same thing. At least in that way there’s a common denominator.”

Shrage explained some of the differences that lead to mistrust, as he saw it.

“A black person comes into a Jewish, Hasidic-owned store to buy a dress, and is talking to the guy in English. In comes another lady, and she begins to talk in Yiddish. The black woman will think there’s a separate price going on: ‘I’m getting screwed here, I think I’m paying for the woman’s dress, too.”

“Why are they talking in Yiddish? That’s their language. It’s an effort for this guy to talk English. He’s got to think—it’s not his mother tongue. Little things like that.”

Other issues took place at the street level. Rose Shrage’s father, who had narrowly escaped being captured by the Gestapo in France, had been stabbed in the early days in Brownsville, sustaining a16-inch cut. And there were many assaults on Hasidim, fueling the rise of the Macabees.

Shrage took a hard line. “Its our fate,” he said. “So we get beaten up every once and awhile, it happened for years, it will happen until the Messiah comes. That’s what being Jewish means, we’re always gonna suffer that way. I say, damnit, no, it will take a little while for the Messiah to come. I want to welcome him healthy–I want to be in good shape when he comes.”

Rev. Bryan Karvelis, of the Church of the Transfiguration in Williamsburg, was in the forefront of community leaders complaining about alleged Hasidic actions. “A kid was brutally beaten by a mob of Hasids,” he said. “They pulled a gun on him and beat him up—he looked Spanish. The official story was, ‘Sorry, we’ll try to control it.’ That’s what they all say. There’s no response from the police and the courts.”

Karvelis conceded that “this is a tough neighborhood. There’s a high narcotics rate, and attacks and robberies.” And it was true that the Hasidim “might be abused verbally, or have their curls pulled. A few times.” But he added that the Hasidim “have an incredible hatred of Spanish and blacks. They come with a built-in hatred for anyone who’s not Jewish. You yell ‘Gonif,’ and within minutes you have 200 Hasidic men there.” Karvelis claimed he had thrown himself on top of  a 19 year-old youth being beaten with tin cans. “I wasn’t wearing a clerical collar–it might have made them more respectful.”

Maybe so. But how could he expect Hasidim to tolerate physical abuses like having their curls pulled–or worse? And did he have an inkling about Jewish history?

In December, I visited Ben’s Dairy, a purveyor of farmer’s cheese and other delicacies on East Houston Street, run by Jonah Friedman, a tall Satmar Hasid with dark hair and a beard, usually wearing a Russian fur hat. We went into the back room , a large area with work benches and a couple of adjoining freezers, and Jonah talked with me while he was moving cheese from the freezer into the oven. His father had “learned by the Rebbe in Europe,” and his family had followed him to Brooklyn. Partially financed by community funds, Jonah had built a good business. “Today there is no reason to be poor if you are only willing to work,” he said.

“How do you like the neighborhood here?” I asked. (East Houston had not yet been gentrified in those years).

“Beautiful. I love it here.”

Before I had a chance to follow up, he held his finger up, sort of winked, reached up to a shelf and pulled down a small revolver in a holster. “If anybody should come in here, I have this,” he said.

“You would kill a man?”

“The Torah instructs you, if your life is in danger, you must kill the other person first. It’s your duty. I would shoot first.”

Later that month, the Satmar held an event at the St. George Hotel in Brooklyn As the large crowd settled down, someone started going over the financial situation of the yeshiva. They read out the names of each contributor. Some sums were quite large: $5,000, $10,000 and higher. Then there were the $50 ones: Everybody knew what everybody else gave.

There were prayers, then the Rebbe himself, whom everyone was struggling to see, began speaking. He spoke at some length in his hoarse voice, going over (I later found out) the Torah passage for the week. When he left, there was a mad scramble for pieces of the challah he had touched. Abe Beame, newly elected as mayor, spoke, too. He was led up to the podium, pushed into a seat, then pulled up again and given the microphone. He mentioned his visit to the boy’s camp during the summer and told the Satmar how much he appreciated what they had done for him during the election. Again, he didn’t smile.

And now there was bad news for Shrage. Beame, who was taking over as mayor on Jan. 1, declined to reappoint him. So Shrage was out of government. And now Shrage was awaiting new commands from the Rebbe. “If the Rebbe calls me at 2 in the morning and says, ‘Sam, you’ve done your thing in New York, get your passport ready, take a plane tomorrow and go to New Zealand (family, too), and build a yeshiva, I would do it,” he said. “And the Lubavitcher Rebbe does that all the time. This week, he sent people to Australia—five young guys. 24 hours notice. Go, no question.”

To be continued early in 2020.

No Checking Required: An Early Credit Offer From Diners’ Club

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By Ray Schultz

It’s hard to picture in this age of instant credit approvals and payment by smartphone. But in 1962, Diners’ Club sent out this offer in a Time magazine envelope without much prior checking:

This invitation is extended to

(Blank for name)

by Mr. Allred Bloomingdale, President

THE DINERS’ CLUB INC.

Your credit standing and financial rating have placed you on the select list of individuals to whom we are limiting the mailing of this invitation for Diners’ Club membership.

We hope you will take a moment to review some of the advantages of membership outlined in this folder and decide to fill out and mail your application today.

The enclosed application is transferable to members of your immediate family or associates sharing your business responsibilities, if you now have a Diners’ Club Credit Card.

Sounds a little loosey-goosey, doesn’t it? But remember: In 1962, Diners’ Club was only 12 years old, and American Express less than half that. Diners’ Club must have assumed that Time magazine readers were good prospects.

Diners’ Club had been introduced In 1950 by Frank X MacNamara for use in restaurants The original plan was to make money by taking 6% off the top of each transaction.

First, Diners’ Club mailed the card unsolicited to several thousand businessmen. The card itself was cardboard, and had the names of its few participating restaurants on the back, wrote Matty Simmons, the press agent for Diner’s Club, and later publisher of the National Lampoon.

In 1962, credit card issuers were mailing their offers to everyone, including, the joke had it, dogs and dead people. That practice of sending out cards unsolicited ended in 1970 when Congress outlawed it.

We don’t know now how Diners’ Club personalized the name on the letter—it may have been by hand, given the technology of that time.

The note was accompanied by a list of institutions that accepted the card in “Canada, British Isles, Europe, Asia, Australia, Arica, South & Central America.”

And there was a brochure proclaiming Diners’ Club as “the newest and mot advanced plastic credit card.”

It said:

Designed for your utmost convenience and honored by thousands of establishments that have been screened for quality and service. These are listed by area in wallet-size directories, which are furnished separately as guides for your additional convenience.

Since this single credit card replaces dozens of individual credit cards you now carry, it actually reduces the bulk of your wallet. In addition, you receive on request Diners’ Club directories covering all international listings and special listings of automotive services, gasoline stations, and repair centers.

Collections were a challenge.

“In addition to cardholders who simply couldn’t pay their bills, credit-card thefts, counterfeiting, and fraud started to escalate,” Simmons wrote. “Thieves, who since the creation of civilization had come up with new ways to rob others of their valuables and their money, now learned how to steal credit cards. They discovered how to falsify their credit applications so they could get their own cards and copy them much like the counterfeiter mattered the art of re-creating twenty-dollar bills.”

Things have improved.

On That Day So Still So Burning: The Poetry Of Nelson Algren

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Book Review: Never A Lovely So Real—The Live and Work of Nelson Algren by Colin Asher, W.W. Norton & Company 2019

By Ray Schultz

Nelson Algren was seen by some as the bard of the dispossessed and by others as the bard of the stumblebum. The operative word was bard. Algren was a poet who wrote novels, not a novelist who wrote poetry, one critic–I believe it was Seymour Krim–observed. And he penned several American classics, the very titles of which have entered our language, like A Walk On The Wild Side. 

Algren died in 1981 at age 72. Since then, there have been three pretty good biographies of him. The latest, Never A Lovely So Real, by Colin Asher, has been hailed as the definitive treatment. But will it supplant Bettina Drew’s 1989 effort: Nelson Algren—A Life On The Wild Side? And do any of them recognize the poetry and depth in Algren’s writing and view him as much akin to Faulkner as to Dreiser?

Asher gives Algren his due in a robust book providing new visibility into Algren’s life and work. And he lets us in on at least a few things that were not widely known. One is the fact that Algren, a “gut radical,” as I heard a friend describe him, was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1953, and that the FBI’s surveillance of him and the cancellation of his passport hurt his morale and ability to write more than many people realized. Some friends may have thought that Algren was having a breakdown over gambling losses and his marital woes when he seemed to attempt suicide, falling into a frozen lake in Gary, Indiana.

The basic biographical details are, of course, known to Algren fans. The former Nelson Algren Abraham, who grew up on the South Side of Chicago and bummed around the country in boxcars during the Depression, wrote one novel that didn’t attract much notice, Somebody In Boots, then broke through in 1942 with  Never Come Morning.

Never Come Morning, tells the story of Bruno Lefty Bicek, a would-be boxer who allows the entire membership of the Baldheads Athletic Club to gang-rape his girlfriend Steffi in an alley under the El. Bruno kills a Greek youth who wants to join in, saying the fun Is “for whites only,” and in the end must pay for this crime–“I knew I’d never get to be 21 anyway,” he says. In telling this grim tale, Algren moved beyond the leftist clichés of the era and replaced them with prose so moody and powerful that the Nation identified Never Come Morning as the work of a depressed man.  Ernest Hemingway admired the novel, and wrote, “You should not read it if you cannot take a punch.” Never Come Morning went on to sell a million copies in paperback.

Algren served as an Army medic in Europe in World War II, but never did the war novel people expected. Instead, living in a $10-a-month flat at Wabansia and Bosworth in Chicago, he wrote a post-war novel–about a card dealer who comes home with a Purple Heart and a morphine habit: The Man With the Golden Arm. It is a vast artistic advance over his prior work, filed with pre-Beat argot, bedroom farce and stunning interior monologue.

The poetry and humor are present in the first two paragraphs, which Asher quotes in full:

The captain never drank. Yet, toward nightall in that smoke-colore season between Inian summer and December’s first true snow, he would sometimes feel half drunken. He would hang his coat neatly over the back of his chair in the leaden station-house twilight, say he was beat from lack of sleep an lay his head across his arms upon the query-room desk.

Yet it wasn’t work that wearied him so and his sleep was harrassed by more than a smoke-colored rain. The city had filled him with the guilt of others; he was numbed by his charge sheet’s accuations. For twenty years, upon the same scarred desk, he had been recording larcency and arson, sodomy and simony, boosting, hijacking and shootings in sudden affray; blckmail and terrorism, incest and pauperism, embezzlement and horse theft, tampering and procuring, abduction and quackery, adultery and mackery. Till the finger of guilt, pointing so sternly for so long across the query-room blotter, had grown bored with it all at last and turned, capriciouly, to touc the ribers of the dark gray muscle behind the captan’s light gray eyes. So that though by daylight he remained the pursuer there had come nights, this windless first week of December, when he had dreamed he was being pursued.

Quite an opening. Unfortunately, writers who quote this always leave out the paragraphs that follow:

Long ago some station-house stray had nicknamed him Record Head, to honor the retentiveness of his memory for forgotten misdemenors. Now drawing close to the pension years, he was referred to as Captain Bednar only officially.

The pair of strays standing before him had already been filed, beside their prints, in both his records and his head.

“Ain’t nothing on my record but drunk ‘n fightin’,” the smshednosed vet with the bufalo-colores eyes was reminding the captain. “All I do is deal, drink ‘n fight.”

The captain studied the faded suntans above the army brogans. “What kind of discharge you get, Dealer?” 

“The right kind. And the Purple Heart.”

“Who do you fight with?”

“My wife, that’s all.”

“Hell, that’s no crime.”

He turned from the wayward veteran to the wayward 4F, the tortoise-shell glsses separating the outthrust ears: “I ain’t seen you since the night you played cowboy at old man Gold’s, misfit. How come you can’t get along with Sargeant Kvorka? Don’t you like him?”

These paragraphs establish the friendship between the card dealer Frankie Machine and his half-Jewish mascot Sparrow Saltskin, known as the punk, and the continuing presence of the police in both their lives.

The novel was said to be the first to depict drug addiction, and the first to use the phrase that an addict has a monkey on his back. But the real strength of this tragedy is in is the cast of characters—Blind Pig (or Piggy-O), Molly (or Molly-O), Drunkie John,  Antek the Owner and Nifty Louie the drug dealer. “Algren makes his living grotesques so terribly human that their faces, voices, shames, follies, and deaths can linger in your mind with a strange midnight dignity,” Carl Sandburg wrote.

Thanks, in part, to these virtues, The Man with the Golden Arm was a bestseller, and it won for Algren the first National Book Award. But what would he do next? The successful author went on to pen Chicago City on the Make, a prose poem that focused on the underside of the city.

It isn’t hard to love a town for it greeter and its lesser towers, its pleasant parks or it flashing ballet. Or for its broad and bending boulevards, where the continuous headlights follow one another, all night, all night and all night. But you never truly love it till you can love its alleys too. Where the bright and morning faces of old familiar friends now wear the anxious midnight eyes of strangers a long way from home. 

A midnight bounded by the bright carnival of the boulevards and the dark girders of the El.

Where once the marshland came to flower. 

Were once the deer came to water. 

 The slim volume, which is now considered a classic, also featured the line, Every day is D-Day under the El.

Next, Algren wrote a book-length essay on being a writer in a time of the hydrogen bomb, originally to be titled A Walk On The Wild Side.. It showed that Algren saw himself as “a multifaceted writer of the old school—and axiomatically a social critic—rather than simply novelist,” Bettina Drew writes. But Doubleday, unwilling to be labeled a “Red” publishing house, refused to publish it. And the manuscript was lost for 40 years.

Meanwhile, Algren had started a novel called Entrapment, based on the story of his onetime lover Margo (identified by Asher as one Paula Bays, in what he apparently considers a scoop), a woman who kicks a heroin habit. He was prepared to spend years on it, working from the inside out, building it in layers. Then he made a wrong turn: To earn an advance, he started revising his first novel Somebody In Boots under contract to Doubleday, and it evolved into the semi-comic work we know as A Walk On The Wild Side, a book that reportedly has influenced everyone from Lou Reed to Dan Dellllo. But it was the wrong book: Algren should have been working on Entrapment.

Not that A Walk On The Wild Side lacks Algrenesque virtues or poetry, some of held over from Somebody in Boots. Algren had learned valuable lessons when riding around in boxcars–like how to avoid the dreaded railroad bulls. 

Look out for Marsh City—that’s Hank Pugh’s. Look out for Greeneville—that belnogs to Buck Bryan. Buck’ll be walking the pines dressed like a ‘bo—the only way you’ll be able to spot him is by his big floppy hat with three holes in the top. And the hose length in his hand.

Your best bet is to freeze and wait. You can’t get away. He likes the hose length n his hand but what he really loves n the Colt on his hip.  So just cover up your eyes and liten to the swwisshhh. He’s got deputies coming down both sides. God help you if you run and God help you if you fight. God help if you’re broke and God help you if you’re black. 

Look out for Lima—that’s in Ohio. And look out for Springfield, the one in Missouri. Look out for Denver and Denver Jack Duncan. Look out for Tulsa. Look out for Tucson. Look out for Joplin. Look out for Chicago. Look out for Ft. Wayne—look out for St. Paul—look out for St. Joe—look out—look out—look out-

Doubleday declined to publish A Walk On the Wild Side, seeing it as too salacious. Algren found another publisher, but while the novel sold well and was later made into a movie, it was ferociously reviewed and Algren was headed for a personal and professional collapse. He stopped writing novels and morphed into the slightly clownish figure we later knew, who wrote travel books, lampooned other writers, lost money at the track and had his dentures broken while living for a time in Saigon.

Factual Errors

Asher recounts all of this with sympathy. But I have several issues with his reporting, some petty, some not.

For one, in describing Algren’s first meeting with the French author and feminist Simone de Bouvoir in 1947 (an acquaintance that instantly blossomed into a romance), Asher writes that Algren “boarded the El on a Friday evening and rode it toward the Loop—beneath Milwaukee Avenue, through the narrow tunnel under the Chicago River, and then south under State Street.”

Actually, the subway under Milwaukee Avenue didn’t open until 1951, and it runs under Dearborn Street in the Loop, not State Street. In 1947, Algren would have had to take the El (or “L,” as the system is branded) the long way around from his neighborhood.

Asher also writes that when living in Sag Harbor, Long Island at the end of his life, Algren “he slipped into the frigid Atlantic and swam a little, but not a lot.” Sag Harbor is located on a bay, not the ocean. And the writer Pete Hamill’s name is misspelled in the citations. The errors add up, and at some point it reads like a badly sourced Wikipedia entry.

Worse, Asher reports that St. Louis was seething when Algren arrived with some tough-guy friends in the autumn of 1955. “A six year-old boy named Bobby Greenlease had been kidnapped and murdered the month before by a man with mafia connections, and three people had been killed since.”

That is wildly inaccurate. Bobby Greenlease was kidnapped and murdered by a pair of losers named Carl Austin Hall and Bonnie Heady in September 1953. Both were put to death in the Missouri state gas chamber exactly two months after this crime.

Entrapment

Then there are a couple of serious omissions about Algren’s career. One is any real account of Entrapment, the novel Algren abandoned after his personal breakdown. Asher mostly mentions this unfinished novel in passing, referring to it as “picaresque.”

Picaresque?

Going by the fragments published in the 2009 book “Entrapment And Other Stories,” I suspect that the novel was gong to start like this: “Now remember this if you can,’ the ancient one-eyed jackal warned Real High Daddy, `you can always treat a woman too good. But you can never treat her too bad.”

From there, Entrapment would have moved into sections written in different voices, a technique Algren used to telling effect in the short story, The Lightless Room, about a boxer killed in the ring, and as Faulkner had done in As I Lay Dying. For example, there is Baby’s recollection of how Daddy got her onto “junk:” 

I was still that simple I didn’t know what he meant.

I found out in due course. In that same room right under the roof where you had to battle for every breath.

On that day so still so burning.

That last line is especially effective the second time it is used.

In his own meditations after the woman has left him, the male character thinks that Here in his own patch between billboard and trolley everyone tried, their whole lives long, to be somebody they never were. Somebody they’d read about, somebody they’d heard about, somebody they never could be. Somebody like George Raft, somebody like Frank Costello, someone like Myrna Loy. It was a world full of big shots, fake shots that fooled nobody except the big shots themselves.

Drew devoted an entire chapter of her book to Entrapment, saying that based on the portions available “this would have been a significant work.” Editor William Targ agreed that Algren “seemed to reach the deep-down essence of the blackest lower depths: drugs, pimping, prostitution, at their most grim level…It would have been an extraordinary achievement…it could have been his magnum opus.”

Yet the National Book award winner and bestselling author couldn’t get a contract for it, although one large portion was published in Playboy. 

It’s our loss. Drew writes that “Entrapment, conceived in the spirit of Never Come Morning and The Man with the Golden Arm, would never be finished, and the naturalistic writer in the tradition of Wright and Sandburg and Dreiser was gone.”

I’ve always thought that Algren is trivialized by people who insist on quoting his line: Never eat a place called Mom’s, never play cards with a man called Doc and never sleep with someone whose troubles are worse than your own. Algren was a serious artist who deserves to be remembered for more than that.

Asher seems to agree. But then Asher does something similar, using perhaps the worst line in Chicago City on the Make, likening Chicago to a woman with a broken nose, for the title of his own book.

That’s not his only misstep. Asher also writes that Algren was not great at titles.

Huh? He says that about the man who has given us such titles The Man With the Golden Arm, The Neon Wilderness, A Walk On The Wild Side, The Devil’s Stocking, Chicago: City On The Make and Native Son (the title he wanted for his first novel until someone stupidly changed it)? Algren’s sometime friend Richard Wright used Native Son, although it’s not clear who got it from whom.

Algren’s Posthumous Career

Finally, there’s Algren’s posthumous career. Algren published only nine proper books during his lifetime, and he edited one collection. After he died, Algren fans were treated to this quartet of significant works:

1983—The Devil’s Stocking

1994—The Texas Stories

1996 – Nonconformity (the essay formerly known as A Walk on The Wild Side).

2009— Entrapment and Other Stories

The Devil’s Stocking, Algren’s first novel in 25 years, was based on the murder case of boxer Ruben Hurricane Carter, with several characters and situations added, including vivid accounts of the houses of ill repute around Times Square.

Asher states that Algren’s prose had flattened out, and that the poetry was gone. I disagree. While it may not rival The Man With The Golden Arm, the Devil’s Stocking has its own rhythm and poetry. Take its description of the future prostitute Dovey Jean Dawkins:

Once a teacher, calling her by her first name with an accent of sympathy, wakened in the child a feeling of great love. For she had great love in her.

Nobody needed it. Nobody wanted it. Love was a drag on the market. 

Then there is the fighter’s father, who once brought his son to the police after he caught him in a theft. 

“I never knew the police would take such hold,” he admits.

“You know it now, old man,” a friend says.

 never knew the police would take such hold,” he admits. 

The man still had it, and Asher does correctly note that The Devil’s Stocking was Algren’s best book in years.

If only Algren had completed Entrapment and the proposed short story collection, Love In An Iron Rain. But as Studs Terkel said in a brief conversation I had with him in 1982, Algren did what he did. He made his statement.

So has Bettina Drew. Her biography is still the one to beat.

The Last Rebbes: Life among The Hasidic Jews, Part IX

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By Ray Schultz

On the first night of Rosh Hashanah 1973, the Lubavitcher Rebbe came down from his study and said, “Good Yontif” to the men assembled there. That greeting is hardly unusual, but everything said by the Rebbe was subject to interpretation, even this. “It was strange,” a Lubavitcher man told me. “It was almost as if he knew what was about to happen, and he wanted to make the best of it.”

They soon found out what was going to happen: Like Henry Kissinger and everyone else, we in New York awoke on Yom Kippur morning, October 6, to the news that Egypt and Syria had attacked Israel on multiple fronts. I felt a shaft of cold fear when I saw the headline: “Egypt Crosses Bar Lev Line,” the sandy build-up on the Sinai side of the Suez canal a day or two later.

As a lefty, I had complicated feelings about Israel. Like many, I exulted in the Israeli success in the Six-Day War in 1967. Israel had destroyed Egypt’s air force with a preemptive strike on June 5. By Saturday June 10, the Israelis had occupied the Sinai, the West Bank and the Golan Heights. On a newsstand, I found a one-shot pulp magazine that featured pictures from the war, accompanied by funny captions, the running joke being that everything in the Middle East was occupied by Israel. One photo showed Egyptian strongman Gamal Abdul Nasser walking down a hall, and saying, “I have to use the men’s room.” A cowering aide says, “I’m sorry, sir, the men’s room is occupied.”

The laughter didn’t last, and I took on what I thought was a broader world view. But I was brought back to Zionism by a strange influence: Rabbi Meir Kahane, the founder of the Jewish Defense League, a friend of Samuel Shrage’s and an alleged racist.

This happened in 1971, a time when things seemed relatively peaceful in the Middle East. Terry Noble, who had lost a leg on a kibbutz in Israel and was now said to be Bob Dylan’s Hebrew teacher, persuaded ABC to let him make a pilot tape for a radio talk show. It never aired. But Terry assembled a formidable panel: Kahane, the Arab spokesman Dr. Muhammad Medhi, a couple of other people on both sides and the Yippies Abbie Hoffman and Paul Krassner. Bob Dylan spent the evening listening in a corner control booth.

It started with Kahane, a man who rivaled anyone in the studio, including Dylan himself, in charisma. “What we have here with our group is a very strange concept: To bring back the old Jew,” he said. “The old Jew is that Jew who lives again in Israel, who fought for it, defended it, lost it, won it, and wanted it back again.”

Dr. Medhi promptly countered.

“We believe that American policy towards the middle-east has been morally wrong and politically detrimental to the interests of the United States, to the Arabs, to the interests of the Jewish people, to the interests of international peace,” he said. “Our concern really is not with the Arabs. The Arabs are at best, a small portion of this beautiful human race. Our concern is really with the human being.”

“I’ve followed you for about seven years, and I’ve always felt that you’re an extremely clever man,” Kahane broke in. “You know exactly what issues to press at the proper time.. When you first began, there was no hint of this sudden love for all people. Dr. Medhi, you’re first and foremost for the Arabs. And you’re using humanism to hopefully catch all our young Jewish friends. And that is dishonest.”

One of those young Jewish friends, Abbie Hoffman, seemed amused by Kahane despite their political differences, and Kahane appeared to aim some of his remarks at him.

“It’s about time that young Jews who march for every miserable cause in the whole world, who bleed for Mozambique and Angola, Biafra, Vietnam and Antarctica and Angela Davis—that’s beautiful,” Kahane said, “But we’d like to see them put in a day, just a day a year, bleeding for something Jewish, too.”

Abbie would joke, “He implied that to stick up for Angela Davis is bleeding-heartism which I always associated with Hadassah because of my background.” But Abbie had a serious answer, too.

“Within the Jewish tradition, and I certainly consider myself Jewish, there’s a history of identification with the oppressed that the rabbi sort of passes on in one broad sweep,” he said. “You can’t have it both ways. You can’t say that we are American Jews and we are a minority and the victims of oppression and on the other hand identify wholeheartedly with that oppressor, the United States, with its imperialist policies around the world.”

Abbie moved on to the “drawing-room intellectualization” of Zionism in the early 20th Century. “To talk about Zionism. I think that on paper it was a good idea,” he said. “From Herzl and Chaim Weizmann right up to Moshe Dayan, the problem is that in recognizing this Jewish state would be in Palestine, they overlooked one problem—mainly, that there were people already living there. When Ben Gurian and Moshe Dayan and Golda Meir from Milwaukee stand up in Israel and say there will be tens of millions coming, if you are an Arab sitting there, you get a goddamned gun.”

I knew Abbie slightly, and thought of him as a lovable rogue. I was surprised he knew all that history, but he admitted later that he had boned up on it the night before.

The teacher Kahane promptly corrected him. “There are several errors, Abbie,” he said. “First, Zionism did not start with Herzl. Zionism started the day after the second temple was burned, when that Jew turned not to Mecca, as Arabs of Palestine turn, but to Zion. From that day on, Jews said, ‘We want to go home.’ It’s our home. We Jews want nothing more than what Arabs have except that Arabs have a great deal more than we have. They have not only one country, they have many countries. We don’t begrudge the Arabs their countries. They can have Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, Libya and Sudan and Algeria. Wonderful. Beautiful. Do what you will there. You can fight with each other. You can have monarchies or Marxist states. All we ask is one little thing: we want our land back. Back. Back. Back.”

Mehdi weakly countered that Kahane and others had “recently rediscovered themselves and they have become nationalist, while the rest of us, having discovered ourselves over hundreds of years, were getting out of the narrow isms, and become more members of the human race. The rabbi and the others have gone backward, a sort of a regression, whereas the rest of mankind is moving forward to a more universalist pattern of life.”

Kahane blew that right away. “We Jews, quite to the contrary, doctor, are not backward, but quite forward. We’ve been where you’re trying to be. Fifty years ago we leaped into the great humanity business. When the first Politboro met at the Kremlin, there were so many Jews there that we could have prayed the afternoon Jewish service. We really did say, this nonsense of narrow racism has got to end. We learned the hard way. We learned the hard way. Stalin taught it to us. We learned the hard way.”

The question arose of why Abba Eban, from England, was allowed into Israel. Kahne answered, “We are both a nation and a faith. That’s why Abba Eban has a right to come back.”

“How about Sammy Davis Jr.?” Paul Krassner asked, referring to the African American entertainer who had converted to Judaism.

“”Sammy? Beautiful. Right on. He can come right home. He’s a Jew.”

“Could I go there?” Hoffman asked.

“Sure.”

“I have a doubt because of Israel’s political ties with the United States, that I would quickly extradited and the doors would be closed.”

“You are wrong. We’ve had far worse than you.”

“It’s a sacrilege!” Abbie shouted. “The Macabees are puking in their graves when they see an Israeli fighter-jet made right here in the U.S. dropping napalm on an Arab village.”

“I haven’t visited their graves recently so I don’t know if they’re puking or not,” Kahane said.

Kahane made a final. point: “The question is not whether one is Jewish because Herzl said so or the Bible said so. When you get right down to it, you are Jewish because non-Jews said so.”

As often happened in those years, Krassner had the last word.

“I was a victim of circumcision, which was the first act of anti-Semitism in my family for me,” he said.  “And it was probably because of Jewish tradition even though I don’t consider myself Jewish. An important point, because it was the Nazi philosophy that Judaism was something that was inherited like a race rather than a culturally acquired religion. I just refuse to identify with the philosophy which, among other things, is male chauvinist. It’s appropriate that there’s only males on this panel. And I think it should be gotten into a kind of perspective that at least we recognize that we’re talking here about value judgments. Not only may Jews not be the chosen people, people may not even be the chosen species.”

All that aside,  Israel was now being threatened again, and a debate was going on right within Hasidic ranks. A day or two after the war started, the Lubavitcher Rebbe told a couple of men that if Israeli meant business, it should go right on to Damascus and hold it as a bargaining point. If true, that statement placed the Rebbe clearly within the Zionist camp. Of course the Satmar maintained their usual antipathy toward Israel.

“I will say it bluntly—our position has not changed,” said Rabbi Chaim Stauber when I called him. “As a matter of fact, this all substantiates our claim that ultimate redemption cannot be man-made. We cannot redeem ourselves from Disapora—it’s a part of our age-old prohibition against rebelling against rulers. Of course, our hearts bleed. Jewish blood has been spilled, life taken once again. We would like to see the war end as soon as possible. But our de facto position has been steadfast. Of course, there is concern for safety, not only for religious Jews. A Jew is a Jew. It’s a part of us, mercy, benevolence, within us, our heritage. Most certainly, this has been heartbreaking.”

Moss In Love

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By Ray Schultz

One evening last fall, my wife and I were enjoying some Blue Point oysters at the Oyster Bar when she turned and said, “Isn’t that your friend Yale?”

Yale Moss! I tried to duck under the counter, but it was too late. Yale was on his way over, accompanied by a very tall young woman who looked vaguely familiar.

The last I’d heard of Yale, he was trying to get into the cannabis business. He sent an offer to his dad Mo’s Proclivities database of drunkards, dope fiends, deadbeats and other such riffraff.

The list hadn’t been updated in years, and the people on it were unresponsive and presumed dead. But many now came forward to place cannabis orders.

It might have worked. But then Yale offered an imported hashish sampler and was sued by a consortium of state AGs. He must have been testing his own product because he looked a little loopy.

Yale introduced us to his friend: Danielle Hall, also called Danny. Though Yale described her as a sculptor, we recognized her at once as the scion of the Hall family, the owner of vast real estate holdings, luxury car dealerships and many other businesses, and super-wealthy in her own right.

We got acquainted—Danny seemed gracious, if slightly bored with people at our level–and Yale offered me “a nice piece of opiated hash,” which I declined since I eschew drug use in all its forms.

Yale and I went to look at the desserts, and he let me in on his plan: “I met her online. I’m gonna marry her. In a month, my algorithms will be running the entire Hall empire. We’re on our way to Tampa to meet my folks.”

Now I wouldn’t be in a hurry to introduce a fiancé of mine to Mo and Wendy, especially one like Danny. But nobody asked my opinion, and they left the next day.

Predictably, Mo instantly saw the advantage of a match between the Moss and Hall families, and he arranged to have the couple married in his living room the very night of their arrival by a judge who had fixed some of his real estate cases.

I was relieved—the fact that we weren’t invited to the wedding meant we didn’t have to send a gift. But I didn’t get it. “What does she see in him?” I asked my wife.

“Well, he is a bit of a hunk,” she replied. (Something she never said about me). “He’s the only man who’s as tall as she is.”

I had to hand it to Yale—he had married into money, which is just as legitimate a way of getting it as any other.

Unfortunately, things did not go well in Yale’s initial interview with Danny’s father Hal Hall, a short man with a huge chest and a large round face.

Yale had set up a presentation on his technology (which had been down since May).

“Don’t bother,” Hal growled. “I’ve got the best IT department in the country, and if I needed any help, you’d be the last person I’d turn to.”

Then, as if he were talking to an employment counselor, Yale said he might like to get into real estate development.

Hal hissed, “When my daughter divorces you, I’ll see you end up on the street.”

Under that cloud, Yale and Danny embarked upon married life. Of course, they needed to find a job for Yale, and Hal came through in the end because Danny usually gets her way. But the job reflected Yale’s standing in the business and also, sadly, in the marriage—that of a kept man.

Every morning, Yale and Danny leave her private 12-room residence in the Pierre, Yale carrying a peanut butter sandwich in a brown paper bag. He wears an outfit that looks as if it was issued by a halfway house: an ill-fitting sports jacket, corduroy pants, a shirt and a knit tie.

They enter a chauffeured SUV and are driven it to Danny’s massive sculpture studio in Long Island City. Then Yale is on his own, and has to catch the No. 7 El to Woodside, and transfer to the Long Island Railroad. This he takes to Rockville Centre, Long Island, where he walks half a mile to a building in back of a used-car lot: the Sunrise Hauling & Cartage Company.

On Hal’s command, the low-level hood who runs the place hired Yale as a salesman on a commission basis—no salary. They expected him to fail—the next step was driving one of the trucks.

Yale sat around for a day or two staring into space. Then he had a brainstorm. Mo has always kept his customer list up to date—it’s far more important than the list they actually sell. So Yale started calling some of the businesses on it, asking if any of them were moving.

Some weren’t happy to hear from him, but you know how real estate is in New York. In two weeks, Yale sold four pretty hefty contracts to factories with all kinds of heavy equipment and computers, and more were coming in as he also worked his father’s bankruptcy list. Of course, he had to go out on the jobs himself, wearing a helmet.

Relieved that the business was starting to show a pulse, Yale’s boss asked him to sell the used cars in the adjoining lot, some of which were on cement blocks or contained stolen parts. Yale was so good at that—nobody who entered the lot, or even passed on the street, escaped without buying a car.

And so, Yale enjoyed some success, probably the first in his entire life. He didn’t make much money by Hall standards, and the pittance he made Danny demanded for household expenses—“I’m sure you want to pay your own way,” she said. But he did receive one token of family esteem.

Hal Hall always bestows lavish gifts on his key employees during the holidays: Cadillacs, Aston Martins, custom yachts. And while Yale was way down the list, he did get a remembrance: a 1985 Chevvy with a badly repaired fender. How do I know? He tried to sell it to me.

Note: Any resemblance between companies and persons is strictly coincidental, etc. 

Previous Moss family misadventures:

A Rolling Stone Gathers No Moss

Your GDPR Security Blanket

I Was A Bitcoin Billionnaire

DEAR FRIEND: The Rascals, Rogues and Roues Who Made American Junk Mail, Chapter 35: The Godfather Of Spam

Posted on by The TellAllmarketing Blog

By Ray Schultz

On paper, Alan J. Ralsky looked just another loser with a record. He had served probation for falsifying bank records and prison time for selling unregistered securities. And in 1996, at age 52, he lost his licenses to sell insurance in Michigan and Illinois.

But the small-time fraud had another card to play. As legend  has it, he sold his car and used the money to buy two computers,  taught himself to use them, and figured out something that had eluded most of the old junk mail kings: that there was a new channel through which to swindle people: email.

Email was cheaper than direct mail, and could reach numbers that rivaled the entire population of the United States in the time of the Lottery King J.M. Pattee. Ralsky, or his clients, sold everything from Viagra to vacation packages, and he was enjoying a life of luxury in the Detroit suburb of Bloomfield. By 2001, he was sending 30 million emails a day, so many that he crashed Verizon’s internet operation. Verizon sued him and he was banned from the network. But he was now known as The Godfather of Spam, a title in which he took pride.

Spam was not new. The first person to send unsolicited email was Gary Thuerk, a marketing executive at Digital Equipment Corp., a computer outfit located in the tech belt surrounding Boston. He had access to ARPANET, a communications system maintained by the U.S. Dept. of Defense. There were maybe 2020 technical people registered on it. He had a brainstorm: Why not use it to market to them?

On May 3, 1978, Thuerk sent a message to 400 people on the system, inviting them to attend A PRODUCT PRESENTATION OF THE NEWEST MEMBERS OF THE DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY.

Some people went, and they bought $13 million worth of computers. But others were unhappy—how dare this guy use this protected system to peddle a product?

By 1994, thanks to the internet, several players were blasting emails, using services like AOL, and later Gmail and Outlook. People started calling it spam, after the canned meat eaten by GIs during World War II and now widely sold; some said this use of the name came from a Monty Python skit.

As with the junk mail that came before it, there were many complaints about spam, especially after Ralsky got rolling. So legislators worked up a law called CAN-SPAM, and President George W. Bush signed it: It took effect in January 2004.

That very month,  Ralsky started a new business, working with a team that included his girlfriend Judy Devenow, son-in-law Scott Bradley and a character known as Wheelchair Frankie—Frank Tribble. And they seemed to take the prohibitions in the new CAN-SPAM  law as their play list.

For one thing, the law prohibits botnets—a network of computers infected with malicious software “that allows a third party to control the entire computer network without the knowledge of the computer owners.”

This Ralsky and his co-defendants did—Ralsky himself placed a job posting on a special ham website: “Need C Programmer Familiar with ClusterMailers,” one who could program “a server daemon for windows that will serve as the installed bot.”

Of course, Ralsky had rented email lists to start his first spam business, but that was expensive and “so 1997,” as some would say. This was easy.

For another thing, CAN-SPAM forbids the use of false header and domain information to hide the identity of the sender—this would include the from, reply-to and subject lines. Ralsky and his team used obtained software that helps with “materially falsifying e-mail header information”

And, of course, CAN-SPAM disallows the sending of mass emails to people who don’t want them. Ralsky and associates “employed several fraudulent means to accomplish the common goals of sending out as much unlawful spam email as possible in order to make as much money as possible.”

Federal prosecutors got wind of the operation, but thought it was just another spam business “selling typical things—Viagra, a substitute imported from India,” said then-assistant U.S. Attorney Terrence Berg.

They raided the home of Scott Bradley, looking for proof. And they were i for a surprise. There they found handwritten ledgers filled with cryptic scribblings—tally sheets of stockmarket ticket symbols. “We were now realized they were involved in activity different from what we thought,” said Berg.

This activity was the selling of Chinese pennystocks, as provided by How Wai John Hui, the CEO of China World Trade. The gang’s emails were designed to create demand and increase the prices of these “pink sheet” stocks, and they had ample incentive to do so:

We get nothing if sold under $1.00

We get $30% if sold between $1-2

And 40% if sold between $2-3

Any thing sold over $3.00 we get 50%

That was only one part of what was turning out to be an international conspiracy. And it was now clear that the techies had taken over from the copywriters and old-time list compilers who sometimes copied government listings onto yellow legal pads.

Ralsky and company worked with one Peter Severa, a Russian hacker and botnet operator whose real name was Peter Levashov. Via online chat, Severa claimed to Bradley that he could get 20 million emails a day info AOL or Hotmail, two of the prime delivery systems. Bradley mentioned Ralsky, and Severa replied, ““King of Spam want to rent me. Cool.”

In barely a month in the summer of 2005, Ralsky paid Severa paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for sending spam with certain stock ticker symbols. And it was a good summer Ralsky, with $3 million in revenue being booked in barely a month.

Then, one day that September, the feds raided Ralsky’s home, seizing financial records, disks and computers. “We’re out of business at this point in time,” Ralsky said. “They didn’t shut us down. They took all our equipment, which had the effect of shutting us down.”

Berg and his staff gathered massive documentary evidence—emails and other proof of wire fraud and mail fraud. “If they had committed this whole scheme by meeting in a Starbucks, we wouldn’t have been able to prove it,” Berg would joke.

Indictments were issued in December 2007, charging a vast network of spammers and the felons who allegedly supported them, with charges ranging from wire fraud to money laundering. Most cooperated with Berg—so did Ralsky. And most pleaded guilty.

Sentencing took place almost two years later. The government recommended from 35 to 43 months for Ralsky in view of his cooperation. Instead, the judge handed him 51 months—over four years, an “excessive sentence,” said Ralsky’s lawyer, Steven Fishman.

“It was the most disappointing event that I have ever experienced in 36 years as a lawyer,” Fishman complained. “The sentence was higher than even what the government recommended, and I never imagined that in a million years. Everyone in the court house was stunned.”

But Ralsky wasn’t alone in drawing a harsh penalty: Hui and Tribble also got 51 months apiece. Bradley was handed 40 months, but Judy Devenow pulled only 18 months.

Severa wasn’t around to either plead or be sentenced: he was thought to be in Russia. Later, he was accused of running the Kelihos botnet, a network of 100,000 hijacked computers that could spit out billions of emails containing viruses, fraudulent offers and ransomware; some even wondered if he was involved in the Russian effort to sway the 2016 U.S. Presidential election.

In 2017, Severa made the mistake of vacationing in Barcelona, and Spanish authorities arrested him on a warrant from the U.S. He fought extradition, telling the Spanish court that he probably would be tortured and murdered in the U.S. He claimed to have worked for Alexander Putin’s United Russia Party. “I collected different information about opposition parties and delivered it to the necessary people at the necessary time,” he said. The Russian government denied it. Severa was extradited to the U.S., facing 52 years in jail, and in 2018 pleaded guilty to numerous offenses, including conspiracy, wire fraud and identity theft.

*****

By this time, many other felons had discovered the wonders of online marketing. For instance, the great Norman Chanes was indicted with two other men for luring people into “free tours” of adult websites, then billing their credit cards without permission. One of his fellow defendants, Richard Martino, was a member of the Gambino crime family, prosecutors claimed.

Then there were the frauds coming from Nigeria–the descendants of the old  Nigerian Prince mailers, but with far greater reach and sophistication. Business inboxes were barraged with fake invoices and other emails designed to spread malware and steal money and identities.

Some companies paid up to $900,000. And an incompetent accountant in San Diego transferred over $43,000 to a fraudulent account.

Other emails targeted “persons looking for romantic partners or friendship on dating websites and other social media platforms. The Nigerian lovers would use fictitious names, locations, images and personas.

The so-called threat actors hacked into company systems, laundered money and committed other crimes.

There was one difference with the old days: some of the perpetrators were caught. In 2019, for example, a 252-count indictment was issued against 80 defendants, most of them Nigerian nationals.

The lead defendants, both residing in the Los Angles area, were Valentine Iro and Chukwudi Christogunus Igbokwe, Iro and Igbokwe, Nigerian citizens, processed payments and laundered money in return for a cut off the top, the indictment alleged. Of course, most of  the remaining defendants were in Nigeria.

In one case, a small-time player named Michael Neu, age 67, of Slidell, Louisiana, was arrested and charged with 269 counts of wire fraud and money laundering.

Meanwhile, Ralsky, age 64, entered prison—he’d been there before. He did his time in Morgantown, a minimum security facility in West Virginia, also known as Club Fed. Despite his cooperation with the government, he was unrepentant.

“In 2006, 2007 and 2008, we were mailing – in the inbox—400 million a night,” he said in a bizarre video with a guy he’d mentored in jail—Rodney Burton, now known as Bitcoin Rodney. “And will never be repeated. That’s because the standards have changed…the methods that we used were used, you just can’t do it anymore. But if you do it right, email is king. Email will make you ready in the long run.”

If any of Ralskys utterances are remembered, though, it will be one he made before that. Anti-spam activists obtained his address and put it on numerous mailing lists. And the man who had send hundreds of million emails a day, oblivious to the annoyance factor or the harm being done, perhaps spoke for all consumers from the Colonial era to the present, when he whined, “They’ve signed me up for every advertising campaign and mailing list there is. These people are out of their minds. They’re harassing me.”