Cassie Chadwick

American scoundrels, Cassie Chadwicks are...

American scoundrels, Cassie Chadwick, the queen of Ohio, true crime historian.

Cleveland, Ohio, December 7th, 1904.

She was in bed when they came for her, sweet at the hotel Brezlin, curtains drawn against

the cold, the whole room arranged to suggest a woman of consequence momentarily indisposed.

They found her bundled in silk, her dark eyes calm, her manner the kind of dignified wounded

that had served her well in courtrooms and counting houses for 30 years, and strapped around

her waist underneath the bed clothes, a money belt stuffed with $100,000 in cash.

She had not been planning to stay.

Her name, the one she was using that week, was Cassie L. Chadwick, wife of a Cleveland

physician, resident of Euclid Avenue's Millionaire's Row, confident to the great and the gullible,

and she had assured every banker in Northern Ohio the illegitimate daughter of Andrew Carnegie.

She was none of these things except perhaps the last noun.

She had been born Elizabeth Bigley in Eastwood, Ontario in 1857, the daughter of a railroad

section hand who worked with his hands for wages.

She had not inherited $40, let alone $400 million.

She had never once shaken hands with Andrew Carnegie.

None of that had stopped her from spending his money for eight years.

The record shows she was a natural.

Not in the romantic sense, there is nothing romantic about a person who spends a lifetime stealing

from people, but in the technical sense, the skills were present early and never left her.

She was 13 years old when she opened a bank account in Woodstock, Ontario, using a forged

letter from a fictional English uncle claiming she'd inherited a tidy sum.

The bank caught on.

Charges were dropped on grounds of insanity.

She made faces at the jury, which at minimum suggests a flair for performance.

She was told not to do it again and sent home.

She was not the kind of person who stopped.

She moved through the next two decades the way a river moves through soft ground, constantly

remaking the landscape as she went.

She became Lydia Scott, fortune teller, then Madame Lydia Devere, European clairvoyant,

operating out of Toledo.

In 1882, she married a Cleveland physician named Springsteen, who discovered her creditors

inside 11 days and threw her out.

In 1889, she was convicted of forgery in Toledo and sentenced to nine and a half years in

the Ohio State Penitentiary.

She was paroled four years later by Governor William McKinley, who would live to regret

a great number of decisions, but probably didn't rank this one high on the list, because

he never knew he'd made it.

She came back to Cleveland as Mrs. Hoover, took a house, and eventually found herself operating

a brothel on the city's west side.

It was there in the mid-1890s that she met Dr. Lee Roy Chadwick, widowed, prosperous,

lonely, and possessed of a mansion on Euclid Avenue, three blocks from John D. Rockefeller's

estate.

She married him in 1897.

He knew nothing about any of it.

His family was suspicious.

His adult daughter was hostile.

The new Mrs. Chadwick had no pedigree anyone could verify and a past she declined to discuss.

She needed a story.

She came up with a good one.

In late 1901 or early 1902, accounts differ on the exact date.

She wrote a carriage to the lobby of the Holland House Hotel in New York City, where she was

introduced to a man named Dylan, an Ohio banker who moved in the same circles as her husband.

She told Dylan she had some business on Fifth Avenue and asked if he'd accompany her.

He said yes.

The carriage stopped in front of Andrew Carnegie's mansion.

She went inside alone, explaining she needed to speak with someone about hiring a domestic.

What she actually did was engage Carnegie's butler in conversation long enough to establish

her presence in the house.

When she emerged twenty minutes later, she paused on the steps and waved toward an upstairs

window.

A well-dressed man, the butler, not Carnegie, waved back.

She descended to the carriage and as she climbed in, she tripped.

An envelope slid from her hands.

Dylan picked it up.

Inside were promissory notes.

Carnegie's signature, a face value of two million dollars.

She swore Dylan to silence, which is to say she selected the one method guaranteed to

ensure the story would be in every bank presidency here in Ohio within the month.

Carnegie, she explained in a whisper, was her father.

An illegitimate daughter hidden for decades, the great man's shame.

He had given her millions and notes out of guilt.

There were seven million more locked in a safety deposit box at Wade Park Bank in Cleveland.

And when he died, she stood to inherit four hundred million dollars.

The notes were real.

The signature was Carnegie's.

Anyone could see that.

The notes were forged.

The signature was hers.

She reminded Dylan not to breathe a word.

He breathed many, many words.

Within weeks, the bankers of Northern Ohio were lining up to offer their services to

Andrew Carnegie's illegitimate heir.

What followed was eight years of industrialized fraud, and it worked for a reason that matters.

The bankers were not innocent.

They were greedy.

They understood or thought they understood exactly what they were doing.

Carnegie was old.

He would die.

When he died, this woman would inherit a fortune large enough to retire the national

debt of a small country.

The loans they made to her came with interest rates that would have embarrassed a loan shark.

They kept their mouths shut about the arrangement because admitting they'd loaned money against

a dead man's projected estate to a woman whose only collateral was a rumor would have been

professionally humiliating.

Their silence was not discretion.

It was complicity dressed up as discretion.

Cassie understood this perfectly.

She relied on it.

She borrowed from Wade Park Bank and Citizen's National Bank of Oberlin from Lincoln National

Bank in New York from a Pittsburgh steel mogul who may well have known Carnegie personally.

From Herbert Newton, an investment banker in Boston who came to her through the Euclid

Avenue Baptist Church, which is either ironic or exactly what you'd expect depending on

your view of things.

She paid early loans with money from later loans, a personal Ponzi scheme running on banker

vanity and her own iron nerve.

The total by the time it collapsed was somewhere between one and two million dollars.

Some historians believe the real figure was higher because a number of her male victims

declined to come forward at all.

She spent it the way a woman who grew up poor and spent her twenties in a penitentiary

would spend it, which is to say, immediately and extravagantly and with no apparent sealing.

She bought eight grand pianos and gave them as Christmas gifts.

She bought trays of diamonds and pearls, inventoryed at close to $100,000.

She bought a pipe organ for $9,000, a musical chair that played a tune when you sat in it.

The pictures from the far east, custom hats from New York, furniture from Europe.

She threw open the Chadwick mansion on Euclid Avenue and dared Rockefeller's neighbors

to outspend her.

They could not.

Her husband bewildered and outmatched, watched it happen.

His family's suspicions deepened and were ignored.

Cleveland called her the Queen of Ohio.

She accepted the title.

It ended because it had to.

In November 1904 Herbert Newton, the Boston banker, the one from the Baptist Church, decided

he wanted his $190,000 back.

He filed suit.

The suit triggered an investigation.

The investigation revealed that the promissory notes in Wade Park Bank's vault were obvious

forgeries.

Carnegie was reached through a spokesman and asked about his illegitimate daughter in

Cleveland.

He had no illegitimate daughter in Cleveland.

He had not signed a note in more than 30 years.

The banks fell like dominoes.

Citizens' national bank of Oberlin, which had loaned Cassie $200,000, was hit by a run

and collapsed into bankruptcy.

Students at Oberlin College, who had deposited their savings there, lost nearly everything.

Ordinary people, not bankers, not speculators, just people who'd trusted a small-town bank

with small amounts of money, found their accounts emptied by a fraud they had no part

in and no warning of.

Charles Beckwith, the bank's president, who had handed Cassie $240,000 plus $100,000 from

his personal account, visited her in her jail cell after the verdict and stood studying

her through the bars.

She had ruined him.

He said so.

Then he said, but I'm not so sure yet you are a fraud.

She had that effect on people.

She was arrested December 7, 1904 at the Hotel Brezlin, Money Belt and All.

She denied everything, denied borrowing under false pretenses, denied claiming Carnegie's

paternity, denied knowing the notes were forged.

Yes, I borrowed money in very large amounts, she told reporters, but what of it?

She said it the way a person says it when they've decided contempt is the best remaining

defense.

The husband filed for divorce and left for Europe with his adult daughter.

Andrew Carnegie himself attended the trial, which became a national sensation.

On March 11, 1905, she was convicted on seven counts of conspiracy against the government

and conspiracy to wreck the citizens' national bank of Oberlin and sentenced to ten years

in the Ohio State Penitentiary.

She brought trunks of finery with her, the warden let her keep them.

She was dead within two years, October 10, 1907, her 50th birthday by some accounts.

She never confessed.

The full extent of what she stole was never established, partly because she would not

say and partly because the men she stole from would not either.

Carnegie, for his part, gave money to Oberlin citizens who had lost their savings.

He endowed a library for the college.

The Carnegie building still stands at Oberlin today, a monument funded by guilt he had not

earned for a daughter he had never had, attached to a fraud he could not explain and did not

choose.

It is the only honest thing connected to the whole enterprise.

Cassie Chadwick built her con on a truth about wealthy men that she understood better than

they understood themselves, that they would rather believe a flattering lie than admit

they'd been taken.

The bankers who lined up to loan her money were not fooled by her.

They were fooled by their own arithmetic, by the certainty that Carnegie's death would

make them rich, and by the absolute conviction that a woman who spent money the way Cassie

spent money had to be getting it from somewhere legitimate.

She was a railroad worker's daughter from Ontario.

She wore their assumptions like a coat.

She never told them a thing they weren't already desperate to hear.

And scoundrels is a personal service of true crime historian.