Step inside a world of opulence, excess, and elaborate deception. While the Gilded Age is known for its industrial titans and lavish parties, a dark and fascinating criminal underworld was thriving, run by some of history’s most audacious con artists. In this episode, we uncover the shocking true stories of the female grifters of the Gilded Age, a group of women who used society’s expectations against itself to swindle fortunes. Author Annie Reed joins us to reveal how these master manipulators stole millions, outsmarted the shrewdest businessmen, and became legends of crime.
From high-stakes cons that shook the financial world to elaborate romance scams, this episode explores the lives of the most notorious Gilded Age swindlers. We begin with the incredible tale of Cassie Chadwick, the subject of Annie Reed’s book, The Imposter Heiress. Chadwick masterminded one of the era’s biggest scams by convincing bankers she was Andrew Carnegie’s illegitimate daughter, securing millions in fraudulent loans. Her story serves as the yardstick against which all other swindlers were measured. But she was far from alone. We delve into the reasons why the Gilded Age was the perfect breeding ground for these criminals, as women began to demand more agency in a world dominated by men and speculative wealth. The conversation then turns to other legendary figures, including Ellen Peck, a lifelong “jack of all trades” swindler in New York whose criminal career spanned decades and netted her an estimated $30 million in today’s money. We also uncover the story of Bertha “Big Bertha” Heyman, the “Confidence Queen” who retired from a life of crime to become a theater owner and lecturer. A particularly dark story is that of Sarah Howe, who preyed on vulnerable women with her “Ladies Deposit Bank,” an early and cruel Ponzi scheme. Finally, we explore the incredible tale of the House of Hearts swindle, a massive marriage scam run by best friends Izzella Brown and Vina, who lured countless men into phony engagements to steal their money. These incredible true stories of the female grifters of the Gilded Age reveal a hidden side of American history, where cunning women built empires on lies.
Introduction
Blaine DeSantis: Welcome to Books and Looks, where we do a deep dive with authors to help you discover your next great read. And when is an author interview not enough? Last year, Annie Reed joined us to discuss her book, a fantastic book, and her debut book was a magnificent success. But she returns to tell us more today about the female grifters of the Gilded Age.
The Gilded Age was a time of riches, a time of excess, and also a time when women were extremely busy as grifters, swindlers, and thieves. Annie’s research has led to a host of fascinating women and their stories, and she has graciously agreed to join us once again here on Books and Looks. I’m Blaine DeSantis. This is Books and Looks. And today we’re chatting with the author, Annie Reed, about female grifters in the Gilded Age. Annie Reed, welcome back to Books and Looks.
Annie Reed: Thanks so much for having me. It’s so great to be back.
Blaine DeSantis: Oh boy, oh boy. Did I enjoy your book, The Imposter Heiress. As a matter of fact, let’s get that out of the way. Let’s just show everybody that book right there, The Imposter Heiress. What a great book this was. You were a wonderful guest. This is a story about someone named Cassie Chadwick. And before we get into today’s topic, tell me a little bit about how you found Cassie Chadwick and how you got interested in these notorious women of the Gilded Age?
Annie Reed: It really all started with Cassie. I learned about her on another podcast, Stuff You Missed in History Class. They had an episode on her. And at the time I was living in Ohio and I had never really heard of her. So I was just so interested right off the bat.
Blaine DeSantis: And that was where she basically ended up making her base of operations, if I’m not mistaken.
Annie Reed: Oh, yeah. She terrorized Ohio, the whole state and a couple of states around for a long time.
Cassie Chadwick: The Imposter Heiress and the Carnegie Con
Blaine DeSantis: Oh, my word. Yes. Tell us a little bit about Cassie and about what her con was that became the basis of your book.
Annie Reed: Well, Cassie was a lifelong swindler and she always kind of ran the same play. It was she pretended to be someone who was rich and she just couldn’t access her money at that moment. So she would take loans from people and swear she was going to pay them back with extra bonuses. And then, of course, she never did.
And this all led to her huge con, which happened in Cleveland, the Carnegie Con, where she convinced a lot of people she was Andrew Carnegie’s illegitimate daughter. And made a lot of money off of it.
Blaine DeSantis: Oh, my. Lots of money off of it. She even conned her husband. She conned everybody.
Annie Reed: It was, yes, yeah.
Blaine DeSantis: And she’s a fascinating individual. Did you enjoy doing the research on that one?
Annie Reed: Oh, it was so much fun. I love every part of it. I love the research. I love the writing. Every part of it was just really fun.
Blaine DeSantis: Now, you say she’s the first one. She led you into other notorious women of the Gilded Age?
Annie Reed: Oh, yeah. I was doing all this research for my Cassie book, and I would come across these other women. She was always being compared to somebody else. It was either people like Ellen Peck or Bertha Heyman who had come before her or after her, they would compare these other women to Cassie Chadwick. So she was kind of a yardstick that they would measure swindlers against.
Blaine DeSantis: And I remember from the last time we spoke, I think you were telling me that of all the swindlers that you had, we’re talking about, she was the most prolific.
Annie Reed: Cassie Chadwick. Yes. Yes. Yeah. As far as she had the biggest con, the most successful. Absolutely. In the U.S. I’m sure other countries have their ladies as well.
Blaine DeSantis: Right.
Annie Reed: Yeah.
Blaine DeSantis: You’re a young girl. Why would you want to get caught up in swindlers, thieves and grifters? Do you like this topic?
Annie Reed: I’ve always loved history of criminals. I’ve always loved it. And I just didn’t know there are that many female swindlers out there. I just didn’t know until I started listening to podcasts and getting a little bit more into it.
Blaine DeSantis: Wow. I never knew about it, to be honest with you. I had done a podcast about Mrs. Mandelbaum and that got me reading and learning a little bit about this, but your book was a revelation.
Why Women Became Swindlers in the Gilded Age
And why do you think the Gilded Age, it was a time of excess, a time of riches. Why do you think the women became so big during that time period and being the swindlers?
Annie Reed: I think there’s a couple of reasons. You’re getting into this period where it’s bleeding to the progressive era, to where women are demanding the vote and they’re demanding to be able to go to medical school, go to law school, stuff like that. And so they’re seeing what men are doing and they’re thinking, I can do that, too, a little bit more.
Or you also in the Gilded Age have this background of all these different companies, speculation and stocks and people getting rich quick off of railroad companies and stuff like that. And I think with this background, you can run a swindle with that same framework of invest money in my company or in my idea or even in me and you’ll be rich just by giving me your money. So, yeah, I think they played with that concept a lot.
Blaine DeSantis: Yeah. It was the, for us, it was the beginning of the, also in the industrial revolution. And there was all this stuff that you said going on and we didn’t have the internet back then. It was hard to find this stuff out. So if a person is running a con, you better figure it out yourself. You’re not going to find it on the internet.
Annie Reed: Yes, yes. A lot of—that was why Cassie was able to go to different towns in Ohio and do the same thing for decades before she was caught because you didn’t know who these people—she could just walk into a different city and be a different person.
Blaine DeSantis: Yeah, wow. Well, she did and she started up in her home area. She was from Canada if I’m not mistaken, and she worked her way around Lake Erie and she ended up saying, I like Ohio. And Ohio liked her. Yeah. Well, anyway, apparently anyway.
We got you on today because I think you are an expert now. You say, oh, I’m not an expert. You are. You’re an expert in my mind on female swindlers, grifters, thieves of the Gilded Age. And friends, these are not fiction. No, this is all real stuff that’s going on. And Annie has got, she wrote a wonderful article about this. And she’ll tell us a little bit about some other women that have become notorious.
Ellen Peck: New York’s Lifelong “Jack of All Trades” Swindler
So Annie, who would you start out with?
Annie Reed: I think I would have to start out with Ellen Peck.
Blaine DeSantis: Okay. Who is she?
Annie Reed: She was this lifelong swindler. And when I say lifelong, like decades, six or seven decades of Ellen Peck swindling people in and around New York. She just committed to it and she never looked back.
Blaine DeSantis: Wow. How much do you think she was, have they figured out how much she was able to swindle or get out of people?
Annie Reed: I believe I saw one as some police officer. So she was very well known after a while. And her picture was in the rogues gallery. She was one of the most high profile criminals in New York at the time. And I want to say that a number was one million that they threw out for her lifelong take. And that was before she stopped. That was in 1892. And that would be today around $30 million.
Blaine DeSantis: $30 million today’s dollars. That’s pretty good. And hers basically was she was into bonds, if I’m not mistaken, wasn’t she?
Annie Reed: The thing about Alan Peck was that she was a jack of all trades with her swindling. Yes, I think her best swindles, she sometimes would pretend she had this property or these stocks that people could invest in. And that was a really common swindle at the time. I am making huge dividends on my mining property or on my stock company and get people’s money and then just never pay it back. But she also, she ran just so many different kinds of swindles. It was just, she was the real expert in swindling.
Blaine DeSantis: Yeah. I read here in your article, you wrote, which is a fantastic article. You can find it on Annie’s website, by the way. Her last swindle, her last con was, she was 82 years old. She didn’t give up, did she?
Annie Reed: No, she showed up to court with gray hair tucked into a little bonnet, and she was just like someone’s grandma.
Blaine DeSantis: And did they keep finding her guilty all the time, or did they have compassion upon her?
Annie Reed: Actually, she didn’t do a lot of prison time. A lot of these women did surprisingly little prison time, but she was found guilty, I believe, that time because she was sentenced. And then people thought it was a death sentence, but she got pardoned.
Big Bertha Heyman: The “Confidence Queen” Who Retired to Show Business
Blaine DeSantis: I think I see another one here called Bertha. Is there a Bertha Heyman? Is that the name?
Annie Reed: Bertha. So she was this German woman who had immigrated over sometime in the 1870s, I want to say. And she was similar to Ellen Peck in that she ran a lot of different swindles. But hers were all her pretending to be rich. She would go the whole nine yards, stay in a fancy hotel. She would have servants and fancy dresses and carriages taking her around and would get people to give her loans. So very similar to Cassie Chadwick, actually.
Blaine DeSantis: Did she, how long was she active do you know?
Annie Reed: I want to say it was a few decades. So she actually did just stop doing it. She retired, kind of saw that she was getting into more trouble than what it was worth. So it was sometime in the 1890s that she went out west and she just started, I think she owned a theater out there. She would appear in lectures and talk about her swindling past and her wayward ways and just got into the entertainment industry out there a little bit.
Blaine DeSantis: And I noticed here that says that she used to wrestle. She would wrestle people.
Annie Reed: So her nickname was Big Bertha because she was a bigger woman. She was stout. And I think there were these exhibition matches to where they weren’t, she wasn’t really wrestling, but people would come and watch.
Blaine DeSantis: I bet she never lost a bet on those matches either, did she?
Annie Reed: No.
Blaine DeSantis: Oh, my. You said she went out west. How far west did she go back then? Was that into Arizona? What was west back then?
Annie Reed: It was California. She was on the coast. She was in California. Yeah, yeah. And she was just someone who always kind of liked the spotlight. So she fit in really well over there.
Sarah Howe and the “Ladies Deposit Bank” Ponzi Scheme
Blaine DeSantis: You’re right. You’re right. Now, another one you had mentioned about here is a lady by the name of Sarah Howe, H-O-W-E. Who is she and what was her con?
Annie Reed: I included Sarah Howe because so often when I’m reading about swindlers and especially female swindlers in history, it’s fun. It’s lighthearted. When they’re getting money from someone, it almost feels like a victimless crime because a lot of the times they’re targeting these rich people who can absorb the loss.
But Sarah Howe actually went the opposite way. She created this, it was the Ladies Deposit Bank in Boston. And she said, this is a bank and it was funded by Quakers. All these Quakers gave me this money to make this bank only for poor single mothers, and they just wanted to help out these poor single mothers. And you’ll also get this incredible 8% interest rate back on the money that you put into my bank.
And so she was really actually targeting some very vulnerable people, probably because they wouldn’t have recourse to sue her or she probably felt like she was safe from those victims. But the bank ran for a few years and it was pretty successful. And then a newspaper in Boston kind of started getting skeptical about everything and published this series of articles pointing out, this doesn’t add up and this doesn’t sound right. And then the whole thing just crashed because people wanted to take their money out, they were scared. There was no Quaker fund. So she was really just taking people’s money.
Blaine DeSantis: She was, she was like a Ponzi scheme. I think it’s sort of like it, isn’t it?
Annie Reed: It was very similar, yeah, yeah. She targeted people who wouldn’t have known any better, kind of like Ponzi did. He targeted people who weren’t savvy and promised these amazing returns. You’re going to make so much money off of this. And it was all just a scam.
Blaine DeSantis: Right. And it’s believable because, like we said, the Gilded Age, time of excess, time of riches, people were making a bunch of money in bonds, stocks, et cetera. So it all sounded pretty good. And it did for her for a couple of years. It was very good.
Mabel Parker and Her Forgery Ring
But there’s one more I wanted to talk about. I’m not sure if you wanted to, but I’d like to chat one more about Mabel Parker.
Annie Reed: So she was part of this forgery and swindling ring, and they would basically steal people’s letters out of their mailbox, find the checks. Mabel would practice signatures until she could forge someone’s handwriting and their signature really well, request more checks from their bank, and then just go to town. So the banks would oftentimes not even know for a long time that they were being cheated out of this money.
Blaine DeSantis: Did you find any real similarity between these women? All poor, maybe all immigrants, maybe. I couldn’t detect a pattern. Did you see anything?
Annie Reed: I didn’t see, I think there were, none of them came from secure backgrounds and wealth. Some of them were very poor and some of them were not very poor, but none of them came from extreme wealth or anything like that. But besides that, no. All walks of life.
Blaine DeSantis: I’ll tell you it was really something. And now you did this article, how long ago did you write that article?
Annie Reed: Oh boy, two years I think.
Blaine DeSantis: Before or after the Cassie Chadwick book did you write that? Contemporaneously or when did you write that?
Annie Reed: It was before. I would say it was right when I started talking to my publisher about the possibility of the Cassie book.
Blaine DeSantis: Okay. All right. Very good. But since that time, apparently your interest has continued and you’ve got some other ones that, wow, I want to talk about these two women.
The House of Hearts: A Gilded Age Marriage Swindle
I’m just going to shut up now and let you go on and on about these two women and something called the House of Hearts. Go ahead. Tell us all about that.
Annie Reed: House of Hearts. So these two girls are just so fascinating to me. Their names were Izzella Brown and [Could not verify with context], and they were best friends in the Gilded Age. They had known each other for decades and really supported each other through some major life changes.
[Could not verify with context] actually had a pretty ugly separation from her husband that Izzella helped her through in some pretty extreme ways. They got a little bit violent with her husband that she was separating from. They lured him to a street corner and they had these whips and they whipped him until he was bleeding and they were very proud of it. They kind of bragged about it to reporters. I’m not entirely sure why they were never fully prosecuted about it. They were very brazen about it. And they said, look, he was trying to cheat Vina out of her money. And we just don’t think men should cheat women out of their money. And so we whipped him.
So that’s the background. They definitely had a contempt for men. And then within a few years they started the House of Hearts, which was this business that they ran together that was essentially a marriage swindle but just very, very big. They would put these personal ads out in newspapers across the eastern seaboard really.
Annie Reed: Saying, I’m a widow and my husband just died and left me all this money. And I am looking for true love and I’m looking for a man to help me with all my money. So of course, you get a lot of people responding because all these men are like, oh, okay, I can marry rich and that would be great. And they would string these men along for a long time.
These men would come into the city, they were in New York and come to their house, which was this mansion that was all decked out, just looked exactly like a rich person’s mansion. They would see their picture on the mantle and they would meet a couple of times. They’d go on dates. They’d get engaged. And then eventually either the man would get wise to what was happening and that he was always sending her money and they were never actually going to get married. Or Vina and Izzella would sense there was just nothing more they could get out of it and they would ghost this guy, just send him a letter from a different city that said, oh, I’ve moved. And they did this a lot.
Blaine DeSantis: So were they both running this con?
Annie Reed: Yes, they both were. I think Vina maybe did a little bit more of the meet in persons. I know that when they got in trouble, it was all of Vina’s suitors that came forward to lodge complaints. But they were both doing it. But it seemed like maybe Izzella was more in the background, although I know that she was doing the same thing. Just maybe she did a better job of handling her men and that they weren’t so upset about it to where Bynum’s men were very upset and wanted to see her in jail.
Blaine DeSantis: And that is one of the problems that unless a man would complain about what was going on, no one would have any idea about what they were doing.
Annie Reed: No. And so often men back then, even now, it’s embarrassing to be swindled by somebody. It happens online and it would be embarrassing and it was very similar is that there were a lot of victims that just never came forward because of the embarrassment.
From the Gilded Age to Today: The Enduring Nature of Scams
Blaine DeSantis: Friends, we talk about, and you say, Blaine, why are we doing this? First of all, Annie’s a fantastic, interesting person, knows a lot about these things, but this was going on for a long time. And we see it nowadays. You can talk to Ukrainian women. You can talk to this. They’re all out to get your money. All they’re trying to do is get, same thing. It’s a con. It’s all a con, one way or the other. I don’t know if it has hit you, Annie, where you are, but we get emails constantly or text messages. You have not paid your toll fines. And unless you pay your fine, the state’s going to do… And it looks like it comes from the South Carolina Department of Motor Vehicles. It’s not. But everybody is trying to get… Do you have those sort of things up there? Have you seen that one?
Annie Reed: Oh, my goodness. When I was back in Ohio, when I was pregnant with my firstborn, I got a call from someone from the IRS claiming that I was in default of something. And it was a good 20 minutes that I listened to this voicemail and then I walked around, I was in a store and thinking, what did I do? How did you, how can I make this better? And then I realized, oh my goodness, that’s clearly a scam, but it did get me, get my heart rate going for a little bit. So it definitely happens.
Blaine DeSantis: It does. You know, we hear about the Bernie Madoffs. We hear about the Nigerian prince. We hear about the person who’s your friend is located in prison in Belgium, and we’ve got to get them out, send this money. They’re all out there. Did you find a definite beginning point to these types of swindles? Did it start before the Civil War, after the Civil War? When did you see that?
Annie Reed: I did see a lot more 1880s. Although really, anytime, I think big cities, places with lots of people and where you can be anonymous. It’s harder to go from town to town, but as more people are getting into more packed places and there’s just more anonymity. I think that’s really gave rise to a lot of it.
International Counterparts: The 40 Elephants and Mrs. Mandelbaum
Blaine DeSantis: OK. And it wasn’t just here. Over in England, they had this group called the 40 Elephants. Have you ever heard of those, Annie?
Annie Reed: Yeah, I was reading about them a little bit. I know they had that TV show on on Hulu, I want to say about Hulu.
Blaine DeSantis: Yeah.
Annie Reed: Yeah. Yeah. And they were, they’re really fascinating. All women, which is just so fun, as much as these can be fun.
Blaine DeSantis: I had no idea what it was about. The show was called, if you have Hulu friends, it’s called A Thousand Blows. And it shows a woman in the corner of a boxing ring. And it looks one thing, but it’s not like that at all. Yes, they’re boxing, but not with a woman. And it’s all about this 40 elephants, the women running these cons and scams and everything else. That size was amazing. Did you see anything that size or anything like that other than the two women you spoke about with a house of love or whatever it was called?
Annie Reed: I did not see anything that coordinated that size. I read this book by Margalit Fox called The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum. And she had this posse of female shoplifters and pickpockets that she mentored. But it wasn’t as organized as the 40 elephants. It was more just women she took under her wing and would sell her their stolen goods and just much smaller.
Blaine DeSantis: We had tried to get Margalit Fox on with you, but apparently she’s having some issues and wasn’t able to be here. But that was another fascinating look at grifting from a different part because she was basically a fence, Mrs. Mandelbaum, on the whole. She started out one way, but she ended up being a fence. And you’re right. She put together these help, gave advice. She gave people help monetarily. She gave them a warehouse to practice their bank thieves in. It was a going concern. I was just amazed at this, not at all like I thought. No, not at all like I thought.
What’s Next for the Author? More Female Criminals in American History
Well, that leads me to a question now. What do you have coming up? Are you going to stick with the women? Are you going to come with another book? Well, you’re going to have a baby. Annie’s going to have a baby in a few weeks, right? A few months, okay?
Annie Reed: I’m pregnant in a few months, yeah.
Blaine DeSantis: Okay. All right. And are you going to write another book? Are you going to stick with the swindlers, the grifters? What are you going to do?
Annie Reed: I can’t quite talk about my next subject or my next book yet, but it’s a female criminal, and it’s always going to be a female criminal in American history. So I don’t know that I’ll stick with swindlers, but I do love swindlers, and I have such a soft spot for writing about them.
Blaine DeSantis: Not many people have a soft spot for writing about female swindlers, grifters, thieves. I was calling for the longest time. I said, oh, she’s going to come and talk about con men. I said, well, they’re not con men. They’re con women. But you don’t hear them, and you don’t use the word con women or con person. So I said grifters. Grifters, swindlers, and thieves. They were all over there.
We saw that throughout the country, there were a lot of women who were doing this. Maybe they were helping to rob stages. Maybe they’re doing stuff out west. But these are the most notorious ones. Did you find, now you’ve talked, you had, your article was on 10. You found two more. Are there any other ones that are out there that we should be knowing about?
A Final Example from France: The Therese Humbert Swindle
Annie Reed: There are so many. One who’s actually not in America. She was in France. Her name was Therese Humbert. And I’m going to pronounce that wrong because I never took French or anything. But she was busted around the same time Cassie Chadwick was. Very similar. I think she made more money, if I’m remembering right. She pretended that she had this safe with this. She pretended there was a whole bunch of paperwork in there that gave her this brilliant, huge estate in America that she had found this American that was rich and he was dying or something. And she helped nurse him back to life. And to thank her, he gave her all this money.
And so she told a story around and she borrowed a lot of money for years and years and years and had this safe where she said the paperwork was. And when everything blew up, because it’s always going to blow up eventually, it was like there’s a button or something like that in the safe. There was no paperwork, no estate. So she also had a huge scale of a swindle.
Blaine DeSantis: Interesting. Hey, one thing, going back to the house, I got to look at my notes here, okay? Where are they? The House of Hearts, okay? Going back, you said they were in a mansion. Did they own the mansion? How did they get in the mansion?
Annie Reed: I did not ever find information about how exactly they, presumably they kind of started with money and they were renting it, but I don’t really know. That would be a good question. That’s a good question. But I assume that they were renting it.
Blaine DeSantis: Okay. She had a butler or someone’s an actor, one’s a sculptor. She got all these people working for, it was something else. They had a great con going on. I’ll tell you, I don’t want to say any more of Annie’s time. She’s pretty pregnant. It’s summertime. It’s hot. They lost the air conditioning the other day. She needed to sit down and relax a little bit. So, Annie, I don’t want to take any more of your time, but I want to say to you once again, thank you, thank you, thank you so much for coming back on to Books and Looks.
Annie Reed: Thank you so much for having me. I love the show. It’s so fantastic.
Blaine DeSantis: Annie, thanks so much for taking time out of your schedule to join us here and highlight these women who are the notorious grifters, swindlers, and thieves of the Gilded Age. Annie’s book is available wherever books are sold. But it’s only here on Books and Looks that she has come to share these stories of other fascinating women. And so another edition of Books and Looks is now in the books. Thank you for taking time out of your schedule to join me on this show. And come back next week for a new edition of Books and Looks.
