Conmen need a battery of traits to win their victims’ trust and lighten their wallets. Chicago’s Leo Koretz had them all. They must be good actors and Leo, acting the part of a savvy financier who hobnobbed with a mysterious syndicate of millionaires, delivered a magnificent performance. They must be likeable, and everyone liked and trusted the generous, wisecracking, charming Leo. He could have been a top-flight lawyer, a business leader, or perhaps a powerful politician. He chose, instead, to become a master of promoting phony stocks.
Leo Koretz's story is not just stranger than fiction, but if an author made up this life story, a reader would never believe it; it's too outlandish, unbelievable; too filled with irony. As Empire of Deception opens in 1920s Chicago, Koretz is being feted by his millionaire backers – people for whom the conman has made a fortune on paper – and as a jest, they call Koretz their “very own Ponzi”; never suspecting that the recently convicted Charles Ponzi (of the famous pyramid scheme) had nothing on their hometown swindler. Could a filmmaker get away with a scene like that or would the audience be hurling tomahtoes at the screen?
But the thing is that Koretz was committing an enormous pyramid scheme, and unlike Ponzi and his one year run, Koretz kept his going for nearly two decades. In the beginning, he was a legitimate land broker, but when his income wasn't sufficient to start a family, Koretz realised how easy it was to sell phony mortgages – even repeatedly on the same property – and the more he sold, the greater return he was able to pay to his early investors, and then more new investors came begging him for a piece of the action. After losing money himself to a conman who was offering timberland in Panama, Koretz developed the exact same idea that everyone knew he lost money on into an irresistible investment opportunity that had Chicago's well-heeled knocking on his door and begging him for shares in Panama timber. When he wanted the scam to grow even faster, Koretz casually dropped to a few acquaintances that oil had been found on his Panama property and the money really started pouring in – with most investors choosing to roll their dividends back into stock so that Koretz never had to pay anything out. When, after nearly twenty years, Koretz knew that the scheme was about to collapse, he made his escape to the woods of Nova Scotia (buying a hunting lodge on a remote lake right next to the lake my own parents currently live on). Had he been able to live a quiet life, Koretz would likely have escaped the law forever, but his free-spending high life eventually brought him down and he was extradited back to the States. Even his end has the air of the incredible: after pleading guilty and accepting the justice of a prison term, the diabetic Koretz had a lady friend smuggle him in a large box of chocolates that sent him into a coma and then death. Koretz committed suicide by sugar. You couldn't make this stuff up.
I'm including Koretz's whole story because that's what Empire of Deception is essentially about – and that wouldn't make a very long book. In order to stretch it out (and, admittedly, to provide some needed context), author Dean Jobb interplays Koretz's story with that of Robert Crowe; the State's Attorney who prosecuted Koretz; who had coincidentally been a young law clerk in the same firm where Koretz made the start of his own career after law school. Although it had nothing to do with Koretz, the sections dealing with Crowe allowed the author to write at length about Chicago's corrupt and violent municipal government, Prohibition, the rise of a young Al Capone, and even the famous Leopold and Loeb murder trial. Charles Darrow makes a couple of appearances, Zane Grey travels to Nova Scotia to go tuna fishing, and we get quotes from Carl Sandburg, Mark Twain, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. In an afterword, Jobb explains that he has been researching the Koretz story for thirty years, and although he found source material to be frustratingly scarce, the amount of peripheral information he assembled is really very impressive – there are hundreds of factoids and direct quotes throughout the book – but to some degree, it felt like padding (and the book is still only around 250 small pages before the epilogue).
Empire of Deception is a very easy and interesting read, but sometimes the writing made me smirk:
A writer of detective stories – reading them was Leo's guilty pleasure – would have pulled out all the stops to describe the way those eyes turned a spotlight on the world. Penetrating, piercing, razor sharp. It was as if he could peer straight into a person's soul.You can't get away with cliches by blaming them on an imaginary “writer of detective stories”, but the tone of this book is overall likeable. Koretz also bilked his own family with his scheme, leaving behind not only his aged mother and siblings but a wife and two children – all reduced from millionaires to destitute – and as a result, the family let his memory die with him (even Leo's stone at the family gravesite just says “son”). In the afterword, Jobb says that two of Koretz's grand-nephews were eventually able to piece together much of their infamous relative's story and that they love to regale friends with the true crime tale, using Koretz's death as “the punchline”. As much as I appreciate the research and passion that Jobb devoted to this book, I wonder, ultimately, if Koretz's story is much more than an amusing bar story.
Dean
Jobb is a Halifax-based writer and it's amusing-but-ultimately-kinda
sad that this book seems to need to have different titles depending
on its market. I like the Canadian title ("Empire
Of Deception: From Chicago To Nova Scotia - The Incredible Story Of A
Master Swindler Who Seduced A City And Captivated The Nation") and
my girls, like I myself was, were most intrigued by the Nova Scotia
connection. But to sell Stateside, I see it needs to be
called “Empire
of Deception: The Incredible Story of a Master Swindler Who Seduced a
City and Captivated the Nation” (best to just leave out all mention
of Nova Scotia). And coming early next year, the paperback will be
called “ Empire
of Deception: Greed, Gullibility, and a Brazen Swindler in Jazz Age
Chicago”. Now we're talking.
