Another seller was William McCloundy, also known as “I.O.U. O’Brien,” who sold the bridge in 1901, “for which he was convicted of grand larceny and served two and a half years in Sing Sing,” The New York Times wrote some years later.
In writing his book “Hustlers and Con Men: An Anecdotal History of the Confidence Man and His Games,” Jay Robert Nash interviewed an elderly swindler named Joseph “Yellow Kid” Weil, who said he had known several criminal vendors of the bridge. Mr. Weil, whom Mr. Nash visited in a Chicago nursing home and described as “probably the greatest con man of the 20th century,” recalled a swindler named Reed C. Waddell, who worked the bridge swindle in the 1880’s and 1890’s. Mr. Weil also claimed to know Waddell’s successors in that trade, the notorious Charles and Fred Gondorf.
Perpetrators such as Mr. Waddell and the Gondorf brothers were savvy. They timed the path of beat cops working near the bridge, and when they knew the officers would be out of sight, they propped up signs reading “Bridge for Sale,” showed the edifice to their targets, and separated them from their money as quickly as possible. “The Gondorfs sold the bridge many times,” Mr. Nash said. “They would sell it for two, three hundred dollars, up to one thousand. Once they sold half the bridge for two-fifty because the mark didn’t have enough cash.”
And there were plenty of marks. “The oddity of the thing today,” said Luc Sante, author of the book “Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York,” “is not that there might have been con artists ready to sell the bridge, but that there would have been suckers both gullible enough and sufficiently well-heeled to fall for it.”
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