Any minute there might be a knock on the door of Edgar Laplante’s hotel room. He might then find himself being quizzed by an officer from the San José Police Department. Once the police got ahold of him, Edgar’s life could veer in several directions, none of them good. Even allowing for the absence of a countrywide criminal database, there was always the fear that the authorities might discover he was a career con man with outstanding warrants against him in the states of Arizona and New York.
Before any of these scenarios could play out, Edgar quit town and headed south. He had with him only a single valise.
The Southern Pacific railroad’s Coast Line furnished the most convenient means for him to make the 416-mile journey to San Diego. Bordering the track were orchards, vineyards, and prosperous rural towns that would have made attractive subjects for his paintings and drawings. Just past Santa Barbara the bucolic scene gave way to a herd of seesawing oil derricks that strayed some distance into the ocean.
For travelers such as Edgar, whose mouth was seldom without a cigarette, the passing views were seen through the misty filter of the smoking car. The landscape had little in common with Central Falls, the close-packed blue-collar Rhode Island city where he’d been reared amid cotton mills, well-maintained tenements, and brick-paved streets, alive with the clip-clop of horse-drawn wagons, the rattle of trains on the elevated railway, and the clucking of the chickens kept in the barn to the rear of where he lived. He and his three younger siblings had grown up on Lincoln Avenue with their parents, both from Quebec. The Laplantes were surrounded by a sizable colony of other French-Canadian émigrés, many of them carpenters like Edgar’s father. Despite retaining their own Roman Catholic festivals and holidays, their own church and school, their own correct if homespun brand of French, their own cuisine, and even their own newspapers, their community’s potent sense of cultural identity had somehow never defined Edgar, whose failure to acknowledge his French origins must have been one of the many sources of conflict with his now-estranged Francophile father.
Persistent in his rejection of the life into which he’d been born, Edgar was still pretending to be the Onondagan athlete Tom Longboat when he reached San Diego on Thursday, March 8, 1917—three days after his solo show at the First Baptist Church. He found his way to the downtown stretch of Sixth Street, where he walked into the mahogany-swathed interior of the Hotel St. James and rented a room. Snazzy hotels like this were important to Edgar and his fellow grifters, who needed to mix with influential and well-heeled types. Eleven stories tall, the St. James rated among the city’s loftiest and most up-to-date structures. It even boasted a roof garden from which Edgar could survey the grid of chiefly low-rise blocks covering the shallow grade that angled toward San Diego Bay, numerous large steamships necklacing the waterfront.
His first night at the St. James was spent befriending F. C. Dean, the hotel’s manager. Within seconds Edgar could beguile men and women alike with his smooth-talking charm, bantering humor, and counterfeit stardom. As was so often the case, this must have blinded Dean to the obvious flaw in Edgar’s Tom Longboat shtick. Though he presented himself as a famous Onondagan athlete, Edgar did not possess the facial characteristics of any indigenous North American people. His daring act of racial imposture was surely assisted by general ignorance of what those people looked like. Dean and many other white Americans probably had no memory of encountering them, no memory of seeing photos of them; just the memory, perhaps, of white actors playing them on‑screen—white actors who lacked Edgar’s uncanny plausibility. For Dean and other white Americans, their prejudices nurtured by then-fashionable racial theories, much of that plausibility would have been due to the manifest illogic of a white American willfully trading places with a member of what was considered an inferior race. Edgar’s maybe unconscious masterstroke was to legitimize himself by displaying an authentic Onondagan’s eagerness to discredit those widespread misconceptions.
Such were Edgar’s acting skills that he gave his new acquaintance the impression that his wartime experiences had left him craving “the milk of human kindness.” Later that evening, Dean obliged by taking him to an event at the nearby Maryland Hotel, where the light, sparsely appointed, pale mosaic–floored public rooms possessed a modernity absent from the St. James. Edgar and Dean hobnobbed there with the all-male membership of the local chapter of the Hotel Greeters of America, a group whose aim was to boost the hotel industry. Dean and the other members treated Edgar as a hero, the atmosphere of bonhomie likely abetted by alcohol. Further ingratiating himself with his host, Edgar presented Dean with a cane that was, he said, made from a spear used by a colonial soldier fighting in the British army.
Probably at the Maryland that evening, Edgar ran into a journalist from the San Diego Union. By talking to the press, he’d render the locals more receptive to his scam, yet publicity increased the chances of his being caught. Risk and reward were one and the same for Edgar, though, because he was addicted to the attention that came from speaking with reporters, to the frisson of risk that accompanied it—risk that courted arrest and imprisonment.
He told the journalist he was planning to settle in San Diego, where he’d arranged to meet his mother, who was heading west at that very moment. But he neglected to mention that any such reunion would require supernatural intervention, his mother having passed away more than a decade earlier. He said he was recuperating from a bayonet wound he’d sustained while serving in France. The wound had, he explained, put him “permanently out of the running game.” He also talked about fighting alongside the Canadian forces. And he spoke about wanting to rectify the common misapprehension that he was “a Canadian Indian.” He added that he’d been “born in New York State.” Weak though he claimed to be, he said, “If America goes to war with any nation, I am ready to donate my services to my own country.”
For all his storytelling skills, which enabled him to pass off fiction as reality, he couldn’t hide the truth from himself. Behind his jaunty double-dealing lay a sorrowful recognition that no matter how hard he tried to be someone else, someone worthy of acclaim, he’d always be that no-good boy from Central Falls.
Inevitably assisted by his convivial evening with the Hotel Greeters, Edgar became a cherished fixture in the lounges, bars, and dining rooms of San Diego’s tonier hotels over the next few days. Swank establishments such as the Grant Hotel—where his debonair looks led swooning young women to declare that “he surely knew how to wear a dress suit”—gave him access to the affluent San Diegans who socialized there. He then lined up those hapless marks for the con artist’s quintessential sleight of mind, for the sad story of how he was “temporarily embarrassed by lack of funds,” a story that applied just the right amount of psychological pressure to ensure they insisted upon lending him money. Flimflam merchants like him accepted these loans only after a show of prideful reluctance.
He said he was recuperating from a bayonet wound he’d sustained while serving in France. The wound had, he explained, put him “permanently out of the running game.”In search of extra leverage, he began saying he’d served in the trenches with Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, known as “the Princess Pat Regiment.” Almost wiped out at the Second Battle of Ypres, where it had fought a dogged but futile defense of its position, the unit was synonymous with military martyrdom. Edgar’s latest embellishment may have been inspired by a recent syndicated newspaper story about Lieutenant Sylvester Long Lance, a Carlisle graduate who happened to be one of the regiment’s few survivors. By attaching himself to that tragic tale, Edgar could exploit people’s desire for glory through association.
Soon he was being pampered by a number of prominent citizens, including Judge George J. Leovy, the gray-mustached, pince-nez-wearing commodore of San Diego’s ritzy and very popular Yacht Club. Edgar also plied his trade at the city’s similarly exclusive Rowing Club, where he suckered two of the young bucks into wining and dining him. They even elected him as an honorary member. In return, he pledged to donate three Indian-style canoes to their club. The minute they started asking after the canoes, he would know his time in San Diego was drawing to a close and he’d have to skip town. “Hopscotching” from place to place—as grifters like Edgar termed this—was fundamental to his line of work. Whenever exposure loomed, he’d move elsewhere. It was a tactic rendered effective by the absence of national newspapers, by the lack of a countrywide radio or highway network, by the disconnectedness of the budding coast-to-coast law enforcement system, and by the inconvenience of long-distance phone calls, which could take upward of seven minutes to put through. Edgar also benefited from the mileage between the cities out west, mileage that conspired with poor communications to make those cities feel like remote islands. Each time the situation necessitated it, he could just go to a new place and begin afresh, debts and friendships casually shrugged off at a moment’s notice. Colonel Joseph P. O’Neil invited Edgar—or, rather, he thought he was inviting Tom Longboat—to be guest of honor at San Diego’s Panama- California Exposition. The role carried such kudos that Edgar’s predecessor was the world-famous opera singer Nellie Melba, who had visited the exposition a few days before. Deep into its final month, the event, held to celebrate the opening of the Panama Canal, represented the latest in a series of ostentatious displays of progress that had been staged in America and Europe over the previous sixty-five years. The exposition was spread across the abundant, rugged acreage of Balboa Park, not far from Edgar’s hotel. At the core of the event were a host of gargantuan, specially constructed Spanish-style buildings, which looked deceptively old. Their elegant towers and domes might have put Edgar in mind of Greater Dreamland, the oceanfront amusement park on Coney Island, where he’d worked seven summers earlier. But, unlike Coney Island that summer, Balboa Park had an off-season feel. Most of its buildings and their themed exhibitions had already closed. Tourists were nonetheless encouraged to wander around the surrounding courtyards, tropical gardens, and citrus groves.
Each time the situation necessitated it, he could just go to a new place and begin afresh, debts and friendships casually shrugged off at a moment’s notice.Edgar’s diminutive host commanded the Second Battalion of the Twenty-First Infantry Regiment, which had been staging parades and mock battles as part of the exposition. Colonel O’Neil and his officers were based in what people called the Indian Village—an imitation of a New Mexico or Arizona pueblo. Three terraced rows of houses appeared to have been cut into the rock face, homemade ladders connecting each level. Yet Edgar just needed to tap those rocks with his foot to understand that he was a sham Indian in a sham Indian Village. The rock face had been fabricated by laying cement over chicken wire. Until just a few months earlier, two hundred genuine, traditionally clothed Native Americans had been paid to live there.
O’Neil acknowledged Edgar’s supposed record as a war veteran by giving him a U.S. Army uniform to wear at the exposition, where Edgar schmoozed with O’Neil and other officers. Like Nellie Melba before him, Edgar was asked to present the Stars and Stripes at the Twenty-First Infantry Regiment’s twice-weekly dress parade.
Behind a marching band, O’Neil’s men conducted their complex drill on the huge expanse of asphalt that comprised the Plaza de Panama. All around Edgar and the parading soldiers were ornate architectural confections, each of which could have been plucked from some Spanish city. The parade culminated in Edgar presenting the flag, his latest escapade offering no more than temporary sustenance to the overpowering compulsions that drove him, compulsions destined to push him into ever more extreme scenarios.
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Excerpted from KING CON: THE BIZARRE ADVENTURES OF THE JAZZ AGE’S GREATEST IMPOSTER, by Paul Willetts. Copyright © 2018 by Paul Willetts. Reprinted with permission of Crown Publishing. All rights reserved.
