THE BADGER GAME - Alexander Hamilton's Mistress

I have always admired Alexander Hamilton. How could you not admire a man who could write, “A well adjusted person is one who makes the same mistake twice without getting nervous” That kind of self knowledge belies the life of a boy who was abandoned by his father at the age of ten, at twelve watched his mother die in the bed next to him, and was then adopted by a cousin who shortly thereafter committed suicide. Hamilton not only survived this horror show but within ten years became one of the most successful and powerful men in America, the man who invented the American economic system. But that childhood also goes a long way to explaining how such a smart man, a happily married man and a devoted father could fall for something as old and obvious as the Badger Game.

In 1791 in Philadelphia, twenty-three year old Maria Reynolds, a lovely and avaricious mental midget, approached Hamilton, who was the Secretary of the Treasury. She told Hamilton that her husband, James Reynolds, had abandoned her and their daughter. Could the noble and handsome Secretary Hamilton provide her with the funds to return to New York? Smitten and horny, with his wife living in far off Connecticut, Hamilton agreed to deliver $30 to her rooms that evening. Let the games began.

The original badger game involved sticking a live badger in a box and then sending in a terrier. After a few seconds the owner would pull the dog out. If the dog held the badger in its jaws, it was marked as a plus. Then the badger would be returned to the box and the dog would be sent in again. This was repeated several times in front of a crowd of Neanderthals, with the shouting and betting building to a crescendo. The similarity between the original sport (outlawed in England in 1835) and the blackmail sting performed on Hamilton is that the dog could be counted on to grab the badger every time, even though the pooch was never allowed to actually eat the badger. The same goes for The Mark in the human game.

Shortly after the Mark's - Mr Hamilton - first liaison with Mrs. Reynolds, Mr. Reynolds made his  appearance in the role of the wronged husband. He wrote Hamilton, “You have deprived me of every thing that’s near and dear to me. … You have made a whole family miserable.” James was a born con-man who had been one of Hamilton’s commissariats during the revolution, scrounging food, clothing and ammunition for the Continental Army despite the penury of Congress. But he was also a wife beater – if we believe Maria. Although why we should do that I have no idea.

Eventually James got to the point. “…give me the sum of (a) thousand dollars and I will leave town and take my daughter with me…”. Hamilton paid, and James then wrote, “I have not the least objections to your calling (on my wife), as a friend to both of us”. The dog now had the scent and Hamilton continued to visit Maria and pay James regularly – in April, $135, in May and June, $50, in August, $200.

The game went on for two years, with Hamilton enjoying the nubile Maria in Philadelphia, while urging his wife to stay in Connecticut. Hamilton even borrowed from friends in order to keep James silent. But the end of the game was predictable, given James’ character.  Or lack of it.

James Reynolds and his partner Jacob Clingman were arrested for cheating revolutionary war veterans out of their back pay, which Congress had been cheating them out of for years. Naturally James expected his “friend” Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of the Treasury, to rescue him. Hamilton, however, was not willing to use his official office to cover up his personal peccadilloes. He refused to help the crook. Angry, James started singing to anybody who would listen that Hamilton had given him inside information on Government bond sales. In particular Jacob Clingman sang to Hamilton’s arch enemy, Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson thought it was Christmas. Hamilton was his political enemy. He gleefully dispatched Congressmen James Monroe and Fredrick Muhlenberg to confront Hamilton in person. And to their stunned surprise Hamilton admitted to an affair - here-to-fore unknown -  but he denied everything else. He even provided proof in the form of letters between himself and both of the enterprising Reynolds’, James and Maria. Muhlenberg and Monroe were so nonplussed they agreed to keep the affair secret. Needless to say, Jefferson was not happy that Christmas had been canceled.

Hamilton resigned from Washington’s cabinet in January of 1795. But Jefferson had made no promise of secrecy, and he filed the information away for use at some opportune future moment, which came in 1797, which is how we know of the entire sordid tale.

Shortly after Jefferson leaked the entire story, the lovely Maria divorced her imprisoned husband James, and immediately married his partner in crime, Mr. Clingman. The newlyweds then moved to Alexandria, Virginia and dropped out of history. Maria's divorce attorney back in New York was Aaron Burr, who would in a very few years shoot down Alexander Hamilton in a duel. And that, one way or another, is the way most badger games end.

In contrast there was William A.E. Moore, a “friend” of President McKinley who appointed him U.S. Counsel to Durban, South Africa. Mr. Moore was in route to Durban with his wife, Fayne Strahan, when, while spending the night in Paris, he surprised the lovely Fayne “flagrante delecto” with a Russian nobleman. Mr. Moore offered to swallow his insulted pride for a mere $2,000, but the Russian chose instead to call the police. Mr. Moore’s diplomatic appointment was revoked and he was forced to return to the United States.

Then in 1898 the pair tried the same gag on Mr. Martin Mahon, proprietor of the New Amsterdam Hotel, in New York City. (a bit of a comedown this, from a Russian nobleman to a hotel owner.) This time, when William burst into the room he took the trouble to beat up the mark, poor Mr. Mahon, and steal $175 from his wallet. William then stuffed a cigar into Martin’s mouth and walked him up and down Fifth Avenue as if they were bosom buddies. Again, the mark went to the police and this time William Moore was sent to Sing Sing for several years, for assault and attempted blackmail. Fayne, meanwhile, went to South Dakota where she got a divorced from William. Some years later she moved to London where she took to the stage, as a chorus girl in the hit musical, “The Messenger Boy”. William was eventually released from jail and inherited $125,000 from an uncle. Last heard of, he was living in luxury. And thus were the wages of sin for what today would be called “Gifters".

And in case you are thinking that these are dusty historical footnotes, a couple of years ago, in San Antonio, Texas, Ted Roberts, attorney at law, was convicted of three counts of theft for a badger scam he ran with his wife and fellow attorney, Mary Roberts. She was convicted of 5 counts of fraud. Mary trolled the internet looking for married men who were seeking sex. She engaged them in chat rooms until they either revealed their fantasies or actually met her for sex. There upon Ted would knock on the door and quietly inform the marks that he was going to sue them for “alienation of affection”, unless they agreed to “settle” out of court.

The couple netted something around $160,000 from five marks that we know of,  before they were caught. Testifying for the defense, past president of the Texas Bar Association was Mr. Broadus A. Spivey. ( No, seriously, that was his name).  Anyway, Mr. Spivey said that the badger game as played by the couple from law school was not illegal because it was not substantially different than a lawsuit. Under oath Broadus insisted, “Litigation is coercive.” Neither the judge nor the jury failed to see through that little fig leaf of judicial logic, but......I will leave the story there, in case there is anybody left in this nation who does not already despise lawyers.

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TORN FROM A FRAME Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Robbery

 

I have been in love with Isabela Steward Gardner (above) for more than fifty years. And she’s been dead for over seventy.  Isabel was the daughter of wealth, who, as was the practice in the Gilded Age, married into even more wealth. She lived in a Back Bay mansion at 152 Beacon Street in Boston. And in the tiny fenced front yard, common to most such mansions, there grew a single tree, in which, legend has it, Isabel used to perch on summer afternoons to unexpectedly greet her startled visitors. Of course the red head was also quoted as saying, “Why spoil a thing with the truth.”

In March of 1865, after her 2 year old son had died of pneumonia,  Isabel’s husband, Jack, began to take the broken hearted Isabela on European trips. There Isabel courted and sat for artists such as John Singer Sargent and James Whistler, and partied with writers such as Henry James. 

Isabel loved to collect art, and to attend boxing matches and Harvard football games. She bet the ponies at Suffolk Downs and advised her fellow blue bloods, “Win as though you were used to it, and lose as if you like it.” 

And she once scandalized proper Boston society at a Philharmonic Concert by wearing a formal evening gown adorned with a headband that read “Oh, You Red Sox!”

After her husband Jack died in 1898 Isabel built herself a Venetian Mansion in the reclaimed marshlands which would shortly give Fenway Park its name. 

Isabel called her new mansion “Fenway Court”, and it held her extensive personal art collection. Included was the Singer portrait  of her, wearing a strand of pearls at her waist, to accent her figure. Jack had hated the painting, but Isabela cherished it.

And it was in Fenway Court where she died of a stroke, in 1924. 

Isabel left most of her fortune to the ASPCA , except for the endowment to turn her home into the “Isabela Stewart Gardner Museum”.  

It would be hard not love a woman who loved animals that much, and who left so many pieces of great art so that clods such as myself could wander about her home for hours.    

And that was why I was so personally offended by the 1990 St. Patrick’s Day robbery of the Gardner. What was stolen was not just art. It had all been the personal property of Isabela. 

It had all meant something special to very special woman. How dare those thugs steal from a great broad like her!

 Shortly after one AM on Monday, 19 March, 1990 two mustached “police officers” talked their way into the closed museum,  swiftly handcuffed the two inexperienced guards and stashed them safely in the museum’s basement. Motion detectors then followed the thieves for the next 81 minutes as they separated and each smashed, cut and shattered a dozen paintings from their frames; $500 million dollars worth - a Rembrandt, five Degas, a Vermeer and a Manet: and one gold eagle from atop a Napoleonic banner. Then, after removing the video tapes from the VCRs at the security desk, the thieves made two separate trips out to their red hatch back parked around the corner from the museum. Before 3AM, the crooks and the paintings had disappeared forever.

We still don’t know who did it.  But the money remains on the same kind of North End gangs that a generation earlier had robbed the Brinks Armored Car Company. But whereas the Brink’s Job of January 1950 had been the work of mooks who were all caught, the Gardner heist remains a complete and total mystery. 

No one has been even tried to claim the $5 million reward for returning the art. The statute of limitations on the theft has run out and yet still no one has felt the need to unburden themselves of guilt or the hot paintings. And the only rumor that ever even hinted at the possible return of the 13 stolen masterpieces was probably just another confidence scam.

The real cops weren’t called until 8:15 AM the next morning. By that time it was likely the paintings were already on their way out of the country. The only description of the thieves that was broadcast was pathetic; one of the men was described as resembling Colonel Klink, from television show “Hogan’s Heroes”. There were no finger prints left behind, no articles of clothing, and no whispers were ever heard in art or criminal circles. 

No leads were received until four years later when a letter offered to return the paintings in exchange for $2.6 million. But after a first hint, that letter led nowhere. Again, in 1997, a reporter for the Boston Herald was led blindfolded to a hidden location and shown what he was told were the stolen Rembrandt’s, and even provided with paint chips as proof. But upon examination the chips could not have come from the painting they were claimed to be from, and the whole thing was eventually written off as an attempt to finagle the freedom of Myles Connor, an art thief already under arrest.

It has been thirty plus years since the dozen paintings were stolen, and increasingly it appears they will never be restored. There is, of course, no honor amongst thieves. It is likely by now the thieves are dead. And with the passage of time, it becomes clear that whoever masterminded the theft is now, also dead,  The paintings, fragile pieces of art, have probably been destroyed. 

But the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum still sits in the Back Bay, and still keeps the empty frames on the wall, to document what was lost. It is in the same spirit Isabeal must have used to preserve that torn place in her heart where her little son had once resided.  It is a sad that she should be remembered because of this robbery. Because, what a great broad she was!. 

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MURDER BY CAD; Lord Lucan Gets Away.

The murderer was Richard John (Lucky) Bingham (above), the Seventh Earl of Lucan.  There was never a mystery about that.  He stood six feet four inches tall, was dark and handsome and debonair and a blue blood. And a murderer.

He was a professional gambler and descended from a long line of royal cads. His great-great-great grandfather, the second Earl, gained infamy during the Irish Potato Famine as the very epitome of a heartless, greedy English landowner, throwing starving Irish peasants out of their homes. John’s Great-Great-Grandfather, George Charles Bingham, the third Earl, was the cad who ordered the charge of the Light Brigade. The Fifth Earl, George Charles Bingham, sat out the First World War in the House of Lords, but liked to be called “Major” a rank he achieved between the wars when there was no shooting going on. And John’s father had shocked the family by switching his alliance to the Labor Party in the 1930’s.

John chose his profession the way most gamblers do, right after a winning streak: he won twenty-six thousand pounds in two days, while playing backgammon. What John did not know was that his gambling local of choice, the Clermont Club, was in fact a den of thieves. One associate of the club's owner, John Aspinall, described his upper class customers as pigeons and described the Claremont as “…like robbing Fort Knox or the Bank of England - just a lot easier.” Lord Lucan was such a favored pigeon that Aspinall had a bust of him placed on display in the club

In November of 1963 John married the petit and pretty Veronica Duncan.  She gave birth to three children; a daughter, Frances, in October 1964, George (the heir) in 1967, and Camilla, born in June of 1970.

John seems to have always been a control freak, and one nanny would later claim that John beat Veronica with a stick wrapped in masking tape when she suffered from postpartum depression.  Veronica would not admit the abuse until decades later, admitting, "...he would beat her with a cane to get the “mad ideas out of your head”..He could have hit me harder. They were measured blows. He must have got pleasure out of it because he had intercourse (with me) afterwards”.

Lady Lucan's untreated depression became worse after Camilla was born, and required medical assistance for herself,  and a young nanny, Sandra Rivett,   to help her care for the children.

Meanwhile, his Lordship had discovered that not only was the income of a professional gambler prone to ups and downs, it was also prone to its own addictions. By the mid 1970’s John was spending the wee hours of each morning, after putting his time in at the backgammon tables, playing what he had once labeled as the “mugs games” of roulette and craps and even bridge; and he was losing at them all, being fleeced by his friend John Aspinall.

The marriage bent under the strain of mounting bills and Veronica’s personal struggles, and the couple separated. John moved into an apartment a few blocks away from their five story London townhouse at 46 Lower Bellgrave Street (above) . (It was just around the corner from Buckingham Palace.) He hired a private detective to spy on his wife and gather information for what he was certain would be an eventual divorce.

Lord Lucan was now suffering from regular headaches, and drinking heavily. He became obsessed with regaining control of his children. When he could no longer afford the Private Investigator,  John turned to stalking Veronica himself.   In March of 1973, John kidnapped his children and sued to gain legal custody.  But in June the judge sided with Veronica.  He labeled John’s behavior as “lawless” and granted Veronica full custody. All three children moved back into the mansion on Lower Bellgrave.  What with child support, alimony, Veronica’s medical care and the cost of a nanny, the judge’s decision left John in debt for forty thousand pounds. So John began to make other plans.

By 9:30 P.M. on the night of Friday 8 November 1974 the two younger children had been put to bed. Frances was watching television with her mother in the family room on the second floor when, just before ten, the new nanny, Sandra Rivett, (above) poked her head in the door and asked if there was anything else she could do before going home. On a whim Veronica suggested a cup of tea, and Sandra went down to the basement kitchen to put the kettle on. Thirty minutes later, when Sandra had not returned, Veronica went downstairs to see what had become of her. When she reached the darkened main floor she was attacked by a man wielding a bent pipe.

He struck her several times in the head. Veronica tried to cry out, but the man ordered her to “shut up”, and roughly shoved two gloved fingers down her throat. Veronica instantly recognized the voice as John’s. She fought back, grabbed John by his testicles and squeezed as hard as she could. He released his grip and the two collapsed on the floor in heap. 

Gathering her courage and her voice, Veronica asked where Sandra was. John admitted he had just murdered the nanny.  In the dark of the basement he said, he had mistaken her for his wife (they were both 5’2” tall and slightly built). Thinking quickly Veronica assured John that Sandra would not be missed, and that in order to avoid a scandal she would help him dispose of the body. John led her to the second floor where they both told Francis to go upstairs to her own bedroom. In the master bedroom Veronica lay on the bed while John went in to the bathroom to wet a washcloth. And the second Veronica heard the water running she leapt off the bed, ran down the stairs and out of the house.

She stumbled down the street to the Plumber’s Arms Pub. In her nightdress and covered in blood, she made quite an impression. She gasped hoarsely to the startled patrons, “Murder, murder, I think my neck has been broken - he tried to kill me” Back at the house, when John realized that Veronica had escaped, he ran for it. They found poor Sandra stuffed in a bloody sack near the basement door. She had been horribly bludgeoned to death.

John’s apartment was empty. The police would discover he driven forty miles to a friend’s farmhouse, and told them he had been passing the home on Lower Bellgrave when he saw an attacker through a basement window.  He said he had rushed in,  only to be knocked down by the attacker. Then he claimed, realizing he would be blamed for the murder he had run away.  He called his mother twice. The second time she asked if John wanted to speak to the police officer who was with her. John hung up. And then, after his friends went back to sleep, Lord Lucan disappeared.

Three days after the attack they found his car parked on a public street near the docks in Newhaven. In the car was his passport and a note to a friend,  asking him to look after his children. In the trunk was a bloody length of pipe, bent by the beating administered to the innocent Sandra Rivett and Veronica.

For decades the police continued to search for Lord Lucan, with dogs, and divers and detectives. An entire industry sprang up,  seeking the most famous missing royal murderer in recent history.  John was reported living happily in Australia, South Africa, and even India. 

But oddly enough none of this string of "Could-Be Johns" has displayed a gambling addiction, or an affinity to act like a snob.  In 1984 Scotland Yard tried to reopen the case but it ran into another series of dead ends. Eventually they gave up. 

The last suspected "John" was a man living in a van in New Zealand with a pet possum, a cat and a goat. But like all the others, he turned out to be somebody else.

Veronica Lucan, (http://www.ladylucan.co.uk/) never remarried,  and always insisted that John threw himself into the Thames estuary (the Solent), probably on 9 or 10 November.  And to tell you the truth, I agree with her.  Over time her mental illness slowly took control of her mind, and by the time she died at 80 years of age,  in October of 2017, she was estranged from her children, and died alone in her Belgrave apartment.

Still it makes a much more interesting story if Lord Lucan managed to escape to someplace, Tahiti maybe, or perhaps Ceylon. But like the famous missing Judge Crater in the United States, Lord Lucan will likely remain not dead, but missing, forever.  Because that’s the way most of us prefer our  harsh reality; with a softening dose of myth.

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