Yellow Kid Weil: The Con Man Who Fooled Mussolini and Lived to 100

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Joseph Weil, better known as the Yellow Kid, stole an estimated eight million dollars over a career that ran from the streets of 1890s Chicago to the offices of a European dictator. Born in 1875, he left school early and by 17 was collecting debts for loan sharks, where he noticed his fellow collectors skimming cash and charged them for his silence. An apprenticeship with a veteran grifter named Doc Merriweather, selling bottled rainwater as a miracle elixir at county fairs, taught him that buyers pay for the story, never the product.

This episode follows Weil as he scales up from short cons to full stage productions: fake prize fights with paid audiences and phony police raids, rented offices staffed by actors, forged surveys and counterfeit credentials. It also examines the cynical rule he lived by, that nobody can be conned unless they are trying to get something for nothing. His marks believed they were the ones doing the cheating, and their embarrassment kept most of them away from the police. Weil served only about six years behind bars and died in Chicago in 1976 at the age of 100.

• The nickname came in 1903 from Chicago alderman Bathhouse John Coughlin, who linked Weil and his partner Frank Hogan to the comic strip Hogan's Alley. Weil later denied the legend of yellow gloves, spats, and a yellow beard.
• His staged boxing matches used hired referees, choreographed fighters, capsules of fake blood, and actors in police uniforms, so that terrified marks fled and abandoned their bets.
• Weil reportedly sold the brother of Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon a fictitious Colorado silver mine for half a million dollars, complete with a fake office and forged core samples.
• Posing as a mining engineer with forged seals and letters of introduction, he took Benito Mussolini for two million dollars by offering secret rights to American mining lands.
• Weil argued that people are 99 percent animal and that the remaining 1 percent, the ego that thinks it can outsmart the world, is what makes a mark.