The Dark Truth Of Roaring Twenties' Get-Rich Scams

Everyone loves a good get-rich-quick scheme. It's often seen as an inspirational story that making millions of dollars with little-to-no effort is possible. But unfortunately, there's very little legitimacy behind them. If anything, these schemes are often scams that end up leaving a trail of victims behind them as the money starts to pile up.

In some ways, the 1920s were a golden age for get-rich-quick schemes because there was little regulation on fraudulent behavior. The stock market is a good example of this, which saw little regulation until after its fateful crash in 1929. Many of the phony enterprises of the 1920s centered around fraudulent stocks and manipulating the market.

In the end, few get-rich-quick schemes have a happy ending for everyone involved. But that doesn't mean that they've gone out of fashion. In fact, some of the most well-known scams today, like the Ponzi scheme, originated in the 1920s. Ultimately, the age-old adage "if it seems like it's too good to be true, it probably is," continues to ring true.

Charles Ponzi didn't actually perpetrate the first Ponzi scheme, despite his name being given to them. Instead, one of the first Ponzi schemes, also known as a pyramid scheme, was instigated by Leo Koretz.

Koretz initially sold fake mortgages, but before long he was also making money off of land in Panama, having been inspired after becoming a victim himself of a similar scam. In 1917, Koretz started selling stocks for a timber and oil land syndicate in Panama, known as the Bayano River Syndicate, but neither the timber nor the oil nor even the five million acres of land itself existed. In total, Koretz scammed people out of $2 million, equivalent to over $30 million today. And it wasn't just strangers that Koretz scammed. When the Chicago Tribune first reported on Koretz's scams, they wrote: "[Koretz] made a specialty for years of systematically robbing only his relatives and close friends."

Like Ponzi and his eponymous Ponzi scheme, Koretz managed to keep people fooled as long as there were new investors coming in with more money. But in 1923, after a group of investors went down to Panama themselves to see the Bayano River Syndicate for themselves, it was then that Koretz's con was finally revealed. And like a row of dominos, all of his scams came undone one by one. Koretz was eventually convicted, and he died by suicide after one month in prison.

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When Courtney Chauncey Julian arrived in Santa Fe Springs, California, in 1922, it seemed like there was no end in sight when it came to oil speculation. But even though Julian had neither an oil well nor anything to drill with, he knew that all he had to do was convince people that he did. By 1923, he'd created the Julian Petroleum Corporation in Los Angeles and he advertised repeatedly in the newspapers, claiming: "I'm trying to offer you the squarest and surest opportunity for big returns that it is humanly possible to make," per PBS.

And the advertisements quickly drew investors. In his first few months Julian sold up to $5 million in stocks for the Julian Petroleum Corporation. But by this point, Julian only had a handful of oil wells, and they could never deliver on the millions that people were investing. By 1925, it was becoming clear that Julian was scamming people and the LA Times stopped printing his advertisements. And in 1927, Julian was charged with numerous counts, including conspiracy to obtain money under false pretenses, forgery, and embezzlement.

But in the end, Julian completely avoided standing trial for his scam, choosing to flee to Shanghai, China instead. He spent the rest of his life in Shanghai, although he died under mysterious circumstances, so it's unclear if he was poisoned by someone he scammed or if he died by suicide.

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One of the most notorious get-rich-quick schemes of the 1920s was a conspiracy perpetrated against the Osage people in Osage County, Oklahoma. After oil was discovered under Osage County in the early 1900s, the royalty payments went to the Osage people, who owned shares of the land and mineral rights. But as the Osage people became incredibly wealthy from the royalty checks, the United States government decided that the Osage people needed to prove that they were competent, otherwise a white person would be appointed as a guardian to control the incoming wealth.

Not only did those guardians pilfer the fortunes of the Osage people, but many Osage people whose fortunes were under guardianship were targeted for murder. The scheme involved white people marrying into Osage families and murdering them, in order to subsequently inherit their land and oil rights. Known as the "Reign of Terror," over 60 Osage people in Osage County were murdered between 1920 and 1925. The Brown family was one of many that was targeted, and Mollie Kyle Burkhart was the only one to survive the serial killings against her family, her story dramatized in the 2023 Martin Scorsese film "Killers of the Flower Moon." By 1924, guardians alone had stolen $8 million belonging to the Osage people.

Although the Bureau of Investigation briefly investigated the murders, convictions were limited, and the Osage people continued to be murdered well into the late 1920s.

In the 1920s, no one was more notorious for his get-rich-quick schemes than Joseph "Yellow Kid" Weil, whose cons were so well-known that he was known as "The King of Con Men." And Weil's cons took many different shapes and targeted people of all income brackets. One of his schemes involved selling fake stock for an Indiana steel mill to a banker, out of which he profited more than $100,000, while another involved keeping a $3 check that he claimed he was collecting for a charity. Some of his smaller cons included selling talking dogs or staging fake fights.

One of Weil's biggest scams involved none other than Benito Mussolini, the prime minister and fascist dictator of Italy. When Weil was in Italy during the late 1920s, he fraudulently sold Mussolini mining lands in Colorado for $2 million. But Weil never saw himself as doing anything wrong, and later claimed: "Men like myself could not have existed without the victim's covetous, criminal greed," per "Don't Fall For It" by Ben Carlson.

Although Weil conned people for almost 40 years, and at the height of his wealth was worth over $8 million, he had less than $200 to his name when he died in 1976. But despite all of his fraudulent behavior, Weil spent less than 10 years of his life in prison, and died at the age of 100.

Not all methods of illegally gaining large sums of money quickly are complicated: Some involve simply going into a bank and robbing the place. But one of the notorious bank robberies of the 1920s was the Santa Claus Bank Robbery of 1927, which led to one of the largest manhunts ever in the state of Texas. During the 1920s, robbing a bank was one of Texas' most popular get-rich-quick schemes, But it also became incredibly risky once there was a reward offered of $5,000 – worth more than $80,000 in 2023 – for killing a bank robber.

On December 23, 1927, Marshall Ratliff, Henry Helms, Robert Hill, and Louis Davis robbed the First National Bank in Cisco, Texas, making it out of the bank with over $160,000 worth of cash and valuables. The robbery's name came from the fact that Ratliff entered the bank in a Santa Claus suit as a disguise. But the fact that there was a high reward for killing a bank robber meant that bank customers with a gun were also ready to make some quick cash. So many people fired their guns in the bank, along with the robbers, that police later estimated that there were up to 200 shots fired.

The situation became so hectic that although the four men managed to get away from the scene of the crime, they ended up accidentally leaving the money behind with Davis, who was wounded and died shortly thereafter.