‘There’s a Sucker Born Every Minute’

The Confidence Man Who Took Oscar Wilde for $5000

Picture the scene: New York in 1882, the sumptuous cafe of the expensive Hotel Brunswick. The heavy blood-red curtains are half drawn against the pounding rain outside, and the room is full of well-dressed bank executives and merchants, smoking, chatting, eating and drinking.  

At one ornate table close to the window, two men are seated in green-velvet straight-backed chairs. One is large, dressed in an immaculate dark purple frock coat with a sunflower in the buttonhole, his straight longish hair framing sensitive features and a slight hook nose in profile. Mr Oscar Wilde is nearing the end of his lecture tour of the United States, his fame spreading, his pockets profiting from his aesthetic and eloquent literary and epigrammatic musings in New York, Boston, San Francisco, Savannah Georgia and Harvard, among other stops. On arriving in New York on 2nd January this year on the SS Arizona, Oscar had made his famous quip at Customs, ‘I have nothing to declare…except my genius.’ To waiting reporters, he said, ‘I am not exactly pleased with the Atlantic. It is not so majestic as I expected. The roaring ocean does not roar.’ 

Oscar is facing a tallish, well-dressed man with an upright posture. The man’s brown hair is short and neatly parted on the left, his face pale, with a large scar on his chin, his eyes intense but with a twinkle in them. At thirty-two, four years older than Oscar, Joseph Lewis, known in criminal circles as ‘Hungry Joe’, and a snatch of aliases including Francis J. Alvany and Henry F. Post, has found a prominent mark. 

Oscar Wilde

Hungry Joe Lewis 

The two have known each other for about a week. On the table before them is a banco board, a game which has been popular in America for about thirty years. Originally imported from England, where it was known as ‘eight dice cloth’, it is deceptively simple. Perhaps for Hungry Joe, who is a professional banco player, known in the New York underworld as a ‘banco steerer’. A professional confidence man, one of the most successful in America, he was arrested for shooting a fellow criminal named Billy Flynn in Detroit just two years ago in 1880 but was released as it was considered self-defence. Oscar finds his companion fascinating, and Hungry Joe, posing as a well-to-do businessman, has shown him many city sights.  

The banco board between them is made up of forty-three squares, all but one of which are numbered. Thirteen squares have stars on them, and these carry no prizes, but the other twenty-nine squares have prizes ranging from $2000-5000, a very sizeable amount. Oscar is engrossed and watches Hungry Joe (not the name Oscar knows him by- this week he is Mr Sellick) throw the dice with a supple flick of the wrist. When Oscar lands on a star, he puts up an amount of money and is allowed to throw again. Hungry Joe lets Oscar win, repeatedly, and Oscar’s investment mounts, but of course Oscar believes he’s winning.  

Hungry Joe steers him on, until the time is right, the game owing the Irishman a tidy sum. Oscar is suddenly given square number 27, and he has to put up capital of between $500-5000. Flush Oscar offers $5000. Then Hungry Joe goes in for the kill, and by his experienced counting method, Oscar has landed on the blank square. The loser loses all. Oscar takes his loss gracefully, and makes out a cheque for $5000, drawn on the Second National Bank of New York City. After a polite amount of time, Hungry Joe offers his commiserations and explains that he has a business appointment and will have to brave the rain outside. Oscar bids him farewell and then settles back in his chair.  

It’s more than an hour later that Oscar realises that he has been skilfully taken, walks to the Second National Bank and has the ‘check’ stopped. Hungry Joe will not get his winnings after all, but Oscar is full of wonder at how cleverly his acquaintance manipulated him. They will never meet again, but Hungry Joe will later claim that he had already taken Oscar for $1,500 in cash that week. 

It will be over three years later that Hungry Joe was finally arrested. That is on 27 May 1885, at the equally exclusive Metropolitan Hotel in New York City, after cheating the English tycoon and tourist Joseph Ramsden out of five ten-pound notes, worth about $250. Ramsden, who had sailed from Manchester, will go to the police. When confronted with Ramsden by the police, Hungry Joe will say ‘I never saw you before, sir.’ Ramsden had also been steered by Hungry Joe in a game of banco. For this, Hungry Joe is sentenced to four years in Sing Sing Prison.  

In later years, Hungry Joe goes straight and sells cigars in New York City’s Bowery district, dying in an apartment on Manhattan’s West Side in late March 1902, at the age of fifty-two. He will be so (in)famous by now that his death is reported in the New York Times and the New York Sun. The phrase ‘There’s a sucker born every minute’ is apocryphally attributed to him.  

Hungry Joe’s friends buried him under another name three days after he died. Joe had asked them to do this, as he wanted to rest in peace anonymously. Of course, Oscar Wilde had died a broken and ruined man at the Hotel des Beaux Arts in Paris on 30th November 1900, sixteen months earlier. A great writer and legendary dilettante, his brief encounter with Hungry Joe Lewis was a small episode in a colourfully eventful, yet latterly tragic life. One wonders what Hungry Joe made of Oscar’s fall and decline, a steeper and more painful one than Joe’s stay upriver at Sing Sing. 

***