Checking off one of my professional development goals for the year

I can’t remember where I picked up my copy of Roy Peter Clark’s Writing Tools, but I have been hearing good things about it from my fellow editors for several years. I think I got it off another editor, but regrettably I can’t remember who.

Anyway, Writing Tools lives up to the hype. It would be worth the price of the whole book just for the bits on the ladder of abstraction, which gives a nice concise framework to a particular type of dull writing I run into all the time, thus allowing easier pinpointing of what is wrong with it. (How to fix it still may often require more time than I’m given, but whatever.) Some of the tools are on the “nuts and bolts” of writing–word choice and sentence structure and all–and others are more about organization and process. There are exercise questions for the reader to practice applying these tools, which I did not do but which seemed like very useful homework assignments, and possibly I should go do them at some point. Overall a very solid little book; a classic for a reason.

A man, a plan, a canal, and no company

In my effort to clear out some of my old Harvard Bookstore Warehouse Sale purchases, I followed up my reading of Dead Wake with another nonfiction book in sort-of the same time period. This one was Dean Jobb’s Empire of Deception: From Chicago to Nova Scotia - The Incredible Story of a Master Swindler Who Seduced a City and Captivated the Nation.

The master swindler in question was one Leo Koretz, an affable German Jewish immigrant who had come over from Bohemia with his family as a child. His parents had worked their way into the respectable-enough stratum of Chicago’s vibrant Jewish community and were able to send Leo to high school at a time when only about 1% of the city’s youth graduated high school. Young Leo then got a job in a law firm and took night classes until he was able to become a lawyer himself. While there were plenty of job opportunities for lawyers in litigious and corrupt early-20th-century Chicago, it wasn’t quite the path to lavish riches that Leo had envisioned, so he started with the shenanigans–first siphoning money from the dead clients whose wills he was executing; then selling fake mortgages on real properties; and eventually his master swindle–selling stock in an entirely fake natural resource extraction syndicate in the Bayano Valley, Panama.

This book is split into three “acts.” Act I is the bulk of Koretz’ life, from his childhood up through the years of increasingly daring and complicated fraud. The scale and coldheartedness of Koretz’ Bayano Syndicate swindle was pretty stunning–this was a dividends-from-capital swindle, meaning you need a constant stream of new investors in order to keep the old investors in the dark about the fact that they aren’t actually invested in anything, so the scam tends to have a short lifespan. Koretz kept it going for over a decade, faking exclusivity and selling shares to his closest friends and his own family members.

Eventually, of course, even he can’t keep it going anymore. When it gets too big, he sends a bunch of investors down to Panama to check out the nonexistent company–and uses their absence to cash out all his bank accounts, send some apologetic cash gifts to his nearest and dearest, and go on the lam. Act II is his life under an assumed name as a jolly millionaire and man of letters in New York (briefly, just long enough to establish an identity) and then Nova Scotia, where he buys an old hunting lodge and turns it into a swanky woodland resort-hotel. He spends about a year scandalizing the good backwoods Nova Scotians with his big-city ways and lavish parties, until he is eventually found out via some discreet questioning between his tailor and a bunch of bank officials, and then the law comes to bring him back to Chicago.

Act III, unsurprisingly, is his trial and imprisonment in Chicago, and all the other fallout/aftermath with his friends and family. There is an odd little twist at the end, which provides an interesting end to the story, although I’m not sure I agree with the author that it constitutes “cheating justice” (I might not be the world’s most committed prison abolitionist but there’s times when I realize my assumptions are not always quite the same as other people’s assumptions about these things).

This might not have been the most riveting piece of nonfiction I’ve read lately but that’s because I’ve read a lot of nonfiction about fairly sensational events these past few months–wars and spies and gangs and whatnot–so I feel like the bar is fairly high. This is pretty comparable to a lot of those though; it’s certainly not a dud if you’re in the mood for the sort of thing it’s about. It gives a pretty good look into the politics and corruption and general scamminess of Prohibition-era Chicago and its very colorful cast of characters. I also learned a tiny little bit about Panama during this era, although it’s no substitute for reading a book actually about Panama. Overall this was a solidly entertaining episode in historical true crime, and it apparently inspired an episode of Leverage, so I’m glad I finally got around to reading it.

Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of fun

I have read Treasure Island before and have, in fact, owned a copy of Treasure Island before, but I made the amateurish error of loaning it to somebody back in the day and then never got it back, so on one of my fits of coveting Peebles Classic Library editions I bought another copy on Etsy. I had thought that my prior batch of Peebles Classic Library books included it but apparently I’d been mashing up in my head the three I did have–Robinson Crusoe, also about an island in the Caribbean; 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, also about maritime adventures of dubious legality, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, also by Robert Louis Stevenson, so you can see how I got confused.

Anyway, apart from some deeply cringey period-typical casual racism, the book does hold up. The characters are memorable, the plot is exciting, the sense of Going On An Adventure is palpable. I ripped through the whole thing in one afternoon by the side of the lake and it was 100% what going to the lake is all about. Much of what goes on in this book has since become cliche, because this is the Foundational Text of fictional pirate adventures (it’s almost single-handedly responsible for the extremely ahistorical trope of burying treasure instead of immediately blowing it on booze and floozies), but at the time it was written it wasn’t cliche yet, and you really see why these things have gotten ripped off so many times: here, they really work. A lot of English children’s classics have essentially no value to the modern world except as a cautionary tale about how early you can start teaching children to be hideously racist; this one, on the other hand, has about a half-dozen unfortunate sentences scattered through it and the rest of it falls squarely into the “This is a classic for a reason” category. Reading it made me feel like an adventurous little kid again.

The barons of border vice

After zipping through two other books at the lake I spent the bulk of the weekend immersed in a book from my Casino City days that I had apparently picked up at Midtown Scholar in Harrisburg, PA: Paul J. Vanderwood’s Satan’s Playground: Mobsters and Movie Stars at America’s Greatest Gaming Resort. During Prohibition, it turns out that for legal reasons America’s greatest gaming resort was actually in Mexico–specifically in the border town of Tijuana, just a few miles from the supposedly respectable city of San Diego. This book is a little bit a history of Tijuana and a little bit a history of San Diego, but mainly it is a history of the short-lived but majestic precursor to the great Las Vegas casino resorts: the Agua Caliente.

The incident that forms the structural backbone of the book is an attempted stickup of the Agua Caliente money van on its way back to a San Diego bank, in which two small-time mobsters with machine guns get into a shooting match with the drivers of the money car, even though–according to the mobsters–the job was supposed to be ‘fixed.’ The robbery thus escalated into a double homicide, shocking San Diegans and kicking off a massive and sometimes embarrassing manhunt and investigation. This was the first and most infamous but not the last of a series of attempts by organized crime to get money out of the very profitable Agua Caliente without doing the thing you ordinarily needed to do to get money out of the Agua Caliente, i.e., be on the business end of it and skim.

Along the way of this nearly 400-page book (it could have been a little shorter, frankly), we get to meet the Agua Caliente’s owners, patrons, workers, government enablers, enemies, and even some of its horses. There are plenty of pictures, both of the over-the-top Spanish Mission Revival-style resort itself and of the various people profiled. Could I keep them all straight? No. Did that matter? Probably also no; I could usually follow what was going on. My biggest criticism of the book is that sometimes the author’s opinions were a bit intrusive, but mostly it was a fun read.