The Impostor Heiress
Cassie Chadwick, the Greatest Grifter of the Gilded Age
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Cassie Chadwick, one of history's most successful con artists, was a master of the trade. She swept from town to town, assuming new identities and running new swindles at each railroad stop. In the dusk of the Gilded Age, years after the robber barons had amassed their fortunes, she was amassing her own.
Using her wits and a series of forged documents, Cassie convinced prominent men from Cleveland to New York City that she was Andrew Carnegie's illegitimate daughter. The con made her impossibly rich. The crash shattered banks and bankers alike. Her sensational trial drew the eyes of a nation that couldn't get enough of the woman, who newspapers called the Queen of Swindlers, the Duchess of Diamonds, the High Priestess of Fraudulent Finance.
Interspersing Cassie's crimes with stories of an unsuspecting Andrew Carnegie, author Annie Reed spins an enthralling tale of true crime. Could the rumors be true? Can Cassie's money last? Will she escape the electric chair?
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
June 11, 2024 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9798855540178
- File size: 284133 KB
- Duration: 09:51:56
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Starred review from July 15, 2024
Glamorous con artist Cassie Chadwick (1857–1907) poses as the heir of industrialist Andrew Carnegie in historian Reed’s juicy first book. Born Elizabeth Bigley in a small Canadian farming community, at a young age she became obsessed with the trappings of wealth and began running small scams; as a teenager, she posed as an heiress who had not yet come into her inheritance, handing out forged promissory notes from respectable people as proof. After getting caught for this scam in her hometown (but being exonerated by a bemused jury), she moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where she adopted the name Cassie and refined her craft, cycling through numerous smaller scams (including soothsaying) and several well-heeled marriages. Chadwick (a name taken from her third husband) “had a knack of drawing men into her web and holding them fast,” writes Reed; eventually, she used this gift to “reveal” to gullible bankers that, as Carnegie’s illegitimate daughter, she stood to inherit $400 million, but couldn’t access the funds yet. Chadwick lived lavishly off this lie for 14 years, taking out new loans to pay off old ones, all backed by forged promissory notes; the scheme collapsed in 1904, taking several prominent bankers with it (“Ponzi is a piker compared to Cassie,” read one headline) and resulting in Chadwick’s imprisonment. Narrated in stylish prose with the galloping pace of a thriller, this charms.
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