How This American Con Man Hustled Hitler

On February 18, 1937, Freeman Bernstein eased his pudgy 63-year-old physique out of the again seat of a rented limousine on the Hollywood house of actress Mae West. Thirty years earlier, Bernstein had been West’s agent, reserving her in vaudeville exhibits. Now he was hawking jewels he’d smuggled from China. A troublesome buyer, West purchased some rubies and sapphires however rejected a budget zircon that Bernstein tried to go off as a diamond. Then she autographed an image for her visitor, writing “To Freeman Bernstein, who was my first agent on the age of 10.”

Bernstein took West’s verify and the image and instructed his chauffeur to drive him to the Brown Derby restaurant. On the best way officers of the Los Angeles Police Division stopped the limo and arrested Bernstein: He was wished in New York for swindling the German authorities out of practically $150,000 by promoting the Nazis a load of what was purported to be beneficial nickel however which turned out to be scrap metallic.

“Adolf Hitler was on bended knee begging me to assist him get some nickel,” Bernstein advised reporters the following morning. “Hitler obtained simply precisely what he paid for in that deal—scrap metal and nickel—and I’ll show it.”

The story of an American accused of swindling Hitler made information nationwide and impressed a cringe-worthy Wisconsin State Journal headline: “Jew Denies Gyping Hitler in Junk Deal.”

Really, Bernstein did bilk Hitler—or a minimum of the Führer’s authorities—however that wasn’t stunning. He’d been flimflamming suckers on a number of continents for many years. Bernstein was a carny, a card sharp, a con man, a shady showbiz promoter, and a racehorse proprietor so crooked he was banned from tracks in Canada, Mexico, and Austria. However he was charming and persuasive and he satisfied numerous dupes to put money into his doubtful schemes. “Even when fleecing the gullible, he did it with such infectious excessive spirits that he believed the marks didn’t actually thoughts,” Walter Shapiro wrote in Hustling Hitler, his wry 2016 biography of the grifter.

Freeman Bernstein was born in 1873 in Troy, New York, son of Polish immigrants. He stop college after fifth grade and at 13 skilled the primary of many arrests, for stealing $10 from the pocket of a person who’d doffed his garments to swim within the Hudson River. Bernstein drifted into the carnival enterprise, receiving a beneficial schooling within the artwork of the grift. By the early 1900s, he was a low-rent impresario, reserving vaudeville acts within the boonies. The troupes he hyped as “The Biggest Aggregation of Vaudeville Expertise Ever Introduced Collectively” consisted primarily of has-beens, wannabes, and goofy novelty acts—a one-legged acrobat, a dwarf comedy crew, and “the white man who sings coon songs.” 

When a efficiency failed to attract a crowd, Bernstein would seize the field workplace receipts and flee on the following prepare, leaving his performers stiffed and stranded. In 1912, he took a 45-member opera forged to Puerto Rico; when the present failed to draw audiences, he skedaddled. “He’s left stranded troupes everywhere in the world,” the editor of Selection, the showbiz newspaper, lamented.

In 1915, impressed by the large success of the film Delivery of a Nation, Bernstein created a movie firm, discovered impressionable buyers, and produced two films, each starring his spouse, singer Could Ward. When the primary, a Revolutionary Conflict drama entitled A Continental Woman, tanked, Bernstein made his second film steamier. In Advantage, Ward performed an harmless farm woman lured into sexual slavery. Bernstein billed the movie “the Most Hanging, Reasonable and Sensational Movie Ever Offered.” Alerted, censors in Philadelphia and New York banned Advantage. Bernstein recouped his losses when a mysterious fireplace incinerated his film studio, which he’d presciently insured. He confirmed a Selection reporter the coverage, saying, “See, I advised you there was cash in photos.”

Ah, so many Freeman Bernstein scams, so little house:

Throughout World Conflict I, he arrange carnivals outdoors military bases and took doughboys’ dough with rigged video games.

In 1929, Bernstein—rebranding himself “Roger O’Ryan”—staged a week-long Irish Truthful within the Boston Backyard, promoting “SOD FROM EVERY COUNTY IN IRELAND…HUNDREDS OF IRISH COLLEENS.” The sod was grown in Massachusetts and the colleens had been native showgirls. On the truthful’s ultimate day, Bernstein took the cash and ran, leaving staff unpaid. “OWNER OF IRISH FAIR MISSING,” screamed the Boston Herald’s entrance web page. “COLLEENS CLAMOR FOR WAGES.” Quickly, Bernstein—dubbed “Mr. O’Ryanstein” by the Herald—was wished for fraud.

Any time cops and collectors closed in, Bernstein took to the ocean, crusing to Europe or Asia, incomes money en route by skinning fellow first-class passengers in high-stakes card video games. Upon docking, he’d seek for and steadily discover rubes dying to be separated from their lucre. “A man like me ought to journey,” he wrote in a letter from London. “There are such a lot of saps round, I don’t know which one to faucet first.”

Bernstein spent a lot of the Nineteen Thirties in China, calling himself “The Jade King” and promoting valuable stones—and doubtful facsimiles—to vacationers. Often, he’d smuggle jade into the U.S. by feeding the jewels to Benny, his Sealyham terrier, shortly earlier than he and the pooch strolled by customs, retrieving the stones when Benny relieved himself.

Bernstein was in Shanghai in 1934 when he conceived his infamous nickel-to-Nazis rip-off. He met a German diplomat who stated his authorities was trying to purchase massive portions of nickel, wanted to make weapons. Bernstein claimed to have a nickel connection in Canada, which produced many of the world’s provide however had barred the metallic’s export to Germany. The diplomat urged Bernstein meet an official on the German embassy in Washington. In 1935, Bernstein visited the man, bringing samples of high-grade nickel he’d purchased at a store in Manhattan. Impressed, the bureaucrat dispatched Bernstein and his samples to the Fatherland, the place Nazis gave him $1,000 as a down cost on an order of 225 tons.

Setting his entice, Bernstein advised his clients that, to keep away from the embargo, the cargo would come labeled “scrap metallic.” Then he discovered a crooked Canadian junkman. Collectively, the pair gathered 225 tons of scrap and a smidgeon of nickel, bribed an inspector to certify that the load was 99 p.c nickel, and shipped all of it to Germany, accumulating practically $150,000. It was, biographer Shapiro wrote, “the grandest racket of his profession.”

Fearing the inevitable indictment, Bernstein fled to China however when he returned to Los Angeles in 1937 to promote jewels, the cops nabbed him. He spent seven weeks in jail then went free on bail. After years of authorized wrangling, the fees had been dropped in June 1941.

Seven months later, Bernstein was on his solution to meet with a Hollywood producer when he suffered a deadly coronary heart assault.

“After I die,” he’d bragged years earlier, “regardless of the place I’m going, you may gamble that I’ll choose up somewhat coin on the leap.”

This text appeared within the Winter 2023 difficulty of American Historical past journal.