STANLEY LOWE
ENGLISHMAN Stanley Lowe’s bid to repeat a fellow conman’s trick shows there is no limit to a determined fraudster’s ambition.
Just after the Second World War, Lowe told a wealthy Texan that the Eiffel Tower had been so badly damaged that it was being sold off for $40,000 scrap value. Much of the Champs Elysees was up for grabs too. The Texan fell for it but Lowe was caught and spent nine months in jail.
Lowe, who grew up in an orphanage in North London, learned his trade after emigrating to America, where in 1938 he had met a rival conman in a New York bar.
“He was trying to sell me Brooklyn Bridge and I was trying to sell him Times Square. Finally we called it quits and I became his protégé,” he said.
Jailed for forging $20,000 and deported back to London, Lowe’s speciality was disguise. Wearing clerical gowns, he once persuaded a Japanese tourist to contribute $100,000 to restoring St Paul’s Cathedral.
In the role of an Oscar-winning Hollywood producer, he duped investors into funding nonexistent movies. He also played the ludicrously named “Group-captain Rivers Bogle Bland”, a British ex-war hero on a top-secret mission.
In the early 50s, Lowe became a footman at Marlborough House, home of the dowager Queen Mary, where he planned to steal her jewellery. He was unmasked when he turned up for his £6-a-week job in a new Jaguar he had just stolen.
In 1965, shortly before his death, the self-styled “King of the Conmen” invited 30 of his victims to lunch at London’s Park Lane Hilton to apologise for fleecing them of a total of £40,000. None showed up.
“Perhaps they thought it was another con and they’d be left with the bill,” he said sadly.