Annals of White Collar Crime

Surely you will remember Bernie Madoff, the perpetrator of the world’s most audacious Ponzi scheme.  He’s now in the hoosegow in North Carolina serving out the early years of a sentence of a hundred and fifty years.  Quite a few greedy rich people got snookered, but there were unfortunately more serious consequences as well.  The lives of various colleagues and family members lie in ruins.  One of his sons was driven to suicide.  Under these circumstances you may not be persuaded that Mr. Madoff got off easy; but history might suggest otherwise.

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought

I summon up remembrance of things past,

I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,

And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste…

I have in mind the sadder fate of the Rev. Dr. William Dodd (1729-1777), generally known to historians, to the degree he is known, as “the unfortunate Dr. Dodd”.  It was concerning this unctuous malefactor that Dr. Johnson made one of his most acute, if usually misquoted, apothegms: "Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully."

            The white collar of Dodd’s crime was clerical.  He was a celebrity clergyman with his own private chapel of ease frequented by urban gentlefolk, especially the female of the species.  The Anglican Church of his age was rarely overtly concerned with religion.  The great historian Lecky describes it as a kind of vague ethical improvements society and an admirable extension of the police force.  Though he was a popular sentimental preacher, Dodd’s greatest achievement was his celebrated Beauties of Shakespeare.  Unfortunately, he developed a liking for the good life, the expensive life.

            Already by the 1760s Dodd was known in some circles as “the macaroni parson.”  Macaroni is a great word.  It means (1) an Italian pasta; and (2) in adjectival form, a literary composition combining vernacular and Latin, as in “macaronic verse”.  Its most interesting eighteenth-century usage has disappeared, though it is preserved in a well-known popular satirical song, “Yankee Doodle":

            Yankee Doodle went to town, riding on a pony;

            He stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni.

Here “macaroni” means foppishness, the acme of high fashion, the imagined quintessence of the cool, the latest style of dress or speech—something along those lines.  It suggests foreign affectation.  The “macaroni parson” was the Apostle to the Fashionable, the Comforter of the Unafflicted.  To conduct convincing field work among the affluent demanded a lavish life style.   And though he anticipated some of our own celebrity evangelists in doing indubitably well by doing dubious good, he always needed more.  Among the plums of his early clerical employment had been a stint as tutor to the Earl of Chesterfield—big money there.  When in 1777 he found himself in debt, Dodd, in an apparently mad moment, forged Chesterfield’s name on a bond of £4200.  He apparently acted with an insouciance similar to that impelling Madoff, a legitimate multi-millionaire, to lust for felonious billions.  Like many notable crimes, Dodd’s peculation was discovered more or less by accident, but it was a fatal accident.  Even adjusted for inflation, forty-two hundred pounds was less than Madoff’s fictive billions, but it was way more than enough to get Dodd arraigned, tried, and sentenced to death in the twinkling of an eye.  Remember, these were the days in England when a man could be hanged for stealing a sheep.  And the forgery of financial instruments was a crime of nearly infinitely greater import than that.  The King, in solidarity with his principal legal officers, was utterly unyielding.  They knew that British prosperity was founded in commerce, and took the view that in a commercial country few crimes could be more serious than financial fraud.  Therefor the sentence of death must stand.

the Macaroni Parson in more fortunate days

            Dodd did have sympathetic friends, quite a few indeed.  Dr. Johnson rallied to his cause out of Christian charity and simple sympathy.  He had barely known the man, and of course acknowledged his folly and guilt.  He raised no theoretical objection to the capital sentence, but he was a man of great heart.  His biographer, Boswell, has several lively pages on the episode, which is doubtless why the case is still remembered so well and why we know that the prospect of hanging wonderfully concentrates the mind.

            What Dodd’s mind so wonderfully concentrated on, of course, was how to stay alive.  Desperate circumstances invite desperate measures.  When it finally became clear that despite popular petitions, tear-jerking letters to the authorities, and the formidable eloquence of Samuel Johnson, Dr. Dodd was certainly going to swing, a new plan was required.  Since he could not avoid hanging, he had to find a way to survive hanging.  Now there’s a real challenge, and it gave birth to an epic crackpot scheme.   It is impossible now to know the degree to which various parts of the scheme were real as opposed to legendary.  But essentially the plot was for a group of conspirators, including a prominent medical man, to secure a safe apartment in a building near the site of execution at Tyburn Prison.  Dodd himself, as he approached the gallows, may or may not have been supposed to secret some kind of breathing tube into his mouth and throat, thus adding to the uncertain pleasures of pendulation those of a simultaneous endoscopy.  The idea seems to have been that death by hanging is not quick but rather leisurely.  Immediately upon the completion of the hanging, Dodd’s friends, waiting at the side of the scaffold with a horse-drawn carriage, were to take possession of the inert body and transport it swiftly the short distance to the safe house.  There the doctor and his assistants would revive the (only apparently) dead divine. 

Quite apart from any inadequacies of medical theory underlying their ingenious initiative, the conspirators had failed to anticipate the problem of traffic control.  Public executions were popular events in eighteenth-century London, and celebrity executions were huge popular events.  Thousands of hyped-up idlers and proletarians, not a few of them inebriated, surrounded the scene on all sides.  Every avenue was blocked.  The makeshift hearse could have more easily speeded through the Holland Tunnel at 5 p.m.  So the unfortunate Doctor Dodd stayed dead.

Family fun at the Tyburn Tree

An enterprising doctoral student should take up a study of the desperations of debt and its criminal consequences in English literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  The title of the dissertation could be “Economic Crime and Punishment.”  The ubiquitous high-born lowlifes who never pay their tailors in timely fashion, if indeed at all, are only the beginning.  The pages of the English novel are practically crawling with deadbeats and ne’er-do-wells fleeing the bailiffs, dodging debtor’s prison, or being hauled off to some sordid “sponging-house”.  Conspicuous among such crawlers is Rawdon Crawley of Vanity Fair, a great novel set in the period of the Napoleonic wars.  Rawdon escapes with mere misery and an ignominious death; but there are worse things.  The last Englishman I know of who was hanged for forgery was a banker, Henry Fauntleroy  (1784 –1824), whose extravagant embezzlements actually destroyed one of London’s old financial houses.  Forgery ceased to be a capital crime in 1836, Reform being (as the historians put it) “in the air.”