Let's Take the Money Away from Wall Street, And Other Essays on Wall Street, Money, and Greed (Liberty Archives Digital Collection) by Bernarr Macfadden & Fiorello La Guardia

Let's Take the Money Away from Wall Street, And Other Essays on Wall Street, Money, and Greed (Liberty Archives Digital Collection) by Bernarr Macfadden & Fiorello La Guardia

Author:Bernarr Macfadden & Fiorello La Guardia [Macfadden, Bernarr]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liberty Library
Published: 2013-01-22T05:00:00+00:00


THE CAGED WOLF OF WALL STREET

A prison closeup of the mystery man of finance

BY JULIA HARPMAN

Who is David Lamar?

Is his true name David H. Lewis, the name under which he conducted a small stationery store in Omaha thirty years ago?

Or is he David Levy, born in obscurity in New York?

Or is he the same David Lamar who had a get rich quick career in Atlanta in 1892, some twenty-four years before he returned there to serve two years in the government prison?

Or is his name Lehman, the name he bore as a fugitive in Mexico City, where he posed as a powerful New York banker?

Nobody knows but David Lamar.

I found David Lamar in prison. Having always pictured the man in the height of fashion and delicate taste, I was unprepared for the shock when, as I stepped through the last of the barred doors, I encountered him in a thick blue sweater closed at the throat with a most unblushing safety pin—a stockily built man of medium height, in rumpled dungarees which had been designed for some one tall and rangy.

Of course, one doesn’t wear one’s riding boots when one is sojourning for a year in the penitentiary at Caldwell, New Jersey. Still, the soles of his heavy, black prison shoes, as they boomed on the clean smelling pine floor, seemed—a bit thick.

“O,” David Lamar exclaimed, “I am most happily surprised. I was expecting a visit from my counsel. But if he comes”—turning to the glum turnkey at the inner door—“if he comes, warden, just say he is to wait.”

Then The Wolf addressed himself again to his guest.

“Come,” he invited, “let us sit over here by the window,” guiding me to a pine bench at the far wall, with a wave of the arm at his surroundings as though he might have said:

“This is the castle of my ancestors.”

He was still the David Lamar that Wall Street knew and, knowing, feared. A suave, gallant, regal being; not audacious at the moment, but light hearted. His hair, which had glistened in jetty spurs at the time of his famous admission to an investigation committee of the United States Senate that he had impersonated various Senators, Representatives, and financiers, was still bristling, but had turned to gray. The mustache which had been a distinguishing feature in the makeup of the old David Lamar had been sacrificed in Mexico, during his most recent hegira, whence he had returned to the United States in shackles and ignominy but not in humility.

David Lamar is a prisoner of the United States Government, and, as such, is accorded certain privileges. Uncle Sam sends only a few of his guests to such State institutions as Caldwell—those who are serving one year or less. Lamar drew his invitation from the government as a result of his efforts to foment strikes and otherwise impede the manufacture of munitions during the war.

As a federal prisoner Lamar had the privilege of choosing between work and ease at Caldwell. He chose not to work.



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