The following is a brief overview of Kit R. Roane’s American Swindler: The life of the greatest 20th century con artist ever to pursue the American dream.

American Swindler is a Horatio Alger story with a Tim Burton twist. It is a tale of self-made promise turned dark and scheming, a study of conquest and dishonest love, and a historical thriller full of ruthless swindles, unchecked corruption, graft, and double-crosses. It is a cautionary tale about a man who spared no one in his pursuit of the American dream during the first half of the 20th century.

F. Donald Coster, the Bernie Madoff of his time, was perhaps the most complex charlatan of what became known as the century of progress. A diabolical sociopath, he was beguiled by his own sense of greatness and primordially driven to lie, cheat and manipulate. Like a hot wax poured into molds of varying shapes, Coster masterfully filled whatever identity seemed requisite for his scam, using his victims' own lust for money, power, or freedom to ensnare them. Like Madoff, he is a reminder of the inherent weakness in man to be seduced and of our economic system's tendency to allow such skilled exploitation.

Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” is supposed to sweep self-interest into the work of building social wealth. But Coster, like many other con artists before and after him, harnessed greed to build his own empire. He was a golden child, a paradigm within a system that even today prizes risk-taking, innovation, and, most of all, the semblance of success, in which caution is an afterthought and regulation an overdue coda.

Coster played his game masterfully. In his many roles, he fearlessly defrauded investors of millions of dollars, all the while bewitching those around him into believing he was a hard-nosed business titan with, as one friend put it, “a beautiful Christian spirit.” He was haunted by only one persistent worry: the ridicule that would come from his exposure as a fraud.

A high school dropout, Coster successfully assumed the roles of brilliant chemist, physician, and CEO. Although a convicted swindler, bootlegger, and snitch, he was also a valued law enforcement investigator and government-paid spy. Raised a poor Italian Catholic, he alternatively assumed the persona of a spats-wearing Broadway playboy and an upper class WASP. Regarded as a devoted and loving husband, Coster blithely framed the innocent, helping send at least two men to the electric chair.

Although a sought-after Republican nominee for President and ardent free marketeer, Coster’s exploits were the very reason stronger regulation of financial markets were needed. When his crimes were finally exposed in 1938, Coster unwittingly helped usher in some of the country’s first sweeping financial reforms.

Coster had “shocked the accountancy profession into breathlessness,” noted one editorial, adding that “the importance of independent audits and of accounting procedure will not be forgotten.” They weren’t. Instead, America’s modern auditing procedures took shape. Recognized as the chief bulwark against company fraud, auditors turned away from the role of cozy apparatchik reviewing ledgers of spoon-fed company results, to become inquisitive tough-minded detectives comfortable with demanding documents, inspecting actual inventories and confirming receivables. Their boss was no longer the CEO, but was now the shareholders who elected a company’s auditors and had the power to review their work.

Coster plied his trade during a period much like our own, one of great financial, political, and social upheaval. Over the course of his lifetime, the country grappled with worker unrest, official corruption, a terrorist attack on Wall Street, unbridled immigration, rising xenophobia, a bloody war overseas, and a feeling of limitless prosperity that finally gave way to the reality of our country’s greatest economic depression.

Using cocksure fraud and cold-eyed forgery, Coster trolled these waters from 1900 to 1938, repeatedly bilking both hopeful investors and savvy Wall Street banks. And the system always seemed incapable of stopping him, until it was too late. For today’s readers, American Swindler is an eerily familiar tale, revealing that the modern con is nothing new, that financial statements aren’t always what they seem, and that regulators can’t protect the innocent.

But unlike our modern-day financial villains, Coster is a much more complex and engaging character. A product of Israel Zangwill’s “Crucible,” Coster took the American ethos and painstakingly stitched together a series of new versions of himself from its trappings. In the annals of modern American crime, no scoundrel has managed so many personal reinventions or so varied and successful a career.

In comparison to Coster, the Madoffs, Stanfords and Petters of today are one-hit wonders. And even those that arose from the ferment of the roaring 1920s with Coster, such as Charles Ponzi or Ivan Kreuger (the Swedish admiral’s son popularly known as “The Match King”), only happened upon single winning systems that they rode to the end.

By contrast, and frustrating all those who tried to stop him, the chameleonic Coster, with his everyman features and owlish eyes, shifted almost effortlessly between a number of high-dollar frauds during his four decades of crime, all the while rubbing elbows with some of the most influential men of his time. Coster tussled with FDR, dined with the famed tenor Enrico Caruso, conducted a brisk business with gangster Dutch Schultz, befriended Benito Mussolini and angered Generalissimo Francisco Franco.

Coster was born Philip Musica in 1884, an immigrant’s son reared in the Five Points slum during a period when New York City was the most densely packed place on Earth. Forty percent of the city’s population had been born overseas, causing the reformer Jacob Riis to write that mapping the city’s multiplying nationalities would have left it with “more stripes than on the skin of a zebra and more colors than on any rainbow.”

The Five Points slum was the city’s most notorious address, a place ruled by warring Tammany-connected gangs and marked by that period’s version of an adventure tour, as the rich were often led down streets with names like Murderer’s Alley to glimpse how the other half lived.

By the turn of the century, New York City also had a reputation for being one of the most corrupt cities in the world, with voluminous official reports concluding that the sole function of the police appeared to be blackmail and that bribery of public servants was routine. Still only in his early twenties, Coster had found a way to pull his family and himself out of this grinding poverty by turning New York’s epic corruption to his advantage and masterminding his first financial crime -- a far-reaching customs fraud on New York City’s docks.

Caught red-handed in 1909, he threw himself on the mercy of a lenient judge, successfully claiming he was the victim of this corrupt system. His one-year sentence was then cut in half by a curious presidential pardon brought straight from the desk of U.S. President William Henry Taft and recommended by the very judge who had sent him away. No one wanted to hear the protestations of the prosecutor in the case, who had already presaged that the young man was a cunning manipulator destined for a long life of crime.

The prosecutor was right. In 1910, at the age of 26, Coster moved on to what became known as the Great Human Hair Swindle. The stock market, while extremely volatile, seemed destined for greater heights, and the economy continued to be supported by increasingly leveraged American consumers. With Wall Street bankers clamoring for hot growth companies, the time was ripe for Coster’s inventory con. It capitalized on the huge demand for human hair extensions, which were used by newly affluent women to achieve elaborate pompadours and other popular Edwardian hairstyles.

Although ostensibly running a human hair import-export business, Coster never bothered to actually ship many of the sought-after strands. His global concern, called the United States Hair Company, was built on nothing more than the shuffling of fraudulent paperwork. By the time President Woodrow Wilson was sworn into office, Coster had fleeced his Wall Street backers and public investors of millions of dollars in a con that went down as one of the greatest frauds of the horse-and-buggy era.

When Prohibition swept the country in 1919, Coster was ready again. Using the alias of Frank D. Costa, the 35-year-old schemer perfected a lucrative bootlegging operation, launching a series of pharmaceutical companies that essentially diverted government-provided alcohol to Schultz and other gangsters who were producing hard liquors.

In 1926, under the alias of F. Donald Coster, the now-portly and bespectacled businessman used his bootlegging-fattened enterprise to take over McKesson & Robbins, a storied pharmaceutical company, and set in motion his most explosive and profitable scheme of all.

But Coster was more than just a bootlegger and a fraudster. Under his given name – Philip Musica – and under the alias of William Johnson, he pockmarked these intervals of fraud with colorful periods as a prison informant, a law enforcement agent, and a spy. Always ready to fabricate, manipulate, and lie to reach his desired outcome, Coster seldom failed to please the powerful men for whom he worked.

In 1913, when the city turned toward politically ambitious reformers like New York District Attorney Charles Whitman, Coster became their favored informant and fixer. While serving time himself, Coster helped convict, among others, New York City’s most infamous cop, Lt. Charles Becker, the first American police officer executed for murder.

When anti-German sentiment swept the country during World War I, Coster again became the go-to guy. Hired shortly after his release from prison by Morton Lewis, the state’s powerful Attorney General, Coster was tasked with a series of counter-espionage investigations connected to the famous Bolo Pasha espionage case in France; using false documents, he nearly succeeded in framing publisher William Randolph Hearst as a Pasha confederate and traitor.

At times, Coster even devoted his efforts to legitimate business pursuits, a fact that helped enable McKesson & Robbins, the third-largest drug distributor in the world, to survive its false-fronted CEO’s many financial crimes and to remain a profitable concern even today.

Coster worked tirelessly to succeed. He broke drug distribution cartels, gambled on the volatile markets of the 1920s and 1930s, and propped up both his legitimate and fictitious enterprises with the same passion he exerted when framing the innocent or stealing the defense from the marginally guilty. Except to tidy up an ever-increasing number of loose ends, Coster tried never to look back. The ghosts were to remain filed away, whether they were the business associates he double-crossed, the men he broke, put on death row, or helped to put in the electric chair.

He was too busy and too narcissistic to reflect, although there were uncomfortable shadows of his past all about him: the wife whom he stole from a friend, the former law enforcement investigator who became his corrupt muscle, the brother and sister mob-team trying to bleed him dry, and the familial-looking man who sat down the hall working to keep Coster’s final scheme alive.

No confidence man in American history ever had more mettle. The unwitting lawyer Coster hired to bury an old perjury charge had been the prosecutor who indicted him for the same crime. While running his Human Hair Fraud, Coster thought nothing of opening up a sideline business to illegally bring indentured servants to the United States from Africa. And when he reeled from hundreds of thousands of dollars in stock market losses in 1929, Coster simply took the cash straight from McKesson’s treasury, not even bothering to cover his tracks.

Had Coster lived past his final fraud, the multi-million dollar looting of McKesson & Robbins, he was planning an even more outrageous feat. Coster had set in motion a Basil Zaharoff-style plan to run guns to General Chiang Kai-shek in China and to a handful of Latin American and European dictators stocking up in preparation for war. Once revealed, Coster’s maneuver sent the State Department scrambling to cool foreign tempers.

Through all of this, Coster had seemed unstoppable. He thrived during the Great Depression, survived the stock market crash of 1929, and appeared unsinkable during the 1930s bear market that followed. But there he was, just days before Christmas 1938, undone by a few scraps of paper abandoned in a warehouse. With U.S. Marshals knocking at his front door, Coster asked his valet to fetch another rye highball, and then locked himself in his bathroom. Finally alone, he stuck a 38-caliber revolver to his right temple and shot a bullet through the top of his head. The marshals called a priest and watched him bleed out in the tub, as his wife, Carol wailed downstairs, asking “My God, Daddy, why did you do it?”

© Kit R. Roane