(Roughly) Daily

Sarah Howe’s early life is mostly a mystery. There are no surviving photographs or sketches of her, so it’s impossible to know what she looked like. She may, at one point, have been married, but by 1877 she was single and working as a fortune-teller in Boston. It was a time of boom and invention in the United States. The country was rebuilding after the Civil War, industrial development was starting to take off, and immigration and urbanization were both increasing steadily. Money was flowing freely (to white people anyway), and men and women alike were putting that money into the nation’s burgeoning banks. In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, and in 1879 Thomas Edison created the lightbulb. In between those innovations, Sarah Howe opened the Ladies’ Deposit Company, a bank run by women, for women.

The company’s mission was simple: help white women gain access to the booming world of banking. The bank only accepted deposits from so-called “unprotected females,” women who did not have a husband or guardian handling their money. These women were largely overlooked by banks who saw them — and their smaller pots of money — as a waste of time. In return for their investment, Howe promised incredible results: an 8 percent interest rate…

All told, the Ladies Deposit would gather at least $250,000 from 800 women — although historians think far more women were involved. Some estimate that Howe collected more like $500,000, the equivalent of about $13 million today…

Then, in 1880, it all came crashing down. On September 25, 1880, the Boston Daily Advertiser began a series of stories that exposed Howe’s bank as a fraud. Her 8 percent returns were too good to be true. Howe was operating what we now know as a Ponzi scheme — 40 years before Ponzi would try his hand at it…

Rose Eveleth on the fascinating story of a 19th-century scammer, and what she can teach us about women, lying, and economic boom-and-bust cycles: “The No. 1 Ladies’ Defrauding Agency.”

* John Dryden, Aureng-Zebe

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As we remind ourselves that what’s too good to be true usually isn’t, we might recall that it was on this date in 1946 that FBI agents arrested Chicago gangster George “Bugs” Moran in Kentucky.

During the Prohibition era, Moran was one of the biggest organized crime figures in America, and has been credited with popularizing the drive-by shooting. He was a rival to Al Capone, who gunned down seven members of Moran’s gang in the 1929 Saint Valentine’s Day massacre.

Unlike Capone, Moran wasn’t a clever crime boss. By 1946 he had been reduced to common crimes like bank heists. He was basically penniless. The FBI found him renting an upstairs apartment from a law-abiding couple in Henderson, Ky.  [source]

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