One such person that comes into question is Jim Bowie. Yes, the guy with the knife. Jason Patric or Richard Widmark depending on how old you are and if, like me, you watch too many movies.
My fertile imagination leads me to think that if Bowie were alive today he would have made a talented Internet conspiracy grifter. There’s certainly a lot of backstory there with political background. The best conspiracy grifts push divisive topics painted as black and white political issues with no nuance. He didn’t even invent this ‘large hunting knife’ used in the sandbar fight that got him notoriety, only popularized it. That doesn’t happen without some sort of charisma. So charismatic that his death along with others at the Alamo is legendary. One need look no further than how Ozzy Osbourne pissing on the Alamo shows how much elevation to deityhood one can achieve by messing with the shrine of Texas. https://loudwire.com/ozzy-osbourne-arrested-urinating-alamo-cenotaph-anniversary/
Bowie helped that shrine becoming a shrine and his own deity status by also being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But at the wrong time with a big, badass fucking knife.
But before that, he got into a nice little scam being in the right place at the right time. And that was a variation of what we joke about now as the, “And if you believe that I have some lovely swamp land in Florida I’d like to sell you.” The basis of that classic is that you don’t actually own the swamp land. It’s an unclaimed or not openly advertised and useless plot of land that you pretend to own just long enough to capitalize on people gullible enough to think they can get a gold mine cheap.
Real estate scams are historically a big draw for neophyte scammers. Pretty much all you need to do is throw together a quick book about how you made an incredible amount of money using magic techniques. Then instead of using nonexistent magic techniques you simply sell the book and make your money off the book sales. And maybe throw in a high priced seminar or 100 along the way. And if that doesn’t remind you of Zachary Hubbard over the last ten years selling sports picks that don’t work, and throwing in every fundraiser he can think of along the way, you really haven’t been paying attention.
Bowie would also have made a great real estate property manager. The way his con worked was that after the US Government bought the land and declared what land claims would be honored, he produced fictitious people and documentation to show bogus rights to the land. It’s always better to cheat the government. It’s way more fun, they never have enough oversight to monitor all the activity in the subsidized housing world. And property managers can play by the rules, bend the rules as they see fit, or break the rules constantly with little or no repercussions. Owning even a tiny little plot of land to call your own is a huge draw for those who are tired of being gouged on rent increases. And becoming part of the, “too big to fail” banking/insurance/real estate grist mill has its decided advantages.
So as you read the material in the first link above, you do see Bowie got caught. It usually takes a scam far too long and with far too much damage done…and far too much getting caught up in the fun and going too far by the scammer for any sort of accountability. And like D.B. Cooper, we’ll never know if the legendary status of Bowie would have been tarnished if he hadn’t had his big knife at the Alamo. I doubt many school history classes talk much about Bowie and his land scams. My fertile imagination has Bowie using the traditional go to arguments we see today when a scammer gets caught going too far and elevating themselves to the status of a problem that needs to be done.
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry I got caught, not sorry for what I did.”
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