It’s June 1st, 1926 and I saw him yet again. Settle in, I’ve been writing this one for months. This guy deserves a proper story.

The courtroom was laughing.

It was January 27, 1928, General Sessions Court, Manhattan, and the trial of Robert Whitman — also known as Lord Beaverbrook, Baron Cornelius Beaverbrook, Herman Krueger, Carl Edwards, Fred Stanley, Dr. Karl Renne, and a great many others — had been lurching toward its conclusion for three days. Two women sat in the witness box. A third had just arrived uninvited and taken a seat near the defendant.

She was the widow of a famous Hungarian violinist. She had traveled from out of town. She wore a great deal of jewelry.

The little man in the dock watched her come in. He had blue eyes, carefully combed hair, and the bearing of someone who had spent considerable time practicing the bearing of someone else. When the princess — she told reporters her late husband had been the Prince Riga — settled into her chair and leaned toward him, he took her bejeweled hand, brought it to his lips, and murmured:

"Ah, Princess. This is more than I dared hope for."

The gallery erupted. The court attendants looked at one another. Even the bailiff, who had seen things, permitted himself a small smile. The two women on the witness stand — Mrs. Rose Burken of Freeport, New York, who had lost $100,000 in jewels, and Mrs. Virginia Cameron Martin of Washington, D.C., who had lost $34,000 on her wedding day — did not laugh.

They had been trying to explain what it felt like to be fooled by this man. It was proving difficult.

Mrs. Martin had been on the stand earlier. She admitted, reluctantly, that she had been married four times before Robert Whitman. The defense attorney, John P. Booth, asked whether the Whitman nuptials counted as a fifth marriage. She said they did not. She had been on a farm in Mississippi, she explained. She hadn't had any sense, she supposed. The attorney pressed her on dates, on her divorce status, on whether she had ever been properly introduced to Mr. Whitman at all.

Her answers developed, over time, a single reliable response: "I don't remember."

What she did remember was this: he had given her jewelry before the ceremony. Beautiful things. And then on the same day they were married, he had gone somewhere to have the gems appraised and insured, he said, and he had not come back. He left with $34,000 of her money and $10,000 of her jewelry. By the time she understood what had happened, Robert Whitman had become someone else entirely.

Outside in the hallway, the princess told reporters that her former husband was simply the victim of lonely women who had thrown themselves and their valuables at him. "He's just that type," she said.

She was not the only woman in the building who had decided to defend him.

By the time Robert Whitman went to trial in that Manhattan courtroom, he had been running the same confidence operation, in various forms, under various names, for more than a decade, and law enforcement had been aware of him, intermittently, for nearly as long. The files showed arrests in Philadelphia, Chicago, St. Louis, Buffalo, and Washington. Warrants in multiple states. A year served in a Philadelphia prison. A parole violation from 1917 that kept not catching up with him.

The New York detective who finally caught him in May of 1926 told reporters his technique: watch the barber shops. The man was always having his hair fixed. He kept it combed pompadour in a particular way.

The arrest itself was almost elegant in its banality. The Ambassador Hotel, Philadelphia. A barber's chair. A girl companion on what the papers called a "business trip." He saw the detectives come in, scanned the exits, and understood immediately. "I saw you had them all covered," he told detectives afterward. "And I knew the game was up."

He was cheerful about it. He usually was.

His name, as best anyone could establish, was Sigmund Engel. He was born on June 22, 1873, in San Francisco, to German parents. He had sixteen years of formal education, graduated from Berkeley, California, and at some point before the first documented swindle, had a career in vaudeville. The stage training was evident. Everything about him was a performance — the monocle, the walking stick, the European title, the aristocratic bearing, the casual multilingualism — and he had been performing it so long that it is unclear whether he remembered which parts were real.

His Sing Sing prison record, completed in February of 1928, lists his occupation as Motion Picture Manager. It lists his religion as Hebrew. Under criminal acts attributed to, in his own looping handwriting, he wrote: desire to live beyond means. He arrived at Sing Sing with two dollars. No property.

He signed the intake document Robert Whitman.

The method, which he eventually described in some detail to anyone who would listen, was not complicated. It was merely relentless.

"Give a woman a love potion of admiration, flattery and tall stories and you've got her," he explained to a reporter in 1949, with the patience of a man explaining something obvious. "While administering the potion, give the impression you have lots of money. Administer this medicine in large doses, increasing the dosage as you see it taking effect. Talk about county and culture and authors. Learn the likes and dislikes of the woman in question. Play up to the lady's likes, assure her they are your own ideas."

He classified his targets with the precision of a naturalist. Redheads, he said, were most susceptible. Blondes were phlegmatic. Brunettes were tough customers. He recommended roses as a standard opening. "Every woman loves roses. A woman loves any man who pretends to be, or is, a gentleman. I am a gentleman. I've drawn upon my store of poetry and philosophy."

Above all: subordinate sex. Be a gentleman always.

The whirlwind courtship was his signature. Police records showed he had married two women within the same month. He would meet a woman, establish the European title, produce letters of reference from "Philadelphia people" attesting to his wealthy family, propose within weeks, and then on or immediately after the wedding day, visit a jeweler with his new wife's gems to have them appraised and insured. He would not return from the jeweler.

"I never took a thing from any one," he told the Daily News in 1927, handcuffed outside a criminal court building, performing a kind of injured dignity for the photographers. "The women just gave their things to me outright. The only charge any one can make is bad faith."

He appeared to believe this. Or he appeared to appear to believe it, which amounted, in practice, to the same thing.

When asked how many women he had loved, he gave an answer he seemed to find genuinely funny: "I am through with women. They only make me lots of trouble. How many have I made love to? Well, enough. I have only been married three times, though. I certainly never committed bigamy."

The police estimated he had been married considerably more than three times. They believed there were probably fifty women in the United States alone, and perhaps fifty more in Europe, about whom they didn't yet know.

The women themselves are the story, and they have been largely flattened by history into a collective — the victims, the dupes, the marks. But they were specific people with specific lives, and what happened to them after Sigmund Engel was also specific.

Mrs. Rose Burken lived on West 111th Street in New York. She was a widow. She had a daughter named Agnes. After Whitman disappeared with her jewelry, she sold her home, planning to move somewhere quiet in the country where she could forget, as the newspaper put it with a certain grim poeticism, "the loss of her jewels and the pleasing manners of Lord Beaverbrook."

She did not forget. She went to the police. She identified him when he was arrested. She testified at his trial. She answered the defense attorney's questions about her divorce, her children, her marital history, with the patience of someone who had decided the humiliation of the witness stand was worth it.

He got ten years. She begged for his release after five.

This is not as strange as it sounds, or rather it is exactly as strange as it sounds but not for the reasons one might assume. Women wrote letters for him, appeared in courtrooms for him, brought him fruit baskets in jail, posted bond, hired lawyers, vouched for his character, and in at least one documented case traveled from out of state to pat his hand in front of his accusers. The Milwaukee Leader noted, with visible bafflement, that his victims "were anxious to meet Whitman, intending to send him money and clothing."

He told an interviewer in 1925: "I can't tell you just why they all fall for me. But I do believe they will continue to do so in the future as they have in the past. Oh, I guess I'm what you boys call a real devil among the women."

He said this without embarrassment and apparently without irony. The interviewer wrote it down.

The 1928 trial was the event that made him briefly famous, and the coverage is extraordinary to read now — not for what it reveals about him, but for what it reveals about the era's understanding of the women he victimized.

The newspapers treated the proceedings as comedy. The Daily News headline: 'LORD'S' LOVES ARE COURT JESTERS. The piece described "chuckles and grins" opening the day when the catchpenny Lord Beaverbrook strutted into court with a bundle of newspapers under his arm. A reporter noted that Mrs. Martin's testimony, "although brief, was also rather hectic," and mentioned in passing that she had been married four times before the Beaverbrook nuptials, which she said didn't count.

The spectators laughed at her. They laughed at Mrs. Burken when she lost her temper under cross-examination. They laughed when the princess arrived.

Meanwhile Robert Whitman sat cool as a man who had been in courtrooms before, which he had, and watched his lawyer work. He wore a good suit. He declined to testify.

The jury was out less than two hours. Guilty of grand larceny. Ten years in state prison.

He was taken to Sing Sing. He signed the blotter Robert Whitman. He listed as his contact a woman named Louisa, of 119th Street in New York, giving her address in the space marked "nearest relative."

He served five years. Mrs. Burken wrote letters requesting his parole.

There is no record of her explanation for this. There are only the letters.

He was released. He violated parole. He vanished.

By 1938 the British papers were running notices warning women on multiple continents. New York Deputy Police Commissioner Lyons announced that the wanted man had at least 350 different aliases and had probably married and abandoned well over 1,000 women. He had netted approximately £200,000 in cash and jewels. He had contracted bigamous marriages in England and France as well as the United States.

He had vanished entirely.

He reappeared in 1944, in Portland, Oregon, under the name Paul Dennis Palmer, facing a fraud charge. He forfeited his bond and vanished again.

By 1949 he was seventy-three years old, in Chicago, and still working.

The last chapter has the quality of something that should be a coda but keeps insisting on being a whole act.

Mrs. Reseda Corrigan was thirty-nine years old, a widow with three grown children, living in Chicago. She met a charming older man. He sent roses. He spoke beautifully. He told her he could give her $250,000 if she would marry him Monday. She thought this was unusual. She thought, in fact, that he was just no good. She told the police.

They set a trap. He arrived at the lawyer's office and, in a gesture so perfectly characteristic it reads as parody, produced $400 in cash at the police station and $5,000 more the following day as a partial repayment of the $8,700 he owed her. He seemed to believe this settled the matter.

Arraigned on Monday. He spoke to reporters on Friday.

"Women are my career," he said. "Maybe scientists will learn thirty years from now that's a good thing." He continued: "I've taken a lot of money from women. There's nothing to it. You ask a woman for money and, naturally, she's going to give it to you."

He had an offer for Mrs. Corrigan, he mentioned. He would marry her. He believed this was generous.

The reporters asked about his total take over fifty years of operation. He was expansive. Maybe five or six million dollars, he said. The police estimated one to two million. He was asked about King Solomon. "I could make King Solomon with all his wives look like a piker," he said. He considered. "I could make it 1,001 if they let me out of here."

He was not let out. Sentenced to two to ten years in Stateville Prison, eventually transferred to Menard State Penitentiary, then to Kankakee State Hospital, committed as a hopeless mental case.

He died on August 1, 1957. He was eighty-four years old. He had spent twenty-three years of his life in prison.

The Kentucky New Era ran six paragraphs. It noted that he had operated on several continents and used thirty-two different names, though other sources counted considerably more. It mentioned that he had frequently posed as Sam Engel, a Hollywood movie producer, and had delighted in taking women to theaters where actual Engel productions were playing and pointing to the name when it appeared in the credits. He spent his last years in a mental institution in Illinois.

The career was over.

The question that the 1920s newspapers could not quite bring themselves to ask directly, and that history has mostly left unasked, is not why so many women fell for him. That part is not particularly mysterious. He was educated, charming, well-dressed, attentive, multilingual, and relentless in his attention. He sent roses. He learned what books you liked and read them. He spoke about your interests as if they were his own. He proposed quickly, which in an era of few options for women of a certain age and a certain loneliness read as urgency and devotion rather than technique.

The question is what happened afterward.

Mrs. Burken lost her jewelry and her home and her composure on the witness stand while spectators laughed, and then she wrote letters asking for his release. She is not named in any account as stupid. She is named as a widow from Freeport who trusted a man.

The Milwaukee paper, in 1927, noted that many of his victims were anxious to meet Whitman even after his conviction, and wanted to send him money and clothes. It offered no theory as to why. Neither did anyone else.

He offered one, at various times, in various forms. Women want to believe, he said. They want what he was selling — the attention, the elegance, the certainty that someone found them worth pursuing — badly enough that they will overlook evidence that accumulates right in front of them. He was not describing weakness. He was describing longing. He had simply learned to locate it, measure it, and price it.

"I can't tell you just why they all fall for me," he said in 1925. "But I do believe they will continue to do so in the future as they have in the past."

He was right. They did. For another twenty-four years.

Sources: Brooklyn Eagle (May 25, 1926) · Pittsburgh Post (May 25, 1926) · Winchester Sun (May 25, 1926) · Washington Times (October 24, 1925) · El Dorado Daily News (November 8, 1925) · South Bend News-Times (November 22, 1925) · Alaska Daily Empire (January 9, 1926) · Daily News (July 7, 1927) · San Antonio Evening News (July 12, 1927) · Milwaukee Leader (September 3, 1927) · Brooklyn Daily Times (January 27, 1928) · Daily News (January 27, 1928) · Philadelphia Inquirer (February 21, 1928) · Washington Times (January 27, 1928) · Montgomery Advertiser (October 18, 1925) · Detroit Free Press (June 26, 1949) · Los Angeles Times (June 26, 1949) · Sunday Oregonian (June 26, 1949) · Daily Mirror (September 30, 1938) · Daily News (November 14, 1938) · Kentucky New Era (August 2, 1956) · Sing Sing Prison Receiving Blotter, Robert Whitman, Inmate No. 80786, February 20, 1928