The Impostor Heiress: Cassie Chadwick, the Greatest Grifter of the Gilded Age

Glamorous con artist Cassie Chadwick (1857–1907) poses as the heir of industrialist Andrew Carnegie in historian Reed’s juicy first book. Born Elizabeth Bigley in a small Canadian farming community, at a young age she became obsessed with the trappings of wealth and began running small scams; as a teenager, she posed as an heiress who had not yet come into her inheritance, handing out forged promissory notes from respectable people as proof. After getting caught for this scam in her hometown (but being exonerated by a bemused jury), she moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where she adopted the name Cassie and refined her craft, cycling through numerous smaller scams (including soothsaying) and several well-heeled marriages. Chadwick (a name taken from her third husband) “had a knack of drawing men into her web and holding them fast,” writes Reed; eventually, she used this gift to “reveal” to gullible bankers that, as Carnegie’s illegitimate daughter, she stood to inherit $400 million, but couldn’t access the funds yet. Chadwick lived lavishly off this lie for 14 years, taking out new loans to pay off old ones, all backed by forged promissory notes; the scheme collapsed in 1904, taking several prominent bankers with it (“Ponzi is a piker compared to Cassie,” read one headline) and resulting in Chadwick’s imprisonment. Narrated in stylish prose with the galloping pace of a thriller, this charms. (June)