Behind the Bastards - Part Two: The Con Artist Who Invented A Country

Episode Date: November 12, 2020

Robert is joined again by Laci Mosley to continue to discuss conman, Gregor MacGregor. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. But you are a professional podcaster? You hosted several? That does not sound right. I know. Even when I said it, I was like, hmm. Yeah.

You're Robert Evans, the host of Behind the Bastards, a show about the worth people of mystery, and today. Oh, I forgot it because of the head injuries. Well, then I guess I should read this script that someone has handed me. And the script says that my guest today is Lacey Mosley. The script is right. Oh, I love a manufactured Jamaican air horn. It's my favorite. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. There's no air horn like the one you pretend to make with your mouth. It's that. So Lacey, how's it going? Good. The same, I assume, because it's minutes after we've recorded the first episode. It's going good. It's nice to talk to people.

Like on days where I have lots of podcasts, I'm like, oh, this is going to be a long day. But then I'm like, oh, it's just talking to people I like. So then it's great. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I don't have many social outlets these days because of the plague and being an introvert. So yes, I too, I too get all of my social life by talking about con men with my friends over the Internet. So thank you for being my con man friend.

Yes. I love this. Wait, were you doing lots of socializing before COVID? I feel like you were. No. No. No. No.

I was mostly hiding in a fortified compound. Anyway, so when Gregor McGregor traveled back to London in 1821, he brought back with him his wife in a scheme that was on the surface very silly. The land that he'd been given was beautiful, but again, worthless from a financial perspective. It was a bad place to grow. It was completely uncultivated. So discovering like whatever resources might be there would take lifetimes worth of work. You'd have to cut through miles of jungle to even do anything. There were natives there, but none of the kind of cultivated infrastructure that Europeans looked for in colonial prospects.

Remember the most successful colonies that Europeans took were in places where like locals had been doing shit for a while. Right. Like food was growing, like shit was, they kind of had to just move in. And this is not that. This is like, this is actual uncultivated country. None of this mattered to Gregor, obviously, because he had no plan doing anything. Right. Employee.

His plan was to lie and pretend it was an actual independent nation filled with riches and fertile land and friendly natives. Eager to learn from British civilizations. Friendly natives. You know natives we love when the Brits come and take all our shit and give us diseases. All the natives loves us. They love it. Oh, that doesn't sound like the British name. More than 40 times they did that.

Smallpox. Come over here. We love to see it. So, yeah, his plan was to drum up a media frenzy around his new country in Great Britain and sell plots of land back to gullible rubes. And then it wasn't really clear what he planned to do after that. But it was like, if you've seen the monorail episode of The Simpsons, that's kind of what he was going for, it seems like. So as it happened, Gregor landed in London during the best possible time to sell a fake Latin American nation to idiots. And I'm going to explain how this scheme got off the ground.

But first, I'm going to have to walk you through how stock trading worked in the 1820s. And this is a funner story than you might expect. So the idea of trading stocks is still pretty new in the 1820s. People have not been doing it in like a kind of recognizable modern way for a long time. The whole concept had arisen in London during the time of Queen Elizabeth I and of what was called merchant banking. The selling and trading of various commodities. Now, this took off in the Isles because the continent of Europe spent basically the 1700s and 1800s fighting a bunch of horribly bloody wars. And the men who profited from those wars did all of their financial gambling in London because London was safe, right?

People aren't getting over to England and doing their fighting. So it's a pretty good place to do your trading. So it was an English bank that managed the $15 million loan that let the US buy Louisiana. And it was Rothschild's bank that loaned Britain and her allies more than 100 million pounds during the Napoleonic Wars. Now, when those wars ended, the situation is kind of like it was for the US and World War II, where everyone else is devastated and the British are doing all right. And they kind of like wind up holding everybody's money at the end of that war. And so with the fighting over, you had all these rich guys who had more money than ever and they wanted to make even more money with that. Because that's the only thing rich guys do with huge piles of money.

Yeah, they're hoarders. Yeah, they're hoarders and they want to like make more money. And so they want to like gamble on something and the Royal Exchange had for decades kind of handled that gambling. But by the end of the Napoleonic Wars, there's way too much money for this tiny little exchange to handle. And there was no like real regulation. And this had started to become a problem. They were all these frauds and conmen and yeah, people were worried that the entire economy was going to collapse under like a whole bunch of giant grifts. And this had happened before.

It had kind of happened repeatedly as soon as people started trading stocks. In 1720, there was something called the South Sea Bubble. This started when the South Sea Company bribed the British government with millions of dollars in exchange for monopoly on South American trade. The government needed that money for a different war with France. So they passed a bill to make this legal. And suddenly all like the South Sea Company stock rises to 10 times its value and all of these Englishmen see like it's like with Bitcoin. Suddenly like, oh my God, that got worth so much more overnight. Something else has got to be like that.

What if I invest in something else and then I can get rich too? And so there's like anyway, speculation starts running wild and people start investing in some really stupid shit. And I'm going to quote from a write up in Historic UK here. Speculation ran wild and all sorts of companies, some lunatics, some fraudulent or just optimistic were launched. For example, one company floated was to buy the Irish bogs. Another was to manufacture a gun to fire square cannonballs. And most ludicrous at all. Quote, this was an investment at the time for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but no one to know what it is.

Yes, that's my kind of scam. Silicon Valley. They're like, if we tell you then somebody's gonna steal it, but just give us money for the thing that we're making. Yeah. And of course the bubble burst in the entire economy collapsed and the government had to resign. So like that had happened about a century before and people saw the same stuff starting to happen again and they got like really worried. So the more level headed citizens in England decided to make a system of rules and regulations to govern the selling of stocks. So the country wouldn't be destroyed completely by reckless greed.

And this is kind of how the London Stock Exchange came about. And like there's there's a lot more to the history than that, but that's more or less the anyway. So you get this stock exchange by the 1800s and it regulates trading and only approved entities could list commodities for sale or sell commercial stocks. So fraud was kept to a minimum, which was good for the economy, but bad for people who want to get rich quick. Right. Bad for fraud. Bad for fraud. So the London Stock Exchange worked for a while to keep fraud in check, but then Napoleon loses his war and the British wind up with all of the money in the world. And that kind of makes people reckless.

So they start looking for schemes that they can't find on the London Stock Exchange because it's vaguely legitimate. And I'm going to quote from the economist here to explain what happened next. The economy was expanding steadily driven on by manufacturing. The cost of living was falling with industrial workers' wages rising. Interest rates drifted down with the government borrowing more and more cheaply. The country was in an upbeat mood. The downside to all this was that investing in government debt, a staple place to park spare funds, had become boring. The market rate on the most popular British government bond fell steadily between 1800 and 1825.

The government made the most of this, swapping its existing debt for new bonds that paid rates as low as 3%. All this gave British investors the incentive and the confidence to look for more exciting opportunities. One option was to lend money to governments that paid higher interest rates. Russia, Prussia, and Denmark all had good credit records, but offered a 5% return. So this is how it happens at first as they start investing in foreign companies that offer more of a return than the government. And foreign bonds weren't traded in the stock exchange, so there's no regulation. Now this is okay when you're investing in Denmark, because Denmark is a real country. And you know that your investment is not going to just fly away, right?

Prussia is not going to default on all of its debt. But right at this time, it's kind of an open place where scammers could establish themselves. And it's not like scam is maybe the wrong way to put it, but less safe bets start being possible. So all of these South American colonies that we've been talking about had been in the process of fighting wars against their colonial oppressors and winning them. And you start having independent South American states at this point. And these are very new countries, and they just finished fighting these horrible wars, so they had a need for a bunch of cash. And all of these people in Great Britain are both obsessed with South America, and they have too much money. So you get this kind of like perfect storm, and it starts with Columbia, which is the first new nation that comes to the people of Great Britain asking for a loan.

They wanted two million pounds, and they're willing to offer a 6% return rate, which was actually illegal in Britain at the time. What? Because it's too high? Because it's too high, and the government's like, anything with a return that high has to be somehow sketchy. But people fall for this, and they love it, and they invest a shitload of money in Columbia. And the way that Columbia has to like, the first country to do this is Columbia. So they kind of go to an effort to convince people that they're legitimate, that like they'll be able to pay this back. So they print up all these brochures with lists of like the revenues they expect to make, and how good their tobacco market's going to be, and how much gold and silver they're going to be mining as soon as the economy gets off the ground.

So it seems like a stable investment. People go fucking wild for Colombian bonds, and the bonds run out almost immediately. And so people start like, yeah, people are very hungry for another opportunity like that, and so Chile comes up. And Chile's like, well, we'd like a loan too. And then Peru comes up next. And by the time Peru starts offering investments, they're not even telling people what natural resources they have to guarantee their... They're just being like, hey, we're fucking Peru, you guys, what's some of this shit? And they guessed correctly that like London was no one was going to factor. They're like, we just like Colombia. We just like, no, everything they said, that's what we're doing too, in Peru. Just give us the money.

Yeah, of course we probably have gold, probably. You don't know. Fuck it. The soil very rich. I saw... Great soil. Yeah. I saw a plant the other day. Anyway, give us the money. Now, these were not all great investments. Obviously, all these countries do have natural resources, but Latin America was still fighting a whole bunch of civil wars. All of these countries were still fighting like none of their governments were actually really all that settled at this point.

They had no credit history and nothing was known about the resources of these places or when they would start being the kind of... Seeing the kind of profits that all these British people were going to expect. Right. And it wasn't even possible to truly vet that all the men claiming to represent these governments were who they said they were. Because it's the time of war, so it's like who... Yeah. Anybody. None of these nations are even recognized by the British government.

So, like... Now, I don't think that's the only path to being legitimate is being recognized by the colonizers. However, I do think it's fun that it's like... Yeah. We don't know who's going to be in charge tomorrow. We are definitely still at war. Yeah. And if you are a British investor and your country doesn't recognize this as a country, that might be a sign that like, okay, this maybe I should be a little bit more...

I don't know. Little precious. Yeah. They invested a bunch of money in these places. And this is the London that Gregor McGregor, the prince of Poyer, walks into in 1822. And the only disadvantage he had when he was trying... Because he wants to do the same thing with Poyer. He wants to put it up for a bond issue and like get a bunch of money from people who are expecting it to be paid back. And the only disadvantage he has in doing this is that Spain had never owned his country.

So one reason British folks were willing to invest in like Columbia or Peru is that the Spanish had fought like hell to hold on to these places. So even though they didn't know exactly what resources these countries had, they figured if the Spanish are willing to fight hard for them, there's got to be. Yeah, exactly. Now, so Poyer didn't have that, but it had an advantage that none of the Latin American countries issuing bonds in Great Britain had, which is that its head of state was in London. And its head of state is of course, Gregor McGregor. Yeah.

So he immediately goes to the press. Like that's his first thing. Smart. And he starts talking about how like basically talking at Poyer is this like utopia with undiscovered riches and stuff. And he has it. He hires a bunch of assistants to write newspaper ads and leaflets and ballads to be broadcast by like street singers in London and Edinburgh and Glasgow to try to convince people. So he hired Drake to sing about Poyer. He was like, we pop in bottles.

This is a real thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Every day that rhymes. We bop in bottles and Poyer every day. Yeah, it is. Shit. Yeah, fuck. That's good.

I would go. So we have some examples of some of the ads that he hired. This one was published in the Glasgow Sentinel and I'm going to read it now. The climate is remarkably healthy and agrees admirably ably with the constitution of Europeans, many of whom having become much debilitated by a long residence in the West Indies have been completely restored to health by removal for a short period to the Bay of Honduras. Poyer is extremely rich and fertile, bearing three crops of Indian corn in a year and produces not only all the necessities of life and profusion, but is well adapted for the cultivation of all those valuable commodities which have rendered the West Indies so important, especially coffee, sugar, cotton, tobacco, cocoa, etc. So everything valuable grows here and the climate makes you healthier if you're European. Right.

And everyone's coming here to the island. The land heals the sick, basically is what he said. Beautiful snake oil sales. Yeah, heals sick white people. Only white people. Don't worry. We'll only heal sick white people. Well, you know, it's kind of a thing at this period.

All the places where Europeans are making all of their money by selling and mining commodities kill Europeans in huge quantities because, you know, they're giving smallpox to the natives, but like they don't have immunity to like any of the local diseases either. So, yeah, there's a lot of reasonable questions that responsible men asked about this investment scheme. For example, Gregor, how do you plan to plan to repay this loan? And Gregor answered that Poyer had a lot of gold and it had all sorts of animals that could be hunted and it had great soil and soon there'd be a bunch of stuff for sale. And so when he said this, people were like, hey, Gregor, if Poyer has all this shit, why has no one ever traded with it before? And Gregor's like, well, the locals were too scared of getting the Spanish attention and then Spain would colonize them and like they didn't want that. And so then they were like, well, why didn't Spain conquer Poyer? Like they were right there. And he was like, well, there's mountains too. There's all these big mountains, huge, biggest mountains you've ever seen. No one could get into it.

And a really deep lake, like the deepest lake and lots of lake currents, sharks, lake sharks. Tons of sharks, sky sharks too. Nobody could get in. So these, again, are all pretty transparent lies, but nobody was checking him out because people just have money to burn and they want to get in on South America. So the loan that Gregor wound up seeking on behalf of Poyer was 200,000 pounds, just a fraction of what larger nations had asked for, but enough to make him very rich. It's the equivalent of about like 11 million dollars or 11 million pounds, I guess, today. Yeah, it's a lot of money. So if Gregor had been an ordinary con man, he would have focused on just this grift. But by 1822, Gregor had gotten good at being a con man and the loan was just his side grift. His real plan was to convince hundreds and hundreds and eventually thousands of English and Scotsman to sell their property, buy land from him, and immigrate to Poyer to help civilize it. Now, I should note here that there's some debate about whether or not he actually intended to try to settle and govern a new nation.

There's some evidence that like he did on Amelia Island, he wanted to move all these people out there so they could form the core of a private country. But he never actually tried to do this. And whether or not he intended to try and start a settlement, the plan was a con from the beginning. And evidence of this comes from the propaganda booklet he wrote to entice colonists to immigrate. It was titled Poyer, Sketch of the Mosquito Shore, including the territory of Poyer, descriptive of the country, with some information as to its productions. Now, he credited the writing of the book to Thomas Strangeways, a man who did not exist, but was supposedly a captain in the Poyerian military, which also did not exist. That was his fake friend's name. What a name. Yeah, Johnny fake name, my good friend.

Jesus. Timothy lecture. So the booklet was a pretty good piece of con art. It opened with an apology that the contents were very dry and serious and wouldn't be entertaining to ordinary readers. Because he knew that the intelligent and like serious men who would agree to invest in Poyer wanted only the best information. They didn't want it to be flowery and interesting. They wanted serious facts. And that's all he was going to give you. So like first off, he's being like, oh, if you're not really, if you're expecting like a lurid read, like this is for serious people.

So like clearly, if you're into this, you're a serious person. Apologies. This book is not for the poor. Yeah, not for poor and dumb people. This leaflet. Just the very smart. Yeah. So the book was a bunch of included a bunch of like plagiarized descriptions of different plants and like lies about the growing season and also these very elaborate calculations for how much farms of different sizes and plantations of different sizes could expect to earn.

And all of this was lies, but he did all like all of the math was laid out in a way that like, oh, wow, this has to be legitimate. He did a bunch of math. There are numbers in this leaflet. Yeah. And these calculations went next to like things that were a lot less reasonable, like claiming that like it had more fresh water than anywhere else. And all of the freshwater rivers were also just filled with hunks of gold that you could pick up. And like it's this mix of like, yeah, it's very fun, very fun stuff. Wait, one question. This poye because you didn't inherit land that wasn't.

Yeah, there's real land. There's real land. Poye is the location of the land that he inherited. Yes. Okay, got it. Yeah. You know what isn't fake land kind of grifted from. Where are you on here, buddy?

I don't know, Sophie. I don't know anymore. Let's just roll the ads. Don't be sad, Robert. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy.

Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the gun badass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven.

Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space.

313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI.

How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. So, we're back. I missed the ads already, but we need to talk more about Gregor McGregor. So, Thomas' guidebook included lengthy descriptions of the local natives. The local Poyazians, I think. I like Poyazians. Yeah, Poyazians, I think is the correct way. In his description, the Poyazians basically had no real culture of their own. Their culture was that they loved the British. Yo, he really sold up the white man story. Yeah, he knew how to sell this shit.

Like, he's not dumb. He knows his people. Their culture is they love you. That's all I talk about. They love you. He wrote, a tradition has long prevailed among them that the grey-eyed people, meaning the English, have been particularly appointed to protect them from oppression and bondage. That's his good grift, yeah. All of the women are young and their breasts are right underneath their chin All they want to do is marry an old decrepit British man. The old and nasty men. The women won't marry young men. They won't fuck anyone under 70. So, yeah, he tells them that these people are probably descendants of the Aztecs,

so they're formerly civilized people who needed English help to rescue them from barbarism. He was like, look, they were colonized once and they loved it. The colonization chef's kiss and they really wanted you guys to come back. Yeah. So, yeah, he wrote, quote, they have repeatedly shun an anxious desire to acquire the arts of Europe as is manifest by their repeated invitations to the English to form settlements among them, as well as by their former offers to seed a part of their country to Great Britain, thereby showing that their aversion to Spain does not extend to all other nations of Europe.

Yeah. Can't wait for you white people to get here. They need you. They don't know how to have a country without you. Said every indigenous population. Where are the white people? What are they getting here? All we've got is this unspoiled country and like a culture not based on constant toil and like, ah. You know what we really need is some incredibly filthy cities choking to death on cold us. God, if only we had cold us. Tell Turlington to pull up. We're ready.

So, yeah, he also goes into length in this book about like how happy the natives are to be hired for basically nothing and how like, oh, you just give them ammunition and they'll hunt all the food that you need. They love doing it. And also, you know, if you hire them and pay them, they never want raises. Like they're happy getting paid the same amount forever. They also want to be treated as second class citizens. Oh, they love it. Can't get enough of being second class citizens. You know what they said to me the other day? They were like, what if we had a system of segregation here? Wouldn't that be grand?

They said to me, me, McGregor, they said, we are tired of opportunity. What do we all say about that? So he also lied about the present extent of European civilization. Claiming that a forgotten load of British settlers had already set up like a nice orderly European city in the country that was its capital. Like there's already a white people's city waiting for you. All you got to do is land there. You'll have workers. You'll have a nice city with a bunch of comforts. Like it'll be fine. All you got to do is set up your farms. They're ready to just be planted and you can just start making money right away.

And wait, McGregor, you said the city is called White People City. Yeah, White Topia. It's full of nice white people things. It's got, I don't know, John Mayer is always there. He never leaves. White conda forever. Selling white conda. Oh, I love it. Condos as far as the eye can see. Burritos with no spices at all. It's amazing. I love that you thought that. Do you think I said condo? Oh, I mean, yeah. Like what condo forever? White condo.

Oh, that's better. I thought you were making a comment about white people's famous love of condos. Soap's up your neck in her head. Robert. So hundreds and hundreds of people sign up and they all start paying him a ton of money for acreage. He's making money hand over fist for this land that these people had never seen. And the bulk of his volunteers were Scotsmen because McGregor finally figures out how to con his own people. Beautiful. Yeah. It starts at home. It starts at home. Yeah.

The historians have spent a decent amount of time trying to tease out why Scottish people were particularly vulnerable to this scheme. And there's an interesting paragraph in the BBC on it. Quote, According to Columbia University psychologist Tori Higgins, people are usually more likely to be swayed by one or other of the two motivational lines. Some people are promotion focused. They think of possible positive gains. In some prevention focused, they focused on losses and avoiding mistakes. An approach that unites the Alpha with the Omega appeals to both mindsets, however, giving it universal appeal. And it's easy to see how McGregor's proposition offered this potent combination. He published interviews and national papers, for instance, touting the perks that would come from investing or settling in poye.

He highlighted the bravery and fortitude that such a gesture would demonstrate. You wouldn't just be smart. You would be a real man. The Scottish Highlanders were known for their hardiness and adventurous spirit. He wrote, poye would be the ultimate testing ground, a challenge and a gift all in one. Gotta love toxic masculinity. It's like, are you going to move to poye or is your dick small? Yeah. I'm working on using that grift. Like, are you too much of a coward to get into a gunfight with the FDA SWAT team? Like, oh, I mean, if you don't want to get into a gunfight with the FDA, then don't move to my compound and die from it.

Yeah, what's wrong with you? I mean, that's a personal problem. What's wrong with you? Oh, you're a coward. No, that's fine. It's cool to be a coward. That's cool. Yeah. Like, you don't have, like the cool people are going to go die fighting the FDA. You don't have to. Because you're not cool. Yeah, you can live the rest of your life knowing that you're a layman. Yeah, yeah, knowing that you suck. So, it is also speculated that one reason the Scots were particularly interested in this is that they were jealous of the English and all of their fancy colonies.

And there was also a manner of honor at stake here. In the late 1600s, the Scots had tried to start a colony on the Gulf of Darien near Panama. And it was a poorly led shit show and basically everyone either died or were conquered by Spain. And Scotland invested fully 20% of all of its money in the scheme, which kind of destroyed the entire country for years. They were bad at colonizing. I kind of like that for them. Yeah, yeah, it is nice about them. I mean, they're good at being the soldiers of colonial oppressors because that's how the British did a lot of their fighting. Oh, yeah, yikes. Before they had African soldiers to fight for them, they had Scots to conquer the chunks of Africa and then hired African soldiers to fight under Scottish officers. It's the whole thing, yeah. They're not dumb.

So, yeah, you would think that having been a part of this like giant scheme that had crashed the entire economy and cost a bunch of people their lives would have actually built like a cultural immunity to schemes in Scotland. But it just made them feel like they had a shame to wipe out and the Gregor took advantage of that. He pointed out that colonizing Poyet would like this will wipe out the shame of Darien. Like nobody's going to be talking about Darien because you're going to have Poyet. People are going to be like, ah, those Scots. They're so good at colonizing. So Gregor was flooded with applicants and he happily set to work hiring and refitting a small fleet of boats for the journey. The first one set sail in September with 70 immigrants aboard. These were to be the vanguard. They were there to prepare the way for everybody else. Now Gregor, of course, stayed behind to prepare the next wave of ships and in his stead he promoted the most gollible of the settlers, commissioning a former British army officer named Hector Hall as Lieutenant Colonel of the fictional second native regiment of foot. Beautiful. Gregor even generously made him the Lieutenant Governor too and granted him a 12,800 acre estate that again absolutely did not exist.

He said, you're king of everything. Now get to work. Now do all the stuff for me. So the second wave of colonists would depart in November after their ship was refit to carry 250 people. And while Gregor waited, he designed and printed his own Poyezian currency and started handing it out to colonists in exchange for their gold. From the land that never was, quote, the new world of their dreams suddenly became a very real world as the men accepted the Kaziks dollar notes with the coat of arms, the crest of the bank of Poyez and the promise that on demand or three months after site in the option of the government of Poyez, one hard dollar will be paid to the bearer at the bank office in St. Joseph. The people who had bought land and who had planned to take their savings with them in coin were also delighted to exchange their gold for the legal currency of Poyez. He loved to print money. He loved to print money, but Gregor did. He said, give me your real money. It's a good scheme. You've got to get on a boat. All that gold's heavy. You know, it's not heavy. These totally real dollars.

These Poyez books. Oh, yeah. Real as hell they are. So just as the refitting neared completion disaster struck, see the financial market that had gotten so bullish in investing in all these South American bonds started to get a little bit like antsy because the Colombian government basically the Colombian government wrote a letter or something to England being like, Hey, you know the guy who's been saying he's our representative? Like he didn't actually have the right to ask for a loan. Yeah, we don't know her. We're not really sure what's going on here. So this worries the people who had invested shitloads of money in Colombia and like a panic takes a hold of the market. And this spreads to the holders of Chilean and Peruvian bonds and there start to be like warnings in the press that people might like, yeah, people might have might be about to lose all of their money. So the bubble bursts and people stop buying Gregor's bonds, which he had not sold all of the bonds he was trying to issue. So he's in a cash crunch.

Now this didn't halt colonization because he had a bunch of money that he'd gotten from these people who are buying fake land from him. But so he had to like rush along and send, you know, hundreds of people off on these two boats and then travel back to London to find a way to grift more money. And it's funny the way he does this. He meets this like British Army officer who's like a very rich and famous man in London and offers him a place to stay. And Gregor becomes good friends with him and he's like, hey, I'll make you the ambassador to Poyer if you like, help me get some bank loans and shit. You can be the other king. We have two kings. So while he's doing this, the first shipload of colonists landed Poyer in early 1823 and they were immediately surprised by a couple of things. For one thing, there was no European style capital right at the edge of the harbor like the drawings that Gregor had showed them had depicted. In fact, there were no signs, no roads, no buildings, no signs of what they called civilization at all.

And there's also no signs of the friendly natives that they'd been promised were eagerly awaiting them. There's no people that they see at first. The first wave of guys splash ashore and they're just kind of baffled. The land's beautiful, but it's completely undeveloped and there's no clear way to make farms there. You'd have to chop down hundreds of trees and put in soil and everything. So yeah, this would not have been an impossible task. Obviously, you could have turned this land into land that had farms and shit on it. If the expedition there had been filled with people who were ready to do that, like a bunch of experienced woodsmen and young farmers who were used to hard work and expecting it.

But the party that Gregor had sent to be the first people in the Poitiers consisted of only a couple of veteran soldiers and younger farmers with any sort of experience with hard work. The rest of the party was a mix of lawyers, artisans, a banker, and one young man who Gregor had promised would be the first theater director on the island of Poitiers. He was Ja Rule. This is the first fire fest. Yeah, there's a Ja Rule. And there were some other farmers, but most of them were old men who like had hoped that they'd get to retire in a place that Gregor had promised that Gregor had told them that like the climate in Poitiers extends the lives of English people.

And then there were clerks who were supposed to staff the empty government offices in a capital that did not exist. So this was not the crew of people you would pick to build civilization from the ground up using nothing but hand tools, right? Like these aren't the folks who are going to clear cut forests and start farms from nothing. Oh my gosh. These are the influencer girls. Yeah, these are a lot of influencers, right? Like there's a lot of people who basically thought like, basically a lot of people who were like middle class and upper middle class and who were told like, you want to be aristocrats, you move here, you can be like the new aristocracy of this new country. And then like, ah, there's no country. Sorry.

But you are still aristocracy. Look, you can rule that tree. You can rule those leaves. You're the richest guy in the woods, according to the fake dollars I gave you. That you can use nowhere because there's no one here. You cannot use. So there were people, there were natives and some of the natives were friendly, but others weren't and like none of them had any desire to work for white people. Like because they were doing their own thing. They were like, well, like we're fine. We already have lines. Like what do you guys are all dying?

Like we don't we don't want to like nobody wants to take advice from you. It should not be that easy for white people to think that people want to work for this. And they were like, of course they want to work for us for nothing. They want to be exploited by us. Come on. Well, this is where we get to the thing about this that is this a beautiful piece of historic irony because all of the white men here, they weren't particularly bad within sort of the context of their cultures, but they all had the same thing that basically all white Europeans had, which is this belief that like they inherently knew how to be civilized

in a way that other peoples of the world didn't. And like that's why they should take all this land from these people is they knew how to civilize it. And so finally, a group of these people who believe that they were who believe that they were going to help a bunch of poor non-white people learn how to be civilized. This group of people finds themselves in a land that's actually truly wild and undeveloped. And so that was like, okay guys, like you're here. Are you going to make a civilization now? Can you do it? And of course not. They all completely fucking collapsed because there was nothing for them to just take over and steal.

They actually would have had to build civilization from the ground up and none of them were ready to do that. They're like, we did that once and then we stole everything from everybody else. And we didn't like people like a thousand years ago did that once and we've just been kind of coasting. Like I'm going to be honest, we stole guns from China and it's been easy. So some of this was the fault of the lieutenant governor who refused to lead his party to higher ground and build permanent structures. See midway through the unloading of the equipment, they brought a storm and hit the coast and the captain of the boat that dropped them there used this as an excuse to abandon them and sell the rest of their stuff.

And the governor couldn't believe he'd been abandoned and he wanted everyone to stay close to shore because he thought a boat was coming back to rescue them. That there had been some mistake. And there is like an actual town that's like a several days journey away that's where like the actual king of the Mosquito Coast is based out of and like there's some civilization by the European terms there, but it's not very big. They don't have any interest in taking these people's money and they certainly like when they talk to this guy who has supposedly this king

who supposedly made Gregor Prince and he's like, I don't know what the fuck you're talking about. I gave that dude some land, but like I was not like nobody. Nobody wants you all to civilize us. Like what are you what's what's going on here? Yeah, so they're kind of fucked. Yeah, you know who isn't kind of fucked though. The products and services that support this podcast. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations.

And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark and on the gun badass way and nasty sharks.

He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left offending the Union's last outpost.

This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI.

How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, we're back. So these people have just realized that they've been grifted and that there's no country for them and that they're alone in the wilderness with dwindling supplies. And so for months, they did very little. They were just kind of waiting for the second colony ship and a chance to escape. Some of them hunted for meat. Others dug holes in the sand to collect semi-drinkable water. They didn't have any rum, which was used to clean water back then. So everybody starts getting sick. And eventually the second boat does arrive along with 250 new colonists. And, you know, they realized that something's gone wrong, but the boat that took them wasn't hired to take them back and they didn't have any money because their only money is fake.

So they're all stuck too. Damn. I feel like I had to try to finesse on that boat. I've been like, y'all pull out or whatever this place is called. It's great. Y'all just go head up that way. Okay. I'm going to go to the boat. So they're they're a little fucked with all the new blood that's just come in. They briefly try to like build permanent structures. They try to chop down pine trees and float them on the river down to their camp, which is the thing that like people do. That's how you get big trees. That's how you moved them in this period. And that would have been a good idea if they'd known what they were doing.

But you have to drain the pine resin out of a tree like that before you can float it because otherwise it won't float. All their logs sink. So they realize their mistake and they start tapping the resin out of pine trees, which takes a long time and doesn't isn't done before the rainy season. And because they're dumb, they throw all the resin away rather than using it to seal the roofs of the huts that they built. Because again, they don't know what the fuck they're doing. So the rainy season comes and they all get soaked and they all get sick and all their kids start to die and then the old people start to die. The guy who got like one of the real tragedies is that there was a guy who Gregor Condon to buying his way on who was a shoemaker and was promised he was going to be the first shoemaker and all of poyean.

Like it to establish. Yeah, which he was and he shot himself to death when he realized he'd been gripped it. Blew his brains out with a musket. Yeah, very sad. So all of the people who were supposed to be in charge of this endeavor, all of the professionals, the former military officers, the civil servants, the people who were planning to be the aristocracy of this new society completely failed to take a hand in building an actual survivable settlement. Instead, they vested all of their hopes in the Lieutenant Governor who made regular trips to the only settlement in poyea to try to find some ship to take them home. They just had no interest in actually attempting to make the best of their circumstances because they didn't know how to bring civilization to a place. They just knew how to exploit people when there was already civilization. David Sinclair writes quote, they had been led to believe that they would find homes in or near a great city that was essentially European in style

and people by men and women like themselves, including English and Americans. In the event, the only people they found living in poyea, aside from the natives, were two eccentric Americans named Moray and Winship, who had built themselves a farm in the hills behind the Black Lagoon a couple of years earlier. I kind of think those guys might have been gay and just like escaping. Moray and Winship. I love it. Well, this is just the like we're gay. The world's terrible. Let's go live alone in the middle of nowhere on a farm. I love it. Seems like it. Yeah. Yeah, that's a good good. I wish I hope things worked out for them. I don't know anything else about them. So it was hardly surprising then when the likes of Colonel Hall, the civil servants, the officer class and the manager of the National Bank of Poyea

realized that they had been comprehensively duped. Their first thought should have been to escape from the inhospitable wilderness in which McGregor's deception had deposited them. On the other hand, there can be no doubt that part of the tragedy of poyea was the failure of the men who, through their societal position alone, would have been regarded as the national leaders of the group to adjust to the uncomfortable and dangerous circumstance created by McGregor's lies and to show some of the capacity for leadership that might have been expected of them. Instead, when the conditions they found on their arrival did not correspond in any way to those promised, they took the view that because the authority conferred upon them by McGregor was obviously as bogus as the country he described, it was no business of theirs to try to compensate for his betrayal.

Basically, they totally dropped all responsibility. When they thought they were going to be in charge of a country that was already ready built, they were ready to be responsible. When they realized they were in a dangerous situation, none of them were willing to do anything. They took all their badges off, threw the jacket down. No, no, I'm not in charge of shit. What are you talking about? And there's a part of this story that kind of reveals how fundamentally hollow the social structure of the British Empire really was. These colonists had been left in a bad position, but not an unsurvivable one. They had a year's worth of food rations. They had two doctors, medical supplies, tools and guns.

They could have built a survivable community, but they weren't a community. They had no desire to be one. There were a bunch of people who wanted to get rich quick and make non-white natives do all of the hard work. As one survivor of the expedition, James Hasty, later noted, I do not wish to say anything rashly, but instead of attending to make us comfortable, it seemed as if everyone was for his own hand, was in it for himself. Even the boards and timber used for fitting up our berths in the ship were mostly sold or delivered. Basically, they had this wood that was used to build berths in the ship that they took out of the boat when they landed, to build homes with. But instead of building homes, the people in charge sold it so that they could buy some manner of luxuries from the local.

Nobody took care of each other. It was every man for himself. It was every man for himself. A couple of the braver souls left to make a 500-mile journey to a British colony in Honduras to try to get help. This was noble for them, but it meant that the most decent and competent men in the whole expedition weren't there anymore. So by the end of April, as James wrote, quote, sickness and despondency was so general that few were able or willing to make any exertion. And I am sorry to have to add that many of those who were still well plundered instead of assisted their sick brethren, and likewise plundered the public stores of anything they could conveniently lay their hands upon.

So they robbed them. Wow. They were planning to rob other people. They wound up robbing themselves, and in the end, more than two-thirds of them died. Wow. Just a couple of months. Yeah. The traumatized survivors were eventually rescued by a passing ship, which was fortunate because as they were rescued, Gregor had dispatched five more ships filled with like a thousand other people, men, women and children, to a colony that had become a graveyard.

The British Navy was thankfully able to recall these boats before anyone else died. I was still sending people over there. Of course he was. He's a grifter. He ain't done grifting. Maybe he thought the first people would actually just buck up and start building something so that by the time the other people got there, they saw something was in progress. That did not happen. Yeah. Yeah. If I keep sending people over, eventually it will be true that there's a settlement there.

Right. He's not wrong. Yeah, because they'll die otherwise. Yeah. So by autumn of 1823, the story of what had really happened at Poyet had hit London, and McGregor's response was to do what McGregor did. Retreat. Retreat.

Yeah, he fled to France where he tried to do the same trick again and tried to get more colonists to go to Poyet. He got about 60 people to sign up and pay him, but thankfully Paris isn't that far from London. The authorities there figured out what was happening, and they got wind of what was going on really when French settlers started applying for passports to a country that wasn't real. So there's an investigation. He gets imprisoned, but being McGregor, he's able to kind of get himself out of incarceration, but that was his last trick.

He was left in financial debt to his investors, and has repeated attempts to find more buyers for his fake Poyezian bond failed to sell for some inexplicable reason. He tried to go back home to Edinburgh, but he was caught by some of the people he'd conned, and he was forced to flee Scotland for the only place that would accept him, Caracas, where he was still a war hero. And his status is that, guaranteed him kind of a place to live, basically,

but not much more. He died penniless in December of 1845. Wow. Yeah. He had come up so much. If he hadn't had just gone for that last, I'm going to sell y'all a freight country. He could have just lived his life out rich. He had like $200,000 or pounds.

Like, wow. Yep. Can't stop, won't stop. Can't stop. That's the scammer thing, right? That's how they all get caught, because you have to be able to walk away. It's like gambling.

You have to know when you're up, you just got to leave. That's how you win at gambling. There's no other way to win at gambling, but leaving. Yep. Lacey, do you want to plug your... Plugable, speaking of scams? Yes. If you like robbery and you like comedy, Scam got his podcast.

You can find me at DIVA, L-A-C-I-D, the Lacey on all platforms. Robert, can they find you? Oh no, no, I can't be found. That's what I thought. I'm in the fucking hills. That's what I thought. Beautiful. Yeah.

But you can find this podcast at Baster's Pod on all the things. Yay. Yay. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse we look like a lot of goods. When our federal agents catching bad guys or creating them,

he was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday.

Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.