Criminal - A Mysterious Bank

Episode Date: May 19, 2023

In the late 1870s, a woman named Sarah Howe started a bank just for single women called the Ladies’ Deposit Company. She asked new customers to tell their friends about the bank rather than advertising in newspapers, and she promised she could almost double their money.  Today, the story of the woman running a Ponzi scheme before Charles Ponzi was even born. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. Listen back through our archives at youtube.com/criminalpodcast.  We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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That's BotoxCosmetic.com. That's BotoxCosmetic.com. In the late 1870s, a woman named Sarah Howe started a bank called the Ladies' Deposit Company. Customers at the Ladies' Deposit were given a book with the bank's rules printed inside. It read, The Ladies' Deposit is a charitable institution for single ladies, old and young. Sarah Howe didn't advertise her bank in newspapers. She asked new customers to tell their friends. So she started off with word-of-mouth advertising and got people to, you know, bring somebody else. We were right at the very beginnings of the Industrial Revolution. People were just starting to trust putting their

money in banks. This is Robin Holsart, a professor in forensic accounting. One woman described the bank as sympathetic. Another elderly customer said at other banks, the tellers would grab her money and throw a passbook at her without a word. But at the lady's deposit, she was given a seat and kindly thanked for her business. A Boston newspaper wrote that the furniture at the lady's deposit was upholstered in raw silk with gold-figured patterns, and that all the ornaments are rich and in good taste. Not much is known about Sarah Howe.

She told the Boston Globe that she had been born in Alexandria, Virginia in 1826, and that her father was named David Chase. She said she was an only child and that she'd been married twice. Before Sarah Howe opened her bank, she worked as a fortune teller, and was also reported to be a, quote, female physician. She had no experience in banking. Banking in the 1800s was almost completely unregulated. This is George Robb, a professor who studies 19th century business and finance.

Anyone really could set up a bank, put a shingle outside your home and call it a bank, and if you could attract depositors, you could be in business. There are a lot of savings banks at this time, but they would have been run by men. So a bank run by women for women was completely unique. One ladies deposit customer told a reporter, I am perfectly well satisfied with the security of my own money, as well as that of my friends. And what did she promise those women who were depositing money? She guaranteed them, I love this, this is my favorite part of the whole story, she guaranteed them 8% interest per month, paying them the first three months ahead of time.

So the math of that is, when you gave her $100, she was going to give you $24 back. Okay, $8 a month times three months. But the big payout is if you left your deposit in through maturity, which was one year, at 8% per month, you would be getting $96 for every $100 you put in. There was another banker who, in 1919, offered incredible returns to his investors. He promised a 50% return on their money in 45 days. When he paid out the first returns, word spread. Six months later, he had 20,000 investors who had given him about $10 million. His name was Charles Ponzi. The problem with the Ponzi scheme is Ponzi schemes are destined to fail because unless you have a

consistent influx of new money, you don't have money to pay out. In 1920, the Boston Post revealed that Charles Ponzi was not investing anyone's money. Instead, he was paying out returns with investments from new customers. In eight months, he'd taken in an estimated $15 million. Later, he wrote in his memoir, we are all gamblers. We all crave easy money and plenty of it. If we didn't, no get-rich-quick scheme could be successful. Charles Ponzi made this kind of fraud famous. But Sarah Howe was doing it in the same city before he was even born. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Tell me, what was the thought about women and money in the late 1800s?

Well, most people in business circles, businessmen, almost all businessmen, felt that women were not suited to pursue careers in business or finance. That they were too emotionally fragile. They were too delicate. Their purity was best protected in the home, and if they pursued careers in business, that this would contaminate their purity. In the early 1800s, it was against the law for married women to own property, manage money, or sign their own contracts. And as soon as you got married, you ceased being an individual.

You became what's called femme covert, which means that you were like the property of the husband. In 1855, the state of Massachusetts made it legal for a married woman to own property, make a will, and have full control over her money. By 1887, two-thirds of the U.S. had passed similar laws. But even after that, judges often ruled that a wife's earnings were her own, only when she was abandoned by her husband, or he was proven to have misspent the family's earnings, or to be unable to support the family.

Meanwhile, single women were allowed to invest their money how they liked. The ladies' deposit only took single unmarried women and widows as customers. Sarah reportedly dressed in her best clothes And she sold that to them under the guise of And you can be just like me And so it became like a sorority for all intents So what she did was she went and created this air of exclusivity in this club This has been done over and over and over. Bernie Madoff would tell people, you had to give me all of your money to get into our club. She just did it in 1880.

I think Sarah Howe was very clever because in targeting women, she could say to them, as a fellow woman, I understand your situation. You can trust me. I won't cheat you the way that men often cheat people in business. And there's this general expectation that women were more honest, that women were morally superior to men. So I think she played upon that. She played upon women's insecurity about what to do with their money. And she promised very extravagant returns as well, which was very appealing to a lot of the women who gave her money to invest. And was she taking deposits from women just in Boston?

Originally, the bank was operating only in Boston, but it seems pretty quickly, women from all over the country were sending her money. And since she wasn't advertising, it's hard to know how that came about. But probably what happened is that women would write to friends and family members in other parts of the country and tell them about this wonderful opportunity in Boston, and they would send money in. Most of the women who put money in the ladies' deposit were mostly women from what we would consider a working class or a lower middle class background. Domestic servants.

There were some school teachers. So there was a kind of informal behind-the-scenes network of women sharing information with other women. For a while, Sarah Howe's bank operated without much attention. But then, in January 1880, the Boston Herald sent a reporter to the lady's deposit. The paper wanted to know how she was able to offer such a high return on her customers' investments. The reporter wanted to go in to the deposit and, you know, investigate it, well, of course they weren't going to let him in. And then after that, what he did was he dressed up like a woman and went back.

And when he went back dressed up as a woman, he was let in. They told him what they told their other customers. You know, they would say stuff like, well, we don't solicit your money. You don't have to deposit unless you want to, you know, giving them that out. And the journalist wanted to know if he could have references. They told him that they don't give out references. And so what he did was, he just wrote an article.

The article was titled, How's This for High? 8% a month paid by a South End bank for women only. How this remarkable enterprise is conducted. And in it, he called Sarah Howe a fraud. Another article in the Boston Herald included an interview with her. She claimed the bank was part of a Quaker aid society. She said that it was really a charity and that wealthy Quakers in the city were financing this

and this was a charitable operation to help women of humble means. She objected to the newspaper's coverage of her business in a letter to the editor, writing that her only offense was refusing to explain herself to prying reporters. In her letter, she implied that the Herald's articles were libelous, and that she was prepared to sue them for it. And so what happened was, the newspaper decided to back off, because they didn't want to be accused of malice. The coverage only seemed to make the lady's deposit more popular.

The Atlantic reported that the bank gained nearly 600 depositors after the Herald's articles came out. The deposit was doing well enough that Sarah Howe moved the bank to a new location in Boston's South End. She bought a $50,000 mansion, paid $20,000 of that $50,000 in cash, which was deposit money, obviously. And if you think about it, that's $5 million in cash in today's dollars. So yeah, I'm going to say she lived pretty lavishly. She reportedly threw a party for her husband's birthday where she invited total strangers so she could have a crowd to see the presents. But it's still a little mysterious

how she spent that kind of money. Of course, part of the money that she's collecting, she is also paying out to people to draw more money in. So it's a complicated juggling act that's going on. We always have enough money to pay the deposits, she said. And if every one of our bookholders should come in this afternoon and demand the principal, it should be paid to the utmost dollar. Then, in September 1880, the Boston Daily Advertiser published a series of articles about the ladies' deposit under the headline,

A Mysterious Bank. The stories ran every day for three weeks. The newspaper said that the ladies' deposit was a fraud. They said Sarah Howe was paying long-time depositors with the money coming in from new customers. They started by saying she wasn't really a bank and the newspaper wanted to make her out to be, you know, this wicked witch of the West. And they went through and they found all of her like quote-unquote past crimes, like that she made her money telling fortunes. They also reported that she had been committed to an asylum in 1865

and that she had been arrested for fraud a decade later. Sarah Howe wrote a letter responding to the articles. She said that the reporter was floundering like a bat in a fly trap, trying to prove the bank was a fraud. When the articles appeared, customers began withdrawing their deposits from the bank. She said that she was going to make good on the principal, but the principal was $196,000 at that time,

and she didn't have that kind of money. She was always going to run out of money if she had to pay everybody back, and so it went downhill very, very quickly. One of the bank's employees, Susan Crandall, said that she was sometimes paying out $40,000 per day. Today, that would be the equivalent of $1 million. The Boston Globe reported that Sarah Howe tried to raise money by mortgaging her own house and furniture.

On October 4th, she started to run out of money. And then, on October 16th, she was arrested. We'll be right back. Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts. Each month, Apple Podcasts highlights one series worth your attention, and they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home.

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There are historical accounts of women who were ostracized for bringing their friends in. And so once it went bad, it went bad in a hurry, and there was just not much left at the end. One woman told The Globe, I wanted the interest so badly that I placed a mortgage on my furniture to secure the principal to deposit. I wish I had it now,

for I shall have my goods sold from under my head. There were women who didn't want to believe that this had happened to them. There were people who continued to think that Sarah Howe had done nothing wrong, that this, in fact, had been a scheme by jealous men to destroy her business. The Globe published an account of a woman who went to the bank to deposit $192 in gold, even though Sarah Howe had already been arrested. They also reported that a group of depositors raised funds for her defense.

The women told the reporter that they were not the ignorant, deluded women they have been represented to be, and that Sarah Howe was a persecuted woman. And some women who had invested early probably got all their money back. So some of the early investors hadn't lost their money. It was the later investors who did the worst. A list of customers was published in the newspaper. It took up an entire page and included women as far away as Illinois, Pennsylvania, Maine, and even England. Was there any way for these women to recover the lost money?

There wasn't. There were cases in the 19th century where businesses failed and there would be relief efforts set up, charitable relief efforts to try to help some of the people who had lost their money. That did not happen in this case. Once the bank collapsed, there was not as much sympathy towards the women who had put money in the bank than we might expect. Some of the commentators blamed the women. Well, this is what you get for being so ignorant. Who but a woman would be so stupid as to think she could make $96 on $100 over the course of a year? There were other people who said for a woman to give money to another woman to invest is a huge mistake.

If you have money to invest, give it to a male relative. Give it to a man of business to invest. So this is just what you get for thinking that you as a woman can make decisions about how to invest your money. Someone wrote a letter into a newspaper to say that the success of Sarah Howe's fraud proved that we must despair of teaching the female sex business principles. Initially, Sarah Howe was very defensive

and claimed that she was running a legitimate bank and that jealous men had destroyed her business. But once she was arrested and once she was facing trial, then she tried to distance herself from responsibility. She claimed she wasn't the person who started the ladies' deposit, and told the story about having been a customer of a branch in her hometown of Alexandria, Virginia. She said that she'd gotten hired after a few years and had been put in charge of the Boston branch. She also said she only earned $100 a month and never handled a dollar of the customer's deposits.

She said she was sure a man named Mr. Gardner was angry with her for refusing to lend him $100. She said, He and a certain lawyer have stirred up the banks and papers against us. When she was arrested, the bank's accounting books were missing. She claimed that someone had stolen them. Her trial began on April 20, 1881. The trial was covered all over the United States, so Boston in particular was widely covered, but newspapers all over the United States covered the case. It was considered quite a sensational and interesting trial, the fact

that a woman had to come up with a scheme like that. There are many trials of men who defrauded people out of money in the 19th century, but this is the first sort of high-profile case of a woman who had done something like that. So for a woman to commit a crime of any kind needed some special explanation. It wasn't seen as something that a woman would normally do. Reporters tried to figure out what kind of woman could do something like this. They looked into the details of her marriages, debating whether she'd been married two or three times.

They printed rumors that she'd been married to two men at the same time. They really focused a lot on what they saw as a depraved sexual character. She had three husbands. Having one or two divorces was a very unusual thing for women in the 19th century. So that was something that later was brought up as an example of Sarah Howe being an immoral woman. Rather than just let her be somebody that built these women out of money, what they did was they spent days publishing stories about how she was ugly,

how she couldn't put two cohesive words together to make a sentence, how she had deplorable manners, and they just went after her and they just shamed her and shamed her and were relentless. And so it was difficult for anybody to feel much compassion for. The newspaper was, I guess, what we would call the social media of the time. How much money did she end up getting from the scam? It was at least $250,000, which would be the equivalent of many millions of dollars today. But because Sarah Howe was not keeping careful books, it could have been much more. There is speculation that she defrauded

as many as 800 people out of about a half a million dollars, and in today's dollars, that would equate to about $13 million. During the trial, the prosecution called on Francis Miller, a Quaker who used to live in Alexandria. He testified that they had never established a charitable fund for a woman's bank. A former ladies' deposit customer testified that when she tried to withdraw her interest, Sarah Howe told her

that she would have the money for her later that week. But when she returned, the bank refused to let her in. On April 25, 1881, Sarah Howe was found guilty of obtaining money by false pretenses. And what was her sentence? She was sentenced to three years in prison,

which seems a fairly light sentence for defrauding people of such a large amount of money. After three years in prison, Sarah Howe was released. And then she opened a new bank. We'll be right back. Thank you. out for. And to help us out, we are joined by Kylie Robeson, the senior AI reporter for The Verge, to give you a primer on how to integrate AI into your life. So tune into AI Basics, How and When to Use AI, a special series from Pivot sponsored by AWS, wherever you get your podcasts. Are you looking to eat healthier but you still find yourself occasionally rebounding with junk food and empty calories? You don't need to wait for the new year to start fresh. New year, new me? How about same year, new me?

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the science behind your eating choices and why you have those specific cravings, and it can help you build new habits for a healthier lifestyle. And since everyone's journey is different, so are your daily lessons. They're personalized to help you reach your goal. Stay focused on what's important to you with Noom's psychology and biology-based approach. Sign up for your trial today at Noom.com. When Sarah Howe was released from prison in 1884, she opened a new bank in Boston.

Quite surprisingly, she set up another one of these Ponzi scheme banks. And she did this for about a year before the authorities caught on to it. It seems incredible that in the same city where she had committed this first fraud and it was so highly publicized that she could get away with it again. Partly, there were some women who had invested in the first bank who didn't lose money and who still had faith in her. But also, in a city like Boston in the 1880s,

every year there were hundreds of thousands of immigrants coming from all over the world, many from Ireland. So there would have been, three years after the first fraud, there would have been a lot of new people who would not even have known about the first fraud and who saw this as just a great investment opportunity. When her second bank was discovered, she got out of Boston before anyone could press charges. She moved to Chicago, and she opened a third bank called the Ladies Provident Aid. When newspapers discovered her, she went back to Boston. She was arrested

again on December 8, 1888. Was it common for people in the late 1800s who were doing these types of financial scams to be caught? When financial scams unraveled, you could evade justice fairly easily if you got out of town before the police arrested you. So, I mean, part of the reason that Sarah Howe was able to get away with this, or other frauds were able to get away with this, is there was no fingerprinting. There was no good form of criminal identification. So you could change your name. You could change your identity. You could move from one town to another and operate a very similar kind of scheme.

And it was very difficult for the police to share information about these crimes from city to city. Why do you think she was successful so many times? I think there were a lot of Americans who didn't understand business principles very much, and I think there were a lot of people who were desperate to make money, and it seemed like a good thing to them. And there were very few opportunities for women to make very good money in the 19th century. So this seemed to be something that was being done by a woman to benefit other women. It was a very well-executed affinity fraud. It was very well-executed in that

she so closely identified with her target market. These women that weren't married, were thought to be not necessarily in the best social situations and everything. And because she identified so closely with them, she knew exactly how they thought and what they were looking for, and she manipulated that to her advantage to the tune of $500,000 over less than a year. It was carefully orchestrated. She knew exactly what she was doing. The problem is she never thought the money would run out. And she thought that she had protected herself because she had cloistered these women away from men, and men are the ones that, you know, at the time had the business acumen to figure out that this was never going to work. These things still happen. In 2008, Bernie Madoff was arrested for defrauding investors out of an estimated $17 to $20 billion,

in what's been called the largest Ponzi scheme in history. A few years ago, a woman named Johanna Garcia started a company that promised investors a 10% return on their money in a year. Investments were supposedly loaned to small businesses who needed startup money. Once the businesses were doing well, they'd pay back the loan with interest, which would go back to the investor. This also turned out to be a Ponzi scheme. In 2021, she was charged with defrauding investors out of nearly $200 million. Before her arrest, she described herself as Mother Teresa, because of how many small businesses she had helped. After her third bank was shut down, Sarah Howe returned to fortune-telling.

She died in 1892 in Boston. The New York Times reported in her obituary that she died penniless, renting a room in a boarding house. Did she ever own up to the fraud? No. No. In fact, when she was living in the boarding house and living on a government subsidy, you know, people periodically would track her down to try to talk to her about the ladies' deposit. And to her dying day, she maintained that it wasn't her, that it was her husband's brother's wife that did that. At one point, Sarah Howe told the Boston Globe,

there's another Sarah Howe mixed up in this matter, and if I was allowed to tell you all I know, I would soon clear myself. We didn't use the word con at the time, but she was nothing more than a con artist. She went and found jobs that she was no more prepared to do than a man in the world, and nobody has ever given any rhyme or reason on why she would do it. She just was a con and would try it all, and it was always, you know, trying to get rich. She must have had a lot of confidence. Well, you know, fraudsters do. One of the traits of a podster is that they can do no wrong and they're the smartest person in the room. What she did was she went out and she just sold a story. ¶¶ Thank you. underscore podcast. We're also on YouTube at youtube.com slash criminal podcast. Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC. We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

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