Unleashed 101

1. Episode · Sep 24, 2026

   "A Bridge to Sell You" George C. Parker and the Brooklyn Bridge (opens the original)

   Episode notes · Neutral tone

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   There is a scene that repeats in New York police accounts around the turn of the last century. A patrolman finds a man on the Brooklyn Bridge walkway with lumber and tools, building a toll booth. The man is polite. He has papers, and the papers are beautiful: engraved letterhead, a corporate seal, a deed of conveyance. He has paid for this, sometimes with everything he brought from the old country, and when he is told the City of New York owns the bridge, he argues. The name on that deed, more o

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2. Episode · Sep 17, 2026

   The Daughter: Cassie Chadwick and the Carnegie Inheritance (opens the original)

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   In December of 1902 a Cleveland lawyer waited in a carriage outside Andrew Carnegie's mansion on Fifth Avenue while a woman went inside. She came out half an hour later holding papers, dropped one, and let him pick it up. It was a promissory note for hundreds of thousands of dollars, signed with Carnegie's name. She asked him to forget he had seen it, and then told him why. She was Carnegie's illegitimate daughter, provided for privately, and nobody could know. The lawyer gave his word and broke

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3. Episode · Sep 10, 2026

   The Man Who Sold Tomorrow: Charles Ponzi and the Summer of 1920 (opens the original)

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   In July 1920, the Boston Police Department assigned officers to School Street because the crowd trying to give Charles Ponzi their money had grown large enough to stop traffic. Seventeen years earlier, Ponzi had arrived in Boston with $2.50. Six months after founding the Securities Exchange Company, he had become one of Massachusetts’ most famous men—and his investors’ money was about to disappear. Who was Charles Ponzi, and how did the Ponzi scheme work? This episode of Unleashed 101 traces the

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4. Episode · Sep 3, 2026

   The Man Who Sold the Eiffel Tower: Victor Lustig (opens the original)

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   In the spring of 1925, six of the most successful scrap metal dealers in France received the same letter on Ministry of Posts and Telegraphs stationery, requesting their presence at a confidential meeting at the Hotel de Crillon. They were told the government had decided to dismantle the Eiffel Tower and sell seven thousand tons of iron for scrap, that the political sensitivity required a private sale, and that sealed bids would be submitted personally to the Deputy Director General.There was no

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5. Episode · Aug 13, 2026

   The Ocean in Bayonne: The Great Salad Oil Scandal (opens the original)

   Episode notes · Critical tone

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   Oil floats on water. That is the entire secret. A ninth grader could tell you. And Anthony "Tino" De Angelis built one of the largest frauds in American history on it. Fill a sixty-foot storage tank with seawater. Float a thin layer of vegetable oil on top. An inspector drops a measuring line, pulls it up coated in oil, and certifies a full tank. He isn't lying. He saw oil. From a leased tank farm in Bayonne, New Jersey, De Angelis borrowed against inventory that did not exist, using warehouse r

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