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Of course, it was all a scam, a “transparent swindle.” Miller had no connection with any stock exchange, and he never invested a penny of the money in securities. He paid the dividends, very promptly, out of new money that flowed in from the “ignorant and credulous.” Naturally, this scheme could not go on indefinitely; at some point, the bubble was bound to burst. And burst it did. One day, Miller bought $100,000 in United States bonds and fled to Canada. Somehow, he was later returned to New York State, where he stood trial on the complaint of one of his many victims, a woman named Catherine Moser, who had given him $1,000 of her hard-earned cash. Miller was convicted, and appealed in 1902.

The precise legal question on appeal was how to label this crime. No one disputed that Miller had been up to no good; but law is law. The state had convicted him of larceny; but, legally speaking, had he actually stolen the money? The court thought yes. “Had the defendant actually used the money in speculation, however improvident or reckless, and lost, his act would not amount to larceny.” But this was not the case: he was lying and cheating from the outset. He never intended to use the money in speculation at all. He got the money through a “trick, device, or artifice,” with the intention right then and there of appropriating it “to his own use.”3 And this, the court said, was most certainly larceny; hence the conviction would stand.

The legal question is not uninteresting; but what attracts attention here is the crime itself. It was, in one sense, a fine example of a nineteenth-century crime of mobility. The victim, Catherine Moser, had aspirations; she saw no reason of class or caste or skill why she, too, could not be rich and famous. She testified: “I read something in the papers somewhere, I do not know where, that Vanderbilt, Gould and all of them made money in Wall Street. I knew this was true and I thought this money was to be used for the same purpose and I would get the benefit of it.”4 If Vanderbilt could make money speculating, and become filthy rich, why not Catherine Moser?

Moser and Miller were thus both products of a culture of mobility, bound together in knots of mutual greed and deception. Of course, he was the predator, and she was his prey. He was neither the first nor the last to try to bilk the gullible in this particular way. But Miller’s crime was somewhat different from the crimes of most nineteenth-century swindlers. He did not use a disguise. He lied about many things, but he did not hide. A typical con man cheats and steals and then disappears. He finds a new neighborhood, a new city, a new mark; here he begins to cheat and steal again. If he is lucky, the chain is never broken. Miller’s scheme was more daring and more dangerous. It was open and notorious.

And it was, of course, a house of cards. Miller, of course, must have known that. When he felt the end coming, he grabbed a pile of money and ran to Canada. Perhaps this was his plan all along. It is hard to know. But, in an important sense, this fact is not relevant. Unlike most confidence games and swindles, the biggest payoff came during the scam, not after: the excitement, the success, the adulation of the investors, the power, the high living. In Miller’s crime there seemed to be an element of desperate narcissism. It was a wild, intoxicating party; and someday it was going to end. With luck, there was Canada to run to; and money besides. Without luck, prison stared him in the face. But while it lasted it was a great game, a marvelous game; and perhaps the game was worth it for itself.

Much later in the century, Andy Warhol, the artist, made a famous comment that, in the future, everybody would be a celebrity—world famous—for fifteen minutes. Miller may have had a similar dream: a year or two of enormous wealth and luxury, and after that, well, all things come to an end. Crimes of mobility merged, then, into another form of crime, which we can call crimes of the self. These are