The Saturday Evening Post History Minute: America’s Greatest Grifter

We like to think that even the most depraved villains have some redeeming quality, but not Gaston Means.

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Gaston B. Means was, as one historian put it, “A swindler for the joy of swindling, a liar proud of the credibility of his lies.” It’s hard to convey the scope of Mean’s lifetime of mendacity. But some of his exploits can give a sense of scale.

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CREDITS

:00 Image by J.J. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:J.J.) via the GNU Free Documentation License (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/en:GNU_Free_Documentation_License) licensed under the Creative Commons (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/en:Creative_Commons) Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en)

1:43 Theodor Horydczak Collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Music: Rythme Gitan by Latché Swing Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 France (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 FR) https://freemusicarchive.org/music/La… https://creativecommons.org/licenses/…

 

 

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Comments

  1. This is beyond outrageous by any stretch of the imagination, even surpassing Dr. John Romulus Brinkley ‘The Goat Gland Doctor To the Stars’ from July. Gaston here almost—-ALMOST—-makes Dr. Brinkley seem tame by comparison.

    Imagine if those two had somehow managed to team up, the destruction they would have brought?! Why it makes the current situations in Washington with ‘you-know-who’ seem downright amateur, doesn’t it?!

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