Born: 1875 or 1877
Died: February 26, 1976
AKA: Dr. Tourneur St. Harriot, Walter H. Weed, James R. Wilson, The Yellow Kid

Considered to be one of the greatest con men of the twentieth century, Joseph Weil posed as a number of characters to pull off elaborate scams. Looking back on his career Weil once commented: “Men like myself could not have existed without the victims’ covetous [desirous], criminal greed.”

The Yellow Kid

Although Weil claimed to have been born in Chicago in 1875, some records indicate that the year of his birth was actually 1877. He was raised in Chicago and began to associate with crooks at an early age. As a teenager, Weil was fond of reading a popular comic strip, “Hogan’s Alley and the Yellow Kid,” which appeared in the New York Journal. He soon picked up a nickname—the Yellow...