The world is full of people of genius. Many of these people go on to do great things. Parker used his genius to spend his life scamming people.
Parker was born in Kentucky in the early 1820's and soon became an orphan for reasons that are not important to this story. Raised by a kindly local judge, Parker received the best education possible until he got bored, ran away, and joined the British Navy. Several years later he returned, his pockets stuffed with cash, and thanked the judge for his past kindness by marrying the man's daughter. Everything started to go to shit from there. Parker's first scam was to collect money to build a ship to take people to the Californian gold mines. The fact that Parker lived in St. Louis, which is decidedly not near the ocean, should have been a tip off that things weren't on the up and up, but people were more trusting back then. When the scam was found out, Parker skedaddled to New York City and, just to show that he had a sense of humor about the whole thing, granted himself the title of Captain.
In New York City, Parker started signing up people again for an expedition to California, promising to get them there within sixty days. Numerous people, greedy for gold, paid to join up and Parker used their money to live an exorbitant lifestyle. After several months of delays Parker got his shit together enough to get the expedition out of New York, sailing to Texas, which as some of you have probably noticed, is not California. Never a man to back down from a challenge, Parker told the expedition that it would be quicker to head overland across the arid Southwest. To accomplish this feat, he purchased some old circus wagons and several tons of food using fraudulent letters of credit from some of the biggest shipping firms in New York. However, all good things come to an end. Parker’s creditors caught up to his decidedly colorful wagon train by the time he reached El Paso. Not ready to face the music, Parker fled with a couple of cohorts into Mexico, abandoning the expedition members to find their own damn way home. A small group of these cheated potential gold miners, pissed off for some reason, tried to hunt Parker down, but he and his thugs ambushed them. During the resulting gunfight Parker was shot in the arm, leading to it getting amputated.
Parker stayed in Mexico for a time, running several cons and robbing ranchers at gunpoint. Finally tiring of his shit, Mexico locked him in jail, but released him eighteen months later when he promised to get the hell out of the country. Parker made his way north to California where he set himself up as a newspaper man, a job which made him popular enough that he managed to get himself elected to the state legislature. To celebrate, he punched a former governor in the face and got shot in the leg. Finding politics rather boring, Parker abandoned his post in 1855 to join William Walker’s invasion of Nicaragua, granting himself the title of Colonel because why hell not. When the invasion succeeded, Walker declared Parker the new government’s ambassador to the United States. The U.S. government, less than impressed with the whole thing, refused to meet with Parker, so he instead held lavish parties and went on a speaking tour to raise funds and recruit more soldiers. However, as always, most of the cash he raised ended up in his own pocket. Parker then tried to return to Nicaragua, but by then Walker was rather tired of his shit and wouldn’t let him stay.
Things began to unravel after that. Over the next fifteen years Parker and his wife crisscrossed the country, running various scams to arrive. These scams included a land scheme in Minnesota, a fake newspaper in San Francisco, an imaginary opium shipment in New Orleans, something involving ginseng, and the selling of non-existent ships to the U.S. Navy in Boston. During the Civil War he was imprisoned for a time on the suspicion he might be a Confederate spy, but even that turned out to be only part of some elaborate scam. After getting set free, he did a few more scams just to keep a roof over his head and then disappeared from history. His last known whereabouts was living in a gutter in Washington D.C., slowly killing himself with cocktails of whiskey and chloroform.
Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Parker_H._French.jpg