Tag: crime history

Dean Jobb continues to promote a false true crime narrative

In a recent interview with the Crime Writers of Canada podcast, Dean Jobb, author of A Gentleman and a Thief, doubles down on his contention that jazz-age jewel thief, Arthur Barry, crashed a Long Island cocktail party in 1924, befriended the Prince of Wales, and whisked his new royal pal off on a secret tour of Broadway speakeasies.  

The claim strains credulity, but Jobb provides the following defense:  

“I lead off with him (Arthur Barry) meeting the Prince of Wales, the future Edward the VIII, who was visiting Long Island in the twenties.  Barry crashes a party, because there were a whole bunch of Long Island parties for the prince and his entourage, and ends up meeting the prince, takes him on a clandestine tour of the bright lights of Broadway and the speakeasies.  

“I mean, a writer has to go, really?  Did this really happen?  Well, start digging into reporters.  I find memoirs or memories of reporters who covered the story, who vouch for it, who did their homework.  The coverage makes it clear that the prince disappeared right at the time Barry says he was doing this.  So, it’s a matter of digging as deeply as you need to in the record to verify for your own peace of mind.  But you owe it to the reader, and if you’re not sure, you tell the reader that.”

As I’ve shown in previous blog posts, all the contemporary newspaper accounts of the party Jobb describes have the Prince of Wales dancing at the Cosden estate until dawn and returning to the Burden estate that morning.  None mention Wales slipping away from the party to experience the nightlife of Broadway.  

Rather than belabor that point here, I’ll address the following contention:  “The coverage makes it clear that the prince disappeared right at the time Barry says he was doing this.”  The “coverage” Jobb refers to involves an episode that occurred the night following the Cosden party.  The “small but jolly” Cosden gathering described in Jobb’s book began late in the evening of Wednesday, September 3, 1924 and continued through the early morning hours of Thursday, September 4.  The period of time when Wales went missing began in the afternoon or early evening of Thursday, September 4 and continued until the next morning, Friday, September 5.

Here is the passage Jobb quotes from to show “that the prince disappeared right at the time Barry says he was doing this.”  The article was penned Thursday night, September 4, one night later than the night of the Cosden party, and appeared in the following morning’s Buffalo Courier.

“The whereabouts of the Prince of Wales were shrouded in mystery tonight.  At midnight he had not returned to the Burden estate where he is stopping.

“He had dinner at the home of J.S. Cosden…It was reported that he left the Cosden home shortly after dinner, but since that time he has been playing a game of hide and seek with those who sought to check his movements.

“Some believe he went for a boat ride up Long Island Sound, others say he attended an all-night dance party at some nearby home, but others believe he went in disguise to one of the white light jazz palaces on Broadway.”

Not only does this passage describe a different night from that of the late-night Cosden party, it describes a completely different set of events.  Wales had dinner at the Cosden home and he left, possibly by boat, and either went to a party or to check out the white light jazz palaces of Broadway.  He’s not fleeing a late night party, he’s leaving after having dinner.  How does Jobb not recognize that these are not only separate dates but separate events as well?  

While the order of events may seem a little confusing to someone unfamiliar with the Prince’s 1924 visit, it isn’t to someone who has casually researched the topic, and it shouldn’t be confusing to someone who has researched and written a work of nonfiction where an alleged encounter between Arthur Barry and the Prince of Wales plays a central role.

The prince’s movements over the 24 hours in question go something like this:  Wales attends a late night party at the Cosden estate and dances until dawn.  He then returns to the Burden estate and sleeps until around noon.  Then he goes to the polo fields for the afternoon.  Sometime in the late afternoon, he returns to the Cosden estate where he either plays golf or takes a stroll around the Cosden’s nine hole golf course.  Then he eats dinner, hops in a motorboat, and disappears off into the Long Island Sound.  From there his whereabouts are unknown for the next 12-24 hours. 

These events are widely covered by the newspapers of the day.  Here’s a question the New York Daily News posed regarding the prince’s missing hours:

“What the folk down Long Island way wanted to know was where the prince passed the time from 2 p.m. Thursday until his reappearance yesterday.”

Does that sound like Wales stole away from a late night party with a stranger he just met, or does it make more sense that he went missing the following afternoon?  How does Jobb miss that unless he’s intentionally taken the route of ignoring the truth and printing the legend?

Queen of the Con: Buda Godman Marries Tell Taylor

Safely ensconced at convent school in Adrian, Michigan, Buda Godman was midway through her time at St. Joseph’s Academy when a group of travelling players came through town.  It was Christmas Eve and the students were allowed to give a late supper.  One of the invited guests was Mr. Tell Taylor, a young actor and aspiring songwriter from Findlay, Ohio.  He sat across the table from Buda Godman and the pair seemed to hit it off.  However, when the dinner ended, the two parted ways without any intention of continuing the friendship through future meetings or correspondence.

A few years later, a nineteen-year-old Buda Godman was out of school and back in Chicago where her family resided.  One evening in 1907, Buda attended a performance of The Girl Question, a hit musical that enjoyed a run of over a hundred performances at the Lasalle Theater.  There she recognized the man playing the part of Harold Sears as the same actor she’d met a few years earlier.  After the performance, she sent him a note and “their acquaintance was renewed.”  Buda Godman and Tell Taylor proceeded to embark on a whirlwind courtship.  “Several times during the course of the week the young couple were out together, lunching and driving, and Monday evening after dinner together at a downtown hotel Judge Arms was called to the parlor and joined them in marriage,” the Lafayette Journal and Courier reported.  Before going to the theater to catch her husband’s performance that evening, Buda called her parents and notified them of the marriage.  Buda’s father joined her at the theater and after the performance took the couple back to his house where the Godmans held a dinner for the newlyweds. 

While the Journal and Courier reported that the new bride “would not go on the stage,” Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer wrote in Chicago Confidential that Taylor got Buda work in the chorus of The Time, The Place, and The Girl.  According to Lait and Mortimer, following Buda’s performance “Chicago woke up to the discovery of a new rave, Buda Godman.  She was wooed and pursued and she fell.  Taylor tried to kill her and fired several shots at her, but missed.”

There are more than a few inaccuracies in Lait and Mortimer’s account of the life of Buda Godman, so it’s difficult to know how much, if any, of this episode actually happened.  However, one thing that is undeniable is that Tell and Buda’s relationship was stormier than a water spout off of Ohio St. Beach.  To hear Tell Taylor tell it, “I married Buda when we were both drunk and I found out she was quite incapable of loyalty to anyone.”  As Variety put it when Taylor filed for divorce from Buda in 1910, “his complaint mentioned several vaudevillians as ‘affinities.’  Their names were omitted from the final record.”

One thing that is never mentioned in the ‘love story’ of Tell Taylor and Buda Godman is the erratic behavior of Taylor himself.  Life with the songwriter wasn’t always blissful romance by the old mill stream.  Taylor did start a successful music publishing company in Chicago, and he managed to author his most famous tune “Down By The Old Mill Stream” in 1910 while still married to Buda.  However, Taylor had his own ‘affinities’ that caused him to make headlines on more than one occasion.  

In July of 1908, Taylor was fined $3 for disorderly conduct over a fight that took place at Freiberg’s Dance Hall 182 22nd street, Chicago.  In his defense, “Taylor declared to Judge Crowe that as a result of the fracas he was carrying around two highly decorated eyes as well as several and sundry abrasions on different parts of his anatomy and that he did not deserve any additional punishment,” The Inter Ocean reported.  Apparently, Taylor, Tim Jordan of the Brooklyn Superbas professional baseball team, and several other individuals were out “doing the levee” when they wandered into Freiberg’s at around two a.m.  As the Inter Ocean reported, Taylor “created a disturbance in the dance hall, and that when asked to leave he had started a row.”  He was then ejected by two waiters and later arrested when he tried to return to the dance hall.

During a separate incident in August of 1910, Tell Taylor again tangled with waiters at George Silver’s basement saloon at Clark and Randolph streets.  After Taylor made a request to cash a check, he was attacked by Silver and several waiters who “threw him to the floor” and “pounded his head with a billy.”  Silver maintained that Taylor “started the row” when he “used abusive language” and “refused to leave when ordered,” the Chicago Tribune reported.  “O, no, he wasn’t beaten up.  He was just thrown out gently,” Silver said.    

The following month, on September 13, 1910, Buda’s father, Otho Godman, died in New York City at the age of 53.  Less than two weeks later, Tell Taylor filed for a divorce.  While Taylor blamed Buda’s lack of loyalty and affinities for fellow vaudevillians as the reason for the break up, it is pretty clear that his adventures in the levee, his brawling, and public drunkenness demonstrated that he was no more committed to the marriage than Buda.  

Within a few years, Buda Godman would be deploying her theatrical skills to con rich men out of large sums of money.  How a former convent school girl managed to fall in with a highly organized gang of international blackmailers is a bit of a mystery.  She certainly could have encountered some of these characters in Chicago.  Lait and Mortimer write that “her father’s calling threw him in with shady people….”  Could Buda have come in contact with underworld figures among her father’s business associates?  Otho Godman’s obituary said he worked “at race tracks in the big cities, and his services were always in demand.”  As an expert in telegraphy, morse code and wireless communications, Otho Godman’s work at horse racing tracks would have placed him directly in the sphere of big-time gambling interests.  Was it only a matter of time before Buda Godman adopted the life of crooks and conmen?  Whatever the case may be, it appears that once the protective influence of Otho Godman had fallen away, and her marriage to Tell Taylor dissolved into ruin, Buda Godman was set free to relieve rich, philandering fat cats of their beefy bankrolls.