“DAPPER DAN”

Dominion, Volume 24, Issue 190, 9 May 1931, Page 12

“DAPPER DAN”

“Sold” Brooklyn Bridge FREE ONCE AGAIN "Dapper Dan” Collins, the notorious English confidence trickster who astounded America by “selling” the Brooklyn Bridge and the Woolworth Building to an Arkansas wheat millionaire and a Minnesota rancher respectively, has been pardoned. Collins was serving a life term in Sing Sing, imposed upon him in August, 1928, under the Baumes Law, which enacts that a man guilty of four felonies shall be held for life. A well-known New York actress friend of “Dapper Dan’s” won his case for him on the plea that he had only been convicted of three felonies and that his “sale” of the Bridge and the Woolworth Building was only a > misdemeanour 1

“Dapper Dan,” a handsome, immaculately dressed man, once told how he made his famous “sale.” “I was staying in the Waldorf Hotel, and was down to my last dollar,” he said, “when I noticed a bucolic-looking old chap, smoking a corn-cob pipe, sitting in the lounge. "He was a gift from the gods, for he told me he was in New York to invest some of his millions made from wheat growing in real - estate. I pitched my tale right away—told him I owned the Brooklyn Bridge, but that I could not be bothered with it. I took him to the bridge—but not too near I ‘Look!’ I said, ‘thousands of cars passing and repassing—each paying a toll fee of one dollar!’ “He wrote me a cheque for £BO,OO0 — and within an hour I had cashed it and fled back to England. “A year later I was back in New York and did the same sort of trick on a Minnesota cattle rancher/ This time I ‘sold’ the Woolworth Building for £40,000. Once I tried to sell Fifth Avenue to a Virginian—but that job landed me in the Tombs, and I did a year on Blackwell’s Island.”

Collins, who is a well-known New York figure, has spent several fortunes on Broadway. There was a time when he had. every girl in the Ziegfeld Follies wearing a diamond anklet bearing his initials. . , He was once photographed with the mayor of New York, and arrested as he walked away down the City Hall steps, top-hat, lavender gloves, and morning suit notwithstanding 1