PARK RIDGE—There are so many scams being perpetrated these days that it can be difficult to stay informed on all of them. There is the one where a caller impersonates the IRS and threatens arrest unless back taxes are paid using gift cards. The grandparent scam asks for bail money for a jailed grandchild who gets only that single phone call.
There are also scams of the heart, where an online imposter drains the savings of someone desperate to find love. Thieves are endlessly coming up with new ways to use technology to their advantage, and yet, as one news clipping from 1893 tells us, there have always been people looking to make a quick buck at someone else’s expense.
Have you ever heard of a badger game? It has nothing to do with actual badgers, or Wisconsin college football. It is a slang term we don’t hear much anymore, but 130 years ago people would have known exactly what it meant. It refers to an extortion scheme in which a man is lured into a compromising position by a woman, and then he is confronted, and blackmailed, by an accomplice—the badger—posing as the woman’s husband or brother.
This was an effective scam in the late Victorian era, when social views on adultery, propriety, and honor were very strict.
An incidence of the badger game in Park Ridge made national headlines this week back in 1893. In a story that was part cautionary tale and part sensationalism, a Civil War veteran lost his savings on a pretty young blonde he met through a newspaper advertisement:
“Paul Hern, 71 years old, of Park Ridge, a veteran of the Civil War, recently got $1,500 of back pension, and while in a happy mood sent an advertisement for a wife to a New York matrimonial bureau. He thus became acquainted with ‘Catherine Hartingdon,’ a blonde soubrette, attractive and about 30 years old,” the story begins.
“Catherine” spent three days at Hern’s house at the beginning of November. On the final day, a man showed up claiming to be the woman’s husband.
“The couple worked the badger game to perfection. Hern was accused of winning the affections of the man’s wife, and violence was threatened unless $1,000 were produced. The stranger also threatened to sue him for $10,000 damage,” it continues.
Hern got together $700, which was all he had. That sum is equivalent to about $25,000 today. The pair made their victim drive them from Park Ridge to the Tappan railroad station on the West Shore Railroad. Justice Smith of Park Ridge issued warrants for the “badgers,” but nothing came of it.
The couple disappeared, off to find their next victim.
— Kristin Beuscher is president of Pascack Historical Society.