Welcome back to another exclusive sneak preview of the Hue Jackson School of Scam Artistry!

Sometimes I get frustrated. Not coaching makes me frustrated. That means I’m not pulling a con, and thus not showing the world how clever I am. What further frustrates me is when the simplest, riskiest, and most impractical cons end up working. That goes against everything you’re paying me to teach you! (By the way, your next $29.95 payment is due. I charge interest in your internal organs. Don’t be late.)

Regardless, sometimes, once in a while, I find it necessary to showcase a simple con. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

BARBARA ERNI: THE GOLDEN BOOS

BORN: February 15, 1743

DIED: February 26, 1785

Liechtenstein: a tiny, mountainous country best known for being fabulously wealthy and a large manufacturer of false teeth. With less than forty thousand people living in Liechtenstein, news travels extremely quickly. For criminals and con artists, it’s a tough place to make a living – especially in today’s digital universe. Little wonder that we had to jump back to over 250 years ago to find the story about the last person to be sentenced to death in Liechtenstein. Worth it? For the con she pulled – I’d say so.

Our scammer extraordinaire, Barbara Erni, was nicknamed “Golden Boos” thanks to her vibrant strawberry-blonde hair. Details of her early life are fairly scant; she was born in the village of Feldkirch to a homeless couple, and as a young woman, married Tiroler Franz, a notorious criminal, in 1779. We can only presume that her hardscrabble life and subsequent marriage taught her the art of scamming very effectively. Unfortunately, there are no portraits or other artwork of her – not that an audiotape series can show that anyways… but whatever.

The legend of the Golden Boos travelled throughout the European countryside thanks to the success of her elaborate con – she only had one, but it was honed to perfection. She would travel from village to village, staying in an inn for the night, taking with her a giant “treasure chest” or backpack of some variety. Upon checking in, Erni would claim that her belongings needed to be locked in the best, most secure room possible, as they contained a valuable, unspecified treasure. Upon locking the trunk in the room, out jumped a little person – her assistant (possibly a tiny man or a large child, we are not sure) – who would steal all of the valuables of the room he was locked in. Finally, scammer and assistant would escape in the middle of the night – the innkeeper none the wiser, at least until morning.

Time-consuming? Yup. Tons of room for error? Absolutely. This is actually a con that I, personally, rather despise, just because the chance of fucking it up is so high. But I will begrudgingly admit that she was skilled at it – legend has it that she pulled it off at least seventeen times over a fifteen-year period, without a hitch. She became a legend of sorts – renowned for her beauty as well as for her impressive strength in lugging around all that treasure from place to place.

The problem with the Golden Boos, as is the downfall of so many con artists, is that she got cocky. In May of 1784, and by this time fabulously wealthy, Barbara Erni (and presumably her tiny attendant) were arrested in the village of Eschen; they were paraded back to the capital of Vaduz, where they were imprisoned. The pair were charged with 17 counts of burglary, and, after a lengthy trial, found guilty. While it’s curious that nobody knows the name or the fate of Erni’s assistant, the records can confirm that she was the final person to ever be executed in Liechtenstein. This is all the more remarkable, as Liechtenstein kept the death penalty on the books until 1987. There’s few records of executions before Erni’s time, as well – especially compared to neighbouring Switzerland and various principalities of the Holy Roman Empire.

So why the Golden Boos? Why not many others of the various petty criminals who frequented Liechtenstein in this era – especially with it so renowned as a criminal sanctuary in this time? Well… with enough pissed-off innkeepers, somebody had to be made an example. On February 26th, 1785, Barbara Erni was beheaded in the town square of Vaduz, in front of a crowd of a thousand people. Considering that she was the last person Liechtenstein ever executed, I’d say the citizens learned their lesson pretty thoroughly.

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So there. That’s today’s lesson. If you keep doing the same shit over and over, eventually someone is going to cut your head off. Probably with a guillotine. I can think of a few people who could stand to hear that message. Keep switching it up, and keep people on their toes. As my personal hero Jeff Probst likes to state – “Improvise. Adapt. Overcome.”

Speaking of adapting, if you’re on time with your audiotape payments this month, you’ll get a discount on my BetaMax exclusive release series! It’s being released very soon*. Don’t forget to call 1-900-FAST-BUX for this fantastic opportunity! Until next time – I’m Hue Jackson.

*When you consider the heat death of the universe, virtually everything is “soon” in comparison.

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Information from this article taken from here, here, here, here, and here. Banner image by The Maestro.