Raymond J. Bischoff The Iowa Ponzi

Raymond J. Bischoff

“Someday, I’ll be a millionaire,” Raymond J. Bischoff told the kids outside Van Buren School, lighting a cigarette like a man with inside information. “I’m not going to work hard for a living.” 

 The others laughed. Of course they did. Nobody from Fifth & Pine Streets becomes a millionaire, not with a father pulling twenty-two cents an hour at the Independent Malting Company, or driving beer trucks through the West End mud.

 

His mother married a blind man after the divorce, which did nothing to raise morale in the Bischoff household. Frank Davis could feel the world but not see it. Maybe that’s where Raymond learned to fake things — to see with words instead of eyes.

 

He started young. A teenage magazine hustler in the Putnam Building, taking orders, cashing checks, then vanishing like a phantom publisher. No magazines ever arrived, of course, but Raymond did. He always came back, a different man each time.

 

In 1917, he was back in Davenport calling himself Sergeant D. C. Breckenridge of Canada’s Princess Patricia Regiment — a fine, heroic-sounding outfit, except for the minor issue that it had been annihilated at Ypres. Only ten men survived, and everyone of them had a better story than Raymond. But that didn’t stop him. He said the Canadians wouldn’t take him because “Bischoff” sounded too German. So he’d done the sensible thing: shed his Teutonic skin and re-emerged as a full-blooded hero. D. C. Breckenridge.

 

Raymond J. Bischoff

It worked. America was boiling over with war fever and paranoia. German names were a death sentence. Farmers woke up to find yellow streaks painted across their barns, immigrant kids were pelted with stones, and in the saloons, everyone whispered about spies. Breckenridge leaned into it — the way a carnival barker leans into a crowd — and told the people exactly what they wanted to hear: blood, gas, and glory.

 

He toured Iowa like a prophet of doom. “I saw men lose their legs, their eyes, their souls,” he’d say, his voice trembling with borrowed trauma. “The gas—my God, the gas!” He’d hold up a hand as if shielding himself from the memory. Somewhere, a widow would faint. Children would clutch their mothers. And Raymond, the little fraud from Fifth and Pine, would bask in the warm glow of borrowed horror.

 

He told them about his kid brother Bob, a sainted boy of sixteen who supposedly died rescuing a wounded German officer — only to be shot in the chest for his trouble. “Money doesn’t count for much when it comes to prices like that,” Raymond said. The crowd roared. Patriotism swelled like an overfed tick. “Do you wonder,” he shouted, “that we speak of the satisfaction of thrusting a bayonet into the belly of a German and feeling the steel strike home?”

 

They didn’t wonder. They cheered.

 

Then there was Little Marie, the Belgian girl with no hands — sliced off, he claimed, by a sadistic German officer for calling him a “dirty pig.” Raymond said he’d adopted her, that he’d bring her to America. The audience cried, passed the hat, and felt they’d done their Christian duty.

 

By the time he hit Omaha, he was a star. John L. Kennedy, president of the U.S. Bank, introduced him to 500 businessmen as “the man who has been through hell.” Breckenridge didn’t correct him. He talked about Hill 64, where he’d been gassed at the Somme.

 

A police officer standing guard in Bischoff's Chicago office

“Ever been seasick? Burned with carbolic acid? Choked until you can’t breathe?” he asked. “Imagine all that together — then you’re getting the gas.” The audience nearly applauded the pain.

 

In Burlington, he described the trenches — boys charging without gas masks, eyes blistering, lungs collapsing, clawing for air while the German shells screamed overhead. The doctors ran out of bandages and used handkerchiefs, shirts, anything to stop the bleeding. “The boys were practically murdered for want of proper care,” he said. Then he passed the hat again, this time for the Red Cross.

 

He brought out Little Dick Freeman, age twelve, an orphaned mascot of the war. And he promised that Little Marie — the mutilated Belgian girl — was on her way by steamer, headed straight to Iowa. No one doubted him. Why would they? He was a survivor of the Princess Pats, for God’s sake.

 

For a few weeks, Breckenridge was a hero. He was invited to luncheons, saluted on the street, maybe even propositioned by women who found tragedy erotic. Then, one morning, the papers exploded like grenades. There was no Sergeant Breckenridge in the Princess Pats. There was, however, a deserter named Raymond J. Bischoff — last seen skipping out on the U.S. Army.

 

They found him at Fort Douglas, Utah, still living under his alias. He confessed everything. He’d deserted twice — once from the American army, once from the Canadian. He’d patched together his speeches from newspaper clippings and pulp magazines, juiced them up with some hellfire prose, and sold the whole thing as gospel. “I just punched the information up a bit,” he said.

 

The public was outraged. Then confused. “What made him do it?” asked The Daily Times. “He told the stories so often he believed them.” Maybe that was true. Maybe Bischoff had breathed his own smoke for so long he couldn’t tell what was real anymore.

 

He served eighteen months in Alcatraz for desertion — a fitting address for a man allergic to truth — and when he got out, he re-emerged in Chicago as a financial genius. Worked for Armour & Co., ran a Boy Scout troop, passed a few bad checks, and reinvented himself again as a money wizard. The same trick, new costume. A man who could turn air into gold — or at least convince you he could.

 

He said it all started when the father of one of his Scouts couldn’t pay a $500 mortgage. “I told him I could double it,” Raymond explained later. “Put it in a speculative stock — doubled in a week.” Word spread. People lined up. It was like the old days again: the audience hanging on his every word, wallets open, faith restored.

 

Maybe that’s all Raymond J. Bischoff ever wanted — not money, not medals, not redemption. Just the crowd, the applause, the rush of getting away with it one more time. And he did, for a short time.