19th Century Identity Theft: An Explainer
19th Century Identity Theft: An Explainer
Copyright © 2026 SYDNEY SCHUSTER — All Rights Reserved
I’ve been going on and on in previous posts about assclowns reinventing themselves in ye olden days. Please enjoy a hearty laugh while I explain how it was done.
I know it’s hard to believe some people died more than once, and changed their identities the way other people change clothes. Gotta love the time before cell phones, when no one could call anyone and blurt “Dog! I just saw your dead wife in Zabar’s — yeah, no, she’s buying Limburger!” People just trotted into city hall, asked for vital records (theirs, somebody else’s, didn’t matter), altered them by hand — crossed things out, wrote other things in — handed them back, and slipped the clerk a tip.
Changing one’s name for legit reasons is legal, of course. People who get married, or their parents named them Bushrod Johnson, they change their names every day. What’s not legal is assuming the identity of another, or changing your name to commit crimes the way Henry Whitney did in my last post. The wankers in this post impersonated others in order to steal stuff and do bigamy, or died and returned to collect life insurance and avoid debts. Or all of the above. Good times!
A heartwarming family example is Vaudeville luminary Lela Gilette Shaw (1880-1918) and her mother, the famous artistic whistler Alice J. Shaw (aka Alice S. Horton, 1853-1918). They vanished the same year.
Alice was a bigger-than-life character noted for her romances and gigantic bosom as much as for her art. In 1909 she sued a dead boyfriend’s estate for $40,000 ($1.47 million in 2026 dollars) for abandonment. Alice died of heart failure in 1918 after receiving a poor review of one of her recordings, only to arrive safely in New York in 1928 on a steamship from England.
Her daughter Lela requires a few more paragraphs. We’ll start in 1894, when she married acrobat-turned-actor Leslie Morosco (1872-1954, aka John Leslie Mitchell) in California when she was 14. They performed together with a touring theater company for years.
Lela was still married to Leslie in 1906 when she married notorious New York insurance fraudster Victor Edwin Freeman (1872-1931, aka Yonkers shoe salesman Valentine Freeman). He was arrested for embezzlement on his way to their wedding, and things went downhill from there. Turns out he had mob connections, which is how he lost some factories.
Lela got bored with Leslie and Victor and ran off with Victor’s brother, Vaudeville performer Arthur Freeman (1874–1936), aka Dr. Agate Freeman, aka Dr Allan Freeman, aka Boston check forger Reuben Lippman, aka book author Robert Appleton, aka Count Roman Ivanovitch de Lippman Zubof, a Russian who didn’t speak Russian. Sergius Stepniak, the famous genuine Russian revolutionary, angrily called Zubof a forger in 1891 before giving him a black eye.
Arthur (born Arthur Randolph Freeman, in Queens) owed a lot of people money. He wasn’t broke. He was just an adventure junkie who liked packing weapons and stealing.
He was probably Arthur Freeman Dennett, security agent for the Parkhurst Society for the Prevention of Crime, a powerful private police force accountable to no one. Arthur was arrested in 1894 for trying to frame two NYC police detective sergeants for blackmail as part of a larger conspiracy to bring down the Gould family. Arthur got his evidence by posing as an Irish immigrant and buying a patrolmanship on the police force for $460. At his grand jury trial, Arthur told the judge he owned a bunch of railroad stock, and a hotel and general store in the resort town of Weirs, NH. The New York Weekly Press covered the trial, describing Arthur as a helluva actor who was “the smoothest Yankee that ever came out of New Hampshire.” The grand jury didn’t indict him. He was promoted to Superintendant of the Parkhurst Society. They kicked him out in 1897.
One of Arthur’s other revenue streams was trashy novels written as Robert Appleton. In 1894 he published Violet, An American Sappho, a roman à clef about Boston society that was so tawdry, the police confiscated all the copies.
Arthur published his own books, because he knew how. He was probably the Robert Appleton whose publishing company got the crap sued out of it for robbing a shareholder. The lawsuit described Appleton as capable of preparing, writing, editing, and composing printed matter. Robert Appleton Company, organized in 1902, was funded with $100,000 ($3.9 million in 2026 dollars) to publish one book: the Catholic Encyclopedia. That right there totally sounds like a money laundry. Anyway, Appleton fired one of the principals, William T. Dickerson, for not being a Catholic. (Arthur wasn’t one either, of course. He was a Protestant. His mother was Jewish.) Appleton stole $17,500 Dickerson was owed under the incorporation contract. (Dickerson v. Appleton, NY Superior Court of Kings County, Court of Appeals, 1908)
Arthur self-published as Roman Zubof, too. He paid Thomas Y. Crowell & Co. to print his 1890 gothic horror novel Viera: A Romance Twixt the Real and the Ideal. Viera is a ghost who haunts people by playing cards with them, or something. The Book Buyer‘s review in 1890 sniped: “Such books are far from healthy in their tendency, and only show a morbid imagination.” The Critic magazine advised Arthur to lose the ghosts and “the page after page of crude and empty speculation.”
Count Zubof was himself a reviewer of literarature by his betters, in the days when exhaustingly long sentences were considered brainy. Below is an especially tedious one he wrote about Walt Whitman in an 1887 issue of The Writer:
In 1896 the New York Times reported that “Count” Zubof (the Times always called him “Count” with quote marks) “spent money like a prince” and “drove a pair of fast horses and entertained lavishly.” That year the New York police arrested Zubof for stiffing the Hotel Cambridge out of months of rent. They caught him boarding a ship to England with a gun, a knife, and a big wad of cash. He committed suicide in the Jefferson Market jail. (Actually, his father snuck him out. During the Tammany Hall era, you could do stuff like that if you greased the right palms. Zubof’s $15,000 life insurance policy (worth $600,000 in 2026 dollars) was cashed by one “Daniel Romaine Van Riper,” who was actually — surprise! — Arthur’s father. The insurance company that issued the policy was owned by — surprise! — also Arthur’s father, and his brother Victor.
Arthur then had a nervous breakdown. One night in 1897 he was found wandering around Concord, NH in his pajamas, carrying a lantern he stole from a roadside where it had been placed to warn vehicles of an obstruction. He refused to tell the police his name, but someone recognized him because of course they did. He was declared insane and sent to the New Hampshire Asylum for the Insane.
A few years later, in 1909, Arthur Freeman and Lela Shaw were performing in Binghamton, NY, when they were married as Alphonso Phillips and Leila (with an i) Shaw of Chicago. (In Chicago she spelled her name Lelia and told everyone she was English.) Arthur was still married to his first wife, Carolyn, his father’s third wife’s sister. They had two children. Lela was still married to Arthur’s brother, Victor Freeman, with whom she had children in 1911 and 1915.
She was also still married to Leslie Morosco. Lela and Alphonso were living together in Chicago when Leslie got tired of competing with Arthur and Victor and divorced Lela. Leslie and Lela never worked together again.
By 1909 Arthur Freeman and Alphonso Phillips had transformed into Vaudeville actor Albert Phillips (1875-1940). (Albert was his father’s name. Phillips was a Freeman family name.) His Binghamton wedding license says he was born in New York City; his newspaper obituaries say Edwardsville, Indiana; Playbill said Edwardsville, Illinois; the Brooklyn Eagle said Brooklyn. Lela often performed with Albert. They became huge stage stars. He was usually billed over her. I bet she loved that. So did Leslie Morosco.
Click the photos to see them better.
In 1918 it all fell apart. Arthur joined the armed forces. Victor cut Lela loose. She died, according to the Times, “after a lingering illness.” (Well, that’s one way to describe the Freemans.) After her burial in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Westchester, she and her late mother went to teach at the California School of Artistic Whistling in Los Angeles. Alice said Lela whistled beautifully.
Four years later Lela was back, acting her dead heart out in a Vaudeville shtick called “There She Is Again,” using her real name in a variety show headlined by Mrs. Lucille Anderson’s Diving Belles. Nobody cared that Lela died. The Albany Times-Union‘s reviewer called her “a robust personality who has a funny little chuckle.”
Albert Phillips and Arthur Freeman lived separate lives after returning from WWI. Lela never performed with them again. In 1921 Arthur appeared at New York’s Shubert Theater in “Irene,” playwright Samuel Johnson’s greatest failure. He also played organ at church and masonic lodge concerts, and was half of a song-and-dance duo called Freeman and Apollo. The other half was probably the guy Arthur was introducing around town as his brother, Orpheum Theater player Jerry Freeman. Jerry was actually Arthur’s cousin, Jerome Friedman, who ten years earlier was Harold Julien Friedman, disgraced Democratic assemblyman from Manhattan’s 29th district.
In 1911 Harold held up a state senatorial election for a record 74 days, amidst much public squawking. Tammany Hall threatened his life, and a corruption investigation by the Assembly Judiciary Committee ensued. Harold fled. He stole some jewelry on his way out, got arrested, jumped bail, and was never heard from again until Jerry Freeman arrived in town a decade later. New Yorkers either never made the connection, or ignored it. Jerry married a showbiz groupie who was already married to someone else. So was Jerry. He murdered his other wife in California to be with her, and oops died in prison.
Meanwhile, Albert Phillips’ career was going like a freight train. He performed on 50 radio programs and made two silent movies in 1923 and 1924, portraying Ulysses S. Grant. His last stage performance was in 1939, as Stephen A. Douglas in “Abraham Lincoln in Illinois” at the Adelphi Theatre in New York.
Albert Phillips (or someone) died in 1940, of a heart attack in a room at the Hotel Langwell on West 44th Street. By then that part of New York City was well established as the gangland known as Hell’s Kitchen. Sounds like karma. He was 65.
Photo: New York City Municipal Archives
In 1925 Arthur Freeman needed money, I guess, or maybe he was just bored. He moved to England for a year. Calling himself Arthur Vectis Freeman, he published crime reports as Frank Power, a Philip Marlowe-type European journalist he invented (unless he was impersonating London Times war correspondent Frank Power, not realizing he died in 1884). As Power, Arthur wrote a series of weekly columns for the Sunday Referee, a British newspaper, “investigating” the disappearance of Lord Herbert Horatio Kitchener. Kitchener was the war hero lost when his warship sank near the Orkney Islands in 1916.
Frank Power claimed to have possession of Kitchener‘s body. In those days, a Kitchener sighting was equivalent to a posthumous Elvis sighting. Anyway, Arthur tried to sell an empty coffin to the British government. The Westminster coroner stated the coffin “was apparently new and obviously had not contained human remains.” Arthur accused Scotland Yard of stealing Kitchener‘s body from him. They were not amused.
Arthur had recently wrested control of a film about Kitchener made by a business associate, journalist Singleton Gates. Gates told the New York Times that Arthur’s investigative series was a stunt staged to publicize the film, How Kitchener Was Betrayed. It was all lies, Gates said, the biggest being finding Kitchener’s body. A few weeks after Arthur’s corpse scam, showings were advertised of Frank Power’s “remarkable” new film. It was banned by the London County Council.
Power also published a companion book, The Kitchener Mystery. Here’s a sample:
In England, the police were looking for Frank Power. They never found him. In America, everyone knew he was Arthur Freeman, including the New York Times and even the Brooklyn Eagle. They found him tiresome. Eventually the British decided they couldn’t prosecute Frank Power for possession of a box of rocks.
The photos below show the headshot Arthur Freeman used for business in 1919 (left), when he was 45 years old. It looks like a bar mitzvah photo. In the photo right he’s 52-year-old Frank Power.
Back in New York again, Arthur leaned into advertising. He did have ad experience, sort of. In the aughts he worked for the Consumers’ Company and the Nichols-Finn Advertising Agency in Chicago, when Albert Phillips was acting there at the National and Marlowe theaters. Then he did window displays at the National Department Stores and R.H. Macy in New York. Before all that he worked at his father’s insurance companies that got kicked out of two states. Eventually Arthur was in demand as a marketing speaker and lecturer. One of his spiels was actually titled “Applying Department Store Merchandising Methods to Insurance Selling.” And of course, he published books. What is a conman if not a marketer?
He left Macy’s in 1916 to be Gimbel Brothers’ advertising director, the same year he toured Montana as Albert Phillips. After boinging around the junk end of retail fashion for years, he left Gimbel in 1919 to join Einson Litho, an advertising printer with a big art studio and factory in Queens. They produced sales posters for department store windows, baseball trading cards, and box games. In 1920 Arthur left Einson Litho to manage the Sadowsky chain of 13 “cloak and suit” retail stores.
He rejoined Einson Litho in 1924 and became its president. The company changed its name to Einson-Freeman.
In 1925 Arthur took 10 months off to f*uck aound in England with his Kitchener movie and start his own company in New York, Arthur Freeman Window Display Advertising Service. Einson no doubt appreciated all that. In 1926 Arthur left Einson (or was shown out). In August he went to work for Gimbel Brothers again, in Philadelphia this time, as general manager. In October, Albert Phillips was in residence at the Longacre Theater on Broadway, playing Orville Mason in “An American Tragedy,” no doubt causing scheduling conflicts with his job in Philly.
In 1928 Arthur returned to Einson and was named chairman. He left again in 1932, to be VP of the Baltimore-based Joseph Katz Company advertising agency.
He returned to Einson-Freeman, of course, a job he leveraged to position himself as a big-time advertising expert. The Boot and Shoe Recorder called him “one of the best known authorities in the country on display and advertising.” He wrote countless articles for trade publications. When anyone sought erudite counsel on world-shaking issues with store standees, Arthur had the answers. He also had an affinity, for some reason, for the YMCA. The Arthur Freeman who worked in advertising didn’t have kids, or a wife. He didn’t even own a home. Maybe he lived at the Y.
His career makes my head explode.
For those keeping score: Advertising Arthur, Vaudeville Arthur, Frank Power, and Broadway/screen star Albert Phillips existed concurrently, from 1909 to 1940. In 1921, when he was giving advertising lectures at mobbed trade venues and appearing on theatrical stages all over America, the Brooklyn Eagle ran a feature about Arthur’s residency at the Shubert, with his picture. Granted, it was a very old picture — his photo was published quite a lot, really — so you have to wonder why no one noticed he was four people. Or if they did, why didn’t they say anything? He was a celebrity, for Pete’s sake. I like to imagine fans ambushing him for his autograph, and Arthur having to ask “Which one?”
He flogged his career at Einson-Freeman until it killed him. Or anyway, it killed Arthur Randolph Freeman, in 1936 according to his NYC death certificate.
Einson-Freeman told the public a different story. The New York Times and Sales Management Magazine, among many other publications, reported Arthur’s “resignation” from Einson to become VP of merchandising for a competitor, Ketterlinus Lithographic Manufacturing.
Arthur spent the next 22 years managing businesses that booted him, including businesses he founded. Ghosting your company for extended periods of time isn’t a good look. Frank Power was “writing” in Europe for a year when he was supposed to be working for Einson-Freeman. Albert Phillips spent 9 months on Broadway when he was supposed to be working for Gimbel Brothers. According to Variety, he also spent significent time acting in Chicago, Cleveland, Kansas City, and Philadelphia.
Career Recap of Arthur Freeman, Fruitfly
● Dec. 1936: Left Ketterlinus for a job with the same title at the Peck Advertising Agency.
● June 1937: Left Peck to start Freeman & Stern, Inc., with offices in Rockefeller Plaza. Provided sales development for chain and department stores.
● Aug. 1938 — Nov. 1938: Director of merchandisiing and advertising for the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Left when Albert Phillips began his run as Stephen A. Douglas in the play “Abe Lincoln in Illinois,” with Raymond Massey, Howard da Silva, and Kevin McCarthy. Arthur’s official reason for quitting the World’s Fair: differences of opinion with the president’s office. (Billboard)
● April 1939: Arthur (not Albert) appeared as a senator in Shakespeare’s “Othello” at Chicago’s Federal Theatre Project.
● November 1939: Arthur co-founded a nonprofit do-gooder group called Realists, Inc. According to the Rochester Times-Union, their mission statement was “to uncover the real causes of unemployment, depression, poverty, dictators and wars, and mobilize American ability to solve these problems through sounder distribution of buying power, to the end that democracy be preserved.” I don’t know what that meant, but I can guess who wrote it. They published a magazine, The Realist. Their only plans were a billion-dollar New York City slum clearance program and a national network of superhighways.
● 1940 to mid-1944: Black hole. The 1942 Standard & Poor’s Register of Corporations, Directors and Executives does not list Arthur as an executive at any company during this time. No more Albert Phillips gigs; he “died” in 1940.
● April 1944: Executive staffer at Meyer-Both Co., New York, an advertising and commercial art syndication company HQed in Chicago.
● 1946: Arthur took over the intra-store division of the Cine-Television Studios in New York, managing (according to the Times) “programming of all types of visual-action sales aids for department stores,” whatever that means.
● 1951: Freelance consultant, giving speeches and judging industry contests.
● 1954-1956: Executive director of the National Commitee on the Observance of Mother’s Day, NYC.
● Dates unknown: General sales manager of the promotion division of Kirby Block & Co., a department store buying business.
● 1958: 83-year-old Arthur was named managing director of the New York communications center of Dunhill International List Co., a B2B direct marketing firm based in Florida. The New York division doesn’t seem to have launched.
Arthur was probably as good at advertising as he was at writing. Magazines published his work anyway. He authored a particularly stultifying defense of window advertising for The Talking Machine World in 1919. Below is one excruciating paragraph-long sentence. Enjoy!
I was unable to track Arthur’s precise whereabouts after 1958. He may be the Arthur Freeman who died in 1974 and currently resides in Montefiore Cemetery in Queens with his great-uncle and aunt, Alfred and Adele Freeman. But in the interim, I think I know where he went.
Along the Way Oops Something Happened.
Back in 1935, a fellow named Frank Allen Burt (1885-1971) obtained a master’s degree in education from Boston University at the dusty age of 50. People usually get those to qualify for college teaching jobs. Frank already had one. Whatever he was thinking must’ve been very big, and very stupid.
Fun Fact! It used to be possible to, um, buy a degree from Ivy League colleges. That’s how Arthur Freeman’s uncle, Frederick A. Freeman, got a law degree from Harvard in 1855 after one semester of undergrad study, and a medical degree in the late 1890s with no study at all, via a sketchy process Harvard called “out-of-course.” By 1935 it probably took the same amount of class time (which is to say, none) and a thesis.
Frank Burt’s master’s thesis was a sweeping 405-page doorstop about job counseling at his local YMCA. (For purposes of comparison, Harvard’s master’s thesis limit is 300 pages.) I read it so you don’t have to. Frank didn’t actually participate in the counseling, he just analyzed data compiled by others, about people who’d never find a job no matter how much counseling they got because it was the Depression. The main thing he demonstrated was his struggle to write sentences less than a paragraph long. Here’s one about selling life insurance:
Why do we care about this Frank Burt? Grab a drink, Grasshopper, and follow along.
Frank was born in Newton, MA in 1885. In 1908 he received a bachelor of science degree from Amherst. He won an astronomy award. By 1913 he was on a career track as a court reporter until veering into advertising, despite having neither training nor experience. He was determined to dazzle Boston’s intelligentsia with his writings, lectures, and impossibly long list of completely unrelated jobs seemingly transferred to his résumé directly from someone else’s.
Frank wrote three profoundly unmemorable books for a captive audience (students): two 1940 textbooks about advertising, and How to Conduct Army Correspondence in 1943. He “co-wrote” the latter with Henry C. Coleron, a specialist on the subject. Frank’s contribution seems limited to a few overstated concepts like this:
Fortuitously for Frank, publishers were bugging his father to write an autobiography. Frank Hunt Burt was a famous court reporter who’d covered infamous criminal trials (Lizzie Borden, James Trrefethen, Mate Bram). He recorded speeches in shorthand by presidents Harrison, FDR, and Jefferson Davis. He wrote a lot of books and magazine articles about travel, history, and education. He was the assistant secretary of the Illinois YMCA, a wilderness explorer, a lawyer, and an editor of Above the Clouds, a summer daily newspaper published atop Mount Washington in New Hampshire that contained mostly advertisements. Frank Hunt Burt died in 1946 without getting around to writing a book about himself, but left behind a trove of journals and archival material.
And so his son, the other Frank, authored the book based on his father’s memoirs. The Story of Mount Washington was exactly the kind of project an ambitious but not necessarily talented author could make into a meal. It was published in 1960 and became a cult classic among outdoorspeople and New Hampshire history buffs. It was the solitaire in Frank Allen Burt’s tiara.
Below is a typical paragraph-long sentence, dripping with drama, from The Story of Mount Washington:
Frank’s bio in The Story of Mount Washington calls him a camper, outdoorsman, and lawyer. (He was none of those things.) But he was more. Much more.
Who Frank Allen Burt was and what he was really doing is not what you think.
His many CVs over the years embellished his credentials, such as they were, inconsistently and lavishly. The mess below — liberally interlarded with volunteer, summer, and freelance gigs, throwaway pamphlets he authored, and correspondence courses he took — was published by Amherst’s College Biographical Record in 1951:
Frank’s history is interesting more for what isn’t there: the artfully omitted 10-year employment blackout from 1930-1940.
During Frank’s blackout, his few jobs may have been apocryphal, or could easily have been done by someone else and, in any case, can’t be checked. You’ve had résumés. You know what I mean. I found only one public appearance during that decade, a speech he gave in Boston to the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in 1935, about the history of advertising since pre-Christian antiquity. They’re probably still there.
Obviously, Frank’s job history as stated by Frank cannot all be true. (Lawyer? WTF!?) And so much of his career journey — remember his grand jeté from court stenography to corporate marketing? — sounds not only improbable, but also suspiciously like Arthur Freeman’s: ad agency proprietor, manufacturing company ad manager, ad agency VP, ad agency account exec, special lecturer on advertising, YMCA something, Shakespeare Fellowship member, 300 magazine and newspaper articles written on advertising and Shakespeare’s plays.
Shakespeare. Seriously? Dude, pick a lane.
Okay. None of what I’m about to tell you next makes any damn sense, but it really did happen.
Frank Allen Burt of Boston was also Frank A. Burt of New York, aka Vaudevillian Augustus Berek (1882–1964).
Augustus toured America with his act and was fairly successful, usually in a lineup with other acts and occasionally toplining. His stage career started three years before Frank Allen Burt left college in 1908. His Amherst yearbook cryptically states that after graduation, he was “obliged to decamp and make for the west.”
Augustus Berek was already working on the West Coast by 1908, writing and performing his own burlesque material and singing and dancing in other people’s choruses. In 1905 he married Myrtle McKinley, a California actor who became his stage partner. They performed as Burt and Rosedale — singing, dancing, cracking jokes, playing assorted musical instruments as bad as they could. They moved to the Bronx by 1910.
Theirs was a fair-to-midling but popular act, if you believe theater reviews. In 1917 Billboard called Burt and Rosedale “a chatter-dispensing combination” of “the bald, mustached kind of comic” and his sidekick who “laugh[s] uproariously at the comedian’s antics.” Billboard faulted them for “gapping spots where the routine lags pitifully and these are the parts of the act in which chatter and pantomimic comedy are virtually forced down the throats of an unprotected clientele.” Ouch! Billboard’s reviewer called Burt and Rosedale lucky that the Loew’s State Theater bookers were impressed enough to let them headline.
Myrtle McKinley retired in 1929. Augustus continued to perform for a year or two, until the Great Depression boiled over and Vaudeville collapsed. People stopped going to stage shows and started going to movies instead, because they were cheaper. Augustus was a little too late for movies. He was bald, middle-aged, and one of his vocal cords was removed in the 1930s. His acting career was cooked. In the 1940 census he was selling refrigerators.
Augustus Berek would’ve known Arthur Freeman. They strode the same boards. Back in 1910 Augustus was being paid, according to one biographer, $250 per week by someone. That’s equivalent to $8,870 per week in 2026 dollars. Headliners did earn a lot of money then; the fair-to-midling acts below them on the marquee, not so much. Maybe Augustus was doing more than singing and dancing. Maybe he was playing a part for someone else: a felon named Arthur Freeman.
Boston, the alternate universe where Frank Allen Burt lived, was a motherlode of rich snobs ripe for pocket picking. It was where Count Zubof and Reuben Lippman and Robert Appleton had so profitably grifted high-society suckers back when Frank Allen Burt was still in grade school. Their wallets always became lighter when Arthur was in Boston.
There was more involved, of course. It was always complicated with Arthur. He may have written many of Frank Allen Burt’s speeches about advertising, and his books, and his Sears-catalog-sized master’s thesis about the YMCA that sounded like a Count Zubof novel. The 300 magazine articles Frank claimed to have written may have been overstated. The Newton Graphic noted in 1931 that “he has for several years conducted an automobile tour feature in the Boston Transcript.” Travel articles seem exactly like something Frank would’ve written while driving around the country to stage gigs, but I didn’t find any, only another reference in the Newton Graphic to his article about old issues of postage stamps. I did find Frank’s story “The Pirate’s Legacy,” contributed to The Occult Digest in 1927, about using “psychical research” to communicate with a dead pirate to find lost treasure. Viera much?
Augustus Berek was as much of an invention as Albert Phillips. Even though Frank had formed a relationship with Augustus’ parents, I don’t think there was ever a real Augustus Berek born in 1882. There were three Berek brothers who died before 1903 (including a 15-month-old who died in 1880), and it would’ve been simple to visit city hall and alter one’s record.
Above: Frank Allen Burt (left) was clearly the son of Frank Hunt Burt.
Below: Augustus Berek (left) was clearly Frank Allen Burt.
So there you have it. New York crime dynasty scion Arthur Freeman was all up Beantown Burt’s butt for reasons, and Frank Allen Burt wasn’t who anyone thought.
Whoever Augustus Berek was in 1912, Myrtle McKinley was stuck in the Bronx raising a toddler and an infant, and Frank did something really freakin’ stupid. He got married.
Yup, notable over-achiever Prof. Frank Allen Burt had an over-achieving wife. She inexplicably became the national chair of the prestigious Motion Pictures Committee of the Daughters of the American Revolution — as if a Boston granny in lace collars and a bun knew anything about Hollywood. Her name was Leila Shaw. Yes, that Leila Shaw.
Leila and Frank Allen Burt were married in Brookline in 1912. Augustus Berek was still married to Myrtle McKinley in New York, and Leila was still married to Victor Freeman and Albert Phillips, who was tied up with a theater gig in Chicago.
Their marriage certificate states it was Leila’s first marriage, and Frank’s occupation was “fruit grower.” They had a big church wedding, followed by a grand reception at Leila’s parents’ home, with both families attending. She wore a white satin gown from Paris, embroidered in silver and silk thread, that probably took a year to make and a month to ship.
I’d like to say the families didn’t know about Myrtle McKinley or Victor Freeman or Albert Phillips. But a year earlier Leila was touring Nebraska, Washington, Wisconsin, and Illinois with Albert. And she’d been pregnant just prior to, or during, the Burt/Shaw wedding, with her daughter Ruth by Victor Freeman (per official records, but probably an estimate). Had Frank Burt spent any time with Leila prior to their marriage, he couldn’t possibly have not known.
That said, he probably spent more time with Leila than he did with Myrtle. Immediately after his graduation from Amherst in June 1908, he applied for a passport in Manhattan as Augustus, the purpose of which was “travel abroad” for six months, apparently without Myrtle (who never applied for a passport). He requested that his passport be mailed to the Manhattan address of his father, Ike Berek, presumably so Myrtle wouldn’t see it. Leila was in Europe at that time. She and her husband Victor Freeman went there in 1906, and didn’t return until October 1910.
Myrtle became pregnant for the first time in 1910. She tried to leave Augustus but was dissuaded by her mother-in-law. She quit showbiz instead. Or rather, showbiz quit Myrtle. Augustus was away for an extended engagement with “Lillian Del Roy,” according to his daughter Miriam’s 1944 biography, Mother Wore Tights. She described Ms. Del Roy thusly: “She’s very handsome. Tall. Blond. She’s very important. Top billing, way above Frank. But that wouldn’t stop her.” “Lillian Del Roy” is a pseudonym. Connect the dots yourself.
Frank chased Leila until she caught him. When they finally married in 1912, she was still married to Victor Freeman and Albert Phillips. Mrs. Frank Allen Burt had three children with Prof. Burt in Brookline: Barbara Burt born in 1913, Dorothy Burt in 1915, and Leila Burt in 1926. I don’t know where they came from, but I can guess. From 1912 to 1921, Leila was on the road most of the time with Albert Phillips.
Augustus Berek nearly always worked with women. In 1915, when Myrtle was at home in Brooklyn raising her two girls, he was touring America with an all-woman ensemble called The Girl Trust. Their big hit was a comedy musical called “The Bigamists; Or Two Husbands and One Wife.” I am not making this up.
In 1916 Victor Freeman threatened to move to England with his and Leila’s kids, 4-year-old Ruth and 1-year-old John, which he eventually did. Myrtle resumed touring with Augustus in a new playlet called “The Substitute.”
Augustus avoided Boston as much as possible, but in 1928 Myrtle twisted his arm, and they performed together there for a week. They took their kids along. They were visited by the city’s morals squad on the first day, who ordered them to change their act or leave town (this according to their daughter Miriam, who was 16 and certain nuances may have been lost on her). I suspect this intervention was staged by one of Leila’s other cuckolded husbands. Burt and Rosedale did finish the week in Boston. They couldn’t wait to go back to New York. Fortunately, Boston cops could be bought off.
Leila Shaw retired from the theater in 1927. She was 47. In 1930 she was living with Victor in Rochester, NY, under fake names, according to the census. The same census shows Frank Allen Burt living with his daughter Barbara in Brookline, but not his two younger daughters, who were 15 and 4. In 1931 and 1932 the Newton Graphic reported that Frank was holed up at his vacation home on Webb Lake in Weld, Maine. Kind of an expensive discretionary purchase on an assistant professor’s salary.
Barbara Burt, an accomplished violinist, was attending Mount Holyoke College. She graduated in 1934, scrammed to Providence, and married a Rhode Islander. She was subsequently scrubbed from Burt family records.
Leila returned to Brookline after Victor Freeman’s death in 1931. Frank Burt and Augustus Berek were AWOL. Augustus’ daughter Miriam’s book doesn’t mention him attending her 1934 wedding. In fact, she doesn’t mention him at all after he became a “refrigerator salesman.”
Maybe the Burts and Bereks were afraid of Leila and the Freemans. Who wouldn’t be?
Leila had a family of her own in Boston. Her stepmother, Isadora Howe Shaw, died in 1937. All of Isadora’s property had been protected by trusts set up by Leila’s late father that went kablooey when Isadora died. Leila probably scared off her whole family to glom onto it.
Frank Allen Burt did return to Boston, eventually. His first post-blackout job was in 1942, briefly, as head of Boston University’s College of Business Administration. Then he wrote his three textbooks. In 1949 he was a lecturer at Northeastern University. He apparently spent the entire decade of 1950-1960 writing his book about Mount Washington.
All’s I know is this: Myrtle McKinley was still telling people Augustus Berek was a refrigerator salesman in 1950; she had ten boarders living in her house in Brooklyn, because it was the only way she could pay her bills. Frank Allen Burt is also missing from his famous father’s FindAGrave page. Now you know why.
Leila Shaw was a honeytrap and Frank stepped right in it. I don’t know how good her acting was, but in 1919 the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle panted: “she is reputed to be one of the most vivid beauties on the Vaudeville stage, a delectably creamy blonde… her face brightly lighted with bouyant vitality.” She was 40. It sounds like a press release Arthur Freeman wrote. But you be the judge. Here she is in 1917:
The only thing Leila loved madly and passionately about Frank Allen Burt was his family’s money and social connections and his intellectual bankruptcy. I think he was conned into ripping off his many advertising and college employers by Arthur Freeman, who helped Frank appear to be an advertising expert to facilitate Leila and Arthur Freeman’s retirement grift plan. Arthur was probably passing rubber checks all over Boston, just like the good old days.
Frank desperately didn’t want people to know he had a bonus spouse or another identity. Threatening to expose him was how Leila and Arthur kept Frank in line. I’m very familiar with how the Freeman crime family operated. I wrote a whole book about them.
Leila’s contribution to the retirement fund was epic. She drove head-on into Boston’s elite do-gooder scene as “Mrs. F. Allen Burt,” wife of eminent academician and adman Frank. (He was called “Allen” in Boston.) She was probably siphoning philanthropic fund-drive cash off the high-society organizations clamoring to accept a celebrity as a member.
She became the general chair of the Brookline Women’s Club, and a member of the DAR, the Daughters of Colonial Wars, the Bostonian Society, and the National Society of Women Descendants of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company (or as the New York Post put it, “no kidding”). In 1943 she directed a Christmas gala at the Hotel Gardner for the Children of the American Revolution. The entertainment was a marionette show by one Charlotte Horton — the sister of Leila’s whistling mother, Alice Shaw, and Lela Gillette Shaw’s aunt.
I
n her own way, Leila was even scarier than the Freemans. She may have killed someone. And not just anyone.
She had two fathers and a phony 1885 Massachusetts birth certificate with her name spelled “Lula.” In the 1900 census she appears as a 14-year-old (she was 20) with her Boston father, Lieut. John Hamilton Shaw (1843–1916), a milk or grain dealer (depending on census year). His Boston Globe and Herald obituaries state he was a Civil War hero wounded at Gettysburg (shot in the leg, according to his military pension application), and commander of Fort Slocum in New Rochelle, NY, when Lincoln was shot.
Lieut. John Shaw’s obituaries say he died on November 24, 1916. It should creep you out bigtime that his state death certificate says he actually died two weeks after his obits ran, on December 6, of gas poisoning.
The day before, Leila Shaw performed at Boston’s Copley Theatre. Two weeks later she was performing her comedy “The Truthful Liar” at another Boston theater. She didn’t seem too broken up about her father’s demise.
Lieut. John Shaw may have been related to Leila’s birth father, New York City salesman William Holland Shaw (1838–1900). More likely, John Shaw was William Shaw. Both Mr. Shaws fathered a set of twins (boys for John, girls for William). Fewer than 3% of US pregnancies result in twins. The ability to create them is a genetically inherited superpower.
William Shaw’s genealogy trail is nonexistent. It starts in 1866, with the birth of his first child with Alice Horton, the artistic whistler, when she was 13. One story about their split says William abandoned Alice and their six kids years before their 1888 divorce. (Lieut. John Shaw had in fact married his wife Isadora Howe in 1871.) Another version claims Alice divorced William to marry Buffalo Bill Cody.
The year after the divorce, someone tipped off the New York Times that William Shaw was lurking at a Pittsburgh whistling performance by his ex. The Times stringer who buttonholed him asked a lot of questions William refused to answer. He did say Alice looked fat, and that everyone involved in their divorce was forbidden from talking to the press about it, “it” probably being that he had two wives. “I had to concede her the children when I gave the divorce,” he said, “but I will have them back again some of these days — and that pretty soon.”
He seems to have succeeded, although not how he meant. Leila Shaw and her mother Alice “died” in 1918, two years after Lieut. John Shaw was gassed to death. Elsie Shaw, one of Leila’s twin sisters, also “died” in 1918 (and then performed in a musical comedy at Manhattan’s Broadhurst Theater, “Ladies First,” two months later).
The dead are reliably judgmentproof. But man, did they ever hate that Lieut. Shaw.
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