The Daily Dispatch: November 26, 1860., [Electronic resource]

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A Stupendous confidence game.

--A Southerner Swindled out of Twenty Thousand Dollars. The heaviest confidence game we remember ever to have heard of, is said to have been successfully practised in St. Louis, on Saturday last, upon a rich planter from near Nashville, Tenn., named T. L. Newcomb. The gentleman, according to the St. Louis papers, is worth $100,000, and came to that city to invest $20,000 in real estate. He made the acquaintance of a man named Johnson, with whom he had several interviews last week. On Saturday, Johnson, it is alleged, having represented himself as a man of wealth, informed Newcomb that he had just closed a contract whereby he had agreed to furnish the city with cellular iron pavement sufficient to pave six hundred blocks, but unfortunately he had not ready money sufficient to engage in the enterprise, and he would be obliged to mortgage his real estate to raise the necessary amount --a thing he didn't care to do. However, if Newcomb would lend him $20,000 be would give him a share of the profits. Mr. Newcomb, not for a moment doubting his honesty or his story, agreed to this, and loaned him the sum of $8,000 in cash on the spot, and gave the remainder, $12,000, in bank certificates, which he helped Johnson to collect at different banks in St. Louis. Johnson, therefore, got his $20,000, immediately disappeared, and has not been seen since.