Con Men and Confidence Tricksters

                                                    Con men and Confidence Tricksters

           

Having been a settlement since the mid 1800’s, Port St Johns has seen the most varied and interesting people walk and sail through its gates. As Sydney Turner, the sea captain more responsible for the settling of PSJ once said; “Port St Johns has become the receptacle for society’s drop outs”. Transkei became a hidey hole for brazen, clever con men.

Bribery and corruption was the norm. It was the done thing to get necessary permissions, licenses, exemption from taxes – whatever.

Jacob Ballantyne fancied himself as a builder of an African Empire, on hearing him speak, one could almost imagine that he had read one too many epic African novels and had modeled himself on his namesake, the swash buckling gentleman hero of those novels. But as they would have said in that era, he was cut from a different cloth, and his breeding showed.

Jacob arrived in Port St Johns at the time when the powers in control wanted everything they saw on TV, and were prepared to pay for it. Yes, of course, the original contributor to that was the South African tax payer. Millions of rands changed hands on a daily basis in the Transkei, so Jacob didn’t have any qualms about spending money on causes that would ultimately make him a fortune.

Other South African property magnates also followed those rules, and acquired properties and business licenses that only Transkei citizens should have been able to obtain. And make their fortunes they did, but at a cost – a change of ruler in Transkei and being declared persona non grata there was one thing – but they hadn’t taken into consideration that the grudge would be carried into the New South Africa. So the fortunes they have, but they cannot come back to their mother country for fear of having corruption charges leveled at them.

Jacob went back to his mother country after making a small fortune. He was an excellent con man, he had a real knack of being able to rope people into his schemes and get them to invest their hard earned money, to ‘obtain rights and licenses’. He set up a house manufacturing factory in PSJ, using the latest low cost fast erection techniques, and then proceeded to sell himself a and his ideas to the unsuspecting greedy ones. Presents of gold watches were a favorite. He’d borrow the money from an ‘investor’, spin a story, present the watch and walk away with a fortune in signed documents. Of course, hard cash was good too – fat wads of the stuff would exchange hands over genteel cups of tea taken on the lawns of an ‘investors’ garden.

Credit has to be given where credit is due. Ballantyne’s prefab houses were well built, and survived all the non maintenance that happened to them. One building, Neats Eats, which stood at the Umzimvubu River mouth for over 25 years, was originally his wife’s little fast food outlet, which served the best Irish Coffees at any time of the day.

Neats Eats after it was razed

It eventually became an illegal tavern, a den of iniquity, after it was taken over, by squatting, by a high ranking police officer. It was eventually razed by the Port St Johns Municipality                                              

South Africa didn’t view Jacob’s business operations with the lazy eye that Transkei authorities did, and he became a wanted man over the border. Eventually, Jacob’s ‘investors’ lost all their confidence in him, and he found it necessary to relocate his large family and neat little wife, back to the island mountains where they had originally migrated from. The family left South Africa on various flights, but Jacob was arrested in Cape Town, trying to board an international flight. He was held at a jail pending a bail application; when a bureaucratic mix-up occurred, and he was allowed to be driven to court by a friend. The two of them took the fastest road to Lesotho, where he got on a plane at the newly completed international airport, and made it to another African country, Zimbabwe. He was on the same flight as that country’s president, and the two discovered they had a lot in common. After swapping notes on how to make the most of other people’s money, he made it back to the mountains he’d come from.

Years later, Jacob Ballantyne came back, maybe a bit meeker, but still full of bluster, and very happy to see that his buildings were still standing – after all, that attested to the quality (if not integrity) of his work, not so? He tried pulling his non paying, catch me when you can tricks, but the owner of the restaurant where he’d run up a substantial tab got the better of him. He’d used her telephone to phone home by reversing charges. When she eventually got tired chasing him for money, she changed tactics. She looked up the number on her telephone account and phoned his wife. His wife, the neat little woman, was actually a harridan in disguise, and she wasn’t at all happy to hear that her husband was in South Africa, when she had been told he was in Spain. Jacob lost his bluster, paid up, and left, supposedly for home, but who knows? He could be sitting in the power chair of another banana republic, advising that ruler on how to run his country.

And of course, when one con man moves out, another moves in. Now there was space for a New Age conman – one full of sympathy and concern for the poor locals, extorting monies from Westerners to help build schools and educate the poor children. The locals nod their heads, shake their heads, and wonder at the cheek of it. And what do the people that are being ‘taught’ all sorts of new skills and having schools built for them think? They think it’s delightful – another sucker is here to hand out freebies in exchange for nothing. Why should they care about where the money comes from or goes? They get part of it for free!