The January 1936 issue of Real America magazine ran a long exposé by De Lysle Ferree Cass, general manager of the Illinois Intelligence Bureau, on a Depression-era racket — organized gangs of "charity chiselers" running phone-bank fundraisers out of Chicago and New York.
About 75% of all charity appeals to American businessmen, Cass writes, were run by professional confidence men. Chicago alone had thirty firms and a floating pool of 200 phone salesmen — the "dynamiters" — who worked rented "Boiler-Rooms" stacked with cheap chairs and telephones, reading from sucker lists. Promoters skimmed 50 to 90 percent of every donation.
Cass also describes the "leaper" — a young woman hired to rush to the mark's office and pick up the check before he could change his mind. If he hesitated, the leaper would cry on cue or, in Cass's phrase, "influence him with suggestive sex appeal."
Real America was a mid-1930s general-interest magazine that ran muckraking exposés and true crime alongside ads for Wrigley's gum.
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