One Cent Magenta Read online

  First, though, she had to establish ownership, which meant tangling with Hind’s executors. She staked her claim to the stamp on a tale that seemed improbable, considering the explicitness of Hind’s will. There was no question that Hind had lavished gifts on Mrs. Hind over the years. The surrogate’s court mentioned a necklace that had cost Hind $25,000, as well as a $6,000 mink coat, a $5,000 platinum watch with diamonds, and the two cars, both Pierce-Arrows. Hind had paid $6,000 for one and $4,800 for the other. But she asserted that the one-cent magenta had also been a gift from Hind.

  She also claimed a third of the remainder of Hind’s estate under a recently enacted state law that allowed widows to do so. Hind’s lawyer had tried to preempt such a challenge with a clause in the will. The new law was intended to empower women whose husbands had blindly left everything to the children. But it applied equally to widows from marriages gone bad.

  She did not admit to friction in the marriage. She told a tale of comfortable domesticity, of a couple who were relaxed and easygoing around the house. She said she herself had taken the stamp out of the vault in December 1931 because he needed it. He had to mail it to London for display at a stamp show. Soon after the stamp was sent back in February 1932 and returned to its place in the safe, she made her move.

  “Arthur Hind was sitting in his study,” a surrogate’s judge wrote later in summarizing her account. Hind’s safe was in the next room. Mrs. Hind knew the combination and dialed it in. She took out the one-cent magenta, carried it to the table where Hind was working and placed it in front of him. “Hind turned and observed the stamp,” the judge wrote. “He said to her in substance, ‘Bob’”—the judge duly noted that this was Hind’s pet name for his wife—“‘ do you know the worth of that stamp and would you appreciate it if I gave it to you?’” Yes and yes, Mrs. Hind said. Hind said the four words she wanted to hear: “You may have it.” The judge said that Hind “turned to the regular work in which he was engaged at the moment” and that Mrs. Hind put the stamp back in the safe. It was just another day around the house.

  Now it was Mrs. Hind who took the stamp out of the safe from time to time and looked at it, the way Hind had done before his interest in philately faded. Or so she said.

  By then, Hind was an old man. He was in his late seventies. He had lived nearly twenty years longer than the national average. A lesser man—less wealthy, less determined—would have retired to a rocking chair. Hind apparently still saw himself as a man on the go. In December of that year, Hind signed a six-month lease on a house in Miami Beach. He came down with pneumonia in February 1933 and died on March 1.

  The funeral was held at the bungalow in Utica; the honorary pallbearers “were all prominent Utica men and old friends of Arthur’s,” the stamp dealer Charles J. Phillips wrote. There were eulogies by executives and employees of Hind’s company and by his bankers.

  Mrs. Hind was not terribly convincing as a grieving widow. Her next husband was the man who sold her the tombstone for Hind’s grave. Pascal Costa Scala was thirty. She was forty-five.

  Scala was a “well-known young Utican,” one of the newspapers wrote, although exactly what was meant by that phrase was not explained. Scala was definitely a local. He had grown up a couple of miles from Mrs. Hind’s bungalow. Across the street from his family’s tenement, home to Pascal and his brothers and sisters, was a funeral home run by a relative. Another relative ran a meat-packing business (and would tangle with Ann over a $20,000 loan during the Depression). A 1925 state census listed Scala’s occupation as “auto salesman,” but he had given that up by the time the next census-taker made the rounds. The 1930 federal census had him selling “monuments.”

  They kept their relationship secret while Mrs. Hind parried with Hind’s executors and relatives, but tongues in Utica must have been wagging, especially if whispers had escaped that they had married in Pennsylvania just months after Hind’s death. The news did not make the papers until later, after she had settled with Hind’s heirs in Britain—and kept the one-cent magenta.

  She sent the stamp to London, where the experts at the Royal Philatelic Society examined it and pronounced it genuine. She consigned it for an auction in London in October 1935, with a reserve—a minimum selling price— of $42,500, or at least $590,000 in 2016 dollars. The bidding opened at £3,500 ($16,000) and topped out at £7,500, $4,500 short of the threshold. The stamp was withdrawn without being sold, disappointing a Pemberton yet again. The final bid came from Percy Loines Pemberton, perhaps to avenge his father, Edward Loines Pemberton, who had declared the stamp genuine but had been late with his check in 1878.

  Back in the United States, Colonel Edward Howland Robinson Green was prepared to pay $40,000 for the one-cent magenta. The New York Times reported that Green would have, “had he lived a month longer.” Green was an eccentric multimillionaire in his late sixties who, like Hind, bought everything in sight. He was the genial counterpoint to his mother, Hetty Green, who was known as the “Witch of Wall Street”—famous for her success, infamous for her stinginess, her pettiness, her nastiness. But his death in 1936 dashed the deal for the one-cent magenta. Later the Times said Mrs. Hind turned down another $40,000 offer, this time from a British collector. Like Hind in 1931, she then raised the price. She insisted she would not sell for less than $50,000. In 1938, she turned to another stamp dealer, Ernest G. Jarvis, who set a more realistic price of $37,500. Still it did not sell.

  She had steadily increased the insurance coverage of the stamp over the years, eventually valuing the stamp at $48,800. But she had no passion for stamps, and probably no patience for them, either. “She has none of the reverence for the stamp that collectors feel for [the one-cent magenta],” a reporter observed, noting the irony of her claim on it: “A woman who never collected anything in her life owns a stamp that makes stamp collectors shiver in awe.” She did not express awe or affection for her most valuable possession. She merely said it was “terribly homely.” She tried to rid herself of the stamp, but not at a loss. She turned down offers ranging from $25,000 to $38,000 in 1940 before she entrusted the stamp to a retailer that was bigger and more “Barnumesque” than any that had handled the stamp before—Macy’s. Macy’s had a stamp department in those days (as did its rival, Gimbel’s), and promised exposure.

  The promises came from Finbar B. Kenny, the precocious—he was in his twenties at the time—manager of Macy’s stamp department. He became the stamp’s guardian and promoter. Mrs. Hind became the stamp’s escort. He arranged for the one-cent magenta to go to the World’s Fair. She dressed the part, in a fur jacket, and was photographed looking at the one-cent magenta. In newspapers that did not print color photographs, caption writers had to explain: “That little black spot on the table [in front of Mrs. Hind] is worth $50,000.”

  Not quite. When she finally sold it, soon after her appearance at the World’s Fair, the check was for less than that. The New York Times said she got only $40,000. But the auction catalogue for a later sale said she pocketed $45,000.

  Mrs. Hind’s marriage to Scala lasted nine years. This time, apparently, it was Mrs. Scala who was the wronged spouse. The judge who handled the case set two conditions. One was that Mrs. Scala could call herself Ann Hind again. The other was that she was free to remarry, but her ex-husband was not. The judge said that Scala was to seek the court’s permission if he wanted to marry while Mrs. Hind was still alive. Nothing in the record explained what Scala had done to prompt such an unusual requirement.

  Mrs. Hind died of heart disease in 1945 at age fifty-seven. Scala returned to court the following year, seeking to have the divorce set aside. His lawyer said Mrs. Scala had “forgiven and condoned the acts of her husband and had done so before the decree had become final.” The judge turned him down but said he could file suit against his ex-wife’s estate. He did, and settled for $6,500.

  Finbar B. Kenny, the manager of Macy’s stamp department, arranged the deal for Mrs. Hind. Her sister said Mrs. Hind never knew who bought i
t. If Mrs. Hind did not know who the new owner was, neither did the public. The buyer was not identified until shortly after he sold the stamp thirty years later. He kept quiet for a reason, and the reason was a grumpy remark attributed to Hind. Soon after the purchase, the New York Times reported that the new owner was “withholding his identity because dealers had deluged Mr. Hind, after he had purchased it, with offers to sell other rarities, often at exorbitant prices.” The new owner recalled a comment by Hind that the pressure had interfered with his business operations.

  His silence did not stop ever-higher numbers from being bandied about. In 1949 the New York Times said that the owner had turned down an offer of $60,000 and would not even part with it for $100,000.

  That sounded like the kind of damn-the-torpedoes attitude that Hind had taken in tougher times, and like Hind, the new owner of the one-cent magenta, Frederick Trouton Small, was another immigrant who was in the textile business. Small presided over a huge fiber and weaving plant in Maryland for years. But there was a difference. Hind had owned his mill and his company. Small was an employee, however prized he was and however much stock he held—the plant manager for twenty-five years, later a vice president at corporate headquarters in New York.

  The company was the Celanese Corporation, which made synthetic yarn and wove fabric from it. Small, an Australian who had been the company’s head of production in Britain when Celanese was turning out a million pounds of acetate yarn a week in the years just after World War I, was instrumental in putting the Maryland plant into operation. The installation of the machinery— indeed, the construction of the factory buildings—ran behind schedule because of a flood. Small arrived with a mandate to get the plant going, apparently even if the rank and file had to work weekends and holidays. The first spool of acetate yarn was finally produced on Christmas Day in 1924. It was marketed as artificial silk.

  Small did not take the one-cent magenta home once it was his. He told some reporters that he kept it in his office, first at the plant in Maryland and later in New York. Perhaps when Small’s secretary said he was not available, he was not holed up studying sales figures or reading memos, he was working on his stamp collection. Then again, perhaps not. He told other reporters that he saw the one-cent magenta only once in the thirty years he owned it. That was at the beginning, after he bought it and Kenny sent it to him by registered mail. Small looked at it and sent it back to Kenny for safekeeping, again by registered mail. The New York Times went so far as to write later on that Small “was not a stamp collector. He was an investor in stamps.”

  Still, Small had the background of a philatelist. He had collected stamps as a boy in Australia. “It was a lad’s collection,” the Times reported, and his parents gave it away while he was serving in the Australia and New Zealand Army Corps in World War I, first in the defense of the Suez Canal and later in the failed Gallipoli campaign for control of the routes from Russia. He was a mechanical engineer who directed the placement of underground explosives that were used against the Turks. One device exploded sooner than it was supposed to, and Small suffered a knee injury. Later he was trapped in an underground mine that was gassed before he could get out. Later still he was sent to England, where he worked in the Department of Aircraft Production in the Ministry of Munitions. Through a connection there, he met the Swiss brothers who started Celanese. They hired him and sent him to the United States as the company expanded.

  He gravitated back to stamps “after seeing the destruction of many classic things” as a soldier in World War I. “Stamps, like everything else, tend to get destroyed,” he said, “and the worth of those that remain go [sic] up.” He owned a fabulous collection of stamps from British Guiana. He also laid claim to specialized collections of stamps from Bavaria and a number of other German states, as well as four collections of Russian stamps that filled forty-five albums—all bought through Kenny at Macy’s.

  Small’s identity as the owner of the one-cent magenta may have been the worst-kept secret in philately for thirty years, but his name was not revealed publicly until after he sold the stamp in 1970. The public face of the one-cent magenta for all that time was Kenny. It was Kenny who put his initials on the back of the stamp, a small “FK.”

  He left Macy’s to join the Army in 1942 and joined a smaller, stamps-only firm that established itself as a powerhouse in philately after the war, and it was Kenny who was quoted when the one-cent magenta went to stamp shows. Presumably, it was Kenny who made the arrangements, letting the stamp be seen, but not too often. And it was Kenny who recounted the all’s-well-that-ends-well anecdotes that had just enough drama to keep the stamp in the news.

  Kenny—and the stamp—traveled only a few blocks to a stamp exhibition at the brand-new New York Coliseum in 1956. Kenny carried the stamp in a back pocket. He stashed a copy of the stamp in another pocket “to foil thieves.” Whether they were real or imagined, it was an irresistible detail in newspaper stories, for there were crowds outside the Coliseum and crowd-pleasers inside. The stamp show, officially the Fifth International Philatelic Exhibition, known as FIPEX, was one of three inaugural events at the Coliseum; the others were the far larger International Automobile Show and the National Photographic Show. The United States Post Office took note of FIPEX by, among other things, issuing a three-cent commemorative stamp showing the chunky, cream-colored Coliseum complex and the statue that stood yards away in Columbus Circle.

  For Kenny, there was none of the nail-biting at FIPEX that there had been at CIPEX, the Centenary International Stamp Exhibition, nine years earlier. For that show, also held in New York, the one-cent magenta was, as usual, accompanied by police and plainclothes detectives. The stamp simply vanished, Houdini-like. Its display case had not been broken open. “Despair and suspense mounted as worried officials at CIPEX scurried about, comparing the apparent loss of the British Guiana to the theft of the Mona Lisa,” the philatelic historian Stanley N. Bierman wrote. Eventually, someone noticed that the stamp had slipped from its place and drifted to the floor of the display case. The CIPEX officials called off the search and remounted the stamp, this time on a stamp hinge that would not give way.

  Kenny sent the stamp to Australia in 1963 and London in 1965 for exhibitions that went well. The 1970s were not kind to Kenny. The decade began with Small selling the one-cent magenta through a firm other than Kenny’s. In the mid-1970s, the firm Kenny worked for was sold, and Kenny went out on his own. The decade ended with Kenny becoming an unfortunate footnote to history, the first person to plead guilty under a new federal law that made it a crime for Americans to bribe foreign officials.

  Congress had passed the law and President Jimmy Carter had signed it in 1977 after an investigation by a high-level task force had found evidence of bribery and other problems by “a significant number of America’s major corporations.” The task force described “facilitation or ‘grease’ payments,” apparently in response to extortion demands by foreign officials, as well as off-the-books slush funds and falsified business records. Senator William Proxmire, the maverick Wisconsin Democrat who had long crusaded against waste and corruption in government, and Senator Frank Church, who had moved to curb “criminal activity” by intelligence agencies after the Watergate scandal, pushed the bill through. But the first case brought by the Justice Department did not name a major defense contractor or a multinational retailer, it named a stamp dealer—Finbar B. Kenny.

  Kenny’s business had come to involve more than brokering deals for rare stamps. He was also designing and printing stamps for emerging nations. In 1965, the year in which the Cook Islands in the South Pacific won independence from New Zealand and became an eight-island nation unto itself, Prime Minister Albert Royle Henry struck an economic development deal with Kenny. It promised a faster, surer payoff than, say, building factories for low-cost manufacturing. Kenny would supply limited-edition stamps for the Cook Islands, and he and Sir Albert’s government would divide the profits. The Cook Islands were just followin
g the lead of other tiny countries like Liechtenstein and San Marino, which depended on stamp sales for revenue, mainly from collectors. Kenny was counting on them to buy first-day covers from the Cook Islands.

  By 1978, the Cook Islands were posting roughly $1.5 million a year in stamp revenues, about 20 percent of the government’s budget. But Sir Albert—“somewhat of a Huey Long of the South Seas,” according to one account— was in political trouble. A representative of Sir Albert asked Kenny for help. The prime minister wanted an advance of $337,000 against the following year’s stamp revenues, the amount in the budget for old-age pensions. In return, Sir Albert’s government would continue Kenny’s worldwide distribution rights for Cook Islands stamps.

  Kenny agreed to the plan. Sir Albert transferred the money from a shell company that Kenny set up, and then used the money to charter six airplanes to fly in 450 Cook Islanders who would vote for him in that year’s election. Sir Albert saw the free trips as the only way to win. He needed the votes. But the Cook Islands had no provision for absentee ballots, and not even he could push one through in time. Under the law, Cook Islanders who lived elsewhere could not cast ballots unless they were on the Cook Islands on Election Day.

  Sir Albert won by the slimmest of margins, but the Justice Department said the money from Kenny had been used to rig the election. Prosecutors said Kenny and Sir Albert had schemed to make the arrangement secret, meeting in Honolulu and agreeing on a code to be used in telex messages. Prosecutors also said Kenny’s shell corporations were intended to disguise the payments. Kenny paid a $50,000 fine—and paid the government that toppled Sir Albert’s another $337,000 to cover the old-age pensions.

  In 1940, perhaps prompted by the stories about the stamp’s trip to the World’s Fair and its sale to Small, RKO assigned a script that became The Saint in Palm Springs, the sixth in a series of eight “Saint” potboilers. From first pitch to final cut, each probably cost $40,000 to make—by coincidence the amount Mrs. Hind got for the stamp—and could be shot in five days. For a B movie with a crime-solving hero, there had to be a crime. The novelist Leslie Charteris and the screenwriter Jerry Cady concocted one about the theft of the world’s rarest stamp at a resort in Palm Springs, California (where, as it happened, Charteris lived). The Saint in Palm Springs made a profit of $90,000, not as much as RKO’s Tarzan movies or Bringing Up Baby. But Bosley Crowther’s review in the New York Times dripped with sarcasm. Simon Templar, the “Saint” of the title, “is entitled by detective-union rules to a vacation every now and then. And that, from the patron’s point of view, is what his scriptwriter has given him in ‘The Saint at [sic] Palm Springs.’” Crowther wrote that “it isn’t in the least entertaining to watch the sluggish plot unfold. If the familiar name of director Jack Hively weren’t prominent in the list of credits, we’d suspect he’d taken a vacation, too. Obviously the scriptwriters did.”