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Melvin Goodrich
===============

I'm writing down here about Melvin Goodrich because sometimes when I
come back to these journals years later, I don't remember the details.
Also, I'm gonna lose my paper after school.

MG Worked on passenger trains on the east coast as a porter.  Really
like a waiter / bartender.  He started eavesdropping and then using what
he learned to go trade stocks.

Made tons of money until his own broker sold him out.

MG died after he got arrested but he had donated nearly all the money
he made to various Black schools.

He may have caused a sell off that triggered the 1929 stock market
crash.  May have.

He had opened accounts with brokers in cities at nearly every city.  At
first, he tried opening an account under his own name.  He wore his most
expensive suit.  Brokers wouldn't talk to him in 1920s wall street.  He
stood all day in lobbies and watched as brokers glanced sideways at him.
Over and over, he was told that no brokers were available.

So he put on shabbier clothes, and said he was in the service of a white
southern family that was looking to move some family $$$ to the north.
He deliberately spoke like an uneducated, unambitious black man.

At that point, the brokers smelled a chance to fleece some old southern
family out of their money, and they signed him up.

MG described all this to a reporter for a black newspaper after his
arrest.

Then.the operation was simple.  MG would serve coffee and cigars and
brandy on the trains and overhear the passengers talking business.  Then
when the train would arrive at a station, he would hit a telegraph
office and put in buy or sell orders.  He would buy photo albums in
southern estates and send wedding announcements to his brokers.

Initially he had a pitifully small amount of money to work with.

But after a few trades, MG was wealthy.

Then he closed the account and took the money and opened new accounts,
again playing the role of the halfwit servant at each house.

He soon realized his brokers noticed bis success and they were
piggybacking his trades.

He even heard in the dining car how one diner bragged about how his
broker described this southern dandy with uncommon trading skills.

MG was a voracious reader and a self-taught mathematician.

After 7 years, MG took his original investment and in today's
dollars, had tens of millions, hidden in various accounts.

The really sad irony though was that he was still working as a porter 7
days a week.  In his jailhouse interview he talked about how even though
at some point he realized he had more wealth than the families that were
on the train, he knew that he was only one false accusation away from
getting lynched.

Then he realized his broker was trying to set him up.

So he made two bets.  With the account with the j with the account with
the Judas broker he made play bet that a certain firm would be
profitable.  Then with a different account many different accounts you
made highly-leveraged facts and other words using his money to borrow
and place an even bigger bad that that business would soon collapse.

The first vet was meant to take advantage of how he knew his Brokers
were leaking his trades to other investors.

He needed a way to place many bets against his main bet so he contacted
the wife of one of the diners in his car. She was an art patron and
through her he found numerous people Bohemian artist types that placed
many many many small bats on his behalf a broker is all over using
margin money so when the financial information came out on the companies
that he had seemingly invested in a reveal these companies were all
worthless so many people had invested in these companies and the
overnight welfare evaporated meanwhile the broker houses themselves had
not adequately calculated how much Capital they had to set aside to
cover all the margin bet in short EG Alvin Goodrich nearly destroyed
Wall Street.

Now all those artists withdraw withdrew their earnings close their
accounts and disappeared and the vast majority of them were communists
they were thrilled to have done this to see the banks could collapse.

And now Melvin Goodrich went to a bank to withdraw some money and he was
picked up.