David Grann on St. Clair McKelway’s “Old Eight Eighty”

It seemed no more than a curious footnote—a counterfeiter so outlandishly inept that his forged dollar bills were detectable even at a casual glance. Nearly all were emblazoned with a telltale flaw: the name of America’s first President was spelled “Wahsington.”

The scammer, who operated in the New York area from 1938 to 1948, was known to the often exasperated agents of the U.S. Secret Service as No. 880, for the number of his case file. Unlike his more masterly criminal brethren, he never posed a threat to the sanctity of the financial system at large. He produced only dollar bills, and only forty or so of them each month, enough to provide himself and his dog with a few supplies. (The bogus currency was easily passed off, because who inspects a dollar bill?)

The Secret Service spent years searching for No. 880. Who was this irritant who had eluded the most sophisticated lawmen in the country, thanks to the triviality of his crimes? In the end, No. 880 was found only because a fire broke out in his apartment, and, as a result, the tools of his criminality—including a zinc engraving plate with the misspelled word “Wahsington”—were thrown out the window and discovered by children playing in the neighborhood. No. 880 cheerfully admitted his misdeeds when confronted by the Secret Service agents, who were taken aback to discover that their bête noire was a sweet-tempered, toothless elderly widower called Edward Mueller. They liked him.

Most reporters would have overlooked Mueller’s case, which defied the imperatives not only of the counterfeiting business but also of the newsmaking business. Where were the great stakes? Yet St. Clair McKelway recognized in the idiosyncratic details the perfect subject for a story, and his article, “Old Eight Eighty,” published in three parts in this magazine in 1949, captivated readers. Wryly told, with an exhaustive accumulation of startling facts, the article is interesting because it is interesting—because it illuminates the timeless oddities and wonders of the human psyche. The piece thereby avoids the fate of most journalism—of becoming disposable—and the narrative possesses the same immediacy that it had seventy-six years ago.

McKelway, who wrote for the magazine from the nineteen-thirties to the sixties, specialized in true-crime stories, bringing to life a gallery of scamps and swindlers and impostors. In an introduction to an anthology of McKelway’s pieces, “Reporting at Wit’s End,” the New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik observed that McKelway’s fact-based tales have “the excitement and surprise of fiction—only not of big fiction, but of exquisitely shaped small fiction, of an O’Hara story. All set in New York, and all bending toward some odd edge of character revelation, they render the outer edges of experience as the normal shape of life.”

By the time I joined The New Yorker as a staff writer, in 2003, McKelway’s work had been virtually forgotten, and I’d never heard of him until an editor, knowing my penchant for writing about charming rogues, suggested that I dig up “Old Eight Eighty.” Reading it provided the thrill of becoming a member of a secret club of devotees. Yet, for me, “Old Eight Eighty” also offered a template for storytelling. Whereas Joseph Mitchell’s pristine artistry and Janet Malcolm’s penetrating eye seemed otherworldly, the elements of what made a McKelway story work were legible to me, albeit polished to their highest form. He was, in the most complimentary sense, a professional. Look at how he valued precise description (No. 880’s dog is described as a mongrel terrier) and highlighted the unexpected (No. 880 never gave his terrier a name, because, as he explained, “When I talk to him, he knows I’m talking to him, don’t he?”). Look at how McKelway seductively unspooled the facts, waiting, like a poker player, until the last moment to reveal his ace.

McKelway’s stories, like his subjects, have their blemishes. They sometimes float too amusedly over the surface. One suspects that a deeper sadness lurked inside No. 880. Yet McKelway, whose own life was shadowed by tragedies—including destructive drinking and doomed marriages—managed, through his craft, to suffuse sordid tales with a flicker of levity or beauty. That his work has now been lost in the archives is a crime story worthy of McKelway himself. ♦