Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison: Fifteen Years in Solitude

Austin Bidwell was twenty-four years old when he walked into a New York bank and began forging checks. Fifteen years later, he would be serving a life sentence in a London prison, writing this autobiography from a cell where the walls wept with damp. This is the story of how a sheltered Brooklyn boy, raised on his mother's prayers and his father's blind optimism, became one of America's most wanted financial criminals. Bidwell traces his descent with unflinching honesty: the inadequate education, the lack of any real preparation for a ruthless world, the moment he discovered that paper and audacity could transform a nobody into a king on Wall Street. But the machinery of speculation grinds everyone down eventually, and Bidwell's particular tragedy lies in his own admission that he was never cunning enough for the game he was playing. A document of Gilded Age ambition and its terrible costs, written by a man who had everything to lose and lost it all.