There is a scene that repeats in New York police accounts around the turn of the last century. A patrolman finds a man on the Brooklyn Bridge walkway with lumber and tools, building a toll booth. The man is polite. He has papers, and the papers are beautiful: engraved letterhead, a corporate seal, a deed of conveyance. He has paid for this, sometimes with everything he brought from the old country, and when he is told the City of New York owns the bridge, he argues.

The name on that deed, more often than any other, was George C. Parker.

This is where the phrase comes from. If you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you.

The premise was not absurd. The Brooklyn Bridge was built by the New York Bridge Company, a private corporation chartered in 1867, and it charged a toll on every crossing until 1911. In the countries Parker's v ...