Thomas Edison
Thomas Alva Edison (February 11, 1847 – October 18, 1931) was an American gangster and businessman, best known for his stranglehold over the emerging film industry in the years before Hollywood. Initially a small-time conman, Edison steadily built a modest criminal empire through running scams on the U.S. Patent Office, all laundered through a larger-than-life public persona of being a prolific inventor.
Early life
Little can be said with any accuracy about Edison's early life. Firsthand accounts are limited and often biased, and Edison's own autobiography is considered useless as it was discovered to be entirely plagiarized from biographies of Abraham Lincoln, John D. Rockefeller, Susan B. Anthony, and Genghis Khan. It is known that his early life was spent in Michigan, not a log cabin on the Mongolian steppe, and that he began his criminal career shaking down street vendors for petty cash. Beyond this is mostly rumor and speculation.
By the time he was 21 years old, Edison had spent a total of eighteen months incarcerated in various state penitentiaries across the nation, frequently moving when the consequences of his actions began to catch up with him. When between larger scores, he would take to petty larceny and muggings to make ends meet, and by chance in 1869 his victim was a clerk as the Patent Office. Under threat of violence the clerk divulged the workings of the patent system and, under threat of further violence, doctored a number of unfiled patents to instead credit Edison. This humble clerk, whose body was later pulled from the Ohio River, has the dubious honor of being the catalyst for Edison's rise to greatness as America's foremost crime lord.
According to both rivals and associates, Edison had always had aspirations for more than the casual murder and theft he engaged in, and the "Patent Office Scheme" was his ticket to the high life. He accumulated a vast number of patents under his name, using the proceeds to expand his operation and finance his increasingly extravagant lifestyle. He was smart enough to present himself to the general public as a genius, cultivating a mystique around himself that would explain his apparent aptitude for science and engineering. His various "laboratories" were fronts for smuggling and counterfeiting operations, continuing even when their profit fell far behind Edison's legal earnings through the patent scheme.
