Joseph (Yellow Kid) Weil, 100, the 1920s confidence artist whose con schemes netted him an estimated $8 million, died yesterday in a convalescent home. For nearly three years, the fragile little man had been a welfare patient, living out his life on the memories of his heyday, when his canary-yellow gloves, cravats and suits, yellow calling cards and autos, yellowish red hair and golden whiskers made him an international figure. "If I had to do it all over again, I would be foolish if I didn't," Weil told an interviewer last summer on his 100th birthday . "I don't feel a day over 70. I still like to look at the ladies and take a sip of wine. I like to listen to the radio, but I'll be damned if I'll play bingo with the rest round here. It's a ripoff."
He said he had spent all his money "in high living and travel," tucking away nothing for his later years. The son of a saloon keeper in a boisterous, two-fisted Chicago neighborhood, Weil worked as a young con artist in New York and Chicago. He had many aliases wearing various disguises, he was known as Dr. Henri Reuel, John Bauer, Sir John Ruskin Wellington and Count Ivan Ovarnoff as he swindled his wealthy financiers and industrialists for more than 40 years. He "retired" in 1941 after serving 27 months in a federal prison in Atlanta on a mail-fraud charge involving a phony oil-lease scheme. Weil was a legend in his own time in the elite world of con artists. In his time he:
• Rented office space and hired lesser con men for a "brokerage office" though which he worked a bogus stock swindle for 20 years.
• Staged fake prize fights, seeded "gold mines" and promoted "talking dogs" who, of course, could not.
• Tried to sell Cook Country Hospital for $150,000.
• Six Years in jail. For his successful life in crime, Weil paid with just six years in jail, although he said he had been arrested 1,001 times.
