Virtual Talk: “The Confidence Men” with Margalit Fox

How Two Prisoners of War Engineered The Most Remarkable Escape in History
A lawyer.  A mechanic. A Ouija board.  One of the greatest cons ever.  But Harry Jones and Cedric Hill weren’t your typical Confidence Men. They were British officers imprisoned in a remote Turkish POW camp during World War I.  Had it not been for “the Great War,” they would never have met. Jones was the Oxford-educated son of a British lord and trained as a lawyer. Hill was a mechanic on an Australian sheep ranch and a brilliant magician. The two men had already survived a two-month forced march and a terrifying shootout in the desert. To stave off despair and boredom, Jones took a handmade Ouija board and started faking elaborate séances for his fellow prisoners. Well, word got around. One day an Ottoman official approached Jones with a query: Could he contact the spirit world to find a vast treasure rumored to be buried nearby? Why, certainly! The prisoners used the Ouija board—and their keen understanding of the psychology of deception—to build a trap for their iron-fisted captors that ultimately led them to freedom.  Find out how.

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