The Julian Petroleum Scandal That Ended in Shanghai – CC Julian, The Astor and telling the United States to go to Hell

Posted: February 19th, 2015 | No Comments »

Occasionally I come across a story that convinces me that everything I think and write about old Shanghai is absolutely true!! Meet CC Julian….

In the late 1920s, the Julian Petroleum Corporation defrauded some 40,000 investors of US$150 million in one of America’s earliest Ponzi schemes. The Julian scam was centred on Southern California and the oil boom of the early 1920s. Courtney Chauncey (C.C.) Julian, a native Canadian, arrive din California in 1922 claiming experience in property speculation and the oil business. Julian secured a lease to drill on five acres at Santa Fe Springs and advertised for investors in the Los Angeles Times and other newspapers. In June 1923, he launched the Julian Petroleum Corp., a venture that he claimed would supplant Standard Oil. In 56 days, he sold US$5 million worth of stock in “Julian Pete.” He lived large in LA, went to the best nightclubs, with the most beautiful women and got in a fight with Charlie Chaplin over something or other.

Julian Petroleum looked fishy and the California corporations commissioner launched several investigations into his activities. It was bad news for many ordinary folk and celebrities who had invested with Julian. In May 1927, the Los Angeles Stock Exchange halted trading in Julian Petroleum. The company had been authorized to issue 159,000 shares of preferred stock. Almost 4 million shares had entered circulation. The fraud exceeded US$150 million. Tens of thousands of stockholders lost their investments. As the legal suits mounted and court dates became legion what did Julian do? Why, of course, what any scoundrel and fraudster in the early 1930s would do – he got caught up in another scam in Oklahoma and then  jumped ship to Shanghai…

Shanghai’s lax entry regulations were ideal. Julian got a false passport and posed as an Irishman called TR King, dressed shabbily and appeared to be down-on-his-luck. He managed to board a ship in Seattle and got off in Shanghai on March 23rd, 1933. Julian shed his shabby clothes, his fake Irish accent and checked into a suite at the Astor Hotel (today’s Pujiang Hotel). American justice went after him in Shanghai but Julian was a Canadian and the laws of extraterritoriality made it virtually impossible to get him in a court room. Recognized by an American also staying at The Astor, Julian told the press, ‘You can tell the United States to go to Hell!’, ‘They can’t touch me.’ With a stash from his US swindles The Astor wasn’t swanky enough for Julian and he moved into The Metropole (see my posts on that hotel here), close to the American Court for China at Shanghai, the American Consulate, American Club and the HQ of the Shanghai Municipal Police and Special Branch. Reports had him in the bar at The Metropole (about to be trashed – see my post here) with ‘cabaret girls and liquids that bubble.’

The Astor Hotel

But Shanghai didn’t work for him. For a year he tried to peddle every scheme he could think of and sank slowly into drunkenness and alcoholism. But Shanghai was a city of con-men and he simply got conned himself most of the time. On September 10th 1933 he bought a friend a drink and declared, ‘That’s my last dollar.’ The Metropole kicked him out.  He moved to a nondescript (and sadly not named) Frenchtown hotel. He tried a few more tricks – borrowed a lot of money from Chinese businessmen who weren’t quite aware of his past, and never paid it back. He claimed to have written an autobiography which his lawyer said was good and kept on appealing to the ladies. After a fruitless year Julian took the last of his borrowed money and checked back into the Astor Hotel. After a lavish dinner he went back to his Shanghai hotel room at 1am one evening, left his girlfriend, a stenographer he had been running around town with, and a lot of empty champagne glasses behind, and swallowed poison. He died five hours later…penniless and on the lam from US justice. His death was recorded as a suicide. His girlfriend, a certain Leonora Levy (who sadly I know nothing much about except her father, a cinema manager in Shanghai was murdered in 1924!) took what was left of his poison and slipped into a coma. She survived and stayed loyal though there was another woman, a Russian called Madam Cantarovich who claimed to have been his lover previously, and had the diamonds he’s showered her with to prove it, so she claimed.

The Astor’s dining room

Julian was broke but a Shanghailander Canadian, who remained anonymous, paid for C.C.’s funeral and, Dr. Emery W Luccock of Oak Park, Ill, pastor of the American Community Church of Shanghai agreed to preside. Nine people attended his funeral, held in the Shanghai Municipal Mortuary, including his Frenchtown landlady who’d kicked him out for non-payment of rent a few days before, two newspapermen in the hope of a stringer’s fee and two ‘young twittering girls’. He got a beggar’s coffin and an unmarked grave in the foreigner’s cemetery. As the earth was thrown in on the coffin only Leonora Levy, dressed in mourning white as per Chinese custom, journeyed from the mortuary to the cemetery and remained by the graveside, crying…and then had to go back to work! Then everyone forgot about C.C. Julian.

Now that’s an old Shanghai story….

Leonora Levy

---