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George Garrigues

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The Shyster Lawyer: A True Story (Read All About It! True Crime) Kindle Edition

by George Garrigues (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

2.4 6 ratings

Part of: Read All About It! True Crime (5 books)

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A portly female baker grabbed George Hayford by the throat at a California train station and waved a piece of paper in his face. It was 1892, and Hayford was trying to scram out of town. He ran for the last car of the train, tried to hoist himself aboard, but missed.

It wasn't the first time that George Hayford would find himself in trouble. Nor the last time he’d be jumping on or off trains.

Hayford was a lawyer, or at least he said he was. He once claimed to be a judge; he once claimed to be the attorney-general of Oregon. He often claimed to have money in banks which he did not really have. He sometimes turned his collar around and called himself a preacher. He was indeed a crook, and a crooked lawyer is known as a shyster, a word that stems from the German “Scheisse,” which means, uh, a piece of excrement.

He started out well enough: In 1889 he volunteered to defend a poor Latina woman who had laid a wooden tie across a track to showcase her claim that the railroad had not paid anything for the right to cross her land. But there was that teenager who clung to him during a goodly part of 1893, much to the distress of her mom and various unrelated busybodies throughout California. And by 1901, he was jumping off an Arizona train in handcuffs, a sleepy detective blinking in confusion behind him.

I present George Hayford’s story to you — curated and edited, but just the way it unfolded — bit by bit, headline by headline, year by year. This is the way it was all reported when the American West was on the edge of maturity, when the omnipresent telegraph lines were able to carry the news everywhere, and when reporters had fun with their stories.

What made George Hayford end up on the wrong side of the law?

I leave that to you, the reader, to decide.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B01MZ10HME
Publisher ‏ : ‎ City Desk Publishing (December 16, 2016)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ December 16, 2016
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 7999 KB
Simultaneous device usage ‏ : ‎ Unlimited
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 145 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #2,151,641 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #504 in Biographies of Lawyers & Judges
- #843 in Biographies of Hoaxes & Deceptions
- #1,835 in Hoaxes & Deceptions

Customer Reviews:
2.4 6 ratings

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George Garrigues

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George Garrigues (1932-2022) launched his career as a journalist when he and his brother, Charles Samuel Garrigues, put together a hand-printed "newspaper," to send to their absent father in a distant city. Later, the said absent father wangled a job for George as a copyboy on the San Francisco Examiner, at the age of 15, and they worked together in the same newsroom, the father on the copy desk, and the son on the copy bench, which is where all the copyboys sat.

Garrigues wrote a book about his father, "He Usually Lived With a Female," which tells the story of C.H. (Brick) Garrigues's life as a 1920s reporter and opera critic, 1930s gumshoe, 1940s would-be novelist, and 1950s music reviewer.

As an undergraduate at UCLA, George Garrigues was one of the many victims of McCarthyism, when somebody discovered his old man had been investigated as a member of the Communist Party in the 1930s and the son was apparently tainted as a bomb-throwing, wild-haired traitor. He was blackballed by student politicians and developed an unhealthy disrespect for Greek-letter cabals, even though he did begin combing his hair more often.

Undaunted, the young man became a reporter on the Inglewood (California) Daily News, Ontario (California) Daily Report, and Los Angeles Times. He worked in public relations for the State of California (San Francisco and Sacramento) and the International Labor Office (Geneva, Switzerland). With a master's degree in journalism, he later was head of communications or journalism programs at University of the Pacific, Wayne State University, University of Bridgeport and Lincoln University of Missouri.

After his retirement in the early 2000s, Garrigues devoted himself to researching and publishing stories of untold history, especially of Los Angeles, some of which can be found on his website ulwaf.com His book Los Angeles: The Palms Neighborhood was published in 2009.

Garrigues founded City Desk Publishing in 2016, to tell the true stories of criminals, victims, journalists and other heroes and villains of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, based on the fascinating newspaper articles from that era. All the books are heavily illustrated.