Born in 1853, Jared Flagg was the black sheep of an illustrious New York
family. His father, Jared Bradley Flagg, was a noted portraitist and
Episcopalian minister who served as Rector of Grace Church, in Brooklyn
Heights. His older brothers were prominent, Paris-trained artists. A
younger brother became a famous architect, while another went on to
found a major Wall Street brokerage. One of his younger sisters married
publisher Charles Scribner, II; another was one of the famed "400"
Manhattan socialites. Jared, Jr., on the other hand, took to the seamier
side of American life, instigating any number of illegal schemes,
ranging from leasing furnished flats to facilitating prostitution, to
finding chorus line and modeling jobs for pretty but talentless young
women, to a phony investment scheme that paid 52% a year, to the sale of
worthless bonds backed by heavily mortgaged real estate. Frequently
penalized for his criminal and unethical activities by the time of his
death in 1926, Jared Flagg had barreled his way through Gilded and Jazz
Age America, offering a fascinating and heretofore unknown view of how a
rising empire evolved through crucial eras in its history.