Benson Syndicate
The Benson Syndicate was an unusual, 19th-century organized crime organization in the western United States which received contracts from the United States General Land Office to perform cadastral land surveys of the public lands. It was led by, and named after, John A Benson, originally from Illinois and later a US deputy surveyor in California.
The Syndicate operated from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific, but was most active in California and headquartered in San Francisco. Its tenure ran from an uncertain origin in the mid 1870s to 1898 but was at its peak activity from 1880 to 1885. In California alone, at least 40 individuals were known to be involved, and very probably more actually were; a major uncertainty involves how many people were involved, and where. The group's modus operandi was to generate false demand for public land surveys from supposedly interested "settlers" using fictitious applications for surveys of specified townships. Two successive California Surveyors General, who were part of the ring, then awarded surveying contracts to Benson associates for the surveys. These were then fraudulently executed, ranging in quality from skeletal surveys based on minimal data, to outright fabrications of all data and maps. The required survey output – official notes and plat maps – were then forged to make the surveys appear legitimate on paper. The scheme only worked as long as no ground-based inspections of the townships were conducted prior to survey approval, which however went on for at least five years. The group's downfall was only initiated when these were finally instituted in mid-1885, which then was very rapid.
The surveys were officially contracted to individual deputy surveyors other than Benson himself, some of whom were not even aware that the surveying contracts existed in their names, having been induced by Benson to sign blank papers which were later turned into contracts and other legal documents without their knowledge. At other times, people with minimal or no surveying experience, and/or lacking proper qualifications as deputy surveyors, performed the work without the contracted surveyor ever being physically present, which was also patently illegal. In the worst cases, entire contracted areas, consisting of several adjacent survey townships, were fabricated by Benson or his associates at his San Francisco office, with little or no work on the ground at all, as exemplified in quotes from GLO annual reports given below.
Extent of operations
Benson's organization infiltrated into very high levels of the government, and syndicate members in governmental positions as well as members of congress made the group's schemes possible. For example, in California two Surveyors General in the 1880s approved numerous fraudulent survey results and approved requests for government payment that were 200 to 700 percent of the originally estimated survey cost, which the government paid.Theodore Wagner was especially notorious in this regard, and his appointment as California Surveyor General coincided with a large increase in the group's activities and power. Others approved contracts that had originally been rejected, without evidence or assurance that the surveys had been properly corrected or completed. Also, at least one such examiner in California was part of the syndicate, attempting to gain payment for some rejected surveys via bogus field "examinations". Banks were also involved, providing the deposits and performance bonds required by the government, in exchange for a cut of the enormous profits generated. These banks later also paid for the syndicate's defense attorneys in trials brought by the government in its failed, ten-year effort to convict the syndicate members and recover funds paid for fraudulent work.
Extracts from Annual Reports of the Commissioner of the General Land Office
Detailed information on the Syndicate's history remains fairly sparse, but reasonably complete descriptions come from two Annual Reports of the Commissioner of the General Land Office, in 1887 and 1888.The 1887 Annual Report, gives this summary of its schemes:
The 1888 Annual Report provides this example description of a fictitious survey of three survey townships in the high Sierra Nevada, southeast of what is now Yosemite National Park: