When doctors examined James Buchanan Brady after his death in 1917, they reportedly found a stomach six times the normal size. This episode follows the man behind it: born in 1856 on Manhattan’s lower west side to an Irish immigrant saloon keeper, he started as a bellhop and courier, became chief assistant to the general manager in the New York Central Railroad system by 21, and then turned his insider knowledge into a career selling the railroads their equipment for Manning, Maxwell and Moore and the Pressed Steel Car Company.

His fortune, estimated at $12 million, came from more than commissions. The episode examines the crooked bets on the 1896 McKinley and Bryan election and a shady Reading Railroad stock deal, then the spectacle he built with the proceeds: more than $2 million in jewels, New York City’s first automobile in 1895, champion racehorses, actress Lillian Russell at his side, and dinners at Rector’s that became legend. It ends with the illnesses that killed him at 60 and the urological institutes his money created.

• Brady reportedly began the day with a gallon of orange juice, and restaurateur George Rector called him the best 25 customers he ever had.
• He won around $180,000 on the 1896 presidential election and took $1.25 million from the Reading Railroad stock deal.
• His horse Gold Heels was champion older male in 1902, and the constant press coverage of his excess doubled as free marketing for his sales career.
• He died of a heart attack at the Shelburne Hotel in Atlantic City, suffering from Bright’s disease, diabetes, gallstones, and coronary heart disease.
• In 1912 he gave $220,000 to Johns Hopkins Hospital, where he had been a patient, to found the James Buchanan Brady Urological Institute.