When I was young and television was young as well, my favorite program was Racket Squad, a police show which would always open with Reed Hadley turning his imposing face from his radio where he had been answering a call to identify himself, “Captain Braddock . . . Racket Squad.” The story would then turn on some elaborate confidence game, generally a long con indeed, foiled eventually by inexorable detective work. At the end Hadley would solemnly advise the audience, “Remember, a man can shake your hand with one hand and pick your pocket with the other.” What appealed to me, I think, was the artfulness of that particular variety of crime. Far from threatening the victim, the grifter eschewed violence and threats and took the opposite tack, convincing the mark of his amiability and trustworthiness before vanishing with the loot. Like an artist, the fraudster must create a convincing alternative world.
While the efforts
of the scammers on television seemed as though they must be exaggerated -- their
efforts to build a convincing façade generally involved actors, props, and such
sets as apparently functioning offices -- they were only magnifying, not
creating, the theatrical flourish that once animated this distinctive field of
criminal endeavor. Con men of today have
no imagination in comparison. We are all
familiar with the extremely common and extremely boring confidence schemes that
currently dominate the field. Everyone
receives numerous spam emails and bogus telephone calls so clumsy and
transparently fraudulent that it is difficult to conceive of their working at
all. Yet the magic of microcircuits has
enabled vast numbers of messages to be sent for virtually no cost while
conveniently allowing a high degree of anonymity to the knowledgeable
sender. The immense quantity of come-ons
makes up for their shoddy quality in credibility resulting, I suppose, in a
satisfactory yield.
By comparison,
the con-man most people today have encountered in person, the three card monte
operator, is a virtuoso artist. A
successful three card monte dealer must equal the skills of a closeup magician
in both his skill in patter and in prestidigitation, or sleight-of-hand. The game, modern successor of the old shell
game, has survived in the street, in subway cars, and in public parks because
it can still bring in money even though everyone is familiar with how it works. What observer could possibly think that the practitioner
of the art, a professional after all, would ever go home with less money in his
pocket than he had had when he left? The
shills are obvious little short of the point of slapstick. And yet the show is sufficiently compelling
that people continue to put their money down.
Police reports
indicate that a few practitioners continue old short-change routines, usually
based on presenting a large bill to pay for a small item and, as the change is
counted out, suddenly saying one wishes to use a smaller bill. Variations exist, mostly depending on using multiple
transactions to generate confusion, though a few maneuvers depend on “fixing” a
wad of cash to make a one seem to be a twenty or a half-bill look like a whole
one. This practice, too, requires manual
dexterity and instant discernment of the clerk’s evolving state of mind.
Newspaper accounts indicate that the old pigeon
drop still can work, too, in which an apparently valuable object is found
which, for one reason or another, the possessor is willing to let go very
cheaply. Perhaps he is an illegal alien
afraid to cash in his winning lotto ticket, or on his way to an important job
interview so he cannot cash in the diamond necklace the two of you have come
upon. At some point the mark is asked to
advance money of his own on the promise of a greater return very shortly. So acting once again is perhaps the leading component of the con.
Self-interested
deceptions are, of course, as old as the ability to lie, which is to say, as
old as language. Some colorful fragments
of past practices are preserved in Francis Grose’s A Classical Dictionary of
the Vulgar Tongue (1785). In what he
calls “flash lingo,” both “money-droppers” and practitioners of the “fawney rig”
are clearly working eighteenth century versions of the pigeon drop. Grose mentions a variety of other con artists
whose specialties have become obsolete.
He defines “amusers” as those who toss snuff into a person’s face,
allowing confederates to lift his purse while pretending to assist him. Among journeyman hatters, he says to “bug” a
customer is to substitute a cheaper product for a beaver hat. He says those selling a lethargic horse might
“feague” it, putting ginger into the animal’s “fundament” in order to make it
behave in a temporarily lively manner. A
more elaborate charade is suggested by his definition of “Vincent’s law” as “the
art of cheating at cards,” a collective enterprise requiring a “banker," a shill
or “gripe,” and a Vincent (the mark).
This last begins
to approximate the professionally theatrical quality confidence games acquired
during their “Augustan Age” [1]. Though
the set-ups that figured in Racket Squad episodes had seemed impossibly
elaborate, in fact, the television version may be no more than a just memorial
for the extraordinarily artful criminal enterprises of the first half of the
twentieth century. David Maurer, their
finest chronicler [2], describes grand and lengthy deceptions, managed like
movie sets, with storefronts staffed by teams of operators, each a specialist
in one role of the deception such as the “roper,” who locates likely marks and
the “inside man,” who impersonates a broker or manager of gambling den. Some of their “long cons” stretch over weeks
during which they may move from one city to another. Each participant is known to fellow grifters by
a nickname: Kangaroo John, the High Ass Kid, Slobbering Bob, Queer-pusher Nick,
the Hash House Kid, Wildfire John, Pretty Sid.
According to
Maurer’s account, which is unlikely to be superseded, such “long cons,” in
which big rewards are possible when the victim is persuaded to draw on his bank
accounts and investments, were common in the years following World War I. Short cons, those in which gains are limited
to what the mark is carrying “went out with the horse and buggy,” though he
does describe a variety of its forms worth listing for the names alone: the
smack (flipping coins), the tat (dice), the tip (cards), the last turn (cards),
the huge duke (cards), money box with the coin, the hot seat, the single-hand
con. Over time serious professionals
used such tricks only to satisfy an immediate need. Looking for a larger payoff, they turned to
classic long cons.
According to
Maurer, the most common set-up originally was the “mitt store” or “mitt joint,”
a term which sometimes referred to a fortune-teller’s parlor, but often meant a
crooked gambling establishment to which dupes were steered thinking they might
win in a fixed boxing match or other athletic contest. Under the name of “dollar store,” the
establishment might offer as a front a number of cheap items for sale, while
the real money was made in short cons inside.
A back room might be given to card or dice players or race track
bookies. Under a variety of names (“the
wire,” “the pay-off,” “the rag”) the same basic set-up can be used for any form
of gambling and for phony stock purchases.
Maurer called the
con-men he knew the “aristocrats” of criminals and the scholar seems to have
shared in their pride in avoiding violence and taking only money that has been
freely handed over. In Maurer’s book
they all seem as charming as Damon Runyon characters and his unlikely intimacy
with these underworld hustlers is reminiscent of William Powell’s “Thin
Man.” Over many years Maurer studied
their argot as well as that of pickpockets, drug users, moonshiners, and
others. His classic account of
confidence games describes their activities in convincing detail, including
lists of the individuals and locations active in various cities over the
years. He is said to destroyed
interviews and correspondence with his informants before his suicide to protect
his underworld friends from possible prosecution.
The fact that the
volume has been translated and several times reprinted suggests that many have
savored the author’s light yet mordant tone and his compilation of stories,
every one of which concludes in the same way, with the trickster making off
with the money and the victim wondering what happened. Edmund Wilson, for one, was susceptible to the
charms of Maurer’s book, sending a copy to Vladimir Nabokov with a note calling
it “very curious” and “extremely funny,” but received only a risqué
joke in response: Nabokov wrote that “for one instant I had the wild hope that
the big Con was French.” [3]
Surely in the
charades of the con artists there may have lurked some of the poet’s creative
ebullience. I fancy that this accounts
for my own interest, at the same time that I was fond of magic and could
perform a few dozen tricks, including a bit of legerdemain and a line of
distracting patter. Magicians, con-men,
fabulators, artists, all surely have something in common. Shamans are known to use tricks in their
theatrical rituals, sometimes identical to the maneuvers of American faith
healers. Imposters, quacks, charlatans,
miracle-makers seem to find a welcome in every setting. I have spoken to two otherwise reasonable men
who proudly displayed tokens given them by the late Sai Baba after he had
apparently materialized these objects out of the air. I understand devotees would receive a momento
of gold, silver, or brass corresponding to their level of faith (though it may
be that this was most easily measured by the size of their previous
contributions).
The question is
where to draw the line. If a given guru
is suspected of fraud, how about the gloriously begowned Pope? Is there a difference only in degree between
the lies of someone touting a wholly phony investment and the enthusiastic
words of a conventional old-time broker?
How may one distinguish an acquaintance who builds a reputation with
information fictitious in part from the huckster who creates an identity out of
whole cloth? Politicans?
Confidence games occupy a fascinating borderline realm, on the one hand artful yet not art. Fraudsters immediately discover in concrete financial terms how serviceable their imaginative constructions are while, on the other hand, the definition of a con fades into the constant subjective reckonings by which we all must negotiate our lives. The greed and ego of con artists creates a fantasy which in turn elicits an answering avarice in the victim, the counterpart, perhaps, of love giving rise to love, or a poet's shaping a structure of words capable of stimulating a desired resonance on the heartstrings of the reader.
1. Luc Sante, “On ‘The Big Con’”, NYRB June 24, 1999 issue.
2. David Maurer’s The
Big Con: The Story of a Confidence Man is worth reading for the author’s
knowledge of criminal cant. Maurer was a
linguistics professor who managed to cultivate relationships with large numbers
of con-men and hustlers.
3. See Barbara
Wyllie, “Shape-Shifters, Charlatans, and Frauds: Vladimir Nabokov's Confidence
Men,” The Cambridge Quarterly Vol. 45, No. 1 (March 2016). Con = cunt.
