Confidence Games

 

     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.