The American Confidence Man – (Charles
C. Thomas, Publisher, Illinois, 1974)
By David W. Maurer, Professor of
Linguistics, University of Louisville, Kentucky.
INTRODUCTION
The principles of the confidence
games are very ancient, going back through the history of Europe to the Near
East, where their origins are lost in the haze of antiquity. However, the
confidence games as we know them today involved very modern technology, and the
big-con games represent a brilliant invention of the twentieth century.
The big-con games per se, together
with the name, are American. Perhaps the earliest mention of the term
confidence trick was in the New Orleans Picayune in 1849. The publication in
1857 of Herman Melville’ novel, The Confidence Man, introduced the term early
into serious literature….
Some of the basic psychology of the con
games has been adapted by certain phases of legitimate business, and especially
the advertising business, both in the United States and elsewhere. However, the
use of these principles by legitimate business is usually (technically, at
least) on the right side of the law.
This book is a by-product of
linguistic research, in the course of which I have had to examine the
backgrounds of many rackets. Over a period of years I have explored the secret
and semisecret communications systems of professional criminals both in the United
States and other countries. Very early I discovered that the technical language
of criminals, which is called “argot,” cannot be studied in terms of language
alone.
These speech-systems have to be
viewed in light of the subcultures which produced them, for all language has a
close relationship to human behavior. In other words, before one can write
about criminal argot, he must learn how professional criminals live….
Where, then, does one go or the
answers?
I have gone to the criminals
themselves. And I have not been disappointed.
While the methods by which this
material is collected cannot be described here, it should be said that they are
in no way sensational, mysterious, or colorful. I do not wear disguises or spy
on operating professionals. And although I speak several argots with some
fluency, I do not, like many bright young television detectives, join mobs
incognito in order to case the racket from the inside, for I would be detected
inevitably – probably on the basis of my language.
My approach is simple. I determine
who the good professional are, secure their assistance, and work with them much
the same as an anthropologist might work with an American Indian tribe he is
studying.
This work is not glamourous or exciting
or filled with adventure; rather, it is carefully restrained within the serve
limits of the scientific method. When I begin having adventures in my work, I
will know that something has gone wrong with my method.
This book should give the reader a
better understanding of one phase of professional crime, but it is not intended
as an expose. It does not purport to reveal ‘forbidden’ secrets of a dark and
sinister underworld. I have not intended to appear as an apologist for the
criminal. On the other hand, I have scrupulously refrained from passing any
judgements with a moral bias. My only aim is to tell, for the general reader,
the story of American confidence men and confidence games, stripped of the
romantic aura which commonly hovers over the literature of the modern big-time
criminal.
Chapter One
A Word About Confidence Men
The grift has a gentle touch. It
takes its toll from the ripe sucker by means of the skilled hand or the sharp
wit. In this, it differs from all other forms of crime, especially the heavy
rackets It never employs violence to separate the mark from his money.
Of all the grifters, the confidence
man is the aristocrat. Although he is sometimes classed with professional
thieves, he is not a thief at all because he does no actual stealing. The
trusting victim literally thrusts a fat bankroll into his hands. It is a point
of pride with him that he does not have to steal….
A confidence man prospers only
because of the fundamental dishonesty of his victim. In his operations, he must
first inspire a firm belief in his own integrity. Second, he brings into play
powerful and well-nigh irresistible forces to excite the cupidity of the mark.
Then he allows the victim to make large sums of money by means of dealings
which are explained to him as being dishonest and hence a “sure thing.” As the
lust for large and easy profits is fanned into a hot flame, the mark puts all
his scruples behind him. He closes out his bank account, liquidates his
property, borrows from his friends, embezzles from his employer or his clients.
In the mad frenzy of cheating someone else, he is unaware of the fact that he
is the real victim, carefully selected and fattened for the kill. Thus arises
the trite but nonetheless sage maxim: “You can’t cheat an honest man.”
…Modern con men use at present only
three big-con games, and only two of these are used extensively….The three big
con games, the wire, the rag, and the payoff, have in some seventy-five years
of their existence, taken a staggering toll from a gullible public….
All confidence games, big and little,
have certain similar underlying principles: all of them progress through certain
fundamental stages to an inevitable conclusion; while these stages or steps may
vary widely in detail from type to type of game, the principles upon which they
are based remain the same and are immediately recognizable. In the big-con
games the steps are these:
1.
Locating
and investigating a well-to-do victim. (Putting the mark up)
2.
Gaining
the victim’s confidence (Playing the con for him)
3.
Steering
him to meet the insideman (Roping the mark)
4.
Permitting
the insideman to show him how he can make a large amount of money dishonestly.
(Telling him the tale)
5.
Allowing
the victim to make a substantial profit. (Giving him the convincer)
6.
Determining
exactly how much he will invest. (Giving him the breakdown)
7.
Sending
him home for this amount of money. (Putting him on the send)
8.
Playing
him against a big store and fleecing him. (Taking off the touch)
9.
Getting
him out of the way as quickly as possible. (Blowing him off)
10.
Forestalling
action by the law (Putting in the fix)
The fix, like
insurance, is protection bought and paid for. It is an institution among all
professional criminals, but perhaps no other professionals use it so continuously
nor rely on it so implicitly as the con men. When it is “in” con men know that
certain powerful representatives of law and order will not only wink at the
operation of con games, but will actually cooperate if necessary. All this is accomplished
by paying a percentage of each touch for stipulated protection. As long as the
con man has the money to meet his obligations and as long as he knows that the
fix is reliable, he has every reason to feel secure. When he is broek or when
the fix “curdles,” he knows that his days at liberty are numbered.
All habitual
and professional criminals employ the fix in one form or another….The fix for
professionals is administered through a more or less permanent fixer who is
part of the underworld-political set up in every city which harbors any sort of
organized crime – and that means every city of any size in the United States.
It is not implied that a fixer is necessary a part of any party political
machine – a good fixer can weather many a change in administration – but he usually
plays off to that machine, directly or indirectly, in cash. The fixer is
sometimes a respectable and legitimate citizen, often an attorney, but in some
places he has a hand in the rackets…
A good con mob
would no more think of setting up a big store until the fix had been investigated
and found effective than Mr. Chamberlain would think of setting out without his
umbrella. Con men have long ago established the value of “appeasement” and they
have developed the proper machinery for distributing it in an equitable manner.
Confidence men
normally have the occasion to fix…..a bank in the city where the store is
located, the chief of police or the chief of detectives, prosecuting attorneys
or district attorneys, judges, juries, sheriffs, and on occasion the mark
himself…..The first thing a big store must have is the protection and
co-operation of a bank….
The “Right
Copper” is the one that will take a bribe, while the “Wrong Copper” won’t.
The wrong
coppers are usually too fair-minded to hate con men; they know only too well
that con-game victims are fleeced while trying to profit by a dishonest deal;
furthermore, they see arresting a con man and giving honest testimony against him
only as part of their sworn duty. But the wrong copper is a very rare bird. The
right coppers who have been on duty for many years know all the important con
men in the country and the con men know all the detectives. They do not hate
each other any more than a merchant hates his customers; they co-operate for
their mutual well-being; it is part of the system…..
The big-con
games did not spring in to existence full-fledged. The principles on which they
operate are as old as civilization. But their immediate evolution is closely knit
with the invention and development of the big store, a fake gambling club or
broker’s office, in which the victim is swindled. And within the twentieth
century these games have, from the criminal’s point of view, reached a high
state of perfection….
So well did
they understand human nature that they played upon it like a symphony conductor
directing a great orchestra. It is mainly about these men that this book is
written; some of them contributed substantially to it. The new generation,
while producing some very competent operators, is a pedestrian lot by comparison.
They lack the grand thinking, the unlimited gall, the sure touch, the high
intelligence, and the total contempt for a materialistic culture….
The confidence
games are not always played for money. Sometimes,….they are played just for
fun.
THE BIG STORE
In the fall of
1867 the Union Pacific railway reached Cheyenne, Wyoming, and that hurly-burly
outpost became the spearhead of a frenzied effort which thrust its way
relentlessly up the canyons, through the passes, and over the Badlands ever
towards the West…..
….Ben Marks
understood all about easy money, for his business was sure-thing gambling. Ever
since he left home in Council Bluffs, Iowa,….Ben had an idea, an idea which was
eventually to revolutionize the grift, and idea which was to become the
backbone of all big-time confidence game. Why not set up a place of business of
his own? Why not operate from a permanent base, let the players come to
him?....
He turned the
idea over in his mind for some time and finally opened, in a shack of a
building, which he called The Dollar Store. In the windows he exhibited all
kinds of colorful, useful and even valuable merchandise – with all items priced
at one dollar – and he soon had customers aplenty. Inside there were several
monte games going, replete with shills and “sticks” to keep the play going at a
lively pace. Once a gullible customer was lured in by the bargains he saw
displayed, Ben “switched” his interest from the sale to the three-card monte,
which was being expertly played on barrelheads. The merchandise never changed
hands. It remained always the same. But the customers were different….
When the
big-con games came in, out went the more primitive stores….The store was now a
much more pretentious institution where men high in the social and financial
world could be played for scores which ran into the hundreds of thousands of
dollars….The most effective swindling device which man had ever invented was
now in the hands of the confidence men.
But a big store
will never beat a mark; it will not take off a score by itself. It is effective
only when it is manned by good professionals and when the props and personnel
are used most strategically. Little by little, con men discovered which parts
they could fill best; some showed special talents which they developed and
perfected to a truly remarkable degree…..
While many
grifters before the advent of the big-con games had been actors of a sort, and certain
grifting teams had learned to complement one another’s little acts in order to
obtain the desired reactions from the victim, there was no organization…..
By 1898 the
wire had started in New York City. Christ Tracy, a fine insideman, opened up
the first of the big stores there that year….By 1900 Charlie Gondorf….set up a
store of his own…
THE BIG CON GAMES
The con man approaches a mark with the old story that he needs an
honest man to finance a dishonest project. The success of the game hinges
entirely upon the ability of the operator to “tell the tale” to the mark….
The Wire
One of three
modern big-con games, the rag, the wire, and the pay-off, the wire was invented
first. Without it, the rag and the pay-off could not have developed….
The name for
the game is an abbreviated form of wiretapping, from which the idea for the
swindle developed….The modern wire store is operated by one regular insideman
who poses as a Western Union official, a variable staff of shills, and a staff
of several outsidemen or ropers. These ropers travel the country looking for
victims who have money and can be played for the wire…..[in which horse race
results are delayed long enough to get a bet down on the winner.]
The Pay-off
Like the wire,
the pay-off sprang from a humble beginning….racetrack touts….[using phony
tickets for supposedly fixed races]
The Rag
In the rag we
see the principles of the pay-off applied to a deal in stocks or securities.
Big-time
confidence games are in reality only carefully rehearsed plays in which every
member of the cast EXCEPT THE MARK knows his part perfectly. The insideman is
the star of the cast; while the minor participants are competent actors and can
learn their lines perfectly, they must look to the insideman for their cues; he
must be not only a fine actor, but a playwright extempore as well. And he must
be able to retain the confidence of an intelligent man even after the man has been
swindled at his hands….
The rather
remarkable but well-established fact is that men who have been beaten once will
come back again – and again, and again. Truly, you can’t knock off a good mark…..
Others do not
discover that they have grift sense until later in life. Some competent con men
are turned out on the big con after they have been beaten at a confidence game,
when suddenly they realize that they have the ability in that line also; then,
without benefit of early training,…they go to work with a professional mob…..
Training and
experience are of course important, but without the grift sense they count for
little, as can be seen from the Gondorff family. Two of the brothers, Charley
and Fred, were rated at the top of their profession, while brother George, who
worked under the very best tutelage, never succeeded…..he just didn’t have
grifting sense….
Con men know
where they will find their kind, and when they are not in the store, they
usually keep to the company in the hangout….The hangouts are often run directly
or indirectly by a fixer, and thus they provide protection to grifters who are
in a strange town….
All mobs have
certain systems of communication among themselves, including their professional
argot, which is more or less unintelligible to the outsider, and a system of
signs and signals (called offices) which are somewhat standardized. For
instance, if one con man sees another on the street and does not want to be recognized,
he will give the office in the form of a slight, high-pitched cough or a signal
made by tapping the closed hand casually against the mouth…..
Thus mobs are
organized. Even though their members are loosely held together and the functioning
units are often flung far afield, there is a remarkable sense of professional
unity. A highly developed group solidarity keeps intact a very strong morale…. Although
there are channels of communication from mob to mob, and, on occasion, even
co-operation of a professional nature, these interrelationships are casual and
personal. It should not be assumed that there is anything like an organization
of mobs on a wide or even a national scale under the direction of “supercriminals”
so dear to the minds of a gullible public nourished since childhood on
flamboyant film and fiction….
However, since
all confidence men live in much the same environment, have something of the
same training and background, live by a loose but nevertheless real code, are
all of high intelligence, have similar attitudes towards their victims, towards
the law, and one another, and run somewhat true to form in their amusements and
recreations, it follows naturally that they develop certain traits in common.
While these traits can hardly be said to be earmarks of their profession, and
certainly they could not be used to identify a confidence man, they are,
regardless of individual variations, characteristic of the group.
Many play golf
for sport….Some fancy horses…
Grift sense
appears to be inherent; con men testify that experience may be helpful in attaining
a high state of perfection, but all agree that the grift sense must be there first….
In addition to
grift sense, a con man must have a good deal of genuine acting ability. He must
be able to make anyone like him, confide in him, trust him. He must sense immediately
what aspects of his personality will be most appealing to his victim, then
assume that pose and hold it consistently….
These steps
are, in themselves, little dramas which must be enacted with great naturalness;
one false move and the mark suspects that his new-found friend is not all that
he seems. If he acts his part well, the mark suspects nothing, for the sequence
of events is built up with most convincing logic and plausibility. After the
mark has taken the bait, and while he is making the easy money which prepares
him for the final plunge, the roper has complete charge of him, that is, he has
him tied up, although the mark firmly believes that he is keeping the roper
under the control at the confidential suggestion of the insideman….
When the mark
is being played for, he is never alone or a minute. The insideman tells the
mark to watch the roper carefully so that he won’t tip off the situation to any
outsiders. And the mark will always guard him faithfully….
It is a
peculiar fact that every professional criminal group has its own language…..
Criminal argots
are rally artificial languages used by professionals for communication among
themselves. The professional criminal speaks one or more argots in addition to
colloquial English. Each profession has its own argot, based no one or more of
the several large systems of argot-formation which are at work in the American
underworld. Intimately related professions usually have argots which are
closely related…But all professional criminals speak at least one argot or
lingo fluently….
Why do
criminals speak a lingo? There are several reasons, perhaps the most widely
accepted of which is that criminals must have a secret language in order to
conceal their plans from their victims or from the police….The lingo of the
confidence men is one of the most extensive in the underworld…..
Closely related
to the phenomenon of argot-formation – in fact, one aspect of it – is the use
of monickers,…Relatively few criminals are known in the underworld by their
real names; in many cases their closest friends know little of their family
connections…..These underworld nicknames usually stick….
Confidence men
trade upon certain weaknesses in human nature. Hence until human nature changes
perceptibly there is little possibility that there will be a shortage of marks
for con games. So long as there are marks with money, the law will find great
difficulty in suppressing confidence games, even assuming that the local
enforcement officers are sincerely interested…..As long as the political boss,
whether he be local, state or national, fosters a machine wherein graft and bribery
are looked upon as a normal phase of government, as long as juries judges and
law enforcement officers can be had for a price, the confidence man will live and
thrive in our society.
THE BIG CON –
The Story of the Confidence Man (Anchor Books, Random House, NY, 1999) with an
introduction by Luc Sante
Note:
Originally published in the United States by Bobbs-Merrill, an Indiana Compnay
in 1940.
When we think
of cheese, it’s Wisconsin,…but with grifters, it’s Indiana….Con men look
puzzled and scratch their heads when we ask them why that would be so…Perhaps
the fact that for many years it was customary for circuses to winter in Indiana
may help to explain the number of grifters who came from that state.
Introduction to
the Anchor Editon
Luc Sante:
The Big Con can
be considered a piece of art criticism, since it is not just an taxonomy of
styles in diddling, but a refined appreciation of a the high swindle, the
confidence game in its Augustan Age.
David Maurer
was a linguist, eventually professor emeritus of linguistics at the University
of Louisville. He began his publishing career in 1930 with Speech Peculiarities
of the North American Fisherman and not long after began his lifelong study of criminal
and demimonde dialects. His other books include Whiz Mob: A Correlation of the
Technical Argot of Pickpockets with Their Behavior Pattern (1955), Narcotics
and Narcotics Addiction (1973), The American Confidence Man (1974), Kentucky
Moonshine (1974) and the posthumously published omnibus volume Language of the
Underworld (1981)….Maurer had requested in his will that his entire archive be
destroyed upon his death, for fear of compromising his pen pals pursued by the
law.
Maurer, as this book will amply demonstrate, earned the intimate confidence
of many vulnerable and close-mouthed miscreants, people who would not have
opened up to journalists. The type of field work he engaged in, “takes a great
deal of physical stamina and a strong personality, as well as mental ability.”
Maurer studied
the lingo of – among others – carnies, junkies, safe-crackers, forgers, pot
smokers, faro-bank players, shell game hustlers, race-track touts,
pick-pockets, moonshiners, prostitutes and pimps, but his interest in the
language of the confidence men was a case apart…..
The big con can
also be considered as a form of theater, very nearly a Gesamtkunstwerk, staged
with a minute naturalistic illusionism for an audience of one, who is moreover enlisted
as part of the cast. The con game always has at least two principles – the roper
and the insideman, whose roles are archetypical as Punch and Judy…They bounce
the victim between them the way cops in a Mutt-and-Jeff torture team manipulate
a suspect: it is a kind of a three man tango….
By 1940, when
The Big Con was originally published, the big con had already retreated into a
kind of music-hall nostalgia. Before George Roy Hill’s The Sting (1973), which
was inspired by the present volume,….
After all, a
look around present day American institutions should suffice to demonstrate
that the character in question has now fully emerged from the underworld and
entered the mainstream, where he may be far less colorful and imaginative, but
no less on the grift.
