The Big Con

"David Maurer is another remarkable character. He’s dead now, but he was a professor of linguistics at the University of Louisville. His basic academic interest was criminal slang. He was very interested in the way criminals used slang to disguise their intentions from people. The people who most need that ability are conmen because they deal face-to-face, for long periods of time, with the people they try to cheat. It’s important for them to be able to communicate certain bits of information to each other without the person they’re trying to cheat realising there is anything awry. Maurer himself was this great big burly bear of a man, over six foot tall, a very active, outdoorsy type. He had a natural ability to get on with people and he used to go and visit prisoners in jail and get them to talk to him. He made friends with one or two conmen and got them to tell him their stories. This was in the 1930s, and it was the first time that any of them really revealed the inside secrets of their profession. He gradually got referred from one conman to the next and he started to excavate the whole story of these amazing confidence games that they’d been pulling. He did this at the right time, because the great golden age of the conman in America was the 1920s. A lot of people had made a lot of money from World War I, very easily. And, of course, when that sort of thing happens the people who have made the money convince themselves that they’re business geniuses, not that they just got lucky when it was almost impossible not to make money. These people who became wealthy quite typically had done so because they knew someone who knew when a contract was going to be awarded, or they had some bit of inside information on something, something very slightly shady. These are the classic people who fall for the conman’s line. What Maurer did was he found out the story of what are called “the big cons”. This is not when you take $10, $50 or $100 off somebody, but when you stay with them – potentially for weeks or months – and you take off with their entire life savings. The amazing thing that comes out of this story is that these conmen were so skilled that they could not only do this repeatedly with a wide variety of different people – using tricks to cool people off afterwards so they don’t go to the police – but they were quite often able to do the same person more than once. They actually persuaded them they hadn’t been cheated, and they came back for more. If you’ve seen the movie The Sting , essentially, that’s the technique they use. It’s a fake betting parlour, or a fake stock office, and the conman claims to have a variety of inside information, which is often in the form of information about a horse race that’s taking place. Someone is holding up the wire down the telegraph office so they can get information about which horse has won early, and they can place a bet. Of course the joy of this from the point of view of the conman is that in bringing a mark in on this, they have to accept that they’re taking part in something illegal. That makes them very, very unlikely to go to the police afterwards. So there’s an escalating series of wins that the conmen allow these men to make, and at the vital moment, as you see in the movie, there is some confusion over the exact nature of the information given, the guy thinks he’s betting on a horse to win which is actually going to come second, and that’s when the whole thing collapses and he loses all of his money. But quite typically, because there’s several different sorts of conmen involved, the victim will blame one of them but still think that some other guy is his best friend, and he might easily come back for more. Maurer sets all of this out in amazing detail. You get this astonishing insight into this unbelievable underworld of fascinating people. Because unlike the Mafia, which I wrote about in The First Family , conmen are very interesting because they make a living by their wits. They’re not just thugs, they don’t usually use guns. They have to be very intelligent. In order to cheat the widest variety of people they have to be real men of the world, they have to make themselves interesting to all manner of different people, and they have to be extremely quick-witted. So they’re just much more fun to read about. They all have the most amazing names like the High-Assed Kid, Slobbering Bob and so on, by which they know themselves. It’s usually quite hard to find out what their original names actually were. The whole book is an insight into a subculture which has essentially vanished. Now, the transmission of information doesn’t lend itself to these kind of con games. They still exist, but what happened in those days is that they could set up in a town – where the police were sympathetic and they could bribe them – and they would have these betting parlours open semi-permanently for months on end, and cheat 15, 20, 30 people in a row. What happens now is that conmen are just as clever, but they tend to only be able to take off with single takes. You have a guy who sells the Eiffel Tower or persuades someone they’re going to demolish the Hoover Dam, but it usually only works once, before word gets out. I don’t think they’ve vanished, but I don’t think they’re taking so much money so regularly."