Book Review
by Yves Barbero

Reprinted from the March, 2000 BASIS

Introduction by Luc Sante (1999), author of "Low Life," about the New York underworld.

The Big Con is both a curiosity and a joy. It is, in some respects, dated, but at the same time gives one pause about the world around us. While many of the "cons" described in its pages couldn't happen today, it is not because people are wiser or that the culture has changed much, but because technology has changed.

People no longer carry wads of cash on their persons, or take days to go from one point to another by train or boat. The time to "con" a "mark" or "chump" is not available because of quick airline flights and the object, cash on hand, is no longer there in most cases. Con men have simply found other ways. Some are considerably more vicious than the Damon Runyon-like characters that populate David W. Maurer's book.

Where the con man of Thirties went after a businessman out of his waters on a trip to another city, the modern con man goes after the poor through telephone solicitations. The con man of old might score $10,000-15,000 (worth a lot more then) after days or weeks of clever work from a rich traveling businessman. The modern bandit will score several hundred or several thousand from many old people who don't know any better in a matter of minutes. Where the "mark" of old could be counted on to be somewhat dishonest, ready to make a fast buck at the expense of a stranger, the modern victim is usually innocent of wanting to cheat anyone.

Maurer's book, although a serious work of scholarship, is best known for being the source for the highly successful film, "The Sting" (1973) directed by George Roy Hill (for those who are interested, two other less well-known films about "the con" are worth a look: "The Grifters" (1990), that deals with the intense psychology of grifting, and "The Spanish Prisoner" (1998), about a hi-tech software con). Of the three, I think "The Grifters" is the strongest. The characters are more substantial, and the story much more realistic. It is a real edge-of-the-seat nail-biter.

Maurer, a professor of English at the University of Louisville until his death in 1981, had a life-long interest in underworld jargon (or "argot" as it was then called he supplies a glossary at the end of the book of a good many con-game terms), which led him to gain the trust of many confidence men. He chronicled their lives and ways, often over-romanticizing their lives or, at least, being conned into thinking well of them when perhaps he shouldn't have. A lot of the factual material he presents seems a bit too good to be true.

Nevertheless, he didn't go quite as far as to completely lose sight of reality, and most of what he writes rings true. The film, "The Sting," on the other hand, went a bit too far in romanticizing con men. It gave them virtues they didn't have (revenge using the classic "big-store wire con" for the death of one of their own at the hands of a vicious underworld figure. It seems unlikely that any Thirties con man would have run the risk of taking on a powerful Capone-like crime boss, especially on his home turf. There were too many easy pickings from less-powerful, if somewhat unscrupulous, businessman roaming the countryside with more money than sense. While the film was a lot of fun, the book is far more interesting even allowing for the fact that Maurer seems a bit credulous at times.

He gives a fascinating history of the con from its earliest American manifestations in the Midwest of Nineteenth Century to the time when it was fading in the late Thirties. He describes a number of "Big Store Cons" and "Short-Cons." Regrettably, Maurer didn't live long enough to describe some modern cons, especially those involving telephone trees and the Internet.

The most interesting modern cons, curiously, are those that border on the "legal."

We've all read about telephone boiler rooms that sell non-existing products, or chances at foreign lotteries, especially to the elderly. To add insult to injury, "sucker lists" are sold to other unscrupulous boiler-room operators. But "honest" boiler-room operations include selling ads in minority business directories, which get printed to comply with legal requirements, but are never distributed except to the businesses and individuals who placed the ads. A variation is the charity directory or the one designed to keep kids off drugs, and sponsored by real police or sheriff's departments, which should know better. Guess who keeps 90% of the take. Subscriptions tied to impossibly generous sweepstakes are popular. There are many senior citizens with stacks of unread magazines in their garage and thinner bank accounts.

There are a number of businesses that border on the legal. Typical is the sales pyramid scheme. It works like this: You sell a real product like soap. After a while, you run out of relatives and friends, and your commissions are sparser than you anticipated. Ah! But you recruit other sales people and get a cut of their commissions. And so it goes. If you're a good salesman, you can pyramid yourself into a fat middle position. Of course, after everyone in town is involved, there's no one to whom you can sell the soap and someone winds up with a basement full of detergent. I was approached by a business client to get in on the ground floor "for this area" as an Amway distributor. My reply, to his disappointment, was that "I don't want to live like that," meaning I don't want to be always "on" as a salesman.

He simply couldn't believe that I wouldn't immediately jump on board at this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. But I was no innocent like most Amway people are when they start. My own business requires some sales technique, and I use it. It is always low-keyed and tied in to what I evaluate to be a client's real needs, of which he may not be initially aware. One of the cardinal rules I use in sales, is that there has to be a real and substantial product or service. When someone starts talking about commissions and stacks of imaginary income without first telling me what they are selling, I am immediately suspicious.

Maurer reports in his book that con men in the late Nineteenth Century came up with the notion of opening up a store to lure "marks" into their various "Short Cons." In the window of their store, they'd put incredible bargains. Once the "mark" entered, he would be lured into various card and shell games and separated from his coins.

But there was more money to be made with the "Big Con," wherein, you not only separated the "chump" from his money, but sent him home, usually by way of a long train journey, for more. In a time before there was cooperation and quick communications among police departments, grifters preferred to get a "mark" off his home turf. But the "con" has come full circle. Most money is now made by getting a little from a lot of people. This has several advantages. The most important is that there are fewer complaints (an embarrassed "chump" is unlikely to complain over a couple of hundred bucks). Instead of a "Big Store," where a "mark" is made to think he's walked into an established business like a betting parlor (as in "The Sting") or a brokerage house, you now open up a web site on the Internet.

Here is your opportunity to make a killing in e-commerce.

Recently, an individual of my acquaintance, sent in a couple of hundred dollars to get in on the ground floor of a computer distribution scheme. It's all legal because they will supply any computer you sell, however costly or inappropriate. You do get a commission. The main selling point is on-line technical support for the salesperson to help the user. Who wouldn't buy a computer from an outfit that offers instant and qualified technical support. Isn't that how Gateway and Micron made their name? (Not mentioned is the fact that these two fine firms maintain a staff of skilled salaried technicians manning telephones, and that they design and produce their own computers.) What is wrong with this picture is that my buddy doesn't know anything about computers (well, almost nothing).

After he shelled out his money, he did wonder and asked me to look into it. I checked out the site. Except for the page where you could join by supplying a credit card number, the links appeared to feed back on each other. There was no technical support that I could decipher. And no product information. I couldn't even find out their hardware prices. But instructions on joining were clear as a bell. Like any good "con," most of the message was left to the imagination.

I guess that the advantage to the Internet scheme over an Amway-like sales pyramid scheme is that you don't have to pay commissions to layers of sales people (I'll dub it the "flat-pyramid scheme"). You don't have to have buildings or a lot of stock - just buy whatever you need from a third-party to keep within the edges of the law. You don't need a physical address. And you don't have to worry about the competence of people who comprise your sales force since your main source of income is the entry fee.

Maurer repeats the old saw that you can't cheat an honest man. An honest man will not expect to make a quick buck or take part in any scheme where there is a likelihood that someone is going to be cheated (all these old cons have an element of making the "mark" feel he is on the "inside" of a less than scrupulous scheme).

There is some element of truth in this, but it is not so much that the "mark" is basically dishonest these days, but that he's unwilling to take the time to learn what he needs to know in our modern information age. Even someone with little or no formal training in the computer business has had to spent hundreds of hours getting to know his trade if he's any good at it. I was once asked the secret of my "success." "Success," to this person, meant being in business, however modest, for a number of years. He didn't like working for someone else. My reply, which he took to be a wisecrack, was, "I read manuals." I might have elaborated that I'd worked at many technical jobs, if not exactly computer-related, over the decades, including complex mechanical-electrical machinery (elevators, office machines and aircraft), but that would have taken the fun out of seeing his reaction. He thought I had made something out of nothing.

"The Big Con" is a fine book, rich in detail and a window on an obscure aspect of Americana. Despite its obvious scholarship, it is unpretentious and written in a breezy journalistic style. By learning how "cons" were done in a long-gone world, he can develop a sense of what is happening today. The techniques may differ, but the psychology is the same. Just as important, reading about the human comedy is always fun.

[Yves Barbero is computer consultant, a former editor of BASIS and the current webmaster of the Bay Area Skeptics Web Site.]