Once upon a time, they could be found in every hotel lobby, on every cruise liner, in every Pullman car. They were looking for the rich, the greedy and the vain.
They were the master criminals and the greatest actors of their age. They played their lines to perfection, enlisting hundreds of extras to lull their marks: their sets were elaborately constructed betting shops or dealing rooms, their plot the subtle mechanics of the wire, the pay-off and the rag. They fleeced their victims of millions with audacious sleights of hand.
This is the story of that aristocracy of crime: of the great con men such as Charley Gondorff, the Yellow Kid Weil, Limehouse Chappie, the High Ass Kid, Slobbering Bob and Fred the Florist.
The Big Con is the classic account of the method of the con man and the con trick and its unique language. It brings back the lost epoch of the first part of this century; its danger, glamour and twisted morality.
This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Version 1.0
Epub ISBN 9781446493175
www.randomhouse.co.uk
Published by Arrow Books in 2000
5 7 9 10 8 6 4
Copyright © 1940 David W. Maurer
Introduction Copyright © 1999 Luc Sante
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
First published in the United Kingdom in 1999 by Century
Arrow Books Limited
The Random House Group Limited
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London, SW1V 2SA
Random House Australia (Pty) Limited
20 Alfred Street, Milsons Point, Sydney,
New South Wales 2061, Australia
Random House New Zealand Limited
18 Poland Road, Glenfield
Auckland 10, New Zealand
Random House (Pty) Limited
Endulini, 5a Jubilee Road, Parktown, 2193, South Africa
The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009
www.randomhouse.co.uk
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 97800999409991
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction by Luc Sante
Introduction by the Author
1. A Word About Confidence Men
2. The Big Store
3. The Big-Con Games
4. The Mark
5. The Mob
6. Birds of a Feather
7. Tin-Mittens
8. Short-Con Games
9. The Con Man and His Lingo
10. Looking Toward the Future
Copyright
David W. Maurer was a professor of English at the University Louisville until his death in 1981. He was the first writer to reveal unknown world of the grifter, his psychology and the subtle language his class.
THE BOOK YOU are holding in your hands, now reprinted after a shamefully long hiatus, is, like its subjects, crowned with many hats. Its origins are in linguistics; it is nominally a work of criminology; it has blood ties to folklore; it falls within the scope of Americana; it serves up a parcel of social history; and of course it is a robust and spring-heeled piece of literature. Swindling is a literary subject that must go back to Egyptian and Mesopotamian antecedents, certainly to Reynard the Fox by way of the Elizabethan coney-catchers and the Spanish picaresque. In American culture it looms as one of the major themes, along with self-invention and going on the lam, which are not unrelated. Edgar Allan Poe put it conclusively:
A crow thieves; a fox cheats; a weasel outwits; a man diddles. To diddle is his destiny. ‘Man was made to mourn,’ says the poet. But not so:– he was made to diddle. This is his aim – his object – his end. And for this reason when a man’s diddled we say he’s ‘done.’
The Big Con can also be considered a piece of art criticism, since it is not just any taxonomy of styles in diddling, but a refined appreciation of 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 Narcotic Addiction (1973), The American Confidence Man (a more scientific enlargement of the present book; 1974), Kentucky Moonshine (1974), and the posthumously published omnibus volume Language of the Underworld (1981). He was one of the editors of H. L. Mencken’s The American Language in its single-volume format and he contributed the entry on ‘Slang’ to at least one edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. His correspondents included fellow language addicts such as S. J. Perelman, and an enormous number of denizens of the underworld, both behind bars and at large. When Prudence Crowther, editor of Perelman’s letters, sought out his end of their exchange, she discovered that 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 closed-mouthed miscreants, people who would not have opened up to journalists. The kind of fieldwork he engaged in, as the linguist Stuart Berg Flexner, a former student of Maurer’s, pointed out, ‘takes a great deal of physical stamina and a strong personality, as well as mental ability.’ It didn’t hurt that ‘Maurer is big, with large shoulders and strong arms and hands, a man who can help pull in a heavy fishing net in freezing weather or push a car out of a muddy backroad on the way to an illegal still.’ He was also, quite evidently, blessed with a considerable sense of humor.
Maurer studied the lingo of – among others – carnies, junkies, safe-crackers, forgers, pot smokers, faro-bank players, shell-game hustlers, race-track touts, pickpockets, moonshiners, prostitutes and pimps, but his interest in the language of the confidence men was a case apart. More than any other of the dialects of the American underworld it approached the comprehensiveness of French argot or Australian rhyming slang. It is one of the peculiarities of all American subcultural lingos that they focus solely on technical terms or other weighted topics – there are invariably words for sex, death, and money, but not for table, door, or window. Grifter slang is more complex by virtue of covering a more complex subject, with an enormous range of situations, nuances, and subtleties that find no equivalent in the language of circuses or dice games or heroin traffic. To study the lingo of the con is inevitably to study the con itself, since a term such as ‘cackle-bladder’ or ‘shut-out’ cannot be properly defined without giving a full account of its use, and such an account cannot be illustrated with stick figures. That is why this book stands alone in Maurer’s oeuvre: whereas it is possible to map out the generic behavior of pickpockets, tracing patterns and supplying copious examples without necessarily referring to individuals, confidence men are after all artists, laden with idiosyncracies that distinguish their work. There are styles, schools, trends, evolutions, innovations, reactions, triumphs, failures. And it takes much more than cupidity and unscrupulousness to make a con artist. The best possess a combination of superior intelligence, broad general knowledge, acting ability, resourcefulness, physical vigor, and improvisational skills that would have propelled them to the top of any profession. The big con would be poorly served by entomology; it demands narrative.
Poe, in ‘Diddling’, provides a list of necessary characteristics of the swindler: ‘minuteness, interest, perseverance, ingenuity, audacity, nonchalance, originality, impertinence, and grin.’ They are items needed for the short con as well as the long or big. But while any practitioner of the big con can play the smack, the tat, or the wipe, the reverse does not obtain. The big con is the game of an elite; to Poe’s list must be added ambition, endurance, rigor, concentration, organization, compartmentalization, persuasiveness, and ironclad self-confidence. If the short con is an anecdote, the long con is a novel. Essentially, a short con involves taking the pigeon for all the money he has on his person, while the big con sends him home to get more. What all confidence games have in common is that they employ the victim’s greed as a lever. The most primitive – the gold brick, which is supposed to be literal, or the green goods, which is a machine alleged to crank out banknotes – operate on the same basic principle as the most elaborate rigs involving intercontinental travel, multiple furnished sets, and dozens of carefully rehearsed extras. In all of them the mark is induced to participate in an extralegal money-making scheme, which requires an investment. The cruder mechanisms are simple bait-and-switch devices – the wipe, for example, in which a rustic or an immigrant is invited to pool his resources with the sharper and deposit the total as security against a lost-wallet rakeoff or something similar, continues to figure in the press at intervals to this very day. In the most sophisticated cons, however, the doe may ever after remain unaware that he has been bilked, merely registering the affair as a gambit that failed.
That last, Cheshire-cat item in Poe’s list merits attention. Humor is never very far from the heart of the con. After all, garden-variety swindles from shortchanging to fortune-telling to patent-medicine manufacture are merely theft without a weapon. The con, however, which hoists the victim by his own petard, combines formal elegance, careful imitation of legitimate enterprise, and rough justice into what can only be called parody. The subgenre called the wire, for example, involving as it does a pretense of stock manipulation, attracts the sorts of birds who would be drawn to actual stock manipulation and skins them alone, thus producing a far lesser loss to society than the swindles engaged in by ostensibly respectable sorts. The big con can also be considered as a form of theater, very nearly a Gesamtkunstwerk, staged with 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 principals, the roper and the inside man, whose roles are as archetypal as Punch and Judy, or Mr Tambo and Mr Bones in minstrelsy. They bounce the victim between them the way cops in a Mutt-and-Jeff torture team manipulate a suspect; it is a kind of three-man tango. Then there are two kinds of settings: available real-life items, such as restaurants and hotel rooms, which might verbally be given imaginary properties but are otherwise unaltered, and outfits completely rigged up, empty offices or storefronts made over into bookie joints, brokers’ suites, or high-end gambling clubs. A scheme might require one or more of these, furnished down to carpets, ashtrays, and spittoons, with crowds of several dozen currently unemployed con men acting as shills, fronts, or mere bodies, at the center of it a manager who is both acting the part of a manager and actually managing the outfit. And such a production must be called into being on very short notice.
I’m referring to all these matters in the present tense, but while there is undoubtedly some surviving form of the big con in operation, these days perhaps being staged on the Internet (aspects of the late savings-and-loan boondoggle had notably big-con-like appurtenances), the high and elegant style described by Maurer was already in eclipse by the time he wrote the book. Its decline, like its rise, was occasioned by changing technology. The reader will note, of course, that all dollar values quoted must be multiplied by at least ten to achieve their equivalent in current sums. Even so, the big con’s Golden Age, which is usually agreed to have run from the turn of the century to the Depression with its peak occurring roughly between 1914 and 1923, was a period of unprecedented prosperity for the American upper middle class. Provincial dentists and wholesale grocers, whose fathers had been blacksmiths or coopers, were making fortunes apparently without effort in a stock market that appeared to have permanently defeated the law of gravity. Often enough such types were persuaded that their success was owed to their perspicacity, rather than to luck or general trends. And while a lack of material advantages is customarily cited as defeating moral strictures and preparing the ground for criminal activity, there is at least as much to be said for the exact opposite circumstance: good fortune can lead to the sense that one stands above the common clutter, that one can’t lose, that one’s prosperity can’t help but benefit the rest of society. Does any of this sound familiar from more recent times?
In that period, however, communication was slower and more haphazard, making possible the pay-off, for example, which depends on an interval between the end of a horse race and the broadcasting of its results. And there were just fewer people in the world, so that business was more personal and intimate, and casual trust in others – especially within the apparent bounds of one’s own class – was greater. It was, after all, a world in which it was actually possible to get in on the ground floor of something big just by striking up a conversation in a Pullman smoker. Some of those bilked by Limehouse Chappie or Yellow Kid Weil may have known others for whom an apparently equivalent set-up actually led to a timely investment in Oldsmobile or Goodyear. And it was possible, at least in second-rank towns, to grease the entire municipal apparatus with only one or two convenient handoffs. 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, the most memorable representation of the topic in a Hollywood film was probably in Preston Sturges’s The Lady Eve (1941). Barbara Stanwyck plays an ingenue grifter traveling with her elderly relatives, all of whom are veteran confidence men; they are preserved in Edwardian amber. Stanwyck’s character is a parody of a stock type, the good girl who hews to family tradition in the face of modernity. If you ever see a photograph of Yellow Kid Weil, you will note he could pass for one of her uncles.
The Big Con may be the only one of Maurer’s books that can be read for purely literary value, but whether or not this is owed to a natural ability otherwise repressed in the interest of science it flies along as if it had written itself. The language on display certainly must have had something to do with it – available vocabulary can lubricate a subject (or, alternatively, tie weights to its shoes and throw it into the river). But the jovial demeanor, linguistic invention, and casual hyperbole of the grift establish a natural rhythm that ties together accounts by retired con men, by police detectives, and by a linguist like Maurer all together into a common barstool chorus. And the slang is only part of it, although it’s hard to see how anyone could resist the joy of typing a sentence such as: ‘“It’s a lot easier to just plug the roper and watch the mark light a rag,” he laughed.’ Maurer’s informants can also sound a mythic note, straight from the frontier of Mike Fink: ‘“At that time marks were so thick in Florida that you had to kick them out of your way.”’ Of course the names themselves suggest an origin on the flatboats and in the lumber camps and along the railroad lines of an earlier America: The Square-Faced Kid, Slobbering Bob, The Hashhouse Kid, The High Ass Kid, The Indiana Wonder, Wildfire John, The Christ Kid. Throughout the narrative it is necessary to remind oneself that these various ‘kids’ were distinguished-looking gentlemen in frock coats and homburgs and Van Dyke beards. The Narrow-Gage Kid was so called because his ‘height was just the distance between the rails of a narrow-gage railway,’ the Yenshee Kid because he chewed gum opium. (Maurer is wrong about Yellow Kid Weil, however, who derived his moniker not from the fact that he had peddled cheap watches but, according to his autobiography, from his fondness for the comic strip of the same name by R. F. Outcault.)
These grifters do emerge from American tradition, combining in their persons aspects of both the Yankee peddler and the backwoods trickster. The genre, furthermore, had been given its epic nearly a century earlier in Herman Melville’s famously ‘unreadable’ novel The Confidence Man: His Masquerade (1857), apparently a parody of Plato’s Republic, in which the con artist keeps reappearing in different guises – land agent, herb doctor, charity supplicant, snake-oil butcher, etc. – aboard a Mississippi steamer. He later appears aboard other boats in the works of Mark Twain, notably as The King and The Duke in Huckleberry Finn, and continues making episodic appearances, as deathless as the Comte de Saint-Germain, throughout the course of American letters up to the present day. That The Big Con is nominally a work of popular sociology should not prevent it from numbering among the landmarks of this serpentine traditional path. 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.
THIS BIT OF journalism came into being in a rather curious fashion. It is really a by-product of linguistic research, in the course of which I have had to examine the backgrounds of many rackets. The impetus for it came from the half-humorous suggestion of a confidence man who was going through my files; the execution of it was made possible only by the co-operation of competent professionals.
The methods by which I collected my material were not in any way bizarre or unusual. I did not resort to false whiskers. I did not, like the author of a recent ‘exposé’ of the arts of the professional gambler, feel it necessary to palm myself off as a detective. I did not try to join any mobs incognito. I simply talked to confidence men, who, little by little, supplied the necessary facts, facts which were not available in libraries or in police records, facts which could come only from the criminals themselves.
In the course of preparing the manuscript, it has seemed advisable to suppress some material which might damage confidence men now operating and prominent individuals who have been victimized. Also, upon advice of attorney, I have omitted the names of some high police officials and politicians who act as fixers for criminals, and have attributed pseudonyms to others in order to avoid the repercussions which might result from linking ostensibly respectable citizens with the underworld. Often it has seemed better to generalize upon certain sensational material, retaining the essential facts but omitting or altering the specific circumstances. Some underworld folk and police officials who read this will observe that occasional episodes are here attributed to persons who did not actually figure in them, that, for very obvious reasons, the names of dead con men have sometimes been substituted for ones now operating; this has been done, not to reflect unfavorably upon anyone, but rather, in a few instances, to avoid embarrassing persons whom the exact truth might damage. To this extent it has seemed necessary to fictionize. But these changes are only superficial; they do not in any way vitiate the truth of the general principles which they illustrate.
This book is not intended as an exposé; it does not purport to reveal ‘forbidden’ secrets of a dark and sinister underworld; it is not artificially colored or flavored. I have not attempted to appear as an apologist for the criminal. On the other hand, I have scrupulously refrained from passing any judgments with a moral bias. I have only attempted 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.
MOST OF THE names and ‘monickers’ of confidence men appearing in this book are genuine. However, in some cases it has been desirable to disguise the identity of certain men under synthetic underworld nicknames. When this has been done, the monicker has been so composed that underworld figures may, without too much difficulty, discern the true identity underneath. For instance, 102nd St George is so called because his first name is George and his swindling establishment is located in the 200 block on W. 102nd St., New York City. The Hashhouse Kid conceals the identity of a very successful modern big-con man who was a waiter before he turned out on the rackets. The Clinic Kid has made a fortune swindling wealthy patients who visited a famous mid-western clinic. However, there are relatively few of these counterfeit names and the lay reader will probably not be conscious of them.
THE GRIFT HAS a gentle touch. It takes its toll from the verdant sucker by means of the skilled hand or the sharp wit. In this, it differs from all other forms of crime, and especially from 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 the confidence man is sometimes classed with professional thieves, pickpockets, and gamblers, he is really not a thief at all because he does no actual stealing. The trusting victim literally thrusts a fat bank roll into his hands. It is a point of pride with him that he does not have to steal.
Confidence men are not ‘crooks’ in the ordinary sense of the word. They are suave, slick and capable. Their depredations are very much on the genteel side. Because of their high intelligence, their solid organization, the widespread connivance of the law, and the fact that the victim must virtually admit criminal intentions himself if he wishes to prosecute, society has been neither willing nor able to avenge itself effectively. Relatively few good con men are ever brought to trial; of those who are tried, few are convicted; of those who are convicted, even fewer ever serve out their full sentences. Many successful operators have never a day in prison to pay for their merry and lucrative lives spent in fleecing willing marks on the big-con games.
A confidence man prospers only because of the fundamental dishonesty of his victim. First, he inspires 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 fatted for the kill. Thus arises the trite but none the less sage maxim: ‘You can’t cheat an honest man.’
This fine old principle rules all confidence games, big and little, from a simple three-card monte or shell game in a shady corner of a country fair grounds to the intricate pay-off or rag, played against a big store replete with expensive props and manned by suave experts. The three-card-monte grifter takes a few dollars from a willing farmer here and there; the big-con men take thousands or hundreds of thousands from those who have it. But the principle is always the same.
This accounts for the fact that it has been found very difficult to prosecute confidence men successfully. At the same time it explains why so little of the true nature of confidence games is known to the public, for once a victim is fleeced he often proves to be a most reluctant and untruthful witness against the men who have taken his money. By the same token, confidence men are hardly criminals in the usual sense of the word, for they prosper through a superb knowledge of human nature; they are set apart from those who employ the machine-gun, the blackjack, or the acetylene torch. Their methods differ more in degree than in kind from those employed by more legitimate forms of business.
Modern con men use at present only three big-con games, and only two of these are now used extensively. In addition, there are scores of short-con games which seem to enjoy periodic bursts of activity, followed by alternate periods of obsolescence. Some of these short-con games, when played by big-time professionals who apply the principles of the big con to them, attain very respectable status as devices to separate the mark from his money.
The three big-con games, the wire, the rag, and the pay-off, have in some forty years of their existence taken a staggering toll from a gullible public. No one knows just how much the total is because many touches, especially large ones, never come to light; both con men and police officials agree that roughly ninety per cent of the victims never complain to the police. Some professionals estimate that these three games alone have produced more illicit profit for the operators and for the law than all other forms of professional crime (excepting violations of the prohibition law) over the same period of time. However that may be, it is very certain that they have been immensely profitable.
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:
The big-con games did not spring full-fledged into existence. 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 they have, from the criminal’s point of view, reached a very high state of perfection.
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 toward the West. Its population increased many fold. It swelled until the frontier town became a teeming little city, sprawling on the plateau like a heavily muscled giant in a suit too small, threatening momentarily to burst every seam. Close-packed frame buildings lined the mud streets, ridiculous in their raw elegance, while around the outskirts clustered the shacks and tents of the myriads of adventurers who sought they knew not what in this new country. In the dust-swirled streets cattlemen, miners, laborers, engineers, land speculators, soldiers and gamblers surged in a tangle of men, horses and material; the gunman elbowed the itinerant evangelist and the Oriental jostled the American Indian. Over the odor of horses and men and raw whisky and wood smoke there hung a more elusive smell, one which emanated from the fevered blood of the men and tainted the air with an electric quality. It was the odor of an ancient lust, the lust for easy money.
Ben Marks understood all about easy money, for his business was sure-thing gambling. Ever since he had left his home in Council Bluffs, Iowa, he had roamed the country from the Mississippi on west. His youthful, stocky figure and red whiskers, bristling in friendly fashion, were a familiar sight on river steamboats, at land-openings, and on the streets of frontier towns. Suspended from his broad shoulders he carried a board upon which he played a most popular frontier gambling game which had come up from Mexico – three-card monte. It was a simple little game in which the players bet against the operator, whose deft manipulation of the cards and amusing spiel drew a crowd about him on the street. He threw three cards, face down, upon the board in plain view of the spectators, then invited them to pick out the queen, first for fun, then for money. They knew it was easy, for they could see the queen flash as he threw the cards. Then he offered to bet upon the ability of anyone to find the queen. One of his accomplices (a shill) bet a dollar and picked out the queen. The crowd grew interested. More and larger bets were taken; meanwhile, another accomplice had located a fat sucker and connived with him to examine the cards, surreptitiously bend the corner of the queen slightly, and beat the operator. When the bet had been run up high enough, the trick was tried, but Ben deftly removed the ‘ear’ from the marked card and put it on another as he manipulated the cards. The player was dumfounded when the queen evaded him.
Ben ground away at this little grifting game, picking up bets of five and ten dollars, occasionally one as large as twenty-five. It made a living for him and his shills, but that was about all. He had too much competition on the streets of Cheyenne, where catering to the vices of lusty men had become one of the chief enterprises. The fat suckers paid little attention to a monte-player who plied his trade on the street.
Then Ben had an idea, an idea which was eventually to revolutionize the grift, an idea which was to become the backbone of all big-time confidence games. Why not set up a place of business of his own? Why not operate from a permanent base, let the players come to him? But how would he get trade? He would have to compete with numerous saloons where gambling was carried on amid other forms of red-blooded entertainment.
He turned the idea over in his mind for some time and finally opened, in a shack of a building, what 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 a-plenty. 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, and each one left some cash in Ben Marks’ money belt. Like most pioneers Ben did not realize the importance of his innovation.
Thus, in a very crude form, developed what we know today as the ‘big store’ – the swanky gambling club or fake brokerage establishment in which the modern pay-off or rag is played. It became the device which enables competent modern operators to take, say, $75,000 from a victim and at the same time conceal from him the fact that he has been swindled. Although today there are several types of store used, they all operate on the same principle and appear as legitimate places doing a large volume of business. So realistically are they manned and furnished that the victim does not suspect that everything about them – including the patronage – is fake. In short, the modern big store is a carefully set up and skillfully managed theater where the victim acts out an unwitting role in the most exciting of all underworld dramas. It is a triumph of the ingenuity of the criminal mind.
The use of a store against which to play the victims of a confidence game developed gradually. Previous to the very end of the nineteenth century there were no big-con games, although the country was overrun with what were then called ‘confidence games’ but which are today known as short-con games. They were played on the street, on passenger trains, in saloons and gambling houses, on passenger ships, with fairs and circuses – in short, any place where short-con workers could find people with a little money. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century there were thousands upon thousands of these short-con workers plying the country; they liked to follow the boom-towns connected with mining and the land-openings on the westward-sweeping frontier, for there people had money and were speculation-bound. The feverish atmosphere west of the Mississippi River was a healthy one in which con-games could flourish and grow. It was quite natural that the principle of the store should have been discovered in Cheyenne. But as yet the mobs were not organized, the fix did not extend beyond the occasional bribing of a sheriff or constable, and the grifters made a small income at best.
The idea of a store caught on among grifters and they began to organize, raise enough capital to open stores, and profit by Ben’s simple invention. It spread over the West, then to the East, where it housed green-goods games and the gold-brick. Other forms of the short-con, largely some form of gambling games, copied the idea, and little Dollar Stores sprang up all over the United States – one of them, incidentally, in Chicago, growing into a great modern department store owing to the fact that the founder, who originally leased the building for a monte store, found that he could unload cheap and flashy merchandise at a dollar and make more money than he could at monte. But the idea of a store was well established and was to be forever afterward associated with confidence games. Ropers and steerers (long used by gambling dives) were adopted, which of course increased the volume of business tremendously, and eventually made the display of merchandise unnecessary.
Gamblers took up the idea, and the mitt store succeeded the Dollar Store. The mitt store masqueraded behind the front of a legitimate business – for instance a sample-room where cloth was sold wholesale, or, in the South and Southwest, under the guise of an institute where farmers were to be instructed in the control of the boll weevil or some other agricultural pest. Old Farmer Brown sometimes used exhibits of cotton bolls in various stages of destruction, together with bottle specimens of the weevil showing its development from egg to maturity. A lecture which compensated in color for what it lacked in scientific value was used as a stall for the farmers from the cotton states and served to lure unsuspecting farmers into his monte game. The steerer for a mitt store brought the victim in on some equally legitimate pretense, invited him to sit down until the proprietor arrived, and pushed him into a chair at a table. Other strangers were seated there, too. A newspaper covered the top of the table. Finally the newspaper was raised to reveal a little game of poker which was going on to pass the time. The mark was ‘mitted in’ whether he wanted to be or not, was cold-decked on his own deal, and fleeced. This type of store, housing both mitt and monte games, flourished prosperously well into the first quarter of the twentieth century, and is still occasionally used by some short-con workers.
Before 1900 crime had not become a big business. Confidence men did not realize that they were destined to become the aristocrats of crime. They had not visualized a smoothly working machine, its political cogs well greased with bribe-money and its essential parts composed of slick, expert professionals. While even in those days the police were frequently paid off, the ‘fix’ as we know it today was still to be developed. The operators of mitt and monte stores simply gave the cop on the beat an occasional five or ten-dollar bill to avoid being run in, and their game went merrily on. The idea of inducing the victim to try to beat the store had not yet germinated; he was pitted against the players, and the store was only a center for the game, a device to facilitate getting the sucker to play. The grifters had to content themselves with the money which the sucker had on his person. If they took off scores of from twenty-five dollars to two hundred dollars, they were satisfied. Some of the better monte-mobs made fairly good money, but nothing to compare with the consistently large scores taken off by modern con mobs. On the whole, they lived a hand-to-mouth existence, with only the best ones making much of a profit over and above their operating expenses.
From 1880 to 1900 thousands of these small-con games appeared, played in crude stores which offered little more than shelter to the players. The fix was a simple transaction between con men and officers, with influential saloon-keepers or politicians occasionally acting as intermediaries in difficult cases. In New York and especially in Chicago, there were hordes of gamblers, thieves, grifters and short-con workers. These men naturally made saloons their headquarters, came to know the proprietors, and the machinery of the fix was established. From 1893 for some ten or fifteen years, the famous proprietor of two of these saloons was unquestionably the best fixer for all kinds of criminals, but especially for grifters; his saloons were a veritable rogues’ gallery most of the time. He still wields a powerful influence in Chicago. There were, of course, many others, some of whom still operate prosperously. The situation in Chicago was typical of the rest of the country, except that both grifting and fixing went on on a larger scale there than anywhere else, with the possible exception of New York.
But bigger things were ahead. Times were to change, and the days of the small score were to end. After 1900, when the big-con games began to develop, the mitt and monte stores gradually dwindled away. With the advent of the big-time games, the simple fix for a small fee was no longer sufficient. Con games were to pass into the realm of big business.
Meanwhile, other types of short-con workers realized the advantage of playing their marks against a store, with ropers to bring the victims in and an insideman to do the playing. The sporting proclivities of the American public were exploited and thus arose the fight store, the wrestle store, and the foot-race store, immediate ancestors of the big store as we know it today. Ben Marks had not stopped with his original Dollar Store, but continued to contribute liberally to the development of confidence games, and had quite an extensive layout at Council Bluffs, Iowa, his home town, where marks taken off the railroad trains or roped at their homes were brought in for the slaughter. He built a large clubhouse where he had a faro-layout, dealt one-handed with great dexterity by his partner, Stebbins, who had lost an arm while blowing a safe. Also, Marks had a prize-ring where he played marks against the fight store, and a circular cinder track for the foot race.
These early stores are important because they not only developed the principles later applied to the big-con games, but also trained a host of both inside and outside workers who brought the benefit of their experience to the big con as soon as its principles were discovered. Ben Marks himself ‘turned out’ many of the young men who were later to become notorious on the rag, the wire and the pay-off. He probably contributed more than any other one man to the development of the big store.
The fight-store swindle worked, briefly, like this. The mob consisted of one or more ropers, an insideman, a ‘doctor,’ two prize fighters and several minor assistants. The roper traveled about the countryside (usually not far from the store) and steered a mark in whenever he could find one. He posed as the disgruntled secretary to a millionaire sportsman, often a railroad executive, who ostensibly traveled about the country in a private car with a prize fighter, his own personal doctor, a trainer and staff of servants. In order to indulge his sporting instincts, he would match his fighter against any other fighters who could get any backing from their own communities, and of course he bet heavily on the fight. Many fight stores used some local bruisers for their fighters; Ben Marks engaged a famous ex-champion of the prize ring and his brother, who was also a prominent pugilist.
The roper told the victim that he had been selected for a part in this scheme because he could be depended upon. The roper’s problem was this: he has been abused and neglected by his employer, who, he says, is really an old skinflint. He has decided to quit his service – but not without making some money for himself. The next fight, for which he is now making arrangements, will be held in Council Bluffs. He has contracted with his employer’s fighter to ‘take a dive’ – pretend to be knocked out – in the tenth round. His employer will bet heavily on his own fighter. He, the secretary, cannot personally bet against his employer; hence he needs someone with money who will bet heavily on the other fighter, then divide the proceeds. It is a sure thing.
If the mark was interested, the roper moved him into Council Bluffs to look the situation over. He met the millionaire executive (the insideman) and his fighter. Everyone talked of the coming fight, with the millionaire calling wildly for large bets, and waving money under the mark’s nose. As soon as the victim was convinced that he could win heavily, he was sent home, procured his money, contributed something to the purse, and made his bet. Often he was made stakeholder as a mark of the high esteem in which he was held – although, without his knowledge, the satchel containing the money for all the bets was ‘switched’ and he was given a duplicate full of paper, just in case he should yield to temptation.
The fight was held before a very limited audience, for in those days prize fighting was illegal in most states and prize fights were held clandestinely, like cock fights today. However; for the mark’s benefit, the fighters put on quite a show. In the sixth round, something happened which no one had counted on. The millionaire’s fighter delivered a terrific right over his opponent’s heart and he fell to the ground, spurting blood from his mouth. All was confusion. The millionaire’s ‘doctor’ came forward with his stethoscope and pronounced the fighter dead. The mark was dazed; the millionaire collected the bet (which was already in his possession, since he had taken the satchel with the stakes in it) and everyone was in a hurry to get out of town before the local authorities got wind of the fight and arrested them for being accessories to manslaughter. Thus the mark blew himself off and the con man split the amount of his bet.
Buck Boatwright, who had this type of store in Joplin, Missouri, Webb City, Missouri, and Galena, Kansas, around 1900, made several innovations in the fight store and raised it to a high peak of perfection. Buck introduced the idea, later used in the pay-off, of furnishing the mark with part of the money for the play; his outsideman carried the millionaire’s money in a satchel and, with the insideman (Buck) calling for bets, the outsideman would slip several hundred dollars out of the satchel and surreptitiously give them to the mark so that he could start by placing that much of a bet. This was important, for it ‘tightened up’ the mark and made him ripe to be put on the send for more money. Buck also made some use of shills, who bet on the millionaire’s fighter with money which Buck furnished; the mark was thus impressed with the amount of money he would win when the fight was over, and would raise his own bet as high as possible – another principle which was later used in the pay-off. Boatwright placed all this money in a small safe which stood against the wall and the mark was impressed with the sheaves of greenbacks he saw being stored therein – not knowing, of course, that the safe had a door in the back from which the money was removed by an assistant in the next room who handed it to another shill to bet. This device was later to become one of the strongest elements in the modern big store.
Wrestle stores and foot-race stores worked on the same general principle as the fight store, with foot racers or wrestlers taking the place of the prize fighters. The stores were quite crude at first and $5,000 was regarded as a ‘banner score.’ However, technique rapidly improved and stores spread over the country, prominent ones, in addition to those operated by Ben Marks and Buck Boatwright, doing quite a business and breaking the ground for the big-time games to come. One of the biggest of these early stores was opened in Hot Springs, Arkansas, in 1902, by Eddie Spears and George Ryan, who did their own fixing. Most of their scores were taken on the fight or foot-race racket. A short time later this store came to grief. At about the same time (1902) Byron Haynes of Colorado Springs opened up a fight and foot-race store which operated for some time. George Ryan also roped for this store, and it fell to his lot to rope the first really lucrative mark ever taken into a fight store. The score was $50,000 and caused a sensation in the underworld. The mark beefed, but the fix was secure and there were no serious repercussions. In Springfield, Illinois, the Keystone Kid operated fight, wrestle, and foot-race stores. In Scranton, Pa., the Narrow Gage Kid and Pretty Billy, both from Chicago, opened a fight store and did their own fixing. It enjoyed its greatest prosperity from 1906 to 1908. Later the Narrow Gage Kid opened his own fight store in Philadelphia with Tim O’Leary doing his fixing for him. In 1911, Gad Bryan and his partner, Jim O’Hara, later owners of the Bowie Race Track, opened up a fight store in the old Junction House in Baltimore. They did their own fixing.
The store for the early con games was a crude arrangement. Usually it consisted only of some place (often a saloon or a room off a saloon) in which to play the mark, and a private ring in which the ‘fights’ took place. The mark was taken on the strength of the ‘con’ which the roper ‘threw into him’ and on the sight of the bag full of money which he had seen the millionaire bet on his fighter. Since he wanted to trim the millionaire rather than the store, as he does in the present-day big-con games, little attempt was made to build up the atmosphere of the store; in this respect the fight store remained similar to the older mitt and monte stores.
The fight store and its prototypes flourished prosperously for about fifteen years, then waned in popularity in favor of the modern big-con games which had meanwhile been developed. But the fight game was really a big-con game in principle. It offered the victim an opportunity to make money by swindling someone else; it displayed large sums of money to arouse his cupidity; it employed shills to stimulate his gambling instincts; it had an excellent device for fleecing him and sending him on his way; and the scores were phenomenally large for that time. Confidence men discovered that, as in modern big-con games, the fix was frequently too delicate to be handled by a saloon keeper and consequently was negotiated directly by the proprietor of the fight store. But the games lacked subtlety. The proposition it offered to the sucker was too bare-faced a swindle. The store was not mobile like the modern big stores; it could not be knocked down and concealed between plays. And when prize fights became legal, the appeal to the average sucker decreased. By 1915 the game had practically disappeared and the big-con games had replaced it. But the principle was sound and even today an occasional touch is taken off with it.