A Nation of Grifters, Fixers, and Marks: David Maurer's The Big Con

confidence games start small. abbott says to costello: "i'm in a hurry, give me two tens for a five." From elements of such amoeba-like simplicity, such little tricks of distraction, come the full-scale epics of deception—extended theatrical productions with large supporting casts—that are the subject of David W. Maurer's 1940 study, The Big Con. But even the smallest experience of getting conned tends to linger in memory. It imparts a sense of unnerving vulnerability—not to violent assault but to the seductive exploitation of your own unacknowledged weak spots. Small wonder so many refuse even to recognize they've been suckered.

Con men are fascinating to contemplate, from a safe distance. You have to get closer to pick up on their scariness. I came upon a perfect model of the type one afternoon in a New York bar, a young man just slightly older than the party of friends I was sitting with. Undetectably, he inserted himself into our conversation and quickly became part of the group; indeed he held the floor, rambling amusingly over many subjects, giving himself the air of an intellectual live wire. At one point he mentioned that he was engaged in postgraduate study at Columbia, specializing in the politics of Tokugawa Japan. At that time, as it happened, I had a burning interest in the politics of Tokugawa Japan and was delighted to meet someone who shared my fascination. It took a while to notice how deftly he diverted the conversation each time I attempted to raise the subject. When I grasped that he likely knew very little, perhaps even nothing at all, about Tokugawa Japan, I had the key to the rest of his discourse, all of which stood revealed as similarly unreliable, a constantly shifting façade. I might have concluded that he was just practicing his skills on his day off, but a reader of David Maurer's book learns that no real con man ever has a day off.

All this was in the analog era. Such face-to-face meetings and manipulations—with all their intimate orchestration of gesture, tone, eye contact, breath control, their devious oscillation between reassurance and coercion—are becoming obsolete now that it's so much easier to rip people off by remote control. By the time you get where you think you're going, the deed is already done: the exiled Nigerian general has pocketed your money, a prescription for a year's supply of adulterated pharmaceuticals has already been billed to your credit card, and your identity has been assumed by a stranger in order to stock up on sporting goods supplies somewhere in southern Florida. With each technological uptick, the human element continues its retreat. In the age of data-herding, Photoshopped photo-ops, and the wholesaling of fake retweets, an earlier age when grifters thrived on direct human contact might take on an almost comforting charm. If you were being stung or trimmed or taken off, it was at least by a person, not a malware-infected robot.

Those social and technological cataclysms notwithstanding, Maurer's The Big Con: The Story of the Confidence Man remains an unavoidable reference point. When it was published in 1940, few would have predicted such a long afterlife. Even then it presented itself as a backward glance at an era already fading, running roughly from the turn of the twentieth century to the onset of the Depression: a period awash in the fever of soaring markets and get-rich-quick schemes. Although written for the general reader, The Big Con is the work of a serious scholar.¹ Maurer (1906–1981) was a linguist based at the University of Louisville, specializing in the study of criminal argot (his other subjects included pickpockets, drug users, and moonshiners), and he pursued his research by talking to those who used the lingo, to amass "the necessary facts, facts which were not available in libraries or in police records, facts which could come only from the criminals themselves" (Maurer [1940] 1999...