Big Con: The Story of the Confidence Man » (Special Value)

CON MEN DON'T STEAL—they literally have wads of cash thrust into their hands by trusting victims. Find out how they accomplish these dizzying feats in David Maurer's The Big Con, one of the finest and most entertaining portraits of confidence men and their games ever written. First published in 1940, it later inspired the Oscar-winning movie The Sting, and is to this day considered a classic of criminology. In addition to being a treasure trove of underworld lingo and unforgettable characters, The Big Con vividly illustrates the fundamental stages of every con, including

• Putting up the mark—finding a well-to-do victim
• Playing the con for him—gaining his or her confidence
• Giving him the convincer—allowing the victim to make a small profit
• Putting him on the send—sending him home to get more money
• Taking off the touch—fleecing the victim

Forewarned is forearmed. In today's world of ever bigger Ponzi schemes, the price of this book might be the best money you ever spent.

The con job has thrived in every time and place the world has known, but a case can be made that the con as we know it was perfected in America with the advent of "the fix," the guarantee that the "mark" won't squeal to the cops. David Mamet and Jim Thompson are just two of many writers whose work romanticizes the con as part of American history; scholar David W. Maurer is another. His book The Big Con, a sociological study of the con man's culture, was first published in 1940 while he was teaching in the linguistics department at the University of Louisville, and it remains a valuable resource for all those fascinated with one of the criminal world's most interesting sub-sects. As would befit a professor in his field, Maurer was interested in the way con men spoke as much as how they operated. Criminals often speak in their own invented colloquialisms and codes, and his book, via anecdote and observation, opens a window into this secretive and colorful world. Maurer is clearly enamored of pre-Depression grifters with nicknames like the Narrow Gage Kid, Yellow Kid, and Postal Kid, descriptive appellations rarely encountered outside of Tom Waits' lyrics. Yet his stories and analysis ultimately seem like little more than a tantalizing build-up to the book's real payoff: an extensive dictionary of con-man lingo. Luc Sante's foreword to the recently reprinted edition is useful for putting the book in perspective: The con, Sante hypothesizes, is most widespread in times of great prosperity, and he writes that it would be useful to return to Maurer's text in light of today's flourishing economy. Perhaps he's right, as the classic con continues to evolve with technology; the characters Maurer writes about would go nuts with the wonders of the Internet. The Bandwidth Kid, anyone?