The Fix is In

The Big Con is a book from 1940 by David Maurer, a professor of linguistics at the University of Louisville who made his career studying the culture and argots of the drug and criminal undergrounds and other subcultures.  A contributor to later editions of H.L.Mencken's The American Language, Maurer discovered his calling trying to penetrate the arcane conversations of fishermen on summers he spent as as a young man working as a hand on fishing boats off the coast of Newfoundland. The Big Con, his most celebrated work,  is a “linguistic study” of the subculture of the streets, taken from testimony of actual con men of the early 20th century.   Men with such colorful names as Larry the Lug, The Sanctimonious Kid,  Wildfire Bill, Limehouse Chappie, 102nd Street George and The High Ass Kid, describing the ins and outs of their métier in language like the following:

Never boast about your rags, but brag about your long cush. That will lead him along to brag about his long jack, and then you’re getting somewhere, brother. If he is a hard-shelled Babbitt, why you’re one too.

But the book is as much about the trade as about the language with which it is plied.  The professor sued the makers of The Sting in the 70’s for $10 million, alleging that David Ward's  Oscar winning screenplay copied his book without attribution or compensation.  Indeed, the plot of  the Sting bears a strong resemblance to a con referred to by Maurer as The Pay-Off and Paul Newman's character Shaw Gondorff is clearly a nod to brother grifters Fred and Charley Gondorff memorialized in Maurer's book.     

As Maurer describes it, there are short cons like 3 card monte and crooked faro games by which any two-bit grifter can separate a fool from his money in minutes, but then there are the elaborate Big Cons like "The Wire", "The Rag" and "The Payoff" that take knowledge, skill, technique, determination, props, sets, personnel and days or even months to come to fruition. All 3 involve an arc in which a "roper" trawls dining cars, poker games or hotel lobbies in search of a suitable "mark", perhaps a small town entrepreneur in the city for some business,  who he chats up in order to ferret out an openness to partnering in the procurement of easy money, often based on inside information say on the results of a race or the performance of a stock, information that due to the willingness of a disgruntled insider the roper has become wise to can be delayed long enough for a bet to be placed or stocks to be bought or sold.  

Once hooked by the roper, the next step is to bring the mark into the orbit of the real master of the con, the "insideman" who can make it happen, a suave and charismatic moneyman who the mark believes must be convinced to overcome his reticence to bankroll the sure thing that the roper and the mark have brought to his attention.  Of course the insideman is in reality the engine of the scam who through his apparent earnestness and deft manipulation gains the trust of the mark, who is ultimately persuaded to raise funds of his own to front or facilitate what he believes is a much larger and more complicated transaction from the insideman that will guarantee that the dreamed of payoff will be enormous, yet which due to a glitch has been inconveniently tied up in a way that only the mark's earnest money can get unstuck.  

With the "trim" (the mark's money) in hand-- often tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars raised surreptitiously but dutifully by the mark from back home-- the sure thing is derailed, usually because of a misunderstanding -- say, a bet "placed" on a horse to win that should have been put on the horse to "place"; a stock that should have been sold rather than bought-- the deed is done.  All that's left is to set the mark on his heels.  Something that's usually not hard to do with the suggestion that the law might have become privy to a questionable, possibly larcenous transaction that the mark participated in with open eyes and full intent to profit from.  If further prompting is needed, perhaps a spectacularly violent murder of the roper whose misunderstanding blew the deal apart staged in front of the mark's eyes, followed up by a hint that the mark himself could now conceivably be convicted by any jury as an accessory to a murder he had surely already thought of committing himself.  If the mark on cooling his heels decides to raise a beef, additional personnel are needed in the form of "fixers"-- attorneys or other influencers free with cash for cops, judges and jurors on the take.  With the fix in, a con could set up permanent shop on Main Street, right next to the Western Auto.  All of it creating a sort of shadow economy co-existent and in many cases finely intermeshed with "respectable society" in many an American town. 

While a little grifter slang goes a long way, the book itself still goes down like the finest bourbon.  What’s especially interesting about it is that one gets the sense that Maurer’s interest in these chaps is more than academic.  There seems to be a good bit of admiration in his recounting of the scams, many of which are insanely elaborate—think of the Sting with its telegraph room and all those fake bettors and other “extras” in on the scam – all of them acting as though their ruse is real, and in a way that is meant to convince the rubes is real.  So elaborate as to invite the question, “who thought this would work, let alone turn a profit?”  But according to Maurer this kind of thing was extremely common, and extremely profitable in the early part of the 20th century.  Here he describes the nightmare of a mark with a beef with uncommon sensitivity to the jeopardy posed to the con:

If the insideman handles the blow-off properly, the mark hardly knows that he has been fleeced. No good insideman wants any trouble with a mark. He wants him to lose his money the “easy way” rather than the “hard way” and the secret to long immunity from arrest is a properly staged blow-off, with the mark blaming the roper and feeling that the insideman is the finest man he ever knew. It is the mark who is not cooled out properly or is mishandled by a clumsy or incompetent insideman who immediately beefs; furthermore, if he is sure that he has been swindled and if the local police do not act, he may go higher up, with revenge rather than recovery of his money as his object. Marks of this type can upset the whole corrupt political machine and even land not only the con men but perhaps some of the police and the fixer as well behind bars.

After his suit against the Sting's producers was settled for $300,000 (over the protests of  David Ward who claims-- plausibly-- to this day to have gotten nothing more than inspiration from The Big Con), Maurer retired from academia to his farm in Kentucky.  Injuries sustained in a car crash aged him before his time.  Hoping to avoid becoming a burden and financial drain on his wife (whom he referred to as The Countess), he took a walk to the cornfield in 1981 and killed himself with a shot gun.  

The Big Con endures.

A sample of grifter slang from the David Maurer's The Big Con:

Apple - A mark.  Any person.

Beef - complain to the police

Blute - fake newspaper clippings used as props in the big con

Bobble- to arouse a mark's suspicions

Boodle - A fake roll of large bills (large bills on the outside, small bills inside which can be flashed in front a mark for effect.

The Broads - 3 card monte.

Bumblebee - $1 bill

The cackle-bladder - Method of shaking off a mark with a beef involving the insideman shooting the roper with blanks in front of the mark, made more effective by blood splurting from a rubber bladder filled with blood held in the roper's mouth.

Cannon (also gun, whizz, dip, etc) - A pickpocket.

Chick or Chicane - Short of money

Cop a heel - Run away.

Curdle - Go wrong (as in a fix that doesn't work)

Cush - Money

Drop-In - Easy money

Ear-wigger - Eavesdropper

Fixer - One employed to buy cooperation of police, judge and jurors 

Get a hard-on - Reach for a pistol

Have smallpox - To be wanted on a warrant (since it might lead to others being sought for arrest)

Heavy-gee - A safeblower or other professional

Jacket - Something or someone liable to be trouble to a grifter in a trial - e.g.,  his criminal record or a witness who can testify against him.

Joe Hep or Hep - Smart or wise to the grift.

Jug or jay - A bank.

Lagged - Sent  to prison

Mudkicker - A prostitute

Peter - A safe

Plinger - A beggar

The quill - Genuine

Raggle - Attractive woman

Savage - A mark

Scat - Whisky

Scatter - Saloon

Shed - Rail or bus station

Sneezed - Arrested

Square paper - An honest person.

Taw - Bank roll

T.B. - Total Blank; No score

Tear off - Cheat one's partner of their share.

Tin Mittens - A fixer (from the sound of coin clinking in the hand)

Tip - A crowd of people

Touch - Money taken from a mark 

Trim - To take money from a mark; also, the amount taken  

Twist - Woman, often in the rackets or connected to crime

Whip -To walk

Winchell - A mark

Wrong - Not bought by a fixer as in a wrong cop or judge.

Yellow - A telegram, especially a fake telegram used in a grift.

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* As a pre-formed youth I was huge fan of the movie when it first came out in 1973-- it was one of the few I paid good money to see several more times than once.  I rewatched it with my family a few years ago.  The fam was utterly unimpressed and I cringed at it from start to finish, mostly at the wooden near 40-year old Robert Redford’s casting as a 20-something street kid.  But the time might be ripe to set the peepers on it for one more go.