The Big Con (24 page)

Next to the short-con workers and related grifters
whose rackets prepare youngsters admirably for the big con, provided of course they are sufficiently talented, professional gamblers and pickpockets most frequently turn con men. Gamblers, because of their natural grift sense and their wide knowledge of people, fall naturally into the routine of the big con. And the good professionals all have their own bag of tricks for fleecing a mark.
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More important still, they have learned how to handle victims from a somewhat higher social level than those which the average short-con worker encounters; they have the manners and the suavity necessary on the big con. Says John Henry Strosnider, “When a professional gambler turns roper, he is good or will make good. He knows how to cut into a mark and how to talk to him. Once he gets his con, he knows what to do with it.” Because of their natural instincts and grifting experience, most gamblers play the outside when they turn out on the confidence games.

Pickpockets who turn out on the big con
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have a fair chance of success. They already have thieving sense, but often lack the ability to rope a mark which short-con workers have cultivated. It is significant that pickpockets, in contrast to gamblers, usually find that the post of insideman is best suited to their talents. Perhaps this is because pickpockets are not very talkative, except among themselves; a roper must be able to open up a conversation with anyone. Pickpockets are frequently too secretive and suspicious to approach strangers in the most effective manner. The Postal Kid, who was himself a pickpocket before he turned out on the big con, explains this trait
among pickpockets by saying, semi-facetiously, that “they hate a mark so much that they don’t like to talk to one.” When they work the inside, the roper has laid down the preliminary groundwork, and handles the mark most of the time, which is a most satisfactory arrangement to an insideman with light-fingered antecedents.

Race-track touts sometimes turn out on the big con, especially on the pay-off, but they constitute a very small proportion of successful big-con men. Perhaps this is partly due to the peculiar type of men who take up touting, for as a class they lack backbone and courage. However, the good ones learn how to handle marks successfully and from the ranks of touts come such top-notch con men as Glouster Jack, 102nd St. George, Frank MacSherry, Claude King and others of high professional reputation. And the fact must not be overlooked that the pay-off had its inception in the minds of two touts, Hazel and Abbot.

Not all con men have underworld backgrounds. Training in some other branch of the grift is very helpful, but is not always essential. Some men like Lee Reil and Buck Boatwright step directly from legitimate life into the big con and make a success of it. Reil’s transition from legitimate employment to con work was abrupt but natural, for his instincts were those of a confidence man, but he had simply not been in a situation where he could give these instincts free play. He worked for many years as a railroad conductor and made the acquaintance of con men through “copping the short.” He also made the acquaintance of a thief-girl in New Orleans who served as an entrée to underworld circles in that city. When he lost his job as conductor he went to New Orleans and turned out on the big con with professionals. His grifting career has been long and successful. Buck Boatwright, formerly a railroad engineer, was fleeced by con men. He suddenly realized that he could play that little game too, and
opened up a store. He seemed to have been born a good all-around con man, but played the inside with excellent success. Other con men with legitimate backgrounds range from N—–Q—–(engineer and contractor) to the Square Faced Kid (mule-skinner) and from Charley Gondorff (bar-tending) to the Hashhouse Kid (waiter). The Yellow Kid, at the top of the list, was born a con man and never in his life had time for any other occupation.

So much sensational material has been printed about confidence men and, generally speaking, the public entertains such romantic and even fantastic ideas regarding them, that a chapter like this would not be complete without a few modest but realistic notes regarding their personal lives.

There is nothing superhuman about confidence men, nor is there anything mysterious or occult about the methods they use. Although they sometimes perform sensational crimes, they are not the super criminals of fiction. They are neither violent, blood-thirsty, nor thieving, in the ordinary sense of that word. They are not antisocial—whatever that term really means. They hold no especial hatred or antipathy toward the individuals they fleece, nor toward society as a whole. They are not, on the one hand, the romantic and sentimental crooks of the movies, nor, on the other, the sinister, plotting, cold-blooded criminals of the crime-story magazine. They are human beings, manifesting salt-and-pepper mixtures of all the vices and virtues to which mankind is heir. If fifty of them were selected and mixed indiscriminately with a group of successful business and professional men, all the correlations and statistics of a Hooton or a Lombroso would not set them apart; and, if a census of opinions upon politics, ethics, religion, or what-not were taken
from the entire group, not even a Solomon could separate the sheep from the goats on the basis of their social views. If confidence men operate outside the law, it must be remembered that they are not much further outside than many of our pillars of society who go under names less sinister. They only carry to an ultimate and very logical conclusion certain trends which are often inherent in various forms of legitimate business.

However, since all confidence men live in much the same environment, have something of the same training and background, live by a loose but nevertheless real code, are all of high intelligence, have similar attitudes toward their victims, toward the law, and one another, and run somewhat true to form in their amusements and recreations, it follows naturally that they develop certain traits in common. While these traits can hardly be said to be earmarks of the profession, and certainly they could not be used to identify a confidence man, they are, regardless of individual variations, characteristic of the group.

As we have seen, most con men have a criminal or semi-criminal background, though some, like the Yenshee Kid for instance, come from good family stock and a high middle-class background, but fall early into criminal company. Most of them have a wide variety of thieving experience before they become confidence men. They have grown up in a tradition of cheating, grifting, stealing; their habits and attitudes are fixed, sometimes from boyhood. “You are shaped by the company you keep as a youngster,” said the Postal Kid. “You tangle up early with guys who cheat for a living. Then you meet other grifters through them and get hardened to their ways. You lose your dough and that hardens you up to the other side of the picture. You become hungry for dough to gamble with. Then you go out looking for a mark you can trim. You take the chances and the gamblers take the dough
away from you. They are very nice to you when you are flush, but when you are chick, boy, they give you the chill. They think you might put the bite on, and gamesters don’t like to associate with grifters who are chicane. So out you go for another mark ….”

Thus is begun a cycle which is likely to continue, with minor variations, throughout a lifetime, for most con men gamble heavily with the money for which they work so hard and take such chances to secure. In a word, most of them are suckers for some other branch of the grift. Among the old-timers, it was twisting the tiger’s tail; among the present generation, it is cards, dice, roulette or stocks. It is indeed strange that men who know so much about the percentage which operates in favor of the professional gambler will risk their freedom for the highly synthetic thrill of bucking the tiger. Yet a big score is hardly cut up until all the mob are plunging heavily at their favorite game; within a few weeks, or even a few days, a $100,000 touch has gone glimmering and the con men are living on borrowed money, or are out on the tip or the smack to make expenses.

Con men are well aware of this weakness, yet few of them, it seems, are able to curb their gambling instincts and gear their lives down to the speed at which the ordinary citizen lives. Many amusing stories are told about this tendency, each con man laughing at the mote in his neighbor’s eye while he ignores the beam in his own. One of these stories concerns Little Chappie Lohr and Plunk Drucker. Plunk had an insatiable lust for faro-bank and played it at every opportunity, even though he lost with distressing regularity. The two men started out on the road with a bank roll between them. Plunk promptly lost it all at faro. They borrowed from an accommodating saloon-keeper in Chicago. At Council Bluffs Plunk disappeared. Little Chappie, fearing the worst, sought him out in the den of the tiger.

“You can’t do this,” remonstrated Chappie. “You’ll lose our bank roll again.”

“Oh, no, Chappie,” said Plunk, confidently, “don’t worry. Back in Chicago, they were only dealing it out at $5 and $10. Here they are dealing it out at $12.50 and $25.”

(For the benefit of those who do not understand faro-bank—strictly a grifter’s game nowadays—the point of the story lies in the fact that Plunk felt confident that he could win just twice as fast because the cards were dealt for double the former price in Council Bluffs; in reality, of course, he was losing at more than double the rate he did in Chicago.)

Another, which is now almost legendary in the underworld, illustrates how Kid McGinley’s lust for poker consumed all of his income from the grift. One time he and his partner stopped for a time in Rochester, New York, just after taking off a big touch. Every night the Kid played poker in a brace-game and lost heavily. He was rapidly going broke. His partner, who had been a professional gambler, tried to warn the Kid.

“Kid,” he said, “that stud-horse poker game is Mill’s lock. All those starters are subway dealers. If you play any longer, you’ll be behind the six.”

“What the hell can I do?” asked the Kid. “It’s the only game in town.”

This indulgence of the gaming instincts becomes more than relaxation; their gratification is the only motive which many con men have for grifting. With many, especially old-timers, faro-bank is an obsession. As soon as they have taken off a score and cut it up, away they go to a faro-bank to try out the systems which they hope will beat the bank in this most fascinating of all card games. They win and lose, win and lose, always losing more than they win, until they come away broke and full of reasons why their “systems” didn’t work that time. The only way
con men can come away substantially and consistently richer is to use the same methods the gambling house uses and beat the house from the outside. Kid S—— and Jerry Daley, for instance, claim credit for inventing a crooked system (probably much older) which they called “copper on and copper off.” At any rate, they perfected it to a high degree and several con men and gamblers formed a mob which traveled over the country taking scores of from $7,000 to $10,000 from each gambling house; but work as hard as they could, all the con men in the country, using the “copper on and copper off” system, could never win back all the money that the faro-dealers have taken from con men. Old-timers have lost heavily at this game, but many young grifters have never seen it played.

While no con men ever play for such high stakes as did some of the multimillionaire plungers of the Canfield era, many of them throw money over the gaming board at a rate that seems impressive to us in these degenerate days. Kid McGinley, who was infinitely more successful at making money legitimately than he was at grifting, always bet high on sporting events, especially prize fights and baseball games. It was common for him to bet as much as $2,000 per race when he was at the track. The Indiana Wonder likes horse-racing, but plunges on longshots only. The Jew Kid gambles on anything, but likes horses and craps best; there are rumors that he has a hand in fixed races. 102nd St. George concentrates on horses, while the Postal Kid, on the contrary, never liked horses but gambled away sizable fortunes on faro and craps. The High Ass Kid likes blackjack; Limehouse Chappie, Curley Carter, and the Boone Kid gamble on anything. Chappie Moran, who had himself been a bookie and should have known better, always aspired to beat the horses. So did the Honey Grove Kid. Fifth Avenue Fred is a high-rolling gambler, sometimes rolling as high as $5,000 at a pop on
the crap table. Lee Reil enjoyed a little faro. The Ripley Kid loves gambling, especially bridge, but his enthusiasm exceeds his card sense and he never wins. The handsome Kid W—— does likewise. Queer-pusher Nick gambles heavily. The Square Faced Kid, himself a fine card cheater, and one of the best bridge players anywhere, is a sucker for stocks and loses his winnings in speculation. Little Bert, although an excellent bridge player, put the interests of his family first, and seldom gambled for high stakes. Wildfire John, a heavy gambler during his entire life, now in his old age lives practically in the gutter.

Naturally those confidence men who gamble heavily seldom profit much from the large sums they take from gullible marks. Others spend their cut of each score rapidly as soon as they get it, or give it to their women, who put it promptly into clothes, furs or diamonds.

In this connection, there is a tale told of E—— S——, who for years shepherded the S——s’ assets, buying diamonds as fast as her husband turned over to her his end of a touch. These she carefully hoarded in a little chamois bag which fitted snugly inside her stocking above the knee. Ironically, for all her thrift, the S—— fortune came to grief in a most plebeian fashion. Several con men and their wives were crossing the southwestern desert by train; E—— retired to the ladies’ room where, in the course of certain solemn rites enthroned, she let slip the little chamois bag and it skittered through to the ties beneath. She leaped for the bell cord and gave it a lusty pull. The train stopped long enough for E—— and her friends to pile out onto the blistering sands. For long hours they paraded back and forth over the right-of-way, but the winds arose and the sands shifted, and for all I know, E——’s diamonds still lie buried there.