The Big Con (16 page)

A few years ago, before the American public turned wholesale to travel by automobile, the Pullman car was the roper’s best hunting ground. “If you were on a train bound for Florida,” said Old Man Russell, a fine wireman of the old school, “you might notice a clean-cut man traveling alone. You would tab him and when he went
into the smoker or lounge car you would tail him there. That would be your first contact.”

This one contact is all a first-class roper needs, provided the mark has the necessary cash and the proper temperament. And it doesn’t take a skillful roper long to find that out. For a good roper is first of all a good listener. In a short time he knows where the mark is going, what business he is in, what his financial standing is, and has collected an amazingly intimate fund of information regarding the mark’s hobbies, his family, his friends, his extra-marital exploits. Many ropers agree that often marks can be played for the same day they are picked up, but most con men feel safer to allow the mark plenty of time to become thoroughly hooked.

The ease with which people make traveling acquaintances may account for the great number of marks which are roped on trains or ships. When a mark is off his home ground, he is no longer so sure of himself; he likes to impress important-looking strangers; he has the leisure to become expansive, and he likes to feel that he is recognized as a good fellow. The natural barriers to friendships with strangers come down. He idles away time chatting and smoking in a way he would not do at home. And the roper knows how to play upon the festive note which is always latent in a traveler away from home.

Occasionally it happens that a fortunate roper has more than one mark in tow on the same train or boat. If he cannot handle both of them, he may turn one of them over to another roper with whom he gets in touch along the way. If the second roper scores with his victim, the first of course collects the standard fee—ten per cent—for “putting the mark up.”

“You can’t always tell which mark is better,” wailed one roper, who once turned a most unprepossessing mark over to his friend, Joe Furey. “The mark I kept was a fat-looking baby, but he blew up and didn’t yield a cent. The
one I put up for Joe was the kind you don’t bump into. He went for a hundred grand and didn’t think anything about it. And all I got was a measly ten per.”

Vacation cruises are often fine hunting grounds for ropers. The High Ass Kid was once riding a boat to Cuba when a friendly, talkative gentleman came up to him in the bar and started a conversation. He practically roped himself. “That egg just blowed a hundred and fifty grand for tying into the wrong man,” laughed the Kid. Almost every roper has had a similar experience at some time in his life.

Summer resorts catering to a high type of vacationers, golf links, health spas and country clubs also furnish their quota of lucrative marks. The Hashhouse Kid, a roper from Minneapolis, was playing golf on a private course adjoining a country club outside Ottawa. He played a few rounds with a visiting Englishman, then steered him to Montreal where he played him against the store and took $375,000 from him on the pay-off. Many of the best con men include slacks and golf clubs as a regular part of their traveling wardrobe.

One roper reports that he operates with some success wherever vacation cruises come ashore. “In Havana,” he says, “I meet each cruise ship that comes in. When the tourists are herded off for a shore excursion, I fall right in and mingle with them. I talk about the trip and they naturally think I’m one of the party. Then I tie into a mark and stay with him until I sound him out. If he looks good, we play the point-out for him and tie him up on the pay-off. The last time I worked there, I cut out a fine old Scotchman and sent him right home to Dingwall, Scotland, for $100,000.”

The roper who depends upon casual contacts will find marks anywhere that well-to-do folk congregate. Sometimes they fall right into his lap. Says Bill Howard, a con man from Detroit, “I was standing one night in the bar
room of the Tod House in New York. Just as I was leaving, a stranger asked me for a match. That match cost him $100,000.” Needless to say, Bill made friends with him, let Gondorff tell him the tale, and the next day he went home for his money, which he lost like a gentleman. “When Charley put him on the train, he was satisfied that a great mistake had been made,” said Bill.

While luck plays a large part in bringing the mark and the con men together, not all ropers are willing to wait for the law of averages to operate. Many of them have agents who “put up” marks for them for ten per cent of the score. Any professional criminal may put up a mark if he locates one; some have permanent connections with confidence men and collect a steady income from this source. For instance, Overcoat Kelly acted for many years as general agent for ropers working out of Minneapolis. Many good con men got their start by first putting up the marks for established con men to trim. Most fruitful of these agents are the professional gamblers who ride the trains and steamships and, as a convenient source of additional revenue, put up marks for the big store. From the many itinerant gamblers who act in this capacity, we might cite the two most skillful and prosperous old-timers—Eddie Mines of Hamilton, Ontario, and Wildfire John of Chicago. Mines is strictly a gambler—and a fine one—but Wildfire occasionally ropes and steers a mark on his own.

Some grifters will put up other underworld folk as readily as they will legitimate marks, and on occasion this cannibalistic tendency backfires with amusing and embarrassing results. Once A—– C—– sent for a con mob to come to Little Rock to trim a sucker gambling house which was taking some of her husband’s business. They were instructed to register at the hotel and wait for A—–’s husband, who would give them the necessary information. When they arrived at the hotel, the roper wandered
out into the dining room and found gambling going on behind a screen. He played for a short time, then left, saying that he would bring in a friend later in the evening. Up in the room the roper said, “Boys, I have spotted the joint. It is so soft you can put your finger in it.” After dinner they gave it a play and cleaned up more than $5,000. The next morning they called A—– and she aroused her husband. “We certainly found that sucker joint easy enough,” said one of the con men. “We took them for five grand last night.”

“Where did you find it?” asked C—–.

“Right down in the hotel dining room,” said the con man.

“Jesus Christ!” howled C—–, “that’s my joint.”

While most men who put up marks are grifters or other underworld folk, it is an interesting and significant fact that often con men have good marks put up for them by legitimate citizens who have no underworld connections except an acquaintance with the con men whom they assist. Many of these respectable agents take no commission, but put up the mark only to help the con man, or, more frequently, to secure revenge upon someone. It is a strange fact that some marks will put up another mark for a con game on which they have just been beaten; they may even beg for permission to watch the process; they seem to feel that they would get a sort of satisfaction from knowing that someone else has taken the bait and found a hook in it; probably nothing would bolster up their deflated egos more than watching the play, but no non-professionals ever get into the big store.

One of the proprietors of the old Bon Ton Livery Stable in Des Moines seemed to get pleasure out of putting up marks for the men who swindled him. After being fleeced himself on
the tip
, he looked up the con men and asked them to fleece some of his acquaintances, refusing any commission. A prosperous cattle-buyer who once ran for
mayor of Sioux City, Iowa, hung around with con men and located fat marks as a favor to them.

However, the ten-per-cent arrangement extends beyond a simple agreement among ropers. Many persons from the respectable and legitimate world accept their commission with never a qualm. F—– H—–, one-time proprietor of two hotels in Chicago, purloined promising-looking guests from his own registers and put them up for con men at a commission. One Dr. A—– of Des Moines located fat marks among his patients and put them up for ropers. A traveling representative for a well-known Cincinnati safe manufacturer, one W—–E—–B—–, ferreted out wealthy marks (to which his business gave him ready access) throughout Iowa and Nebraska; because of the sure-fire quality of his marks, he received the rather high commission of 33⅓ per cent. But sometimes he seems to have lacked the courage of his convictions. One roper says of him: “B—– always introduced me to the mark and then lit a rag out of town. He seemed to have an unholy fear that something would go wrong.” A former railroad executive who was later interested in a prominent midwestern baseball club also acted as agent for con men for many years. W—– S—–, originally from Paris, Kentucky, bought a hotel in Kansas City; a pair of con men took him there for a nice round sum which ruined him and his business. Later on in a St. Louis hotel he accosted the man who had roped him. S—– was a husky, flaxen-haired Kentuckian who had the reputation of being dangerous; the roper was much relieved to discover that S—– only wanted to recoup his losses by putting up several wealthy marks in St. Louis. The con men obliged him, and S—– went happily on his way with his commission tucked in his pocket.

But enough of these hypocritical folk who pimp away the purses of their friends. They are mentioned only as
illustrations of the fact that larceny makes strange bedfellows.

Other lambs are brought to the slaughter through newspaper advertisements. The roper puts an ad like this in a metropolitan newspaper:

From the surprisingly large number of persons who claim to have the character and the money to qualify for this investment, the roper selects those who seem to merit an interview, then from these selects one or more to be played.

Sometimes a mark is found by answering bona fide advertisements seeking purchasers for farms, real estate or established businesses. The roper pretends an interest in purchasing the property, offers the victim a high price, then under the pretense of consummating the deal, steers the owner to the city where the big store is located and “switches” him over to the pay-off, the wire or the rag. Prosperous farmers and small-town merchants who have laid by comfortable nest eggs are often visited at home after they have been investigated and found suitable.

Strange as it may seem, there are authenticated instances of a man’s looking up a con man in the hope that he can profit from a con game. “I remember one winter in Miami,” said the Postal Kid, “when there was a mark hanging around trying to meet someone who played the pay-off. He had read about it in the papers and had brought along a bank roll to see if he could make some money at it. But none of the grifters would pay any attention to him. They thought he was batty, until one day the Leatherhead Kid found out that he really had the money.
So the Kid played the point-out for him right there. They moved him to the store and he went for twenty-five grand. When it was all over, the mark said, I’ll go home and raise some more money, and we’ll clean up next time.’ This savage just thought things broke that way. You couldn’t knock him.”

The Square Faced Kid tells a tale in similar vein. “One day I went into Dan the Dude’s place,” he said, “and Dan gave me what he thought was a good subject for the wire. He was an old gentleman about seventy years old. So I went over to Plainfield to see him. He was a spunky old boy and looked like a good mark. So I moved him to the City and we told him the tale of the wire. Then he blew up. ‘Young man,’ he said, ‘I’ve been swindled by that game. Not only that, but I’ve been swindled by every other crooked game in the country—the gold brick, the green-goods game, three-card monte, the shell game, the eight-dice game, and a braced faro game. And do you know, they all took me good. Now I’ve been reading in the papers that there is a new game out. It must be all right, for it’s the only game where they pay you off. It’s called the pay-off and I’d be interested to take a whack at it if you can dig one up.’ He thought the game was on the up and up because they paid you off. He was the only perfect sap that ever was born.”

And Joe Furey—whose statements must be discounted because of his reputation for tall talk—adds, “At that time [1925–1929] marks were so thick in Florida that you had to kick them out of your way.”

The sagacity of Buck Boatwright’s philosophy that any man with money is worth playing for would not be questioned by any experienced con man. The first thing a mark needs is money.

But he must also have what grifters term “larceny in his veins”—in other words, he must want something for nothing, or be willing to participate in an unscrupulous deal. If a man with money has this trait, he is all that any con man could wish. He is a mark. “Larceny,” or thieves’ blood, runs not only in the veins of professional thieves; it would appear that humanity at large has just a dash of it—and sometimes more. And the con man has learned that he can exploit this human trait to his own ends; if he builds it up carefully and expertly, it flares from simple latent dishonesty to an all-consuming lust which drives the victim to secure funds for speculation by any means at his command.

If the mark were completely aware of this character weakness, he would not be so easy to trim. But, like almost everyone else, the mark thinks of himself as an “honest man.” He may be hardly aware, or even totally unaware, of this trait which leads to his financial ruin. “My boy,” said old John Henry Strosnider sagely, “look carefully at an honest man when he tells the tale himself about his honesty. He makes the best kind of mark .…”

In most big-con games the initial approach is made to the mark on the basis of his fundamental honesty. When ropers interview prospective marks who have answered “come-on” advertisements it is customary to insist upon character references which will establish the mark’s honesty beyond all doubt. Plunk Drucker tells this anecdote which is so typical that one version or another of it is repeated each time a mark is roped. “I had advertised in a Chicago paper for an honest and reliable man with $50,000 to invest for a quick, sure profit,” he said. “A redheaded Jew answered the ad. I interviewed him in his office and raised the question of his character. He said, ‘Mr. Bannester, to show you how honest I am, I found a pocketbook with $220 in it on the street the other day. I spent three dollars advertising to try to find the owner.’
I shook hands with him and congratulated him on his integrity. I said that showed that he was just the party for a large and confidential transaction.” The mark’s honesty is always a standing joke among grifters.