The Big Con · Samuel Little · Oprah
Plus: Why no one questioned Elizabeth Holmes and how to lose a book deal
the true crime that's worth your time
The Big Con, or: Imagine if The Sting and Pop-Up Video had a longform kid. ...And named it “The WPA Writer’s Project”? Okay, so this genetic-experiment comparison doesn’t entirely hold up -- and neither does David Maurer’s 1940 study of grifter argot, The Big Con, but it’s a worthwhile time capsule nevertheless. Maurer, a linguistics professor at Louisville, wrote anthropological encyclopediae of other subcultures’ lingo as well, including narcotics addicts and pickpockets, but The Big Con is his best-known book, and did serve as one of the bases for The Sting (Maurer’s interpretation of the amount and value of the screenwriter’s “inspiration” was decidedly less generous). Maurer went into the field with underworld figures to get this intel, and was meticulous in his protection of those who shared information and process with him, to the point of ordering his correspondence with them destroyed upon his death.
Luc Sante, a similar figure of our own era, seems to have had some role in bringing the book back into print, and you can read his 1999 review of The Big Con here; he’s right that it’s a work of various disciplines, including criminology and linguistics, so there’s a little something for everyone, including those wanting to immerse themselves in an America before air travel and internet. Maurer has an elegantly sepia way of putting things, describing a mark who, thinking he’s killed a member of the big store, is getting hustled out of town, as “scurr[ying] wildly around the room with his hands full of neckties.” Setting up a con pulled on a long trip, Maurer says the mark and the “roper” “talk freely and confidentially, each one lying to the other, as men do on the strength of a shipboard acquaintance” -- just a few strokes to encapsulate the temporary, but highly intimate, nature of vacation friendships. Other passages put the “rich = right” mentality of many wealthy targets quite neatly, or offer a grand phrasing like “succumb under the weight of accumulated venereal decorations” to the death of a legendary con man from, one assumes, syphilis.
That’s not the only aspect of the text that reminds you when you are, alas. The grifting community wasn’t any more diversity-forward than the rest of the country before the Second World War, and Maurer’s (or his sources’) sniffy dismissal of one method of short con, the wipe, as having “degenerated to a rather low reputation among professionals … now used mainly by Negroes, low-class Italians and Gypsies” takes you out of the book. And of course I loved the numerous lists of con “monickers” [sic] like The Seldom Seen Kid, Proud Of His Tail, Slobbering Bob, and Wildfire John...until a couple of cons named Mike with racist epithets for nicknames, so consider this a content warning for some hateful terms, sexism by omission, and overall contemporaneous insensitivity.