The life and lies of Charles Ponzi: New addition to the
con-man canon suggests an honest man can't be grifted
by Robert Fulford
(The
National Post,
19 April 2005)
The concept of Original Sin lies at the heart of the criminal confidence game, that favourite subject of movies and TV. Robbing a victim, or mark, can be seen as an exercise in applied theology. It succeeds by drawing to the surface the worm of greed that may live within the soul of even the most respectable. The con man offers the mark a safe way to do what he's always yearned to do: Steal.
In con games, victims inevitably share the blame. Certainly that was the case when Charles Ponzi went to prison for stealing millions from people who wanted huge, quick profits. As Mitchell Zuckoff points out in his entertaining new book, Ponzi's Scheme: The True Story of a Financial Legend (Random House), The New York Times in 1920 suggested that those robbed by Ponzi weren't entitled to much sympathy: "They showed only greed -- the eagerness to get something for nothing." Besides, they lacked Ponzi's charm. Crook though he was, he was picturesque; the Times editorialist even used the word "gallant."
Long ago Edgar Allan Poe wrote with admiration of the qualities required by grifters: "Perseverance, ingenuity, audacity, nonchalance, originality, impertinence." David W. Maurer shared that attitude. His classic work, The Big Con: The Story of the Confidence Man, has been providing material for fiction writers and filmmakers ever since it was published in 1940.
A linguistics professor at the University of Louisiana, Maurer began by studying underworld slang. After interviewing various scammers, fleecers and flimflammers, he decided that their craft was as interesting as their language. He noticed that they played human nature as a conductor directs a symphony: "A confidence man prospers only because of the fundamental dishonesty of his victim; his main job is to excite the cupidity of his mark."
Sometimes language and technique came together in a single exotic word. I like to think of the way Maurer's heart must have leapt when he first heard and understood the term cackle-bladder.
In a big con there's usually a moment when the con men have appropriated all of the mark's money and now desire only that he disappear. To make this happen, they sometimes stage a killing, one con man firing blanks at another. The shooter hands the gun to the mark while blood spurts from the mouth of the wounded man. (The blood comes from a bladder concealed in his cheek; the word "cackle" refers to the fact that it's chicken blood.) Horrified by this scene, certain he's become an accessory to murder, the mark flees. With luck he won't be heard from again.
The cackle-bladder, or faked killing, provides the climax of The Sting, the 1973 film with Paul Newman and Robert Redford, which was based on Maurer's research and became the most successful of all con-man movies. Another cackle-bladder provides the turning point in House of Games, David Mamet's terrific con-man film, made in 1987. And a third opens Confidence, which James Foley made in 2003.
The cackle-bladder, or faked killing, provides the climax of The Sting, the 1973 film with Paul Newman and Robert Redford, which was based on Maurer's research and became the most successful of all con-man movies. Another cackle-bladder provides the turning point in House of Games, David Mamet's terrific con-man film, made in 1987. And a third opens Confidence, which James Foley made in 2003.
Confidence failed, despite the presence of Edward Burns and Dustin Hoffman, because it violated the myth of the amiable, friendly con man: The hustlers headed by Burns, far from being engaging, are bitter and sleazy. In 2002 Steven Spielberg didn't make that mistake with Catch Me If You Can, his film about a young man defrauding banks while frequently changing his identity. Spielberg cast Leonardo DiCaprio, automatically putting the audience on the crook's side.
Maurer, who died in 1981, considered con men the aristocrats of thieves, highly imaginative criminals who developed their special argot as a revolt against conventional language. He liked their monikers too -- the High-Ass Kid, Limehouse Chappie, Brickyard Jimmy, the Indiana Wonder, Larry the Lug. A cop who could be paid off was called a Tin Mitten (because he liked to hear the clink of coins in his hand).
Maurer explains one way they discovered otherwise unknown citizens who were already toying with the idea of corruption. A Chicago con man had a girlfriend who worked in a mail-order firm that sold crooked gambling equipment, from marked cards to loaded dice. She compiled sucker lists made up of purchasers across the continent, men who were at least thinking about how to cheat their fellow gamblers. Her boyfriend sought them out as potential marks.
At their most ambitious, as in The Sting, gangs of con men would set up "the big store," which meant a poolroom, a broker's office or a betting parlour staffed with confederates, where the atmosphere convinced the mark that he could pull off a big, illegal score. This was a piece of theatre for an audience of one. It's occurred to me that the big store was perhaps enhanced by Maurer's imagination, but he insisted that within a few years after it was invented in 1906, big-store cons were being perpetrated across the continent.
Ponzi's con involved promising gigantic profits, money doubled in 90 days, and he actually paid off a few early investors by giving them money taken from later investors. In Boston the citizens, some 30,000 in all, lined up for hours to put their money in his Securities Exchange Company. Soon he was being chauffeur-driven in his Locomobile, the most expensive of all cars at the time, for which he paid $13,600 in 1920 money. Eventually he was imprisoned and finally deported to Italy. He transferred his activities to Brazil but went broke and died in a charity ward. The phrase Ponzi Scheme, meaning fraud by the pyramiding of money, became his memorial.
It's commonplace to describe the con as characteristically American, but that's not entirely true. Ponzi's own imagination was fired when he was a 25-year-old Italian immigrant clerking in a Montreal bank and his boss promised to pay 6% interest on savings, triple the normal rate; the bank became briefly popular by paying the interest, which involved stealing from the deposits of other customers.
That crook was a piker by the later standards of Charles Ponzi, but he had the essence of the thing. And in those days, Maurer reports, the cleverest con man was a swindler named Eddie from Ottawa, and the biggest score of all was a $350,000 con worked on a British tourist in Montreal. It's hardly the proudest item in our heritage, but Canadians were among the early masters of the con.
