The Big Con by David W. Maurer

Maurer, David W.  The Big Con: The Story of the Confidence Man.  1940.  New York: MJF, 2009.

Even as it was coming off the press in 1940, The Big Con was describing history.  The confidence game described by David W. Maurer had evolved with the times, opportunities, and creativity of the con men, and it surely didn’t stop evolving 70 years ago.  Even so, it’s an interesting history.

Maurer was a linguist who studied the jargon of criminals.  The book includes a glossary of terms used by con artists in the early 20^th Century.  If you want to talk like a character in a hardboiled crime story, check it out.

This study led him to the culture and methods of confidence men.  Con men were the kings of grifters. The grift involved nonviolent crimes, in contrast to the heavy rackets.  The confidence game was the highest grift because the marks would give their money to the grifter.  It was a game of intelligence and acting (and deceit) that tripped up the greedy.  Con men had to be able to mix with legitimate society and seem to fit in with people who had regular jobs, legitimate business, and money.  The appearance of respectability was so important that con men avoided the company of other criminals and cultivated associations with straight citizens (maybe just a little bent).

The Big Con is not a textbook for running a con game.  It does give you a pretty good idea of how con men worked.  Maurer concentrates on the big cons: the wire, the rag, and the pay-off.  These games all convince the mark to get involved in a crooked scheme for sure-thing bets on horses or stocks.  They give him a taste of winning, and then send him off to get all the money he can get his hands on.  When the big money is in, the scheme falls apart and everybody needs to skip town to escape suspicion.  A hooked mark is convinced he was onto something and may come back to try again.  Even if he is suspicious, he has little recourse because turning in the con men means admitting involvement in something shady and possibly criminal.

Maurer summarizes several short cons, too.  Some of these may still be around.  I saw a version of the wipe depicted on and episode of CSI: New York.  Because it was a CSI: show, the con artist was murdered; obviously not part of the plan.

The big cons are not one man operations.  Maurer describes the con mob.  He also discusses the relationship between con artists and crooked officials and other criminals.  He is interested in culture as well as methods.

Maurer comes off as having some a fascination with the con men, even a kind of admiration.  I don’t think he admired what they did.  He seemed to respect the skill it took to pull a successful con, especially to do it over and over.   The con men come off as charming, probably because they were.  They had to be charming, they had to be able to read people, and they had to recognize people who had the right combination of money and greed to make a good mark.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Man Who Loved Books too Much by Allison Hoover Bartlett

Newton and the Counterfeiter by Thomas Levenson

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American Nerd by Benjamin Nugent

What makes a nerd a nerd? In American Nerd, Benjamin Nugent doesn’t try to put aside nerdy stereotypes. He gives them a context.

Nerds are people who seem to others to be like machines.  They are often passionate about a technical interest, they use jargon, they avoid confrontation, they favor logic over emotion, and they enjoy working with machines.

One of the interesting things about the book is that Nugent provides examples of machine-like nerds from literature.  The prototypical nerd is Victor Frankenstein of the Mary Shelley masterpiece.  Frankenstein has a powerful intellect and technical skill.  After all he makes a body from corpses and brings it to life.  On the other hand, he lacks emotional depth and the ability to connect.  Shelley shows this in his withdrawal from family and in his inability to cope with his creation when it is a living being.

Of course, nerds are not machines.  One thing that makes them nerd is their passion for their interests.  No machine is passionate.  Even though nerds are passionate, they generally aren’t comfortable with emotionalism.  People send out a mass of confusing and contradictory signals.  Nerds prefer lower-noise communication that is direct, rational, formal, and rule bound.

In this regard, Nugent compares nerds to people with Asperger’s syndrome.  Asperger’s involves difficulty in reading the emotional cues of others and in affecting appropriate responses.  It a result of their neurological makeup; Asperger’s has a physiological basis.  Because of this, people with the condition share with nerd’s preference for formalized communication, social discomfort, and attraction to scientific and technical fields where logic and rules prevail.  Nerds don’t necessarily have Asperger’s, but people with Asperger’s might often end up becoming nerds.

While I’m on that subject, I thought it was interesting that Nugent cited research about Asperger’s and engineering, my own profession.  There is evidence that suggests that autism spectrum disorders appear in engineers more than in the rest of the population.  Also, 15 percent of people with Asperger’s have an engineer in their family, about three times the typical frequency.

In many ways, engineering is a profession of logic and rules.  It also calls for creativity and social skills.  A project of any size is the work of several people.  Engineers have to work with their peers and often with people from other fields:  CADD operators, equipment operators, architects, surveyors, contractors, skilled laborers, craftsmen, lawyers, accountants, and government regulators just to name a few.  The social aspect of practicing engineering, and the inherently social mission of the profession, is greatly underplayed.

Nugent points out that the dichotomy between head and heart, thinking and feeling, drawn by Romantic authors and popular teenagers to distinguish the machine-like from the genuinely human, the in crowd from the nerds, is not necessarily a true one.  To support this argument, he calls on T. S. Eliot’s critique of Romanticism and defense of metaphysical poets.  The Romantics appealed to the heart, but the metaphysical poets used heart and head together, little distinguishing between thoughts and feelings, and produced affecting poems that were also full of ideas.  We don’t have to choose between following our hearts and using our heads; if we’re wise we’ll do both.

If you’re looking to understand what nerds are into, you probably won’t find much in this book that you don’t already know.  If you’d like a look at the origins of the idea of nerdiness and a thoughtful theory of what makes nerds nerds, Nugent’s book will fill the bill.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Arthur & George by Julian Barnes

The Essential Engineer by Henry Petroski

How to Build an Android by David F. Dufty

Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones

Quiet by Susan Cain

Nugent, Benjamin.  American Nerd: The Story of My People.  New York: Scribner, 2008.

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