But he actually told me what he told me when he told me to be me on immediate alert mainly because of what was happening to him, and which he thought might involve me simply because I was beginning to be in regular contact with him. Yet the way he said it also let you know that he did not expect you to be alarmed. It was as if he took it for granted that you would take it as yet another kind of thistle in the briar patch.
Which in effect was also what Roland Beasley expected of me when he explained what he explained to me about confidence games of the local city slickers as a routine part of my orientation as a newcomer settling down in New York for an extended or maybe permanent residency. But unlike Taft Edison, who was outraged by what struck him as the self-righteous gamesmanship of what he called revolutionary recruiters out to kidnap your mind, Roland Beasley almost always sounded as if he were sharing his curiosity about something rather than warning you about it.
He never sounded as if he thought you needed to be warned. It was always as if what he said about some example of the confidence game as he knew it was something that amused him and also something that you could probably match with some anecdote of your own. And whenever you did, he would say, Hey, old buddy, that’s my good buddy. Man, you’re as up with this stuff as old Rolo.
Even when he started breaking it all down in terms of variations on basic game patterns, it was still as if he were primarily concerned with your appreciation of his anecdotes, and it all came across as if it were more of a hobby, like cowboy and gangster movies and sea stories, than as a matter of serious concern.
But as is often the case with many people and their hobbies, his insights on procedures were no less precise or comprehensive for not being professional, and one day after we had been going to museums and galleries and bookstores together for several weeks after my first visit to his studio, we stopped in at Gotham Book Mart, and while I was browsing the shelves labeled We Moderns, he bought a book the clerk had been holding for him, and when we came back outside he handed it to me and said, Hey, man, I know you already have a good grip on this jive because you had some basic anthropology in college, so you know this stuff is not just a matter of classic pattern and variation, this stuff probably goes all the way back to primitive rituals of those early days when people first started using words to make deals with. Because I’m pretty damn sure that jiving and conniving are just about as old as language itself. Hell, even older. After all, there was a lot of bullshit gesticulating and face-making before they got around to using words.
And that was when he said, Anyway, this is something you might find very interesting when you can spare the time away from your academic assignments. I think you just might find this kind of journalistic writing amounts to something pretty close to anthropology.
It turned out to be as evocative of certain aspects of American city life during the first forty years of the twentieth century as such old Herbert Asbury books as Gangs of New York, Ye Old Fire Laddies, The Barbary Coast, The French Quarter, and The Gem of the Prairie (Chicago). But its specific focus was on the dynamics of the swindling racket known as the confidence game or the big con, which it described as being operated by one or more grifters, who choose and set up the prospective victim or mark, who is led to the store, which is operated by the often informally recruited but expertly coordinated mob, who set him up for the kill by allowing him to make an impressive amount of money by some means the mark knows is crooked. This gives the mark confidence and sets him up for the kill, which is the amount of money the mark is willing to risk on a sure but illegal bet or investment. The grifter then plays the mark against the store, which is immediately raided by the other members of the mob disguised as law-enforcement officers. This allows the grifter to brush off the mark by spiriting him away by pretending to be as vulnerable to the arrest as he is. The objective of the confidence game is not simply to take money from the mark but also to do so without allowing him to catch on to the fact that he has been taken.
Indeed, the book also makes much of the fact that the mark is not supposed to realize that he has been duped and thus lose confidence in himself. The very fact that his confidence remains high is what leaves him vulnerable for other grifters! Much is also made of the fact that many people become ideal marks who are roped, taken, and brushed off time and again because they have come to believe that the high social status they enjoy because of the money they inherited or married into is a result of some inherent special superiority. His unshakable confidence in his own keen business judgment is precisely what leads him to get roped into one con game after another.
I started reading it on the way home, and when we got together about ten days later I had checked back through Suckers Progress and The Gem of the Prairie, which was one of Joe States’s favorite books on the subject. He had given me a copy of it that he had picked up in the Pickwick Bookstore in
