Grifters

CONFIDENCE MEN and grifters have always been part of society, but they are perhaps most identified in the 19th century with the circus grifter and the riverboat gambler, and in the early 20th, with the world of the Big Con games, most famously portrayed in the 1973 movie, The Sting, and later the 1990 movie, The Grifters.

The world of the traveling circus was tailor-made for the con men, including the shell-game artists and other fraudsters. The circus management cultivated this relationship, providing their midway as a venue, and a fixer to avoid arrest, all in exchange for a cut of the profits. Mississippi riverboats and the transcontinental railroad construction camps, justly famous for nurturing gambling and vice, were also fertile ground for grifters, a life detailed by George Devol in his memoir Forty Years a Gambler on the Mississippi. However, not all gamblers[Page 383] were grifters, and not all grifters were gamblers. David Mauer, a linguist who studied the con argot, defines grifter: “In the strict sense, one who lives by his wits as contrasted to the heavy-men who use violence,” and further, identifies grifters as “professionals within the criminal world.” The grift (noun) is defined by Maurer as “a racket or criminal profession or group of criminal professions which employ skill rather than violence.” The grift might also be used to connote a fraternity of professional swindlers who relied on their wits.

A grifter did not simply cheat at cards, he went out of his way to concoct a scheme to entice a prevetted mark (victim) into a crooked (fixed) game at which the mark would be fleeced (relieved of funds), and followed up with a carefully rehearsed brush off (exit strategy), to put the mark off the trail.

Legendary con man Ben Marks is credited with developing the concept of the Dollar Store, or a fixed location at which to play-out these schemes, at a “hell-on-wheels” construction camp attached to the Union Pacific Railroad in 1869. Transformed into the Big Store, this basic concept led to increased specialization and efficiency in the world of the grifters. The big store could be any kind of fake establishment: betting parlor, horse parlor, stock brokerage, or office used to swindle a series of victims.

While late-19th-century grifters were commonly associated with the circus, by the first quarter of the 20th century, most of the grift fraternity was associated with the Big Stores operating in New York City, Chicago, Illinois, and a host of other congenial cities where the police and political establishment could be fixed. These included Los Angeles, California; St. Louis, Missouri; Hot Springs, Arkansas; Des Moines, Iowa; Miami, Florida; and Denver, Colorado.

At each location, an insideman, or fixer, maintained a permanent operation, employing a loosely organized mob of grifters which often traveled from one location to another. In the mobs that operated out of New York and Chicago, and other cities in the first quarter of the 20th century, the grift fraternity included men and a few women who performed specialized functions, including ropers (recruiters), who traveled widely, enticing the marks into a carefully scripted play, organized by the insidemen and the shills or “sticks,” the supporting cast of players known collectively as the boost. In practice, the boost was often made up on the spot by any roper in town at the time. It was this itinerant, specialized, professional fraternity which defined the grifter in the beginning of the century.

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