Just as one would expect a profile of a skilled illusionist to open with a colourful retelling of his most famous sleight of hand, the most natural way to begin a multi-book review about con artists would be with the tale of a particularly egregious swindle. It would start by presenting a situation exactly as the con artist would want his or her audience to view it, that is, at face value. The exotic prince who desperately needed help to secure his vast fortune. The successful doctor who held the promise of a fairy-tale relationship. The financial mastermind with a foolproof moneymaking opportunity.
That, of course, would constitute the all- important setup, a fundamental component of the con proper. Then would come the equally important reveal. The so-called prince was in fact the itinerant oddball son of Midwest factory workers. The doctor was a college drop-out with a history of domestic violence. The financial mastermind was perched atop a precarious multimillion-dollar pyramid scheme. Justice would not always feature in the coda, but various manifestations of shock, anger and suffering would be all but guaranteed.
Pithy narrative form
Clearly, the con – the bunco, the gyp, the sting – lends itself to anecdote. It’s no accident that Hustlers and Con Men (1976), Jay Robert Nash’s thick compendium of 200 years’ worth of cheats and hucksters of all kinds, used that pithy narrative form as its sole vehicle. But a more fruitful jumping-off point might be to peer behind the anecdote and try to locate the source of its appeal, a kind of “Cons and Their Relation to the Unconscious” .
What exactly is it that we find so compelling about con artists, even if their hustles are variations on a timeworn theme and their success depends entirely on things ending badly for someone? Maybe it’s that the tales of their exploits rarely fail to provide us with many of the classic elements of a riveting story: mystery, suspense, oversized personalities, moral (and indeed mortal) conflict, adventure, romance. The brazen flouting of rules and convention, often facilitated by spring-loaded wit and a gilded tongue, evokes a powerful mixture of admiration and resentment.
Or maybe our fascination has less to do with the grifter than with the victims. Whereas the motivations of the chameleonic, conscienceless con artist might come across as too alien or inscrutable, we can identify at least to some degree with the marks – even if we, being worldly and grounded and self-aware, would undoubtedly have spotted all the red flags that are so painfully obvious in hindsight. Sympathy and Schadenfreude can be a powerful emotional combination too.
Debonair thief
The term “confidence man” appears to have been coined in 1849 during the trial of one William Thompson in New York. A debonair thief, Thompson had a knack for ingratiating himself with complete strangers on the street and then asking, “Have you confidence in me to trust me with your watch until tomorrow?”
Many did, which cost them their expensive timepieces. The much-publicized trial and the odd crime at its heart piqued the interest of Herman Melville, who reworked it eight years later for his under-appreciated high-concept final novel, The Confidence-Man. After boarding a Mississippi steamboat on April Fool’s Day, its Mephistophelean titular character adopts a succession of guises with evocative backstories and surnames (Goodman, Truman, Noble) with the aim of getting one over on fellow passengers.
Spurred by self-interest and reflective of society at large, the dupes place unquestioning trust in tokens such as attire and profession, making them as complicit in the con as the perpetrator. In The Adman’s Dilemma (reviewed in the TLS, January 25), which used literary and cultural waypoints to chart the evolution of the common snake-oil salesman into the modern man of advertising, Paul Rutherford bleakly described Melville’s novel as “a study in deception and even a self-deception so complete that there was no possibility of redemption”.
International stage
This irredeemable symbiosis of deception and self-deception goes some way towards explaining how a blue-collar, Rhode Island-born entertainer such as Edgar Laplante could pass himself off on an international stage as a heroic First World War veteran, a gifted linguist fluent in dozens of languages, a famous Olympic athlete and an Indian chief with blood ties to French royalty and an ancestral claim to massive tracts of land rich in natural resources. As Paul Willetts writes in King Con, his vivid biography of Laplante, the restless vaudevillian got his “formal apprenticeship in the techniques of the professional con man” by selling tapeworm pills in travelling medicine shows around the fin de siècle.
Although the contents of the pills themselves were “sometimes just a length of string that could be mistaken for a tapeworm” after it had passed through the unwitting customer, the folks who peddled these bogus cures fashioned their sales pitch around the mysterious shamanistic medicine practised by the Native Americans of popular imagination.
Laplante had first donned indigenous dress as a young ballyhoo man calling himself Chief White Elk at a Coney Island amusement park, and he quickly came to recognize that “white America’s long-standing fascination with Native Americans and the Wild West” was ripe for exploitation, even if it also happened to be “freighted with tragic irony, given that it coexisted with systematic discrimination against Native Americans”. Sporting a feathered headdress and beaded vests, aided only by an astonishing gift for ad-libbing and exploiting fortuitous coincidences, he was able to cause a suspension of disbelief so profound that it took him across North America and Europe for speaking engagements, celebrity appearances and high-society parties. On the rare occasions when his luck faltered, the remedy was a quick flight to the next town or a brief stint in jail.
Laplante’s story, particularly as told by Willetts, is fascinating for a number of reasons – some universal, some unique. As always, there’s the question of how he managed to pull off such an audacious stunt for so long. How was it possible for him to publicly masquerade as Tom Longboat, a much-celebrated native Onondaga athlete and war hero who looked nothing like Laplante, without being found out? How did he fool Burtha Thompson, a Native American woman with immediate and genuine ties to the Klamath tribe, into marrying him as Chief White Elk? Why did the rich Contessa Milania Khevenhüller-Metsch and her daughter fulfil his serial requests for tens of thousands of lire again and again? - Times Literary Supplement
Add new comment