Grifters, mountebanks ‘run the world’
The guy in the video still is Caucasian and skinny as a knife, with a scruff of beard visible beneath the bill of his ball hat. The succinct press release from the RCMP didn’t say a thing about how he carried himself.
Which leaves me wondering whether he strutted confidently like Leonardo DiCaprio as Frank Abagnale Jr. in Catch Me if You Can, or slunk, furtively, like Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman) in Midnight Cowboy. When he opened his mouth, did this alleged grifter stammer like Verbal Kint in the Usual Suspects? Or did his words ooze arrogance like Fast Eddie Felson in The Hustler?
All we do really know is that around 4 p.m. last Thursday, a man entered a coffee shop in the tiny town of Hantsport, N.S. and asked for change for a $50 bill.
Police say during the exchange, the guy confused the clerk. When he left it was with a coffee, his original $50 bill and two $20 bills.
Two days earlier police think that the same man entered a restaurant in Barrington Passage, N.S. an even smaller community on the province’s south shore. There he caused some kind of a distraction, getting the clerk all discombobulated to the point that they again handed too much change back to the unidentified man. The scam is known as shortchanging.
That it occured twice within a couple of days in places hundreds of kilometres apart was enough to spur the RCMP to issue a news release reminding employees who handle cash to be on guard, particularly when they are handed larger bills or asked for change.
I hope the next time this guy tries to cheat some smalltown business out of its hard-to-come-by revenue he gets slapped in cuffs.
That doesn’t stop me from being intrigued by folks like him — flimflammers, bunco artists, con men. “Con men sell dreams of easy money, a sales pitch that’s hard to resist,” says University of King’s College journalism professor Dean Jobb, whose latest book, Empire of Deception: The Incredible Story of a Master Swindler who Seduced a City and Captivated the Nation, was about a mountebank named Leo Koretz, who bilked investors out of millions before finishing his career in Nova Scotia. “They’re smart, charming, fun to be around — the life of the party. Until, of course, the swindle is exposed and the victims realize their dreams — and their money — have disappeared.”
Maria Konnikova, the author of the 2015 book The Confidence Game: Why We Fall For It . . . Every Time, feels much the same way. “We shouldn’t forget that these are bad people who ruin lives,” she told an interviewer. “But of course you have a grudging admiration for them because they’re really, really good at what they do. The name ‘con artist’ really does capture it. They’re artists, and I have admiration for all artists.”
She is not the only one. Hollywood, perhaps because it feels a certain affinity for the subject matter, has long gravitated to colourful confidence men and women. (Think The Sting, American Hustle, Elmer Gantry, The Usual Suspects, The Music Man.)
So have writers as varied as Paul Auster — “Con men and tricksters run the world,” he wrote in his New York trilogy. “Rascals rule. And do you know why? Because they are hungrier than we are. Because they know what they want. Because they believe in life more than we do.”
Clip artists, jacklegs and double-dealers seem to make up most of the characters in David Mamet’s plays and movies; swindlers they find their way into songs by Public Enemy.
The United States, let’s face it, elected a con artist. Britain was fooled into pulling out of Brexit like a tourist getting bilked of their dough by a three-card monte dealer.
They are a pair of big reasons why I believe that we live in the age of the grift. CNBC’s business television show American Greed is a hit because our neighbours to the south don’t tire of watching shows about white-collar criminals who have bilked ordinary Americans out of their savings.
Just this summer, a fictionalized film about the Bre-X scandal, Canada’s biggest mining fraud ever, hit the movie theatres. It had a Nova Scotia link through a geologist who immigrated here from the Netherlands, before getting involved in the gold shemozzle.
The story, you may recall, is a wild yarn replete with salted core samples, stock manipulation and a prospector who jumped or was pushed from an airplane to his death in a Filipino jungle.
When cons happen around here it’s mercifully smaller stuff: a guy, say, scamming a waitress for a few bucks. When it happens twice, well that’s a Maritimes-style crime-wave.