The Con Men

Hustling in New York City

Terry Williams, Trevor B. Milton

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780231170826
• eBook ISBN: 9780231540490
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

This ethnography of NYC's scammers presents "a revealing portrait of a critical but little known element of city life…timely, incisive, and poignant" (Elijah Anderson, author of  Code of the Street).
 
This vivid account of hustling in New York City explores the sociological reasons why con artists play their game and the psychological tricks they use to win it. Sociologists Terry Williams and Trevor B. Milton spent years with New York con artists to uncover their secrets. The result is an unprecedented view into how con games operate, whether in back alleys and side streets or in police precincts and Wall Street boiler rooms.
Whether it's selling bootleg goods, playing the numbers, squatting rent-free, scamming tourists with bogus stories, selling knockoffs on Canal Street, or crafting Ponzi schemes, con artists use verbal persuasion, physical misdirection, and sheer charm to convince others to do what they want. 
 
Williams and Milton examine this act of performance art and find meaning in its methods. Through their sophisticated exploration of the personal experiences and influences that create a successful hustler, they build a portrait of unusual emotional and psychological depth. This engaging ethnography demonstrates how the city's unique urban and social architecture lends itself to the perfect con.

ONE

ALIBI: PORTRAIT OF A CON MAN

We wear the mask that grins and lies / it hides our cheeks / and shades our eyes.

—Paul Laurence Dunbar

Though you will meet many con men and women before our narrative is finished, Alibi Jones is our main character, and in many ways he speaks for all the others. Alibi in particular personifies the con man, one who makes a living off of con games. By sharing his life story, he gives us a peek into the inner world of a con man and helps us understand something about his personality and about his actions and those of his confederates. His is a dynamic account; he and his crew find themselves in constantly changing situations. Ethnography is one of the few methods capable of capturing an individual in this way, and throughout this and the following two chapters, we will try to understand something more about Alibi the con man, the thief, the manipulator, and about the language he uses to persuade.

THE MAKING OF A CON MAN

Alibi said he was taught the art of the con by an Irish guy from Yorkville that he met in jail. “He taught me about misdirection. And he said I was smart but that it takes more than smarts to be a good con man. ‘You have to have balls,’ he said, ‘you got to pay close attention to everything and everybody as if you’re looking for the first time. As if your eyes were opening up for the first time.’ But I wasn’t in there [jail] for that long a time, but I never forgot what he told me.”

Most con artists learn tricks of the trade from other con artists, like Alibi did. As far as I (Terry Williams) can discern, unlike in Dickens, there is no Fagin-run school for con artistry—though gypsies are said to teach their pickpocketing methods to their children, and supposedly, though this may just be myth, there is a pickpocket academy, the School of the Seven Bells, in Bogota, Columbia. According to legend, the schoolmaster wears seven bells attached to his clothing; each new student must extract whatever is in his pockets without making a bell ring.

Alibi learned how to hustle from a woman who “turned him out.” She first tried to make him into a pimp, but because so much of the pimp game is about hustling, she inadvertently taught him the “hustle game,” which included all the ways young men who want to hustle earn money by their wits. I wanted to know more about this woman, but he told me little about her or her influence on him.

He did explain how she introduced him to the world of hustling: “She taught me, for instance, about making money from hos because she said the first thing a ho will want to do is go back to her old friends, and you gotta stop her from doing that. Her life, once she turns that trick, is to be a ho and live in a ho’s world, which is your world, the pimp’s world. There ain’t no turning back. What I learned from that is once you find a sucker, thump her head. Don’t let her turn around. Don’t let her go back; keep her looking at the prize, keep her occupied. As long you got her looking ahead, you got her in the game.

“Let’s get to the peanut butter and the jelly of the sandwich. That’s when she told me something that really applies to my whole framework for the con game, and that is this: she said a player can teach a ho to turn a trick, just like that.” Alibi snapped his fingers. “But, if you trying to teach a ho or anyone how to hustle it takes a much longer period of time because you gotta pay close attention. You got to be aware of nuances, the little things. You gotta pay attention because the voice is important. I should say the tone of the voice is important. That tonality. Little things. You gots to pay attention to little things. What the person is wearing is important. Conning is the same; you gotta pay close attention to everything. Well, I learned all of this from her. But she had friends in the con-game world, you might say, and they started to pull my coat on a number of other things. All these worlds, pimping, ho’ing, hustling, gambling, overlap anyway, you know. All these individuals in the life have codes of behavior, language, understandings in common.”

From Alibi’s memoir:

I had started out writing numbers in East Harlem. I soon became a pimp, crap hustler, con man, fence, slum jewelry seller, fake liquor seller. I dealt in counterfeit money. I sold drugs in some of the after hours joints I ran. I was called the Master because of my shoplifting abilities, I could take someone in the store with me and get a coat or sometimes two coats and take it to the cash register and the sales people would staple the bag up for me and I would walk out the store. The person with me would ask me why didn’t you take something and I would inform them that I had. They would always be baffled. But I was never arrested for any of those things. I also laundered money for a Latino gang, participated in credit card scams and many other activities but I never signed anyone’s name on a purchase. I would get the cards from a dipper (pickpocket) or another source. But I was never greedy enough to sign any document, I preferred to take a fifty-fifty split, and there were plenty short story writers (forgers) around that would work on a fifty-fifty split.

Alibi is not typically a pickpocket, though he admits to having been in what he calls “pickpocket situations” and has used the “touch” to take advantage of a loose wallet or bag here and there. He learned that the key to being a good pickpocket is practicing the moves and knowing how to misdirect the attention of the victim at a critical moment. He also pays close attention, like his teacher taught him, and as a result he has a tremendous knowledge of how people behave in the city. He knows how to catch a stranger’s eye in a city of millions; he knows that if you bump into a victim or “stall” him in the street, his hands will move to that part of his body where his wallet or money are concealed. (Police officers know this too. If a person flinches during a patdown, usually that’s where the contraband is located.) Alibi tells of a guy named “Fast Eddie” who could “steal the crack outta yo ass and stink from shit. He could tell if the guy [mark] grabs his right pocket he knows that’s where the money is. The right or left front pocket is the most difficult to pull off and the only ones who can do that are cannons.” (Cannon is the con-artist term for master pickpocket.)

Alibi is not a “popcorn pimp” either, though he has had over his career more than one woman in a pimping situation. A popcorn pimp is one who uses any and all means to acquire cash, jewelry, drugs, counterfeit money, boosted clothing, anything to make a living, but rarely just prostitution. They are also referred to in the life as “simps” or simpletons, or simple pimps, hustlers who need to rely on brawn, not brains, and have no “game.”

Alibi has not always wanted to be a hustler, but he feels he had little choice. He revealed his misgivings in a moment of reflection I noted in a journal entry:

I made no bones about the hustling world I had lived in but I stressed the fact that it was a mistake to have wasted many years in a somewhat negative way when I could have done things quite differently. I let them [people, friends, hustlers, cops, anyone he talked with] know quite honestly that I only entered the hustling world to survive and support my family. I told them that a majority of the brothers in prisons throughout the country was in prison because they were forced there by being unable to get a job. Malcolm X once remarked when someone made a snide comment about his being in prison, that the person shouldn’t laugh at him for being in prison because in America all Black and poor people are in prison, they just didn’t know it yet. I explained to them that I had been sworn in at the Post Office near Christmas time.

The post office he refers to here is on 125th Street between Morningside Avenue and St. Nicholas Avenue. He used to shoot dice on the side street at 126th Street, directly behind this facility. Alibi had applied for a job there, and he had apparently passed the exam to be a postal clerk when it was discovered a month later that he had previously been arrested for gambling. He was quite irate about this turn of events; the reference to “them” is those supervisors who took his job away. This anger would propel him to “get all of them back,” meaning all of society—and conning was the method of his “revenge.”

He went on to explain that point in his life:

So they told me that I couldn’t be hired because I had been arrested for gambling. My wife was pregnant at the time, and after being sent to the United Parcel Service to start work there, I was given the same reason for not being hired by a supervisor from another facility. I couldn’t at that time understand what that [gambling arrest] had to do with my ability to do the job. As I know now, it was just a stumbling block that was used … to keep Blacks in low paying jobs or no job at all. At one time in this country you could be turned down on virtually any job if you had an arrest record. It didn’t matter if it was a misdemeanor or felony charge. Now you can’t be turned down in most places for a misdemeanor arrest.

This experience of losing his job with the post office left Alibi with a lasting sense of disgust and hatred for everyone in authority. He used that seething resentment, along with his innate intelligence, to craft con games and hustles to seek his revenge.

CON MAN AS GHOST

Alibi is unlike the Invisible Man that Ralph Ellison described in his classic 1952 novel. Ellison’s man was not only forced to wear a mask; he also lacked the ability to recognize that he was doing so. Alibi is cognizant of his mask and chooses to wear it because he knows that the mask is an indispensable part of his life as a con man and that it gives him the ability to fool or hoodwink others, to lie and cheat to get what he wants—usually money or something else valuable.

Even to his friends, Alibi remains invisible; even people who knew him for years do not really know him. “You won’t believe this, but you know more about me than people I’ve known all my life.” I (Terry Williams) was unsure of the truth of this, but I took it for what it was worth. Perhaps he was just blowing smoke about knowing more about him than anyone else. The other people I talked with about him over the years admitted to knowing little about his background. I knew he had a daughter and two brothers, both of whom are deceased, but I knew little else about his other family, his past, his values, his aspirations, or his dreams. The only “straight” jobs Alibi ever had was when he first came to New York and worked as a stock clerk or delivery boy at one of the dailies. I never knew him to do anything except hustle.

I know very little about his other crew members (see chapter 3), and what I did learn, I promised not to reveal. They, too, were largely ghosts to me. But how long could he or they stay in the shadows without the need to feel they belong?

The psychologist William James argues that most of us want to be noticed:

No more fiendish punishment could be devised were such a thing possible than that one could be turned loose in society and remain absolutely unnoticed by all the members thereof. If no one turned round when we entered, answered when we spoke, or minded what we did, but if every person we met “cut us dead,” and acted as if we were non-existing things, a kind of rage and impotent despair would ere long well up in us, from which the cruelest bodily tortures would be a relief.¹

Like Rinehart in Ellison’s Invisible Man, Alibi does not see himself as another street-smart petty hustler but as a modern man who seeks invisibility because if he does not he will be caught and sent to jail, or some other fate worse than death, so he hides and creeps and finds solace in his ability to remain hidden, invisible not only to his victims (which is crucial to his survival) but to friends as well. Alibi never felt others could actually see him as himself. He felt that he was whole—in his mind he was—but he could not convince others of that basic fact. “I feel like that way sometimes,” he tells me. “Just like an itch that I can’t quite get to scratch.” He compared it to a friend of his who lost a leg yet can still feel it via phantom pain.

Con artists must be ghostlike because they must be able to disappear in order to continue to survive in the city. Hakim Hasan, a contact of mine who worked on Sixth Avenue for many years as a street bookseller, entrepreneur, bibliophile extraordinaire, street intellectual, and card-carrying member of the subintelligentsia, describes it: “During the 1990s when I sold books on the street, I saw the three-card monte hustlers work on Sixth Avenue mainly near the corner of Eighth Street. They would literally appear out of nowhere. There would be a lookout man or woman. They would assemble a makeshift card table made up of boxes. These people were dressed like any pedestrian. They would appear like ghosts and in a matter of minutes set up the table and go to work. When the lookout person signaled that the police were coming (or something was not right), they would kick down the table and slowly walk (blend) into the crowd like ghosts.”

Richard Wright considered the issue of being unrecognized and rejected by society when he wrote the introduction to Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City, by the sociologists St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton. This pioneering work depicts an iconic “ghetto” and is an exhaustive survey of black life in Chicago. Some see it not just as a study of the ghetto but of the entire black community. It has been the sociological “bible” for several generations of social scientists, scholars, writers, and those interested in black life since it was published in 1945. Wright says in the introduction:

There can be, of course, no such thing as a complete rejection of anybody by society; for, even in rejecting him, society must notice him. But the American Negro has come as near being the victim of a complete rejection as our society has been able to work out, for the dehumanized image of the Negro which white Americans carry in their mind, the anti-Negro epithets continuously on their lips, exclude the contemporary Negro as truly as though he were kept in a steel prison, and doom even those negroes who are as yet unborn.²

While Wright was speaking of blacks, his commentary also perfectly applies to the con artist: a dehumanized, nearly completely rejected and unnoticed member of society who wishes to be unseen so as to remain undetected when he hides in plain sight. The exception to this rejection, Alibi once said, is when black men, or con artists, are needed to “feed the system,” as he called it. “The black man is invisible until there is a need to feed the system. If no blacks are wanted in a white neighborhood the police come around to harass him out. Whether he is driving a new car or wearing a new suit. If the jails need filling up they find every reason, no matter how silly, ludicrous, or inane the reason, they stop, frisk, and question.”

CON MAN AS WANTED MAN

In other words, in Alibi’s opinion, it does not really matter if he is a con or not when it comes to corrupt police; black men can be picked up, as Alibi was many times, just for being black. There are all too many examples of this. Consider the case of Louis Scarcella, a New York homicide detective who, back in the 1980s and 1990s, used deceptive tactics to convict at least seventy black and Latino men (one of whom died in prison) of crimes they did not commit. Many of those cases are now coming to light, and multi-million-dollar settlements are being paid to those wrongly convicted and their families.

As a black man, Alibi is as vulnerable as all minority men to policies such as stop, question, and frisk and the haunting legacy of vagrancy laws, Jim Crow laws, and other racially based law-enforcement strategies designed seemingly to incarcerate or emasculate members of minority groups, especially black men, overwhelmingly. And Alibi, like many others disenfranchised by arrest and incarceration, has been stripped of the most basic rights and privileges: the right to vote, the right to be considered for public housing, and access to student loans and to jobs.

Alibi and his consorts live in a “weird state” of “nowhereness,” as he calls it, because he is a convicted felon. He was arrested several times for gambling, but he never spent that much time in jail and was always quickly released. He says being a felon is “just like being an unregistered alien, man. Don’t you see that?” He said he had warrants for his arrest, although it was not likely he’d be caught if he played his cards right or kept cool, as he had these many years. But he lives with the possibility that he might be caught one day, and that weighs on his mind. He knew healthcare was out of the question. “Listen man, Obama talks about healthcare for all, but even if he did that I would still be out in the cold. Right? Am I right? I can’t register or sign up for healthcare because if I would then I’d be in the system and they (the authorities) would find me.”

He said he couldn’t get licenses of any kind either, and that meant he could not even get a low-paying job if he wanted to. “So what am I supposed to do, starve? No, I ain’t gonna starve. I’m gonna make me some money the best way I know how.”

In part this kind of philosophy helps Alibi convince himself of his need to hustle. At one point he wrote in his memoir: “I took note not to glamorize the hustling world. But I also wanted to let them [his employers] know that it was nothing to be ashamed of. Whenever someone asks me even to this day what did you do in New York? My instant answer is I was a hustler.” Hustlers and con artists often speak of their profession in the past tense, as if to say “I no longer do that” or to disassociate themselves from the acts of villainy they are accused of being part of. Or they point to the misdeeds of others as a defense mechanism, to draw attention away from themselves. In Alibi’s words: “Many legitimate, or pseudolegitimate businessmen are some of the world’s greatest hustlers. Some of America’s wealthiest and best-known families owe their riches to a member of the family that was a notorious hustler. Yet today they look at hustlers with total disdain, forgetting or pretending not to know where their life of luxury had its beginnings. I assume some of them give away money to many charitable organizations as a way of feeding their guilt feelings.”

CON MAN AS PUBLIC CHARACTER

Jane Jacobs was a social activist, urban scholar, and journalist who organized West Villagers in New York City to oppose an expressway that would run through—and potentially destroy—their neighborhood. Her work on urban life and culture was groundbreaking in that she highlighted previously overlooked parts of the city, such as the sidewalk, and analyzed them to a degree few urban theorists had previously done. In her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs explains her theory of a public character and his or her impact on the city streets:

The social structure of sidewalk life han...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Alibi: Portrait of a Con Man
• 2. City Cons and Hustles
• 3. The Con Crew
• 4. The Con Game as Street Theater
• 5. Petty Street Hustles
• 6. Canal Street as Venus Flytrap
• 7. The Numbers Game
• 8. New York Tenant Hustles
• 9. A Drug Hustle: The Crack Game
• 10. NYPD and the Finest Cons
• 11. Wall Street Cons
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index