Americans Have Always Treasured Their Right to Be Conned
A Review of ‘A Century of Swindles: Ponzi Schemes, Con Men, and Fraudsters’, by Railey Jane Savage
A Review of ‘A Century of Swindles: Ponzi Schemes, Con Men, and Fraudsters’, by Railey Jane Savage
Contrary to the well-worn aphorism, it’s pretty easy to con an honest man. Financial predators trade on the loneliness of the elderly, the fear of the indebted, and the credulity of the helpful.
Loaning a stranger money for his grandmother’s operation or hiring a fixer to help reduce your credit card debt can be a financially disastrous mistake, but I don’t think it says anything about a person’s basic interpersonal honesty.
The original saying has this connotation about greedy people getting fleeced by even greedier people. From an outside perspective, there’s a certain sense of comeuppance when people believe in massive returns on minimal investments since greed isn’t something we praise.
But even these cons can work on otherwise honest people when they’re short-term hustles.
“You can’t con an honest man,” is supposed to make us feel better about people being bilked out of their life savings when they clearly were trying to get something for nothing. In some ways, given that the mark was complicit in their own undoing, con artists are committing a victimless crime.
It also fits nicely into our larger myths, where every tale has a moral and the only way to succeed is to rise above the petty human condition. Mostly, though, it appeals to our sense of moral superiority. Bad things happen to bad people, and the greedy will never see it coming.
Maybe we can say you can’t con an intellectually honest person.
Of course, this is all bunk. No one deserves to be lied to, bullied, or intimidated just so someone else doesn’t have to get a day job. This makes intellectual sense, and two years ago it also passed the gut-check test, but every day that the pandemic drags on, it gets harder to pity the gullible and at least as difficult to choke back Schadenfreude.
Revenge tales feel good for a reason. We need comeuppance to keep our delicate conception of morality in check.
What distinguishes the truly prodigious con artist from a petty thief is their ability to make marks complicit in their own fleecing. Maybe we can say you can’t con an intellectually honest person.
In an era that seems desperate to distinguish itself by its aggressive ignorance, it makes sense to dip back into our history if only to recall that the willfully stupid and arrogantly self-important aren’t just natural victims but also catalysts for predators.
They create and sustain intellectual and emotional profiteers by a stunning overconfidence in their own cleverness. They know that no one could possibly deceive them and/or that no one would dare try. As a result, the more audacious the lie, the easier it is to swallow.
Coming to Terms With the Influencer
While Railey Jane Savage’s A Century of Swindles: Ponzi Schemes, Con Men, and Fraudsters is a history book on its face, recounting with wit and detail several big cons in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it reads just as well as cultural criticism.
We know the archetypes because they are in the news today; they are on Twitter and Facebook and making a bloody fortune being contrarian.
In the story about Elizabeth Bigley, a psychic who convinced some of the country’s wealthiest people she was Andrew Carnegie’s illegitimate daughter, Savage writes, “She had manufactured legitimacy and sold it with boldness.”
Carnegie, upon whose name Bigley drew massive amounts of credit, thought it was amusing that his name could be used to such effect.
People who dressed as they did, or who carried themselves in a certain way, couldn’t have possibly been thieves.
The thread that runs through the seven short histories (although each stands alone) is this notion of influence that I just couldn’t shake. It doesn’t take much effort on the reader’s part to imagine any of the Instagram accounts that would have been associated with these hucksters, and I don’t think that is an accident.
Savage paints the pictures that her subjects would have happily snapped themselves had they the technology. All but one of the profiled scammers captured the public’s imagination visually, or at least tonally. People who dressed as they did, or who carried themselves in a certain way, couldn’t have possibly been thieves.
This isn’t to say that they were necessarily good-looking people, only that most of them cultivated a sense of wealth and/or power simply by acting the part.
It is frustrating to watch as Savage (who allows the scammers no quarter for their ridiculous claims) gives lie time and again to the notion that wealth and success in America have anything to do with brains or cunning.
The wealthy in this work are so gullible and so desperate to increase their own wealth, status, and influence as to be beyond pity, at least on the face of it. Taking a step back we may better see how fragile the notion of influence can be, and how we support it, essentially weaponizing our attention for use against us.
At every turn, our inclination to blame the gullible ends up indicting us as well.
Learning to Use Fake News
As amusing as it is to see people decry “the media” as if it has undergone a fundamental change, it is worth noting that using the mass distrust of the press isn’t any more novel than the other common scammer tactics.
What the con artist knows is that newspapers tell the truth when we agree, and lie when we disagree. What is actually in the paper very rarely matters when it comes to changing perception.
In the wonderfully twisted story of the Drake scam–a bold lie that convinced hundreds if not thousands of Americans that England (the country) would be liquidating many of its assets because of a forgotten debt to Sir Francis Drake’s secret heir–newspapers do a great job in supporting the lie with coverage.
It is so much easier to keep believing in something than it is to stop believing in it once you are completely invested.
Once the scam is revealed, however, the papers were impotent in convincing the victims about the scam. No matter the amount of reporting on the shaky deals, the ongoing investigations, or the criminal arrests of some of the perpetrators, many members of the public would not be moved.
It’s critical to see how we participate in these kinds of mass denials. There is more than a little shame in falling for a story so blatantly fabricated. While there is no shame at all in sticking to your guns and following your gut.
Savage writes:
Sure the overwhelming majority could look at facts contained in documents, testimony, and tradition and arrive at a consensus of what is reality. But a minority chorus of cheekily posed what-ifs, demanding a reexamination of this reality and demanding revision to right perceived wrongs, wears away the integrity of the otherwise accepted state of being.
It is so much easier to keep believing in something than it is to stop believing in it once you are completely invested.
The confidence with which these fraudsters deny reality, even as the scams crumble around them, is unchanged in the last 200 years in America. If you repeat anything enough, some people will start to believe it is true.
The scammer disregards evidence presented against them as if ignoring charges is the same thing as refuting them.
And it works every time.
Undermining the Experts
These aren’t people trading on talent. They’re not particularly inventive storytellers or even expert forgers, which at least requires craft. If these con artists have a talent, it is for sniffing out vanity in others and exploiting it by creating a new reality and forcing it upon the people around them.
In the story of an elaborate diamond hoax, wherein the scammers buy cheap diamonds, literally spread them around on the ground, and convince some of the country’s wealthiest men to buy up the diamond fields, expertise fails to rise to the challenge of intellectual honesty.
It starts simply enough, with an endorsement from famous jeweler Charles Lewis Tiffany. Asked to value the off-brand diamonds, Tiffany could have easily said, “I only deal in finished diamonds.”
Instead, the jeweler valued the diamonds at $150,000. In fact, the stones he saw were only a portion of the raw gems the perpetrators bought in England for something closer to $2,000. But, as with Carnegie, Tiffany’s word was good enough to trade on.
The geologist who had examined the fields was too much taken in by the vast diamond fields to smell a scam. By the time he corrected his misdiagnosis, most of the damage had been done.
His failure caused something of a ripple in the mining community and Savage reproduces an editorial from Engineering and Mining Journal from dated Dec. 10, 1892:
We have warned the profession, again and again, the devices of swindlers are innumerable and profoundly ingenious. The more eminent an expert is, and the more widely known for cautious and even cynical judgments, the more anxious are the speculators to secure, by fair means of foul, his favorable opinion.
As with all of the stories, Savage clips along at every turn, stopping only to look at the remarkable details insofar as they support the larger narrative. The concise prose helps give these compressed histories life and urgency. What’s equally important, though, is that she allows the themes to rise out of that history.
The mechanism of the scams may have changed, but the bones are still there. If you tell a big enough lie for money and refuse to back down, people will eventually pay you.
It is interesting and fitting that, while there is little in the way of satisfying endings in terms of punishment, the bones of the scams are unearthed for our own examination.
Scroll through the latest conspiracy scammer nonsense and you will find that they haven’t changed in structure or execution in a very long time. From the quackery of selling “Oxigenized Air” to the promise of speaking to the dead, hope for miracle cures or access to the afterlife is always going to sell, and Americans are always going to buy.
A Pattern Emerges
Each of the stories has a central tension. The reader knows the con from the very beginning and watching people get taken in again and again, seeing how the fraudsters double down on every lie, and realizing that (in some cases) they retained sway over their followers from jail stirs outrage.
We’re mad at the thieves, but even more angry at the marks and the middlemen. Those who were conned because they believed and those who were conned because they were greedy share a frustrating credulity.
We want to shake them. We want to shout at the scammers to shut up. Of course, by the time they’re made to shut up, it is too late.
As I revised this review for publication, the news came out that Alex Jones has been held liable for spreading the Sandy Hook hoax. That’s all well and good. He, like many of the fraudsters in Savage’s book, may die broke and alone, but the damage is done. His remaining supporters will continue to fund him and to decry the witch hunt that has sought to silence this noble truthteller.
As Savage said, the integrity of our shared reality has already been undermined. It’s a shame something so easy to give is so difficult to get back.
A Century of Swindles: Ponzi Schemes, Con Men, and Fraudsters, by Railey Jane Savage is available from Rowman &Littlefield publishing.
Tony Russo is a journalist and author of “Dragged Into the Light: Truthers, Reptilians, Super Soldiers, and Death Inside an Online Cult.” Subscribe to his Bagel Manifesto here.