Con Artists and Hustlers

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deserve to be robbed, and I never been caught,” adding, under his breath, “that many times.” “I’ve always wanted to have money, women, and a warm place to shit, and I’ve had all of that and more.”

Alibi has lived most of his life as a con. He was born in Kenner, Louisiana, a stone’s throw from New Orleans, where he spent most of his time as a kid hustling drunks, stealing bicycles, and running away from the police. This, too, he justifies. “Where I come from not a single cop is a good cop. They’re all corrupt, crooked, rotten to the core. Cops would even take money from school kids and old ladies, they were totally fucked up. Everybody will tell you about newAaawlins cops as the worst, most corrupt in the country.” His parents were farmers; his father ran a strawberry farm near Slidell, Louisiana, and sold chickens.

When he left home, he came to New York and stayed in an apartment in Harlem near Convent Avenue, where he could be seen shooting dice across from the post office, only a block or two from the Apollo Theater.

A CITY SO NICE . . .

I don’t believe in reality, or life, just in the imagination because reality is just the stories we tell each other. Some good stories, some not so good.

—Francois-Henri Soulie

New York City is rugged, aggressive, and competitive, yet it is also one of the most desirable cities in the world, with broad boulevards, tree-lined avenues, yellow and lime-green cabs darting hither and yon, and frantic crowds moving along busy streets. And though New Yorkers constantly complain about trash, traffic, trains, and any number of other hassles, most of them readily acknowledge that they live in one of the greatest cities in the world. Among its many finer points, New York offers access to the best museums and cultural institutions and an intelligentsia unmatched anywhere. New York, New York: a city so nice

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they named it twice, as the disc jockey Frankie Crocker used to say on his 1970s radio show.

The lyrics to the classic 1977 song “New York, New York” assert, “If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere.” The operative word is “if.” And, as Alibi Jones often says, “If a frog had a muddy appetite and a square ass he’d shit bricks.” This dream of “making it” has been repeated for decades in barber shops and street corners, in social clubs and candy stores, in churches and bodegas, but the reality is that it is hard to make it here—and getting harder. In this city success is defined by the most famous among us, movie stars and superstar athletes, presidents, moguls, and Wall Street millionaires. It would be much more fair to compare your success to that of your peers, those you grew up with, your street buddies, or your neighbors, but that’s not how it works.

Those coming to New York seeking great fortune or world-class fame quickly learn the hard way that living in this city is a daily struggle; it requires a tireless work ethic in order to keep up, just to make ends meet. Every aspect of city life can be a grind, from the competitive job market, to the exhausting daily commute, and even to demanding relationships. New York City—massive, crowded, dirty, teeming with bodies—can be a nightmare for the human spirit. It is also a dream location for scientists looking to study the human condition. This towering metropolis or concrete jungle (whichever way you choose to view it) is the end result of centuries of social liberalism, capitalist expansion, herd migration, artistic experimentation, and the rampant street entrepreneurialism that stems from the constant struggle to survive.

As of this writing, the city burgeons with 8.2 million people, and more arrive every day. Massive numbers of new immigrants and migrants work in every conceivable industry: South Americans and Central Americans sell flowers and fruit; Chinese workers hawk knickknacks on the sidewalks; South Asians drive cabs and run newsstands; undocumented Irish construction workers dangle from scaffolding, building new high-rises; little Africas and little Mexicos sprout up in the outer boroughs.

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At the other end of the economic spectrum, a new breed of millionaire and billionaire is leaving its imprint. Industries of the past, such as the garment business or other manufacturing concerns, are going, going, gone. Now, finance, insurance, technology, and real estate rule; Wall Street leads the way. Inequality is built into the capitalist system; the catchphrase “the rich get richer” is not a cliché. The growth in the U.S. economy favors the wealthiest individuals (the 2 percent), and, as the economist Thomas Picketty argues in Capital, the richest Americans increase their wealth (through inheritances or other means) more than five times faster than the average American does.3 The city is full of the “haves” and the “have-nots.” For the con man, if you cannot “have,” then you take. The con artist’s feelings toward this city are complex. Most con artists don’t so much hate the city as feel betrayed by it because it beckons with a dream but provides no realistic means to obtain it. In a sense, the American dream itself is a masterful con that suckers people in. So some come to realize that the only way to reach this mythological dream is to not play by the rules of the game but to devise a different game, a game of chance, a gambling game, a hustling game, a conning game, a pretender game, a now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t game. To understand the art of deception, you must see that it is essentially about changing the rules of the game and misdirecting the audience in order to “get over.” (We should note that the “game” can be played or performed anywhere, in any city, at any time, though large cities are preferable because density and anonymity are part and parcel of the ruse necessary for a successful con to work.)

Thus, laced into city’s economy alongside the wealthy, the working classes, the struggling, and the tourists, some New Yorkers have created a quasi-professional niche built on misinformation and seduction.

Some are tireless salespeople, illegally trading and bartering goods.

Others use sleight-of-hand to distract naïve spectators while swiping their riches. These crafty opportunists of New York City use their well-honed skill set to wring money out of New York’s informal economy. They wait for the moment when their target’s guard is down—or

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“sleeping,” as they say—and then they strike. These are who we mean when we refer to the con artists and hustlers of New York City.

CON ARTISTS AND HUSTLERS Confidence artists—those who deceive in order to procure money or goods from unsuspecting strangers—perform a type of street theater that capitalizes on the fluid structure of the dense, diverse, and mobile city. They use their cunning to draw in the unsophisticated and then deploy a practiced anonymity to sneak away with the prize. These skilled craftspeople often take years to learn how to dazzle a crowd in one instant and disappear into the same crowd in the next.

The term “con man” originated with a New Yorker named William Thompson. In the 1840s, Thompson was famous for approaching wealthy strangers, pretending to be an old acquaintance, engaging in conversation, and then asking something to the effect of, “Do you have confidence in me to trust me with your watch (or money) until tomorrow?”4 Of course, he would never return with the watch or the money, and eventually he was caught. During his trial in 1849, the New York Herald dubbed him the “confidence man,” thus coining the term.

More recent practitioners of the art, like Sante Kimes or David Hampton, rely on similar skills of ingratiation and disguise to run their cons. Sante Kimes’s lifelong career of grifting included forgery, shoplifting, arson, fraud, and theft, and it reached its apex when she attempted to steal the identity of a wealthy heiress, Irene Silverman, to gain access to Silverman’s Manhattan mansion. (Kimes and her son were ultimately convicted of murdering Silverman.) David Hampton was a teenage con artist who was famous not so much for the amount of money he received but who he was able to con—the so-called limousine liberals, upper-class patrons of New York society. Hampton was said to have classic con-artist qualities; he was good looking, well groomed, and charmingly articulate. He was able to convince wealthy (and otherwise savvy) New Yorkers that he was the son of the actor

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Sidney Poitier and a Harvard friend of their children. They welcomed him into their homes and offered him lavish meals and hospitality; eventually, they discovered that he was not who he said he was. Sidney Poitier did not even have a son.

The French sociologist Loic Wacquant, who has researched ghetto life and culture (but is better known as a radical theorist of the state) defined the actions of the con artist as “a field of activities which have in common the fact that they require mastery of a particular type of manipulation [symbolic capital], namely, the ability to inveigle and deceive others, if need be by joining violence and chicanery and charm, in the pursuit of immediate pecuniary gain.”5 Symbolic capital refers to the value of a person’s reputation, in other words, the kinds of resources an individual has at his disposal based on his position in society. Attributes like honor, power, and prestige all have a certain value that can be utilized.

In his 1851 classic London Labour and the London Poor,6 the British journalist Henry Mayhew called con artists “street artists,” also known as grifters or back-alley hustlers, all with their own individual skills yet also with much in common. They used their verbal ability and charm to manipulate people into being victims. The con game is a social act and a social event that follows a predetermined series of steps. C. R. D. Prus and Robert C. Sharper, two noted sociologists of the hustling scene, list those steps: finding a suitable victim, gaining the victim’s trust, persuading the victim to commit to a scheme that will benefit him or her, getting money from the victim, and, finally, placating the victim in order to quell any uneasy feelings about the situation.7 The New York penal code defines conning as “fraudulent accosting . . . when a person accosts a person in a public place with intent to defraud him of money or other property by means of a trick, swindle or confidence game.”8 This is a Class A misdemeanor in New York and is taken seriously by the courts. As compared to con artists, hustlers are the seasoned entrepreneurs of the city’s informal economy. They hold down jobs like most anyone else, but their jobs tend to be self-made, self-enterprising, and, of course, illegal. Hustlers are the self-employed vendors of legally purchased goods—or illegally made substances—sold

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through unauthorized means. Hustling includes a variety of activities that violate numerous penal codes. Such activities can include manufacturing and peddling homemade cocaine in after-hours clubs or on the street; selling stolen (“hot”) merchandise; selling counterfeit goods, such as handbags; selling wholesale merchandise, such as electronics, at retail prices; betting on games of chance (cards, dice, pool) in ways forbidden by the law;9 and participating in the underground lottery of the ghetto, known as policy or numbers. At the more felonious end of the scale, they can include petty pillage and theft; stealing cars; break-ins; scavenging materials such as bricks, copper pipes, windows, and door frames from abandoned buildings; mugging; stickups; pimping; racketeering; extortion; and the wholesale and retail trade in drugs. The sale of “loose” or “untaxed” cigarettes (in violation of New York State Tax Law §1814) is one of the more popular hustles in New York City. It is estimated that 59 percent of all cigarettes consumed in New York State have been smuggled in from other states in order to avoid the state’s hefty $4.35-per-pack tax.10 Hustling and con artistry differ in a few key respects. A hustler is a kind of con artist, but the category of hustling is expansive and includes individuals who simply work hard to make extra money (by legal means). And then there are “gorilla hustlers” who make a livelihood from more violent acts. A true con artist usually does not resort to physical violence; his most potent weapon is his smooth, articulate conversation. Many con artists are quick to admit that if you must use violence to get a mark’s valuables, you are not a con artist but a common criminal, a gorilla hustler. Ironically, con artists do not see themselves as common crooks; as Alibi rationalizes, “I’m only doing what the mark would do to me. You see, an honest man could not be conned.”

Local law-enforcement officials restrict, regulate, and squeeze those who want to make fast money by selling illegal goods, yet experienced hustlers, if they are skilled enough to evade surveillance, can make a good living. Hustling is lucrative because the city is saturated with tourists (thirty-five million per year at last count) and locals alike who may want a new t-shirt, a knockoff handbag, or some other good priced slightly or, in some cases, significantly below market value.

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Bettylou Valentine, in her book Hustling and Other Hard Work, notes that hustling “refers to a wide variety of unconventional, sometimes extralegal or illegal activities, often frowned upon by the wider community but widely accepted and practiced in the slums and ghettoes.”11 Valentine was an important anthropologist who conducted research in poor black neighborhoods in the northeastern United States for half a decade. Her most famous location was the fictitious city of Blackston, a multiethnic community of one hundred thousand in Massachusetts, where she conducted an in-depth analysis of three families and how they survived through “creative lifestyles” such as hustling, public assistance, and other ways of making ends meet. Valentine reasoned that given the intricacies, aggravations, trials, and tribulations these people faced in trying to survive, hustling was essentially “hard work.” Her full-immersion method of doing fieldwork was especially notable because it required a more meaningful and sincere collaboration between social scientists and the communities they studied.

Valentine goes on to note: People also hustle by buying or selling “hot” goods, whose source is often unknown but correctly assumed to be stolen or otherwise illegally obtained; gambling (most often card games, pool or billiards, craps); bootlegging liquor after hours or Sunday; stealing cars and/or stripping them for salable parts; stripping abandoned buildings of salable parts such as copper tubing and fixtures; shoplifting; looting; hijacking; running con games; and trafficking in narcotics.12

Hustling is a complex phenomenon that transcends race, class, and ethnicity. It has both legal and extralegal components. Items can be purchased legally and then resold illegally on the “gray market,” or illegal items can be sold. The Madoff Ponzi scheme, the Enron scandal, and the Tyco International Koslowski case all demonstrate that hustling can be perpetuated by the best and brightest, but it is also perpetuated on a daily basis by the common man or woman. Think of the housewife pilfering extra money for her family, the cop fixing tickets for extra pay, or the street kids selling bogus and real drugs. These examples point

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to a kind of behavior that almost everyone engages in when they “cut corners” (even fudging a bit on taxes could be thought of as a hustle).

Thus the definition of hustling should be viewed along a continuum, running the gamut from low to high, legal to extralegal, nonviolent to violent. At the low end is the worker who takes a side job to make extra money. A middle-range hustle might be someone who works at a butcher shop or restaurant and takes meat or produce to sell on the side. At the higher end is the street gambler who acquires crooked dice and inserts them into the game to assure a win. The highest-end hustler would be the Ponzi scam artist who rakes in millions from unsuspecting friends and family members.

But the world we are about to enter involves a more exacting definition of hustling, a more elaborate and lifelong example of what it means to hustle, a vocation that has been around since the beginning of mercantilism. Prus and Sharper, in their book Road Hustlers, offer another take on what they refer to as a career hustler: Career hustling is much different from occasional involvement—where many persons will “take an edge” if the situation presents itself, it is most unlikely that anyone attempting to make a career or lifework of hustling could rely on chance opportunities alone. A career hustler has to create his own opportunities; he will not only capitalize on circumstantial opportunities but will also set up targets for his hustles. In this sense it matters little whether one is a robber, prostitute, dope pusher, or confidence man, or whether one’s hustle is assaultive or sociable, obvious or subtle. Career hustlers cannot simply wait for their opportunities; they are continually “on the make.”13

The criminologists Ronald Clarke and Donald Cornish claimed that crime and deviance are influenced by opportunities created by circumstance, neglect, or public policy. According to their rational-choice theory, opportunities for crime “may tempt an otherwise law-abiding person into occasional transgressions.”14 According to the tenets of rational-choice theory, an average individual—someone not actively

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seeking to engage in crime—may do so if, say, a stranger accidentally drops a cash-filled wallet on a sidewalk or a power outage in a major retail store renders the security system impotent or a loophole in unemployment insurance allows to the recipient to work “off the books” while continuing to receive unemployment benefits (a very popular strategy during the recent Great Recession). Clarke and Cornish claim that most crime in society is not committed by a unique, deviant brand of evildoers but rather that increased opportunity and lack of punishment will drive the average (mostly law-abiding) person to commit crimes that seem “rational” in the moment. We will return to rational-choice theory throughout this book.

This now classic theory essentially applies to inexperienced criminals, but New York’s con artists and hustlers, such as the ones profiled in this book, are far from average. This book offers a new take on how structure and opportunity influence crime; the average rational person could not engage in the cons and hustles featured here. The con artists and hustlers in this text possess a rare set of utilitarian values and have an unmatched knowledge of the city’s landscape and a sophisticated skill set that has taken years (or a lifetime) to acquire. We think of them as sage opportunists because they are able to match their abilities exactly to the opportunities presented by the city’s shifting economy. And while many sociologists tend to view their subjects as “victims” of circumstance, we recognize our respondents as very lucid craftsmen (and -women).

Together they all represent a unique brand of New Yorker: those who have mastered the art of deception and the science of persuasion.

TERROIR AND THE CITY The New York City landscape plays an important role in the con game, though its part can be latent and passive. Just as drug dealers and sex workers find hidden spots—behind certain buildings or in warehouses along the waterfront, for example—con artists and hustlers use busy transportation hubs (such as Union Square, Times Square, or Grand