He could deliver the very verisimilitude of honesty, sincerity and utmost confidence. Well, he was a confidence man. He had dedicated his entire life to making a living from fleecing the gullible marks, or fish, that he said populated the world.
Our not quite friend John, despite being able to sell Lucky Charms cereal to a dedicated health food addict, had an honest streak that kept him from truly succeeding. We first met him while he was running an insurance scam in Baltimore. When the scam went bad, he appeared at our Beacon Hill Folkie crash pad one evening. In exchange for a few days of lodging ( until he had himself set up locally) he offered nightly seminars on scams, buncos, and rackets. He offered insights into how to spot them, avoid them and how to get free of them. He even ran us through a few playacting workshops so we’d see how really enticing these could be.
John said there were five basic rules to being a successful “artiste of the con,” but the first and most important was enrolling the fish in the scam. Get them invested, and The fish becomes a collaborator when the fraud collapses. They’ll be too embarrassed to turn in the artiste if and when the swindle collapses.
The mini-workshops were a wonder to watch. He was the most confidant person we had ever met. Unlike many people who fake confidence John did not appear boastful, loud or over confidant. You wanted to trust him. It was scary how good he was.
We asked him once how he’d managed to stay clear of arrest and prison. He replied that he was extremely disciplined. Laughing, he mentioned that it had literally been beaten into him as a child going to parochial schools.
For more on John see:
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Sounds like he is quite the character.
Ah, the lessons well learned in parochial schools…
Yes! The Sisters of Perpetual Pain and Sister Marguerite D Sade!
I think I saw them at a gay bar….
Dressed in chains, no doubt.
No, it was a theatrical group at a bar in Guerneville, CA
Yup…the scarred knuckles from the yardstick, the bruised buttocks from the “board of education? The good old days. Not!
that’s the key — involving the victim in the scam makes that person feel special and elite and cool and shit.
FYI John pointed out that the same rules were used by politicians .
Well, HWSNBN has done well with those skills of his…
Actually I think he has not done well by the rules. He shafts friends as well as enemies
And yet he makes friends. I realized today what I feel about all this. I’m sad. I’ve been sad since that horror show of a debate last summer and the ensuing circus.
Another anthropologist mentioned that what he is doing is making this a Patron/clientage type of society – very transactional. He’s not so much making friends as he is creating clients who owe him in return for his patronage. This sort of system is intimately by people in large parts of the Mediterranean and Latin America.
Mafioso…
Formal Patron Clientage systems are not normally as bad a the Mafia. But yes the Mafia certainly comes out of a P/C society.