The 1973 Oscar winning film “The Sting” labeled the beginning of each scene with a title that was descriptive of the phase of the scam that scene depicted e.g. ‘the hook,’ ‘the shutout,’ the double cross,’ ’ the wire,’ and of course ‘the sting’
The popular television show “Leverage” similarly made use of shorthand names (real or fictional) for various scam operations e.g. ‘Romanian Circus’ or 'the Spanish Prisoner or ‘the badger game.’
It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that investigators or law enforcement might use these shorthand names, but I wonder do professional thieves and grifters themselves use this sort of jargon in planning and executing scams?
…“They’ve got the Monet stored in the upstairs gallery on Monday. We’ll need a good grease man to get through the ventilation shaft. We’re also going to need two dolls to distract on this job: Lisa, you cover the east entrance guard and Keisha you take the guard at the south entrance…”
How much of this is real and how much of this is Hollywood?
I suspect that it is a mix of some that are real names for real scams and some that are made-up clever sounding terms for real scams (and some that are made-up clever sounding terms for made-up scams.) For instance, it looks like Spanish Prisoner has been around for centuries–but probably has gone under many names during that time. (This topic is sort of fresh on my mind, having just re-read American Gods, which describes the fiddle game in detail.)
Many of the terms are real enough but the majority of cons are run by individuals or a very small set of accomplices and there isn’t going to be as much discussion as you see in the movies. A pickpocket ring would more likely be a large operation than a group of con artists like you’d see in The Sting, one big reason for that is they don’t trust each other. I’d think they’d use more common street lingo for their time and place than terms of art.
Not familiar with that one, but when I think of movies about grifters (other than The Sting) I think about an obscure (made half a million at the box office) movie called Traveller.
The classic here is The Big Con by David W. Maurer. Many of the names and much of the jargon in “The Sting” are cribbed directly from that book. There is a glossary in the back; the shut-out, the wire, the huge duke, gun moll, and much more lingo are all in there, mostly for classic big and short cons, not so much the “heavy rackets” or anything modern (the book was published in 1940).
I recall that it was said at the time that the slang term “The Sting” wasn’t really appropriate for the con they were pulling. I don’t recall what the proper term was supposed to be. Nevertheless, “Sting” has the appropriate sound and connotations. Hill and others justify its use here: The Sting (1973) - Trivia - IMDb
The specific con they were pulling in the movie is called “the wire”; I think they even call it by that name in the movie (in the scene where they decide what con to run).
In Maurer’s book, “The sting” is defined as “1. The hipe [a certain short con]; 2. The point in a confidence game where a mark’s money is taken”.
I heard about some of this listening to an episode of the Dragnet radio show. A typical, or at least common, scenario was (is?) for pickpockets to work in a team of three, each doing a job that had its own quaint denomination. IIRC the “pusher” distracted the mark whether by “accidentally” bumping into him, or otherwise distracting him, say by asking for a light. The “jug mob”, IIRC was the accomplice who would case the area beforehand, and the “wire” was the man who actually reached in and pulled the mark’s wallet out of his pocket.
According to Dragnet episode, such a team of pickpockets, could gather in thousands of dollars in one day, which is a whopping amount considering how much it was worth in the early 1950s when the episode aired. Of course, people did use cash quite a bit more in those days, too.
I was under the impression that Maurer’s books on the subject—of which there are about a dozen—are definitely nonfiction. He was a professional linguist studying grifters’ argot as an academic discipline.
The badger game is real enough. The con itself has probably been around since recorded history. And the term for at least since the early 20th century, probably longer.
As DPRK points out, the con in The Sting is taken directly from The Big Con, not only in the slang: The entire plot is laid out in Chapter 3. They even use a cackle bladder.
The book is fascinating, and quite detailed.
It’s pretty neat how so much of what seems clever, spontaneous, and unique to The Sting is described in great detail in the book as standard practice (e.g. the aforementioned cackle bladder).
I confess that I never finished the book because it left such a bad taste in my mouth about humanity. It is not written in a entertaining heist style, like the movie, where the cons are enjoyable to read about; rather, it is written in a way where I feel bad for the victims and disappointed at how many people are out there trying to cheat and steal at every moment. I suppose there is nothing wrong with portraying crime as bad.
On a side note, it is an odd sensation in fiction when we first think “wow, this is clever” until we find that pros in the trade know all of those things. I recall reading Ice Station Zebra as a kid and noted how the submarine crew had the very shrewd idea of running the diesel after a fire to clear bad air out the boat–as a sailor I learned that this is a well known emergency drill in subs, not some cool thing Alistair McLean invented.
And I suspect Tom Cruise’s neat “slam on the brakes” trick in Top Gun is the most basic of dogfighting tricks.
