The big con : the story of the confidence man and the confidence game
"'Of all the grifters, the confidence man is the aristocrat,' wrote Davide Maurer, a proposition he definitely proved in The Big Con, one of the most colorful, well-researched, and entertaining works of criminology ever written. A professor of linguistics who specialized in underworld argot, Maurer won the trust of hundreds of swindlers, who let him in on not simply their language but their folkways and the astonishingly complex and elaborate schemes whereby unsuspecting marks, hooked by their own greed and dishonesty, were 'taken off'--i.e. cheated." --From publisher
Print Book, English, 1940
First edition
The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Indianapolis, 1940