Like most con-artists, my Dad and Jack preferred to target the elderly. The Nigerian scam is just a variation on the good old door-to-door hustle. If all went well, through subtle signals, false shuffles and double-dukes, my father and his partner would clean them out. From all appearances Dad was a man with more money than smarts and Jack drew attention to that idea, teasing out the larceny-sense of the other players. Jack would be what they call a shoot-up man, meaning a public relations guy, the one who looks sharp and has the gift of the gab, the guy who would eventually provide distraction during the game and give Dad some shade when he was ready to make his moves.Īs far as the other players knew, my father and Jack were strangers to one another. My father would play the slightly inept, gullible guy.
They worked the room separately, making gregarious chitchat until they could lure enough suckers into a poker game. He and his partner-let’s call him Jack-would infiltrate conferences and college reunions, impersonating various professionals. So smooth you wouldn’t spot the trick if he were to announce it blow by blow. He could slip a deck of cards up one sleeve and a “cooler” (fixed deck) down the other. He was a mechanic, meaning that he could deal what he wanted to whom he wanted. Though he was a con-artist in every sense, his specialty was card sharping. When I was a kid, it astonished me that over and over again, Dad could instill the sort of confidence that would make a person hand over hundreds, even thousands of dollars. I wondered, as I often do, if my father might be listening somewhere, wishing he’d been born in the digital age. There are promises of a big payback if you’ll only lend a hand. The broadcast began, “If you’ve never received an email from a Nigerian prince asking for a small loan-then you probably don’t have a computer.” For the uninitiated, the host explained that this scam begins with an email request for a loan or your bank information to help out a deposed Nigerian dignitary. Yesterday, as I drove across town, I flipped on the radio and listened to a story about a Nigerian scam. Seems every time I look at the papers, one more gullible mark has been duped by a con-man. I would expand that to include the thief’s children. They say that suspicion haunts a thief’s mind.
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