David Maurer and the Anthropological Birth of the Big Con
In 1940, an eccentric professor of English linguistics at the University of Louisville named David W. Maurer published a book that would inadvertently become the foundational bible for three generations of American screenwriters. Titled The Big Con: The Story of the Confidence Man and the Confidence Game, Maurer's monograph was not a work of sensational journalism; it was a rigorous linguistic and anthropological study of the golden age of American swindlers who operated between the 1890s and the Great Depression.
Maurer did something no scholar had attempted before: he gained the trust of master con men, gamblers, and grifters, recording their specialized underworld argot and transcribing the precise mechanical steps of "The Big Store." Where amateur pickpockets and grifters worked "short cons" (quick street-level swindles for fifty or a hundred dollars that left the victim angry and sprinting for the police), the elite confidence men developed the "big con"—an elaborate, multi-act theatrical production designed to strip wealthy marks of tens of thousands of dollars while ensuring the victim was so legally compromised or humiliated that they could never report the theft to law enforcement.
Maurer identified the eight sacred structural phases that every big con required:
- The Locating & Scouting (The Put-Up): Finding a wealthy mark whose vanity, greed, or hubris makes them vulnerable to an illicit edge.
- The Steer (The Roper): The scout who makes casual contact with the mark, strikes up a natural friendship, and maneuvers them toward the bait.
- The Introduction (The Inside Man): The charismatic, seemingly reluctant insider who possesses access to an exclusive, secret financial advantage.
- The Convincer (The Tale): Permitting the mark to make a small investment and pocket an immediate, spectacular cash profit to dismantle their skepticism.
- The Breakdown (The Touch): Sizing up the mark's total net worth and designing the specific transaction that will compel them to liquidate everything.
- The Send: Sending the mark back home or to their bank to retrieve their cash reserves without suspicion.
- The Sting (The Pay-Off): The catastrophic twist or sudden arrival of authorities where the mark's money disappears into a legal abyss.
- The Blow-Off (The Hurrah): Soothing the mark or terrifying them with legal exposure so they leave town immediately without calling the police.
David Mamet and the Poetics of Complicity
Four decades after Maurer's work, playwright and filmmaker David Mamet recognized that the confidence game was the purest distillation of dramatic tragedy. In his 1987 directorial debut House of Games and his 1997 thriller The Spanish Prisoner, Mamet stripped away the jaunty ragtime nostalgia that George Roy Hill had popularized in 1973's The Sting. Instead, Mamet treated the con as an exercise in ruthless linguistic psychology.
Mamet articulated the profound truth that lies at the core of all great caper writing: You cannot con an honest person. A grifter does not force the victim to open their safe; the grifter merely hands the victim a mirror that reflects their own moral corruption. In The Spanish Prisoner, the brilliant inventor Joe Ross is not swindled because he is foolish; he is swindled because he suspects his employer is underpaying him and eagerly entertains an offshore stranger who validates his sense of grievance.
Mamet understood that a confidence game is fundamentally a contract. It is a shared theatrical improvisation where the mark is cast in the role of the master player. The con man does not speak in elaborate lies; the con man speaks in fragmented ambiguities that invite the mark to fill in the blanks with their own self-aggrandizing fantasies.
"It's called a confidence game because you give me your confidence? No. Because I give you mine." — David Mamet, House of Games (1987)
Translating 1920s Wire-Delay Scams into 21st-Century Screenplays
When John Rogers, Chris Downey, and their writing staff assembled in Portland to plot Leverage, they faced a formidable modernization challenge. In David Maurer's 1940 chronicle, the two most famous big cons were "The Wire" (where the mark believed telegraph signals from horse races were being delayed by 90 seconds, allowing guaranteed winning bets before the bookmaker received the telegraph) and "The Rag" (where the mark believed they were purchasing unlisted stock shares before the trading board posted them).
In an era of fiber-optic transatlantic cables, sub-millisecond algorithmic trading, and ubiquitous smartphone connectivity, how could a television show convince a corporate mark that a 90-second delay was physically possible?
The answer lay in mapping Maurer's psychological mechanics onto modern infrastructure:
- The Modern "Wire": In episodes like season one's The Nigerian Job and season three's The Morning After Job, Alec Hardison hacks microwave line-of-sight relays, cellular base stations, and high-frequency trading servers. The delay is no longer telegraph wire latency; it is an engineered DNS cache poison or a targeted GPS spoof that feeds the mark proprietary data 45 seconds ahead of their institutional competitors.
- The Modern "Big Store": Where classic grifters rented vacant storefronts and filled them with fake telegraph operators and bogus betting blackboards, Leverage rented executive suites in Portland's US Bancorp Tower and populated them with fake Bloomberg terminals, corporate receptionists, and bogus international trade arbitration boards.
- The Modern "Melodrama": Adapting the Victorian "Badger Game" into corporate exposure cons. Instead of staging a husband catching a wife in a hotel room, the crew stages a counterfeit federal regulatory audit, an SEC freeze, or an environmental biohazard quarantine, prompting the mark to voluntarily surrender their encrypted offshore credentials to Nate's "protective" escrow trust.
By honoring Maurer's classical taxonomy while ruthlessly adapting its technical execution to the digital era, the writers of Leverage demonstrated that human psychology has not evolved since the 1920s. Greed, arrogance, and the desperate human desire to believe one is smarter than the system remain the master keys that unlock every vault.