Abstract
Artifice is everywhere. With personal online profiles, themed businesses, and advertisements all claiming to be true, people have to constantly sort through what is real, what is fake, and what falls somewhere in between. Many sociologists have responded by examining “authenticity,” or the idea that some places, products, or groups of people are more genuine than others. Most of this research has taken a social constructivist perspective and found that while people define authenticity in different ways, what is considered “authentic” is usually whatever people in power say is authentic. Still, it seems everyone has a claim to make, like why their favorite Italian restaurant serves the most authentic pasta dish. But as Terry Williams and Trevor Milton show in their revealing new book, The Con Men: Hustling in New York City, there are people out there who know that what they do is not real. Their job is to make others believe it so they can take full advantage of them. Deception is their business, and their goal is to get people to believe them for just long enough, before they figure out it was all a lie.
Williams and Milton present an array ofcharacters—mostly men, with some women—who are hustling to earn a living in today’s postindustrial city. We learn about the schemes of con artists, people who sell bottles of water and pirated DVDs on the street, vendors of counterfeit merchandise, crack dealers, numbers runners (an underground, chance-based lottery), apartment renters’ hustles, and even the practices of the NYPD and Wall Street investment bankers. They are mostly people of color and are either on the bottom rung of the socioeconomic ladder or close to it and have either been there before or can find themselves there at any time. Some risk imprisonment for their illegal actions, while others toe the legal line and/or hover under the radar of law enforcement (and some are law enforcement). Needless to say, most do not want to put themselves at risk of exposure, presenting a challenge for anyone wanting to learn more about them.
Readers familiar with Williams’s work will know he is a master at gaining access to hidden populations. He has studied teenaged cocaine dealers, participants in a crackhouse, and people who live in subway tunnels. Here he divides the labor with Milton. Once again using his remarkable talents at getting in, Williams studies the truly hidden folks: Maria, a collector at a banca (a secretive numbers location), and, most especially, Alibi Jones, a full-time con artist, and his crew. Milton mostly studies people with whom New Yorkers will be quite familiar, like Lee, who sells bottled water to people in cars at traffic lights; Otis, who sells DVDs on the street; and Daniel, whose family owns an electronics and souvenirs shop on Canal Street.
The book’s strongest chapters take readers inside the most hidden of these worlds and reveal the work strategies and lives of their characters. Alibi Jones is a master of deception. Usually with a small crew, he orchestrates street cons, which Williams and Milton equate with a form of public theatre, à la Goffman, complete with props, scripts, and roles. It is fascinating to see actual cons in action, as they show in Chapters Three and Four. One needs a healthy combination of greed, salesmanship, and acting skills to be an effective con artist (and Williams and Milton see their work as an art). Interestingly, Alibi and his co-deceivers justify their own actions by saying that victims are also greedy and would try to con them if given the chance. “You see,” says Alibi, “an honest man could not be conned” (p. 8). He can pick a stranger out of a crowd and just know he is greedy enough to fall victim to misdirection.
Just as fascinating is the case of Lorena, a notorious serial hustler of landlords. Lorena signs a lease, pays a couple of months’ rent, and then reports a variety of violations to the city, which means she does not have to pay her rent until they are resolved. She has lived mostly rent-free through this strategy for decades.
An issue with the book is also one of its selling points. Williams and Milton consider a hustler to be a kind of con artist (p. 8), when really it is the other way around. Short for “confidence man,” a con man gains the trust of unsuspecting victims to procure their money or goods. Alibi Jones is the book’s example of a con artist. Lee, the water seller, is not a con artist. He is simply hustling to pay his rent and college tuition by re-selling water he bought wholesale. He is not taking advantage of his customers. Most shoppers on Canal Street, New York City’s premier tourist destination for knockoff and counterfeit goods, know they are not buying the real deal and enjoy haggling over prices, which is part of the experience. And Ramon, a former crack dealer, certainly hustled during the crack epidemic, but he was selling an illegal product that practically sold itself to addicts. If the mark knows the game is taking place and gets something in return, then there is no victim, and it is not a con. Likewise, a numbers operation is a hustle, but there is no deception going on since everyone involved knows it is basic gambling and willingly participates. (In a nod to Ned Polsky’s classic work, a more accurate title may have been “Hustlers, Con Artists, and Others: New York City’s Underground Economy.”)
But the conceptual concerns do not detract from the vivid presentation of people who must hustle in today’s city to survive and are also perfect subjects for classroom discussions and debates. Are the tactics of deception that police officers use to get suspects to confess the same as when Alibi Jones pretends to be someone he is not to fleece strangers out of their money? Bernie Madoff certainly engaged in a massive con game when he ran his Ponzi scheme—an excellent example of a white-collar criminal using tactics of deception and sales skills typically found in the street. But is it accurate to call Wall Street as a whole a legal con game and call bankers con artists? Can we apply a concept based on interpersonal interaction to the collective activities within an industry? Greed and salesmanship may be requirements for being a con artist, but is everyone who is greedy and a good salesman a con artist?
What makes hustling such a great topic is its ubiquity in society. As the authors state, “the definition of hustling should be viewed along a continuum, legal to extralegal, nonviolent to violent” (p. 10). Practically everyone hustles to some degree. Questions about why some hustles are praised for their ingenuity while others are labeled deviant or criminalized, and why some people have to engage in certain types of hustles to survive, are excellent starting points for fundamental sociological conversations about inequality, social norms, and values. Williams and Milton successfully conjure these questions. With its colorful characters, spotlight on hidden social worlds, and highly accessible writing style, I can see instructors using this book in their social deviance and criminology courses to great effect.