[glimmertwin]

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Why ? Because cons found someone who acted on trust and then violated that trust ? What is "respectable", the ferreting out or luring of a victim or the act of thievery ?


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While I wouldn't go as far as Johnny, and suspect that it was the writer in him making an entertaining rhetorical point rather than a sincere belief he was expressing, I do understand what he's talking about.

Like the poker player, the good con artist lives by their wits and makes their fortune from the sucker's greed. Remember the saying, you can't cheat an honest man? Almost all great cons live and die by that motto, so they tend to view their victims as somebody who would get over on them if they could, but they just aren't smart enough. This is precisely the same basis on which poker players justify their winnings.

The reason for this is that the con man wants to avoid people who will go to the police to report the con, so they set up a situation in which the sucker either thinks they are conning the con artist (e.g. three card monte etc.) or in which con man and sucker are co-conspirators in a larger crime that ultimately turns bad (e.g. the nigerian 419 scams, etc)

In that sense, con artists represent the elite of the criminal fraternity because they live by their wits, the crimes they commit have a sense of both drama and style about them because of the amount of intellectual effort involved, and the fact that each crime evolves differently and can't simply be learned by rote but requires a high level of creativity to be successful.

So while it's obviously wrong and an antisocial act, if you *are* going to root for an outlaw, give me a con artist over some bean-counting off-shore bookie any day of the week.