Sympathy for the Con Man

In New York City in 1849, a man named William Thompson stole a gold watch just by asking for it. Strolling down a busy Broadway, Thompson approached a stranger with a strange question: “Have you confidence in me to trust me with your watch until tomorrow?” Eager to prove his good faith, the stranger handed his watch over. Tomorrow came; Thompson did not. As far as street crimes go, it was a funny and largely forgettable one. Thompson himself has been largely forgotten, but he nonetheless retains the unique distinction of being the first so-called confidence man—named for “using the word confidence in his swindle,” as the scholar Johannes Dietrich Bergmann wrote in his landmark 1969 article on the origins of the phrase.

There’s a little of Thompson in every con man, whether real or fiction. Swindlers, grifters, and tricksters are everywhere in American literature and folklore, from Davy Crockett to the likes of Jay Gatsby and Augie March. Thompson himself was a probable inspiration for the inscrutable scammer in Herman Melville’s novel . Now, another cast of cons appears in , , and , all