The big store is the most elaborate structure in the history of confidence work, and the principle behind it is simple: rather than lying to the mark inside the world, build a small world in which everything is a lie.
Joseph Weil — called the Yellow Kid, for the gloves — worked Chicago from the 1890s and claimed to have taken eight million dollars over his career. His operations required premises, cast and script.
He would rent an empty office or storefront and fit it out overnight as a brokerage or a bank: desks, ticker, blackboard with quotations, telephones, clerks, a manager, a queue of customers. Every person in the room was an accomplice. The customers were shills who placed bets and collected winnings in front of the mark. The clerks took orders. The manager was authoritative and slightly reluctant to accept new business.
Into this the mark was brought by a roper — someone who had cultivated an acquaintance over days or weeks, done small favors, and then let slip a confidence.
The mechanism is worth stating in terms of the Asch experiments in chapter 8, because that is precisely what the environment achieves. Asch found that conformity to an obviously false consensus collapsed by around three quarters if a single other person dissented. The big store guarantees unanimity. There is nobody in the room to break it, because the room was built to that specification, and the mark's ordinary social-verification channel — glancing around to see whether anyone else finds this strange — returns nothing but confirmation.
The second element is the illicit-advantage frame, and it is what makes the fraud safe to run.
The mark is not told he is making a good investment. He is told, in confidence, that there is a delay in the wire service, that results are known before the odds close, that the arrangement is not strictly legal but is not really hurting anyone. The mark believes he is exploiting inside information.
This does three things. It explains the secrecy. It explains the urgency. And most importantly it makes the mark a participant in wrongdoing, which means he cannot consult a lawyer, a banker, or his wife — the outside check is closed off by his own conduct, and afterwards, when he has lost everything, he frequently does not report it.
Weil's own summary, in the memoir he published in 1948, is the most quoted line in the literature: the desire to get something for nothing has been very costly to many people who have dealt with me and with other con men. But I have found that this is the only way to work a con.
It is a self-serving line, and half true. Greed is the hook. The environment is the mechanism, and it would work on a person with no greed at all if you built the right one.