The Con Men: Hustling in New York City

The government should neither participate in nor be a party to, crime nor break the law in order to enforce it.

—Gary Marx, Undercover: Police Surveillance in America

There are eight million stories in the naked city; this has been one of them.” This now famous line from the 1960s crime drama The Naked City suggests the wide variety of illicit tales left untold in a city of (at the time) eight million residents. Although it is considered to be the “safest big city in America” today, New York City was infamous for its high crime in the 1980s. Stories such as the tale of Bernard Goetz—who shot four teenagers on a Manhattan train after they allegedly attempted to mug him—became a part of New York City lore. Anyone could be a potential victim; anyone could be a hero, anywhere in the city. Although he was eventually convicted of possession of an illegal weapon, Goetz became a champion for some.

New York City was—and still is, in some places—a tough town. The police department tripled in size during Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s two terms. Between 1993 and 2005, reported crime in New York declined by 46 percent;¹ arrest and incarceration rates began to skyrocket. New York City police officers, heralded as heroes, ushered in a new era of safety and (almost) worry-free city living. But crime scholars have noted that the number of police on the beat or the force has no causal connection to the reduction in crime. Frank Zimring, a noted criminologist who has been researching crime since the 1970s, has shown that 80 percent of crime reduction in the city—such as robbery and burglary—could not be attributed to policing changes.²

Thanks to this increase in street policing, however, much of the visible con game culture—such as the ubiquitous three-card monte players, who enjoyed a heyday in the 1980s—was pushed off the streets and into the darker corners of the city. Giuliani rebranded a long list of nominally tolerated social behaviors—such as vagrancy, panhandling, and selling cheap homemade goods—as “quality-of-life crimes,” adding to the city’s arrest and conviction totals while simultaneously “cleaning up” sidewalks, vestibules, and parks—and, some worried, trampling personal freedoms. The offenses Giuliani targeted often demoralized community residents and particularly affected business people because they were seen as creating physical disorder. The game of three-card monte, for example, required cardboard boxes and playing cards, which were usually discarded in the street once the game was done. But more importantly, it encouraged many locals and tourists alike to gather on the street to watch, often blocking sidewalks, littering, getting into street fights, and causing other “disturbances of the peace,” which rubbed many middle-class sensibilities the wrong way.

Some critics saw this criminalization of minor offenses as a war against the poor, with the police leading the vanguard. Loic Wacquant illustrated how government began attacking the least advantaged in our society in the name of safety in Punishing the Poor:

Out of a proclaimed concern for efficiency in the “war on crime” … this discourse overtly revalorizes repression and stigmatizes youths from declining working-class neighborhoods, the jobless, homeless, beggars, drug addicts, and street prostitutes … designated as the natural vectors of the pandemic of minor offences that poison daily life and the progenitors of “urban violence” bordering on collective chaos.³

One could argue that the poor were forced to resort to these so-called offenses because they were searching for creative ways to make a living during a time of deindustrialization, unemployment, and economic downturns.

Some experienced police officers have firsthand knowledge and a clear memory of these times, as I (Trevor Milton) discovered one summer afternoon at a Manhattan playground. While I was watching my son, I entered into a chance conversation with a retired police officer named Frank (a pseudonym), who was watching his grandkids. The small talk about kids and then eventually about the work we both did led to his telling me about his recent retirement from the police department. I told him I was writing a book about con games.

Frank said he had come across thousands of hustles and cons in his day, and in a situation qualitative researchers call “ethnographer’s luck” asked if we could meet again and talk about his experiences. He explained the various cons that police officers engage to get food and other things free from stores and position themselves for lucrative jobs (security and otherwise) both on and off the books.

I wondered why a retired police officer was willing to talk to me. Is one of the tricks of the trade of ethnographic research to find people who are retired from their profession, who would be more willing to talk because they feel that they have less to lose? His tales of NYPD theft and precinct turf wars sounded like something one would see in a movie; actually to hear a police officer corroborate these stories as reality was another matter.

We arranged to meet one on one in a Manhattan park, where there would be no distractions. (He seemed to feel better meeting in an outdoor space as opposed to a place more enclosed like a restaurant.) Frank—roughly mid-forties, short but muscular—liked to show off his chiseled arms with a short-sleeved NY Giants t-shirt. Born and raised in the Bronx, he had a typical New York swagger and frequently flashed his gap-toothed smile as we sat on a park bench and watched passersby. I asked him about the most recent cons he had come across. He stretched his legs out onto the walking path before answering. Then his low baritone voice began to fill the park.

THIEVING HUSTLES

“One I was thinking of the other day was guys stealing from one precinct and selling in another.” He sat up straight and started drawing imaginary lines with his hands. “So you have the borderline between precincts. Some precincts border others that are more middle to lower class. So like black and Hispanic neighborhoods. And the adjoining precinct would have more of an upper-class clientele … or residents. In the lower-class neighborhoods, they have bodegas. In the upper-class neighborhoods, they have delis.”

I chimed in, “And grocery stores.”

“And grocery stores. Yup, yup. So these … not bums … I think they are more opportunists than anything. They go to the ghetto neighborhoods—the bodegas—and they take orders. And with those orders, they go to like the Duane Reades [in upscale neighborhoods], and they steal exactly what the bodegas want. They come back, and they already have it sold already.” Frank folded his arms. “So it’s not a matter of a crackhead saying, ‘Hey, I’ll sell this to you for 50 cents.’ No. It’s ‘Here’s your merchandise. I brought you your merchandise. You set the price.’ And that’s it. It’s a done deal.”

I questioned, “I get the impression it’s like young kids, like nineteen or twenty years old.”

“No.”

“So these are like old men?”

Frank shrugged his shoulders, “Some, yeah. If I had to get an age range. I’d say between eighteen and forty.”

I hesitated before my next question. “So do you think these guys are like—I’d hate to use this word—but like fiends [addicts]?”

Frank waved his hands. “No! No, they’re not. Some of them are not drug related, at all. That’s just their hustle.”

“So you mean like …” I pointed to a drugstore across the street. “Take this Duane Reade for instance. I feel like I wouldn’t be able to steal from there, even if I had the skills for it.”

With one arm still folded, Frank pointed to the street. “Okay. There’s a Duane Reade where there is a train stop at the back entrance, which is an entrance that the public can use. The main entrance is on Broadway, but you have to go around the block to enter the train. Now, if you had somebody working with you, to know when the train is coming, right? The Enfamil baby formula—which is very expensive—is always in the back. But this back door is left open. The store opens at 8 a.m., and security doesn’t get there until 9 a.m.”

I furrowed my brow. “What?”

“Exactly! They’ve [Duane Reade] been told many many times [to beef up their security in the morning]. And the only person watching the door is a pharmacist. And he’s not jumping over a counter to save Enfamil.” We both laughed.

“And someone is looking down the [train] tunnel?”

Frank shook his head. “Someone is sending some kind of signal saying, ‘The train is coming.’ They have a black bag. They pack it up. There’s one shelf that has all the Enfamil. And each of those cans is like thirty dollars. They come with the bag, they drop it on the floor.” He mimicked an arm dragging across a shelf. “They go fdddrrrromp! Fix it, grab it. Walk right out the store. You know? The shelf is here, and the pharmacist is here. So the pharmacist can’t see you until you get near the door. They see you walking out, but the door’s right here. So, he’s gone. He runs down the steps. Hops on the train, and he’s gone.”

I joked, “They might want to lock that door.”

Frank laughed and slapped his knee. “They’ve been told that, and they say because of the neighborhood it’s in, the people that shop there are more likely to feel confined if that door is locked.”

Much of what Frank described sounded like crimes of opportunity rather than premeditated malice. As we have discussed throughout this book, the criminologists Derek Cornish and Ronald Clarke proposed in their “rational choice” theory that even an average person could become a criminal if the right opportunity offered an undeniable reward in the right moment.⁴ Since the 1990s, the NYPD has been utilizing this principle by attempting to reduce criminal opportunities and increasing punishments for all kinds of offenses, thereby in theory driving the average person to think “it’s not worth the trouble.” But for every preventative measure, there is a loophole, and con artists and hustlers seek these out.

Frank illustrated this fine line between opportunity and punishment by discussing department-store scams. “There’s a DSW [shoe store] and a Burlington Coat Factory in Union Square. There’s a homeless guy—this one I know for a fact—and homeless kids who live in the park. And there are people that come up to them—regular people—who come up to them and they take orders. They take orders for what the people want from DSW.”

“And people know to approach these kids?”

“Yeah. They walk up to them and say, ‘This is what I want.’ I don’t know how they—the kids—know the exact article of clothing.” Frank did not disclose what type of commission they receive in exchange.

Aware of the rules intended to curb theft, I wondered if these kids understood the difference between petty larceny and grand larceny. Petty larceny is a class A misdemeanor, which is punishable by a small fine; grand larceny theft (theft of goods worth five hundred dollars or more) is a class B felony—punishable by up to three years in prison. I kept this in mind with my next question. “So are they smart enough to stop at $490, or do they just go for it?”

Frank giggled. “I don’t think they’re smart enough; I just think the orders are not big enough. I think that they take what they can because there’s not enough room to fit that much in. I don’t think it’s a matter of planning; I think it’s a matter of luck. And chance. Unless you are stealing a very expensive item or from a specialty store. You know? DSW is not going to have a thousand-dollar jacket.”

I slouched on the bench, staring at the nearby cityscape. “That’s funny to me because stealing from a clothing store is like stealing from a bank. Like I wouldn’t be able to get away with it nowadays. But I guess there’s always some loophole, or there’s some area where you can slide in.”

Frank flashed his gap-toothed grin and threw me a curveball. “Well, if you want to go to the bank-robbing end of it, they do that, too.”

Bank robberies in Manhattan had been making news headlines at the time, but they still seemed technically impossible to me. “What do you mean?”

Frank slapped me on the back, leaving what I imagined was a mild bruise. “And you would think in Manhattan it would be hard to rob banks, but they do it!”

From my vantage point, it appeared that banks were the ultimate examples of the logic of the rational-choice perspective: given the bulletproof glass, the armed guards, the surveillance cameras, the marked bills, the silent alarms, the quick police response, and even the dye packs in the bags of money, no rational person would never attempt to rob them. Yet, regularly, someone robs a bank in Manhattan and gets away with it.

Frank smirked and put his hands in the air. “They do it all the time. And what they do is, they don’t get greedy. They don’t put on a mask and hold a gun. They walk in with usually a cap and glasses and walk up to the teller, but before that, the street hustle is this: before they do that, they must have some sort of police scanner or something … they know how many people are working. How many police cars are out there. They know. And they know what frequencies each police precinct’s radios are working with. I’m positive. Because the way they run—”

I wasn’t sure what he was getting at. “So, they are spaced out far enough from the precincts?”

Frank grabbed a nearby stick and started drawing a diagram into the dirt next to the bench. “So it’s always like two precincts. Some, very rarely, will use three precincts. So if I transmit over my radio that someone just robbed a bank at this corner, my precinct and an adjoining precinct will get that call.” He drew a vertical line in the dirt and marked two x’s to the left of the line. “They’ll hear it. But, if the borderline is the next block—say our precincts are divided by east and west and we both stop north to south on each side of the line—they will rob this bank and run that way.” He pointed to the right of the line.

I confirmed his meaning. “Running away from the second precinct.”

“Running toward the precinct that is not receiving the call coming over the radio. It will eventually come over their frequency, but it will take five minutes—which is enough time for people to get where they are trying to get, and then they are gone. Their getaway car and their getaway plan is on that side of the block. They do it a lot. So you’ll notice that the calls—the banks that are getting robbed are on the edges of bordering precincts that don’t transmit to each other.”

I thought for a moment about past news reports about bank robberies.

Frank continued, “And it can’t be coincidental. And in addition to that, before they go into the bank, they’ll make a bogus phone call on something happening on the other end of the precinct.” He pointed to the other side of the park. “Over there. So everyone is rushing to fly over there. And by the time we get back here to get a description, he’s gone. Because he’s already in this precinct which does not transmit to this third precinct, and now he has double the time. And he’ll get like a ten-minute run. Or a fifteen-minute run.”

Stroking my chin. “That’s pretty smart. So you say they don’t get greedy, so they grab what?”

Frank dropped the stick and sat back into the bench. “They just take whatever is there. They take—like the most I’ve ever heard is like $24,000.”

Much of the con-artist activity Frank explained fit the ideology of rational choice. Police surveillance (or lack thereof in certain spots) and public policy allow opportunities for criminal behavior, and the aforementioned perpetrators oblige. But this also reflected a sign of the times. New Yorkers live under ever-increasing amounts of surveillance and a strict penal code. Getting away with a crime involves seeing the cracks in the foundation of the law, or knowing how to get over on someone who can open a door for you, or knowing someone that will allow you to get away with it in the first place.

COP CONS

In his book Undercover: Police Surveillance in America, the sociologist Gary Marx argued that police and state officials should be held to a higher standard than the average citizen: “The state should not teach bad morals lessons or engage in conduct that shocks the conscience.”⁵

Of course, police officers are not shielded from criminal opportunities and are not immune to greed and corruption. The New York City Police Department has a long list of allegations of corruption and brutality and cons and hustles of their own. In 2014, 106 former NYPD and New York City Fire Department employees were caught in one of the largest disability fraud cases in the city’s history. Since 1988, these officers conned the city out of $400 million in tax dollars by faking disabilities. Another cohort of cop con artists claimed to have suffered from “crippling emotional damage” after being first responders to the terrorist attacks in downtown Manhattan on September 11, 2001. It was later found out that many of the recipients of disability benefits had never even been to Ground Zero.

Former NYPD officer Joseph Esposito—who advised officers and firefighters how to fake disabilities in exchange for a fee—was dubbed the ringleader of the fraud and eventually pled guilty to first-degree grand larceny and agreed to cooperate with the Manhattan district attorney.⁶ Even the “finest” and “bravest” citizens of New York are susceptible to crime if the right opportunity comes along.

I asked Frank if he would volunteer any stories of police corruption. “So is there such a thing as a police con? Or a police hustle?”

Frank smiled so big that I couldn’t see his eyes. “Of course.” He slouched in the bench and folded his arms, allowing some of the memories to come to him. “Well, the con is like, the con is the classic good guy/bad guy. That’s the con. That’s the biggest one. Basically, anytime you say anything to a police officer, it’s on the record. It’s never off the record. The biggest con that police officers have is … say you get pulled over … they call it a ‘spontaneous utterance.’ Spontaneous utterance is exactly what it sounds like … ”

“On my part as the driver?”

“It’s the person in the car. It’s the person stopped on the street. When they say something—unprovoked—that can harm them in a case. So basically—and this is everywhere—worldwide. Spontaneous utterance is something that can be used against you in a court of law. You know it’s a part of one’s Miranda rights.”

“My understanding then is that without the Miranda, then it’s inadmissible in court.”

Frank smiled. “Except for spontaneous utterance.”

“So that’s a lot of gray area.”

“Right! In other words, the biggest con that the police department has is getting you to say … getting you to admit guilt without specifically asking you a question. Like, ‘Did you do it?’ ”

“To me that sounds like that has to happen before the arrest.”

Frank straightened up in his seat. “No, no. If I have probable cause to arrest you, okay? Let’s give the example of shoplifting. Security caught you but didn’t catch you on camera. Security caught you stealing something. But you didn’t pass the register. You only put it in your bag. And now security stops you and says, ‘Yeah, he was going to pass the register.’ But you were right at the register, so it’s like an iffy thing. I mean, you put it in your bag and you were about to walk out. And you the thief are basically saying, ‘Hey, I was here to buy stuff, and I put it in my bag and I forgot to pay. And as soon as they stopped me, I was turning around to pay.’ So that’s like an iffy area because—”

I interrupted, “Can that be counted as an utterance?”

“Yes, but … but what you were saying is that you ‘weren’t stealing,’ you were ‘coming back to pay.’ Now … your nerves are all in a bunch. And you’re thinking, ‘I’m not going to say anything. I’m not going to fuck this up.’ So what I do is, I come in. I calm things down. I’m like, ‘Don’t worry about it. Shoplifting is fucking nothing. It’s stupid. You know.’ Frank motioned to a fake chair, ‘Just have a seat … Hey you want a cup of water? You want this?’ ” Frank stood and shifted around as if he were adjusting an imaginary police duty belt. “I wait. And then later on, I get to know you because I have to ask you questions. And so then I’m like, ‘This is stupid. This guy last week got caught stealing. And you know? It’s the same charge whether you admit it or not. I told the guy last week’ … So I’m lying at this point … ‘It’s the same charge. And you know what the guy did? He told me the fucking truth. And you know what I did for him? I let him out. I fucking let him out because you know what? I was thinking, this guy is honest. He’s telling the truth.’ And then you go … ” He pointed at me.

I laughed. “Ding! Light bulb!”

“You’re thinking, ‘This guy is a good guy. He let this other guy go. I think I’m going to tell him that I did it.’ And then, boom! That’s it. You’re done. Because once you say that—now, I didn’t ask you a question. I didn’t ask you if you took the stuff.”

“Oh, because otherwise an attorney needs to be there. Or a confession.”

“Well, yeah. In other words, you need to be Mirandized. So that term spontaneous utterance is actually written in our manuals and in the law. Spontaneous utterance is admissible in court … before you get Mirandized. So that is a con. That is a con that police use all the time.”

I smirked. “I get it. So the judge asks, ‘Officer did you ask him?’ ”

“ ‘No.’ ”

“ ‘No?’ ”

“ ‘Nope.’ … I mean there’s dirty cops who lie, but you know … That’s not a con, that’s … ”

I laughed. “Well, now you’re conning the judge.”

“That’s just a lie.” Frank held up his hands submissively. “But there’s ways to get around it. Unless you are a seasoned criminal, I mean, seasoned criminals are not stupid. But the average criminal, is not, you know [that smart].”

It was interesting to hear Frank’s quick admission that officers use the language of the law to their advantage, even if they are doing something unethical. The NYPD has had an image problem for decades. Many New Yorkers view members of the NYPD at best as dishonest and at worst as outright corrupt. For example, at the time of my interview with Frank, the NYPD was caught in the midst of a ticket-fixing scandal. It was found that there was a “systematic practice citywide”⁷ of making traffic tickets disappear for offending police officers and their friends.

I decided to continue questioning Frank. “Do you know of situations where officers use their uniforms to their advantage? Use their badge to their advantage?

Frank laughed and stomped his feet on the ground. “Yes! There’s officers who do things that are against our policies, very against our policies. One where you walk into—I’ve seen this before—one where you walk into, say, a restaurant. It’s kind of the unwritten rule that you will get a discount on your food.”

“For free?”

“Some … Now, that’s one thing. The problem is, is when they don’t. They don’t do—it’s called ‘do the right thing’—when people don’t do the right thing … If they charge them full price in a restaurant—I don’t know if that’s a con or a hustle—but they [the cops] will go back and hit the place.” Frank explained that if an officer feels slighted, he will send his underlings back to look for code violations, something most restaurants are incredibly afraid of, because the grading system can make or break a restaurant.

Frank continued, “There’s a lieutenant at my job—and I don’t know how he gets away with this.” Frank leaned in closer and lowered his voice. “There was a hotel that opened up. Now this hotel was built from the ground up. Talk about millions and millions of dollars. This lieutenant walks up to the head of security—who he doesn’t realize is a retired police inspector—he walks up to him, and because the hotel opened up in what he considers to be his backyard, he walks up to him and says, ‘Hey, this is what I’m going to do for you. I’m going to make sure you don’t get summonses. I’m going to make sure that you’re taken care of. The whole parking thing. Inside, you’re not going to get visits.’ And so the head of security told me and said, ‘What the fuck is up with this guy? I could have taken his job.’

“So the cop says that to him, and the security guy says, ‘Do you have any idea who I am?’ He said, ‘No, why?’ He said, ‘I’m a retired inspector … from such and such precinct.’ And the conversation ended there.” Frank laughed. “He was ‘this is who I am. Get the fuck out of my face.’ And that was the end of it. He left and he never spoke with him again. But … on the flip side of that, there are people who have been under his command, and this guy has been with a girlfriend … he’s married, so this is a girlfriend of his … drinking and eating. And they haven’t done the right thing [i.e., the restaurant has not offered him a discount]. So he’s on duty, drinking [alcohol] and eating, and he’s called his cops—those under him—to come in and find violations with the restaurant. In other words, he’s sitting down eating, and he says, ‘Hey, so let me get the bill.’ Here comes the bill. The bill’s the full boat. So he looks at it, pays it, puts it back. Five minutes later, his guys come in, shut down the place for like hours … and if you shut down the place for hours on a Saturday night, the place is losing a lot of money. He gave them all these summonses, violations, this, that, and the other.”

I was shocked. “I mean, I feel like it’s a hustle if the message is out. Like, ‘That’s Officer so-and-so, make sure he gets a free meal. Or he’ll fuck with us.’”

“Well, what this guy doesn’t understand is that he’s not liked by these owners. And this is why I don’t understand why he’s still employed. I don’t understand why he still has his job. And the only conclusion I can come to, is if and when he’s getting in trouble, he has what’s called a hook—someone higher up that he knows—which means what they’re doing is shutting down the phone calls.”

I added, “He must be somebody’s favorite.”

“Yeah. Somebody’s favorite who’s connected. And maybe he’s connected to the officer.” Frank sat for a moment, trying to think of other examples.

I coached him along. “How about something where people got stuff on the side. But it’s advantageous to be an officer in order to do that stuff on the side.”

Frank leaned back and spoke without hesitation. “The security business.”

“But that’s sounds legit to me … unless you are talking about something off the books.”

He scoffed. “Well there’s that too. Say you’re a cop. And you are a lieutenant or captain or whatever, and I work here.”

Frank pointed toward the park, then in the general direction of some restaurants. “And I always go to lunch there, and right next to it is a building that has security. After some time working here, I make friends, I make connections, and I say, ‘Okay, well, I’m going to get a job there.’ And the hustle is finding a job off the books and also securing yourself a position in an agency when you retire.”

He mentioned that the head of security at a major university was a retired deputy inspector. “Now you cannot tell me that he did not secure that job before he retired. He stuck his tentacles into that school and he got there. All the security underneath him are ex-NYPD officers. That’s a perfect example. That guy used his position in the NYPD to secure a position after he retired. That’s against NYPD regulations. But because he was deputy inspector, nobody looked into it. Nobody cared to look into it.”

I asked, “And his qualifications are?”