36. Inside Stuff

The sharpie who got tired of selling the Brooklyn Bridge moved into the District and now sells the Washington Monument.

Suckers aren’t born at the rate of one a minute, Washington never does anything on time; but the Union Station and the airfield pour them out day and night. And God made them marks. For they are either simpletons with cow-dung on their boots or they are the conman’s dream, the lunk with larceny in his heart. Those who don’t come to Washington to gawk come to get. And the little chiseler is a setup for the bigger chiseler. The characters in “The Gilded Age,” by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner have shaved off their beards, but otherwise are still with us. Men with grandiloquent schemes, who think a Congressman from their county can land them a $10,000,000 contract for the quick conversion of a barn, are ready-made for the polished pros who can wrap that up for them and who set themselves forth as “expediters.”

They confide, sotto voce, that they have connections which they can’t even breathe about; they hint with delicacy that certain people must be reached, and for that purpose advance funds must be placed in hand, after which the expediter will gladly accept a small commission on the completed deal—as, if, and never.

That is only one, but the main one, of the lines. Nowhere else are there so many men and women who live in luxury and are guilty of vagrancy. In a community of nonproducers, where there is a minimum of tangible exchange, the nature of man breeds agents and agents’ agents, because the liveliest industry is “getting to” people who can or could deliver golcondas.

Those who are not big-time enough to know people can know people who know people, and do nicely on the far fringes. They case a “prospect” and work him on whatever he is after. His principal occupation will be waiting—waiting; thus he will have the time as well as the temperament to be plucked. In that atmosphere the crudest con-games flourish. Never trust a stranger in Washington. Gyp-and-clip carney operators who are run off the lot because they can’t shill a rustic to a ten-cent wheel of fortune, come here and take executive vice-presidents.