Apr

6

The new book The Mark Inside: A Perfect Swindle, a Cunning Revenge, and a Small History of the Big Con by Amy Reading may be of interest:

"[Norfleet] got swindled partly because of his intelligence. He was a 54-year-old self-made man. He had gone from being an itinerant cowhand to owning his own cattle ranch, and the way that he grew successful was to do business with a handshake with other honest, straightforward men. And those were exactly the qualities that the swindlers, who encountered him in Dallas when he went there on a land deal, used to take him for everything that he was worth. … When he met Joe Furey, Furey represented himself as a broker on a stock exchange — someone with inside knowledge of this arcane financial world that was very different [than] the world of cattle. So, it's not so much that his moral radar was off as that he thought he was vaulting up into a new plateau of financial savvy. And they flattered his knowledge and his intelligence."

From an NPR article about it.

Reading's uses material from a 1924 book by Norfleet entitled Norfleet: The Actual Experiences of a Texas Rancher's 30,000-Mile Transcontinental Chase After Five Confidence Men.


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