American culture has always had a place, even a soft spot, for the grifter. P.T. Barnum became rich convincing 19th-century audiences that the desiccated, stitched-together corpses of a monkey and a fish was an exotic “FeeJee Mermaid.” Herman Melville warned of the seductions of the manipulative fraud type in his 1857 novel, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade . Unlike the common thief, the grifter was understood to be a small-scale swindler who relished preying on people’s emotions and trust to