David W. Maurer

David Warren "Doc" Maurer (April 12, 1906 – June 11, 1981) was a professor of linguistics at the University of Louisville from 1937 to 1972. He was an acknowledged expert in American slang, especially the lingo of grifters, pickpockets, forgers, safecrackers and other underworld characters. He wrote more than 200 journal articles, professional papers, and books in the field of linguistics.

Maurer's best-known book was The Big Con (1940), one of his few works written for general readers. It details early-20th-century American practitioners of confidence games, both "big cons" (also known as "long cons") and "short cons". It was based on knowledge Maurer obtained from interviewing hundreds of grifters and con artists. The book provided source material for the Academy Award-winning original screenplay by David S. Ward for The Sting (1973), but in Maurer's view, The Big Con was not properly credited. In 1974, he brought a $10-million copyright-infringement lawsuit against Ward and Universal Studios. The suit was settled out of court in 1976 for an estimated $600,000.

Biography Growing up in New Philadelphia, Ohio, Maurer was an outstanding student with a flair for language. He graduated first in his high school class in 1924. He then went to Ohio State University where he became an English major. One summer during college he took a job on a North Atlantic trawler fishing off the coast of New England, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland. The experience resulted in his first published journal article, "Schoonerisms: Some Speech Peculiarities of the North-Atlantic Fishermen", and it enabled him to learn criminal argots "through meeting the rumrunners and smugglers who worked the coastlines of the Eastern United States."

In 1935, he earned a doctorate from Ohio State in Comparative Literature and was immediately hired as a professor in the university's English department. They settled on a farm in Jeffersontown, a suburb of Louisville, Kentucky, where Maurer had begun teaching at the University of Louisville. He would teach there for more than 35 years, devoting much of his academic career to studying the language of criminals, drug addicts, moonshiners, and other marginalized subcultures.

Maurer was described by his former student Stuart Berg Flexner as "big, with large shoulders and strong arms and hands, a man who can help pull in a heavy fishing net in freezing weather or push a car out of a muddy backroad on the way to an illegal still." To buttress Maurer's claim, a gambling consultant for the film revealed that The Big Con was in use on the set. Also, a Universal-supplied publicity booklet for The Sting contained quoted excerpts from Maurer's book. The lawsuit was settled out of court in 1976. The exact amount was not disclosed; however, the Los Angeles Times reported that it was in the vicinity of $600,000 ($ today). Maurer reportedly received half the amount after attorney fees and expenses.

In his last years, Maurer was plagued by health problems. A traffic collision in 1970 "severely limited his activity by unremitting pain and, ultimately, almost total blindness." The source material for The Big Con came from Maurer's correspondence, interviews, and informal chats with hundreds of underworld denizens during the 1930s. Among the con men he profiled were such colorful figures as Joseph "The Yellow Kid" Weil, Charles Gondorff, Dan the Dude, Limehouse Chappie, 102nd Street George, Fred the Florist, and the Big Alabama Kid. Maurer won the trust of grifters, who let him in on their language and methods.

In a chapter titled "The Big-Con Games", there is a lengthy section detailing "The Wire" (later demonstrated in The Sting). It was one of three types of big cons (along with "The Pay-Off" and "The Rag") that involved setting up a façade establishment known as a "big store", which in the case of "The Wire" was a fake off-track betting parlor filled with grifters posing as horse-race bettors. As with every flavor of con that Maurer elucidates, "The Wire" works by appealing to the mark's greed for dishonestly acquired money.

Sometimes, if the mark was not sufficiently enthusiastic, it would be necessary to utilize the "shut-out" (also demonstrated in The Sting). As Maurer describes it, The "shut-out" was considered a method for "stepping up the larceny in the veins of a mark".

The Big Con ends with a 25-page glossary of con man lingo. Maurer published a scholarly enlargement of The Big Con in his 1974 book, The American Confidence Man. – a collection of 20 articles by Maurer. This posthumously published volume, edited by Allan W. Futrell and Charles B. Wordell, includes a foreword by Stuart Berg Flexner describing Maurer's methods for researching criminal argot.