What I loved about Jay Robert Nash’s (1976) Hustlers & Con Men was the way it depicted scamming as a parasitic ecosystem curling through the equally carnivorous American sales monster. Nash focuses on individual scammers and loosely categorizes them, ending with a glorious “chronology of cons.”
In each mini bio the swindler eventually gets his or her comeuppance, and on their day in court they blab about how it wasn’t the money that lured them in, it was the thrill of conjuring another story and contouring it perfectly to fit a mark.
My favorite took place in 1950 in Wetumka, Oklahoma, a town of about a thousand not too far from my old teaching post in Tahlequah.