Daily Blague

Am I the only one tingling with Schadenfreude at the unhappy lot of John W Worley? Are mine the only eyes that gleam at the punishment meted out to a "Christian psychotherapist" who capped a fifteen-year stint in the Army by driving the getaway car when some pals held up a liquor store (he was honorably discharged, however), and who declared bankruptcy in the Nineties? Do I feel that the government has overreached by seeking to imprison him for fiscal felonies, or that the jury was wrong to convict him? Well, actually, yes, I do.

What I learned from Matthew Zuckoff's article about Mr Worley in the current New Yorker, "The Perfect Mark," is that the particular long con that involves email - I receive two or three every week - from ostensible officials in Africa who need help moving money from corrupt government coffers to their own accounts is called a "419," after the section of Nigerian law that criminalizes such frauds. What I didn't learn is quite how it works. On several occasions, Mr Worley deposited checks payable by American businesses to other American businesses. The checks were forgeries or fakes, but how they or their originals were extracted from the American banking system for modification was not made clear. Mr Zuckoff does say that no Nigerian has ever been prosecuted under Section 419.

When I worked at E F Hutton, we in the Law Department used to have a high old time dealing with what we called "Arab Money Letters." The manager of a remote branch would come all the way to New York to try to persuade us in person to authorize the sending of a letter that would welcome a new client and assure him that Hutton would be a safe place for his deposit of X hundred thousand dollars. The managers could never see the harm in such statements, which was no surprise given their provincial background. It would never occur to them that the recipient, from whom they'd probably never hear again, would use the letters, written on Hutton letterhead, to swindle other investors by persuading them that there was a genuine deal afoot. One of the wire houses had had to pay fairly massive damages because of such a letter, a settlement that translated quickly into strongly-worded edicts.

But the managers were innocent souls, I am sure. Mr Worley clearly isn't. His email trail suggests that his sniff tester was working perfectly well but that his yen for easy money trumped it. Now he sits disgraced at Allenwood - for five years.

I am persuaded that prison is overdoing it as regards Mr Worley. He did wrong, but he was amply chastised by the complete failure of the scheme to put any money in his pocket. On the contrary, he was obliged to restore the funds that he helped to shuffle. The personal financial disaster and the shame, even if only his family knew, are punishment enough. The masters of this particular long con have made a lot of money and they remain at large. They tempted Mr Worley with great sophistication, deluding him at one point into believing that he was rescuing a lady in distress. They made him, in short, the perfect mark.

But appetite for risk is only part of it. A mark must be willing to pursue a fortune of questionable origin. The mind-set was best explained by the linguist David W. Maurer in his classic 1940 book, “The Big Con”: “As the lust for large and easy profits is fanned into a hot flame, the mark puts all his scruples behind him. He closes out his bank account, liquidates his property, borrows from his friends, embezzles from his employer or his clients. In the mad frenzy of cheating someone else, he is unaware of the fact that he is the real victim, carefully selected and fatted for the kill. Thus arises the trite but none the less sage maxim: ‘You can’t cheat an honest man’.”

The harsh punishment of weakness strikes me as deeply inhumane. But there will always be a majority of Americans who believe that it was right to throw Adam and Eve out of Paradise and let Satan run Hell.