Word: conning
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This grisly old con-man of Mark Twain's imagining was soon proved a fraud and ended his brief reign riding out of a Mississippi River town on a rail. But the real-life claims of another pretender to the same identity were still in dispute last week. When he first arrived in Paris on May 26, 1833, he was a balding watchmaker with a thick mustache and a fringe of chin whiskers. His passport identified him as Karl Wilhelm Naundorff of Weimar, but the passport, its bearer promptly explained in almost incomprehensible French, was merely a blind; Karl...
...Con. This argument would be hard to answer in purely military terms if the U.S., by striking first, could (as General Anderson seemed to suggest) really destroy Russia's atomic capabilities. But by "atomic nests" Anderson obviously meant Russian A-bomb factories. He could hardly hope to destroy the stockpile of Russian bombs already made and hidden. Nobody knows how large this stockpile is; probably it is more than 10 and less than 60-enough to give the Kremlin a means of dreadful retaliation...
...Con. But the Russians in 1953 will have increased their atomic stockpile, thus materially reducing the present U.S. advantage in atomic weapons...
...Con. Nothing could be more realistic than the fact that the longer Europe stays defenseless (while the U.S.S.R. makes A-bombs), the more the danger of war increases-and the greater grows the threat that the West would lose...
Months later, when Shephard was reduced to selling rugs made by the blind because nobody else would trust his con's record, he got a wire from the Burns people. A check-passer of his general description, Edward Sullivan, the "phantom forger," had been picked up, they said. Shephard made his way to Wisconsin, where Sullivan had been sentenced, came face to face with a man of his same general build and coloring, his same long face and heavy jaw-but by'no means a twin in looks. The real "phantom" looked at photostats of the checks which...