Word: conning
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...whatever his faults, Tim Geithner knows how to game America's confidence in the banking system. But does that mean the stress tests themselves are one big confidence game? Perhaps. The playwright David Mamet said such scams get their name not from the confidence the victim places in the con man, but the trust the con man pretends to place in the victim to elicit trust in return. By that standard, Geithner may be the most effective con man around, for better and for worse...
...Father Cutie" - the kind of hunk-in-a-collar whom smitten Catholic schoolgirls often nickname "Father What-a-Waste." In 1999, when Cutié burst onto the scene just four years after his ordination with his first television talk show on the Spanish-language Telemundo network, Cambia Tu Vida Con Padre Alberto (Change Your Life With Father Alberto), he remarked to the Miami Herald that celibacy is a "struggle, but it's a good struggle...
That's not to say, however, that Cutié is a liberal priest. His current television show, Hablando Con Padre Alberto (Talking With Father Alberto), airs on the conservative Catholic network EWTN (Eternal World Television Network), which was founded by the engaging but dogmatically stern nun Mother Angelica. Last December Cutié blasted Playboy's Mexican edition for what he called a "blasphemous" cover photo that depicted a model as the Virgin Mary. On his shows on the Radio Paz (Radio Peace) network and in his columns and books, like Ama de Verdad, Vive de Verdad (Real Love, Real Life...
...working for bigger operators. This is where both books dive headfirst into a huge pile of baloney. In 1932 a swashbuckling American journalist named Karl Decker published a piece in the Saturday Evening Post, in which he wrote that in 1914 in Morocco, he met an aristocratic con man, Marqués Eduardo de Valfierno, who told him that he had masterminded the theft as part of a scheme to sell six meticulously forged versions of Mona Lisa to six gullible millionaires. Each would be duped into believing he had secretly bought the picture that had just been famously stolen...
...chief credit goes to Baker, and not just because he's easy on the eyes. His (mildly) reformed flimflam man takes a cool, roguish pleasure in solving murders by reading the same tells and tics he once used to con people into thinking they were talking to dead loved ones. In one episode, he offhandedly tells a suspect woman what her type is - "sporty bad boys with a hidden masochistic streak" - and when she denies it, he grins and adds, matter-of-factly, "No, that was a bull...