Word: grifters
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Sante and Kenny Kimes are a walking, talking dime novel. This mother-and-son grifter team has conned, robbed and even enslaved. But the real problem, as an acquaintance observes, is that "the people they deal with keep coming up dead." The most famous of these may be Irene Silverman. This clunky but engrossing account of the Kimeses' relationship with the wealthy Manhattanite leaves us where the New York Police Department is now: with a seemingly notorious murder, but no body and only circumstantial evidence. Still, the book's catalog of doctored passports and errant blood drops shows why this...
Sure, it might be a little strange growing up with a wealthy mother who's a world-class grifter and uses a couple dozen aliases, but it's not as if there's no upside. You can torch a neighbor's house, terrorize a girlfriend, become a bona fide problem child, and your mother's in no position to pass judgment. And should you choose "criminal" as your grownup occupation, it's the ultimate flattery...
...Myles is woefully ignorant about people and kind to a fault, and fails to see that guys can be maggots," says Billy, who wears a constant woe-is-me grin that says low-grade grifter; watch your wallet. But while he is no genius, he was smart enough to realize that bringing Myles into this mess gives him a credibility the feds can't ignore...
...into (some would say assaulted) the language. Most of the new vocabulary has come fromdiscrete groups for whom a special jargon affords status and protection: students (barf), blacks (jazz, originally to copulate), the military (blow it out your barracks bag), alcohol user (crocked), drug user (crackhead) and the underworld (grifter...