Word: swaggies
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Looking for a bargain? Try Vincent Swaggi's store, where merchandise is stacked to the ceiling: household goods, toys, shoes, sweaters, suits, radios, electric toothbrushes, records, film, perfume, wigs, even ballet slippers. Ignore the department-store price marked on most items. Swaggi will give you "a real steal." But watch yourself. What you are reaching for is likely to be really stolen goods, hot as a smoldering coal. Vincent Swaggi is a fence...
...scrutiny of journalists, cameras and sociologists. Until recently, that is. In The Professional Fence (Free Press; $8.95), Sociologist Carl B. Klockars offers the latest word on the ancient practice of selling filched goods by introducing the reader to a true-life fence whom he has playfully named Vincent Swaggi. Klockars analyzes Swaggi's business methods, personnel problems and regular customers, and, best of all, allows his subject, who is an intelligent, fast-talking crook, to speak for himself...
...immigrant Sicilian feather importer, Swaggi began his career at age twelve selling fake "Parker" pens. Soon Eighth-Grader Vincent was pulling in "seventy or eighty bucks a week ... twice as much as my teachers." Flushed with the thrill of "the score," he passed up high school to study the practical wisdom of hustlers like "Willie the Wop," "Cigar Face Joe" and "Abe the Louse." During the Depression, Swaggi boasts he saved $10,000 in one year. By age 23 he had hustled his way through more than a decade of crime in four cities under two aliases...
Stolen Suits. Swaggi the fence knows his mark. "Nine out of ten people got larceny," he explains, "maybe even 99 out of 100 ... If the price is right and a man can use the merchandise, he's gonna buy." During World War II, Swaggi parlayed his philosophy of man into a thriving odd-lot business that provided a "front" for a lucrative swag mart that soon was fencing hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of hot goods a year-virtually unimpeded by the police. In more than 30 years as a fence, Swaggi, 60, has spent only eight...
...Swaggi offers no apologies. Says he: "The way I look at it, I'm a businessman. Sure I buy hot stuff ... but if I don't buy it, somebody else will." So the fence goes about his business, cunningly aware that good citizens and good thieves share a common goal: getting something for almost nothing...
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