The Art of the Steal Read Online Free

have sent it without a stamp. If I needed to get on a flight and it was fully booked, I knew that I could go to a phone, call the airline, and say, “Hi, do you have the manifest for flight 462? I’m Mr. Smith and I’m afraid I need to cancel my reservation.” There’s almost always a Smith or a Jones on just about any flight. Then I would call right back, ask if it were possible to get onto flight 462, and I’d be told, “Oh you’re in luck, we just had a cancellation.”
    If I needed to make a long distance phone call and couldn’t pay for it, I knew a way to do it. You’d look around for the first available corporate building and get their main number. Say it was 999-2000. You’d dial 999-2020, figuring that it had to be someone’s extension. You get Bill Kenner in human resources. You’d say, “I’m sorry, I must have the wrong extension, could you put me back to the switchboard?” When the operator came on, you’d say, “This is Kenner in human resources, I need to make a long-distance call, could you give me an outside line?” And then you’d make your call.
    It was obvious to me that every system had loopholes in it. I guess I thought in loopholes. And so I realized that I could teach people who handled checks and other legal documents how to protect themselves against fraud and theft. And I wanted to charge them.
    “Well, if they’ll do it, go right ahead,” my parole officer said. “It’s up to you. But not the law enforcement people. That’s got to be free.”
    I approached a suburban bank director and outlined what I had in mind. I was upfront in relating my sordid background as a chronic bilker of banks. I told him that I wanted to spend an hour one day after the bank closed to give a lecture to his employees. I told him that consumer fraud is committed today in the blink of an eye, and you needed to be prepared. If he felt the talk was worthless, I said, he didn’t owe me anything. If he found it beneficial, then he had to pay me five hundred dollars and make a few calls to colleagues at other banks and recommend that I come in and tutor their employees. I told him that if what I taught his people stopped just one bad check from crossing a teller’s window, then he would have more than made his five hundred dollars back. He told me to come on by.
    The ways of the world are truly unpredictable. He liked my presentation, and I got both the pay and the referrals. This first paid appearance as a “white-collar crime specialist” led to another lecture at another bank, and another and another. Banks heard about me in Dallas. Then I got calls from El Paso. Before long, I was in demand not only by banks, but also by hotels, airlines, and other businesses. In retrospect, it was a godsend that I was paroled to Houston, because Houston was booming and that allowed me to get off to a very good start.
    Twenty-five years have passed. I talk to all sorts of businesses today, and I’ve increased my fee. But to this day, I never take a dime from any law enforcement agency. I do a lot of lecturing to new agents at the FBI Academy, but I won’t accept any remuneration, not even my expenses. Part of it is, I’m just grateful to be where I am. And another part of it is that I feel this is one way I can make amends for my past.
    ONCE A CON ARTIST . . .
    And so I had turned things on their head. I had converted something negative into something positive. I had found a way to meld my expertise with social good. I still had all the needs that had made me a criminal. I had simply found a legal and socially acceptable way to fulfill those needs.
    In a certain sense, I’m still a con artist. I’m just putting down a positive con these days, as opposed to the negative con I used in the past. I’ve merely redirected the talents I’ve always possessed. I’ve applied the same relentless attention to working on stopping fraud that I once applied to perpetuating fraud.
    Living this way is much better than