Sometimes we met our victims at saloons. Velica would be talking to some Italian immigrant who had money, when I would turn up and be introduced. Treating all around and flashing a roll of bills I could soon win the sucker's respect and confidence, and make him ante up on any old con. One day in a saloon in Newark we got an Italian guy for one hundred and fifty dollars. Before he left the place, however, he suspected something. We had promised him the position of foreman of a gang of laborers, and after we got his dough we could not let well enough alone, and offered to give his wife the privilege of feeding the sixty Italians of whom he was to be the foreman. I suppose the dago thought that we were too good, for he blew and pulled his gun. I caught him around the waist, and the bartender, who was with us, struck him over the head with a bottle of beer. The dago dropped the smoke-wagon and the bartender threatened to put him in prison for pulling a rod on respectable people. The dago left the saloon and never saw his money again.
About this time, too, I had an opportunity to go into still another lucrative kind of swindling, but didn't. It was not conscience either that prevented me from swindling the fair sex, for in those days all touches,--except those made by others off myself--seemed legitimate. I did not go in for it because, at the time it was proposed to me, I had enough money for my needs, and as I have said, I was lazy. It was a good graft, however, and I was a fool for not ringing in on it. The scheme was to hire a floor in a private house situated in any good neighborhood. One of the mob had to know German, and then an advertisement would be inserted in the _Herald_ to the effect that a young German doctor who had just come from the old country wanted to meet a German lady of some means with a view to matrimony. A pal of mine who put such an advertisement in a Chicago paper received no less than one hundred and forty five answers from women ranging in age from fifteen to fifty. The grafters would read the letters and decide as to which ladies they thought had some money. When these arrived at the office, in answer to the grafters' letters, they would meet two or three men, impersonating the doctor and his friends, who had the gift of "con" to a remarkable degree. The doctor would suggest that if the lady would advance sufficient money to start him in business in the West it would be well. If he found she had plenty of money he married her immediately, one of his pals acting the clergyman. She then drew all her money from the bank, and they went to a hotel. There the doctor leaving her in their room, would go to see about the tickets for the West, and never return. The ladies always jumped at these offers, for all German women want to marry doctors or clergymen; and all women are soft, even if they are so apt to be natural pilferers themselves.