I've been re-reading The Big Con, which describes con artists in the 20s and 30s pulling off scams which allegedly netted hundreds of thousands of dollars. Tonight I happened to catch a rerun of the movie "The Sting", which is basically playing "The Wire" game from that book; where they claim to be intercepting horse-race results; the mark can't lose if he puts on a big bet, but at the last minute "something goes wrong" and he loses the money.
To make it convincing, they hire dozens of "extras" to pretend they are in a bookmaker's shop; the book claims they could also be in a Stock Brokers, or one of a number of other "scenes" designed to fool the victim.
The "roper" finds the mark, and the "inside man" tells him the tale; but they also needed lots of other con men to play out the roles of ordinary people in a fake store.
The movie is basically just a chapter from that book, with a Hollywood adaptation (excellently done, it must be said).
The modern TV series "[Hustle](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hustle_(TV_series))" is based pretty much entirely on the book too.
Is there good evidence that long-cons like this existed, or was it just one big urban myth, which got documented in a really appealing way, and lives on in our minds to this day?
Another name for 'long con' is the confidence trick. Basically, you build a person's confidence in you until they trust you, and then make a run for it with their money.
These definitely existed, and no doubt do today. It's plausible that the number of them has been inflated, but it's fairly difficult to tell. People don't like admitting they've been tricked in such a manner, so not all of them will report it to the police.
One of the more notable long cons I know of is that of Gregor MacGregor, which happened in the early 1820s. Gregor MacGregor was named the Cacique of Poyais, an independent nation on the Bay of Honduras. He was sent to London to gather investors and settlers for the new nation. He had a fancy reception held for him to welcome him to London, set up offices, and went through the process of making an old comrade-in-arms of his the legate of Poyais. They opened an office, secured a loan on behalf of the government of Poyais, and sold parcels of land.
If you're starting to get suspicious, then congratulations, as you're far more worldly then most of the people buying land were. There was no country of Poyais. MacGregor went so far as to either write a book (or have someone write a book for him, it wasn't clear) by Captain Thomas Strangeways, which wrote about how lovely the country of Poyais was. Supposedly there was even an abandoned British colony, just sitting there waiting for people to live in it.
This would probably be the point where most people would take the money and vanish. MacGregor was not that smart though, and he held it out. A full two years after he'd first come to London, a ship of settlers set out for Poyais, having changed all their currency for Poyais's currency (which was of course worthless). Three months later, a second ship left with the same goal, bringing the number of settlers to either 240 or 270 (accounts vary). Of course when they arrived, they discovered nothing but jungle and the ruins of a settlement that was in no way livable. At least one person killed themselves, and several people were taken ill with tropical diseases and passed away.
A ship from Belize was sent to investigate, and was forced to rescue the settlers, informing him that there was no place named Poyais, and no place matching the descriptions they had been given. It had been three or four months since the settlers first arrived, and by the time they were rescued, more then two thirds of the settlers had passed away.
With the first settlers having left for Poyais in November of 1822, it wasn't until August of 1823 that the survivors (less then 50) arrived back in London.
Just in case this whole thing wasn't quite crazy enough, when the survivors returned, several gave interviews and published books... and the majority refused to place any blame on MacGregor. Instead they blamed more or less everyone but him. His advisers, the publicists, everyone.
MacGregor himself left for France, and largely repeated the scheme over again. France managed to catch on before things got too out of hand, and when people began requesting passports so they could go to a country that didn't exist, France seized the ship that MacGregor had purchased. By that point, he'd vanished, leaving another one of his army acquaintances (Gustavus Butler Hippisley) to take the fall for him.
Almost a full year later, MacGregor was finally caught. It took more then a year after that before he was finally tried.. and found innocent.
Only one of the people involved was actually sentenced to anything, and it wasn't MacGregor. There's debate on if MacGregor was the mastermind, or if the others knew that Poyais wasn't a place as well, but in the end he repeated the scheme several times, with much less success. He was never actually held accountable for what he'd done, and as far as records go, there was never any justice for any of the people he scammed.
There have been lots of books written about his absurd adventures, but there are a few available online. He has an entry in the 1893 edition of the 'Dictionary of National Biography', which can be found here, which covers most of his life but largely glosses over the Poyais fiasco.
A great book on the matter is "The Land that Never Was: Sir Gregor MacGregor and the most audacious fraud in history." by David Sinclair.
If anyone has any corrections, let me know. Most of what I wrote was from memory, with only quick searches, as my copy of The Land that Never Was is long gone.