CONNED! (Bandits, pandits, and P.T. Barnum)

May 28, 2017 Countryman, Features / Columnists

By Dennis Nichols
Our country folk may or may not be the most gullible people in the world, but some of us are right

Dennis Nichols

up there with American showman P.T. Barnum’s suckers that are ‘born every minute’. They’re everywhere; whether we’re seen as smart, stupid, primitive or enlightened, and regardless of any other man-given labels, we’re all susceptible to The Con! And the con man or woman! In the arena of one-upmanship there are as many kinds of The Con as there are The Conned. I was one of the latter, and I thought I’d left that kind of naïveté behind. Wrong!
Lately we’ve been having, at least in the media, some Columbus-like discoveries about a couple of so-called fake pandits in our midst. News Flash – The fake healers, pandits, bandits, obeah practitioners, and con men have always been around, as close to us as family and familiar faces, or as novel as a visage of oriental splendour.
Some are adorned with the trappings of executive office, some flaunt clerical garb or an evangelistic flair; others dress in flowing robes of mystic enlightenment; but there’s also the overburdened labourer, the underpaid civil servant and the harried housewife who’ve had an epiphany as to how they can escape drudgery and embrace ‘spiritual’ wealth.
Some people believe life is just one big con game in which a handful of suave, super manipulative puppeteers string along masses of mindless marionettes as they play an insidious version of hide-and-seek (You seek, I hide; you get wisdom, I gather wealth; we both win) Now this is not going to be an incisive commentary on the shady world of players and the played; that may be a waste of mental energy. Better some comic relief from the more serious news with a couple of anecdotes, which although quite funny, have potentially harmful social and psychological consequences.
I was still in my teens when I lost a precious two-bob (50 cents) to a three-card hustler at the Bourda Cricket Ground. I remember trembling with excitement, so sure about the prospect of doubling my spending money; so enthralled by the flitting hands and flashing cards; so trustful of my own sharp eyesight – and then, the weird sense of shock and disappointment, followed by embarrassment and a brand new feeling – violation. Later, hungry and angry, the flashing bat of Roy Fredericks was small consolation to my downcast mood. But I’d won wisdom, and I’d never be caught again; well …
The next two cameos could have ended disastrously. It was the early nineteen-seventies, and an attractive young woman, fresh from the country, was walking along Regent Street, downtown, when she was approached by a stranger several years her senior. He had a self-effacing charm, she later told me, as he made his pitch. He’d come from ‘foreign’ with a suitcase full of ladies’ clothes he’d brought for a nice Guyanese girl he’d met some months earlier. He couldn’t find her at the address she’d given him and was tired of walking around hoping to spot her somewhere. Then the clincher; my friend looked a lot like that girl, and because he had to leave the country shortly, he wanted to give her the suitcase with everything in it. That was it; she accepted the offer and an invitation to meet him at his hotel later that day.
But she made the fortunate mistake of telling her older sister who’d been living in Georgetown long enough to shake her head in disbelief at her sibling’s gullibility. She gave her a tongue lashing that brought the latter to tears and a promise of ‘never again’ then hugged and told her why she was being so hard on her. She added, with words colourfully borrowed from their mother’s country wisdom, that she would have been putting both her virginity and her life at risk. Like me, my friend gained instant wisdom. Maybe not for long!
Several years later she found herself walking, with a slight limp, on North Road. A predator saw weakness and made his move. It was another ‘foreigner,’ a Surinamese no less, accent and all. He was a spiritual man, he said, and sensed she had a sickness in her. He’d prove it too with a powerful demonstration. Taking out a sheet of white paper, he stared at it, mumbled some ‘Dutch’ words, and rubbed it with a substance. Miraculously, a grotesque image appeared on the paper. It was the ‘cancer’ inside her he intoned sadly. The cure was to ‘wrap something’ in a $20 note, bring some personal item, and meet him, (again unbelievably) at a certain hotel.
Her sister wasn’t there this time, but I was, shocked to know that she fully intended to comply with the man’s request. I upbraided her, but later understood just how easily she could have been caught up in the mixture of fear and apprehension. However that didn’t prevent me from hinting that such fear and naïveté could have led to the loss of her $20 (a tidy sum back then) and that she could have been screwed in more than one sense of the word.
The con won’t go away as long as gullibility is an element of the complex human personality, egged on by id and ego. The bad guys in Guyana are small fry compared to such sultans of swindle like Bernie Madoff (What a pun name for someone who ‘made off’ with other people’s money) and master swindler Charles Ponzi.
On the local scene I remember hearing in the eighties about a colourful character who with the utmost equanimity, attempted to sell City Hall, St. George’s Cathedral, and several other prominent buildings, and once almost succeeded! I close off with what may have been a subtle, yet pretty straightforward con played on me recently.
It was on the ferry from Supenaam two Wednesdays ago that I encountered a stranger who had a sad tale to tell. In the Port Kaituma ‘backdam’ he’d gotten the news that his son had fallen from a scaffold, broken his neck and died. He’d left immediately for home in New Amsterdam, with almost no money, and didn’t know how he’d get there. His countenance was downcast, his voice trembled with sincerity. To cut a longish story short, I gave him some cash along with my sympathy and a consoling pat. Then the second guessing started.
On Saturday I called a friend in N.A. and asked if he’d heard about the tragedy. He hadn’t. I told him about the guy I met on the boat; he told me I’d been played. Well, I guess it’s still possible the man was telling the truth, but I may never know; I simply may have been conned. And if that was the case, the funniest thing is, knowing the kind of person I am, it may well happen again.
For the past several months, a TV ad for the services of a certain Indian ‘priest’ on the Essequibo Coast had been aired almost daily. Claims were made of cures for the negative effects of obeah, evil spirits, bad luck, travel-abroad, love, and much more. Fixes are permanent, and all religions are welcome. I’ve listened to these ads with a mixture of disbelief and admiration at their boldness, assuming too that there would have been a constant trickle of ‘victims’ to the healer’s quarters. So, what else is new? P.T. Barnum was very shrewd, and may have been very right.