The Lexicon of Leverage

The TNT drama Leverage features a collection of former criminals who assist victims of corporate crimes that have little legal recourse within the justice system. The Leverage team brings a full array of talents to the proceedings, including a former mercenary with exceptional physical capacities, a genius computer hacker capable of breaking down any firewall and a thief with acrobatic abilities and talent for cracking safes. While these skills all play a role within any given episode of the series, however, in reality the group relies on elaborate cons and subterfuge in order to save the day, making Leverage a contemporary continuation of the classic conman from earlier times.

Hollywood has always had a fascination with the criminal element that relies more on their intelligence and wit to make a living rather than brawns or break-ins. Major motion pictures such as The Sting and Ocean’s Eleven, for instance, have found box office success through the years, while television dramas like the original Mission: Impossible and USA Network drama White Collar have found equal rewards on television. Almost all of them, however, can trace the roots of their narratives to the work of David W. Maurer and his 1940’s exploration of the Twentieth Century conman, The Big Con (Anchor Books).

Although filled with firsthand accounts of such practitioners as Charley Gondorff and Yellow Kid Wiel, Maurer’s linguistic background enabled him to concentrate on the unique verbal nature of conmen in The Big Con as well. “Criminal argots are really artificial languages used by professionals for communication among themselves,” he writes. “Of all criminals, confidence men probably have the most extensive and colorful argot. They not only number among their ranks some of the most brilliant of professional criminals, but the minds of confidence men have a peculiar nimbleness which makes them particularly adept at coining and using argot.”

Leverage, meanwhile, has taken the colorful language utilized by professional conmen and made it an integral part of its narrative. The elaborate cons performed by the group on the TNT drama are often assigned such intriguing monikers along the likes of the Swedish Rail Con, the Double Blind and the Moscow Circus, making the “argot” that the characters speak just as entertaining as the narratives they inevitably center around.

“No way, I’m not wearing that dress again,” grifter Sophie Devereaux declares during her rejection of the Cairo Flyer in one episode. “He’s not going to leave the country,” thief Parker offers in a later installment when the Spanish Turnabout is suggested. “The Turnabout pays off in an airport.”

While fans of Leverage are left to use their imagination in regards to how such cons would have played out, other schemes are both explained in detail as well as witnessed on screen. Many of them even have a real-life reference points, such as the Mona Lisa Variant from the season two episode, “The Two Live Crew Job.”

“In 1911, the Mona Lisa was stolen and the conmen who did it made six identical copies,” it is explained during the installment. “And then they put them on the black market and each buyer thought that they had the original.” The famous Leonardo Da Vinci painting was indeed pilfered from the Louvre Museum in Paris on August 21, 1911, but not by a professional criminal. An employee named Vincenzo Peruggia was the actual culprit, and his intentions were more patriotic in nature—he simply believed that the masterpiece belonged in an Italian museum, not French. Another conman named Eduardo de Valfierno, however, had already created six forged copies of the Mona Lisa, thus allowing him to make a small fortune when the original disappeared.

Other Leverage cons and their corresponding explanations include:

Glengarry Glen Death. “It’s like a mutual fund but instead of stocks, you invest in death.” The con takes its name from the David Mamet play Glengarry Glen Ross, in which Chicago real estate agents attempt to unload worthless land on unsuspecting buyers. In the Leverage episode “The Snow Job,” however, the scam involves purchasing life insurance policies of the financially-strapped terminally ill at a fraction of the cost in order to acquire a wealthy payday when the mark actually dies.

The Lost Heir. “Classic European scam. You pose as a long lost descendent of the Royal Family and when you pull it off, the payoffs are really sweet.” Not to be confused with another Leverage con, the Mummy’s Tiara, which “involves using a forged relic to purchase a royal title.”

The Romanian Circus. “You turn the mark’s suspicions on his own people so he’s vulnerable to an outside attack.” In the episode “The Hot Potato,” the crew manufactures the hunt for a fake corporate spy while using the distraction to break into the company’s secure vault.

The Fiddle Game. “We’re not going to play a fiddle, we’re going to sell one for a hell of a lot more than it’s worth.” Basically, the con involves inflating an object’s value in the eyes of the mark while swindling them out of a large sum of money in the process. Leverage also used a variation of the scam called the Skyway Shuffle against a West Virginia mine owner. “It’s like the fiddle game, only underground. The mine is the fiddle. We convince him that he’s got something valuable in his mine, then we sell him the process to mine it and then we take all his money.”

The High Mini. “Means ‘high courtly love.’ In middle ages, a knight would undergo challenges to prove himself worthy of a noble women’s love.” Of course, once the tasks have been successfully completed, the mark is likewise ripe for the picking.

In addition to the cons outlined above, Leverage has also delved into many of the classics that David Maurer describes in The Big Con. The wire, for instance—which serves as the main storyline of The Sting—was referenced in the season two installment “The Bottle Job” when the group pulls off the infamous long con in less than two hours. The fight store, meanwhile, was used as the centerpiece of “The Tap-Out Job,” in which resident tough guy Eliot Spencer enters an illegal boxing match that ends with the fictitious death of his opponent.

In the episode “The Three Strikes Job,” the Leverage team attempt to lure a corrupt mayor involved in the shooting of state police detective Patrick Bonanno with a Hook Pinch and Flip. “Hook the mayor with the idea that we’re going to build a ballpark here on all the land that he owns, then pinch him for a bribe to guarantee he gets the action. He’ll take the bribe out of his re-election funds, which is a federal offense.” Then comes the “flip” part. “When the heat comes down, whoever shot Bonanno cuts a deal and the mayor goes down.”

In The Big Con, David Maurer writes that grifters “derive a pleasure which is genuinely creative from toying with language. They love to talk and they have markedly original minds, minds which are singularly agile and which see and express rather grotesque relationships in terms of the flickering, vastly connotative metaphor which characterizes their argot.” While the characters on Leverage are fictitious descendants of real-life conmen from the early part of the Twentieth Century, the writers on the TNT drama share the same love of language that David Maurer likewise chronicles in his book. The unique lexicon of Leverage is also a source of entertainment for fans of the series, who derive their own pleasure from the wordplay just as Charley Gondorff and Yellow Kid Weil did over a hundred years earlier.

Anthony Letizia (January 9, 2012)

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