Leverage:
A Modern Day Mission Impossible
Although
the Tom Cruise-starring movie franchise is filled with plenty of chase
scenes and explosions, the original Mission: Impossible television
series was more cerebral and relied on the long con rather than brawn
within its narrative. “It was basically an action-adventure movie
and not Mission,” actor Martin Landau explained to MTV
in 2009 about the first film. “Mission was a mind game.”
Mission: Impossible aired on CBS from September 1966 through
March 1973 and each week the cast, which included Landau’s character
of Rollin Hand, would take on assignments within the Cold War context
of the times by infiltrating the enemy and successfully completing their
operations through elaborate deceptions and misdirection.
Forty years
later there is another team of specialists likewise using their intellect
to accomplish equally challenging tasks in much the same way as the
Impossible Missions Force of the 1960s. Instead of fighting a war against
foreign enemies that pose a threat to the country, however, this small
group takes on non-traditional adversaries that pose a threat to every
day Americans. And while Mission: Impossible was a secret government
agency, the quintet on Leverage are specially-skilled criminals
operating outside of the law.
Leverage
premiered on cable channel TNT in December 2008 with a pilot episode
that effectively established its premise. Nathan Ford (Timothy Hutton)
was a former insurance fraud investigator whose only son died from a
rare disease that could have been effectively treated with an experimental
procedure. The company that Ford worked for, however, refused to pay
for the treatments, sending the grieving father on a downward spiral
of unemployment and alcoholism. When Ford is approached by the CEO of
a research company to oversee a group of criminals hired to steal back
stolen documents—and screw over his former employer in the process—he
reluctantly agrees only to be double-crossed in the process. Nathan
Ford and his criminal cohorts inevitably turn the tables on the CEO,
while likewise making a small fortune by short-selling the company’s
stock, and decide to continue their working arrangement by taking on
cases involving ordinary people who have fallen victim to various forms
of corporate scheming and wrong-doing.
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Leverage
and The Big Con
In
1940, David W. Maurer published The Big Con (Anchor Books,
1999), which tells the story of the early Twenty First Century conman
pieced together from interviews with the actual practitioners. Maurer
was an academic linguist by trade, and had a fascination with the unique
vocabulary developed by various criminal elements. Through the course
of his career, Maurer published works on everyone from pot smokers to
moonshiners to prostitutes, but it is The Big Con that stands
out as his crowning achievement. While the language of the conman is
most definitely explored within its pages, in actuality the book has
an inherent narrative element that is both entertaining and historic
in nature. The Big Con served as the inspiration for the 1973
Paul Newman/Robert Redford film The Sting, as well as the blueprint
for every similar motion picture and television series that has come
since.
While the
TNT drama Leverage contains a cast of characters encompassing
grifter, hitter, hacker, thief—as well as a former insurance fraud
investigator who serves as the “mastermind”—the series
is more about the con than any of the other dubious undertakings portrayed
on the show. Like the 1980s The A-Team, the crew of Leverage
operate outside of the law to bring criminals to justice, while their
method is the sort of elaborate subterfuge utilized by the original
1966 television drama Mission: Impossible. And whether intentional
or not, Leverage is likewise a direct descendent of David Maurer’s
The Big Con.
For instance,
Maurer outlines the numerous steps used by conmen when launching a new
con. The list could also serve as an outline for how the majority of
Leverage episodes unfold over the course of each installment.
From “locating and investigating a well-to-do victim,” to
“gaining the victim’s confidence,” to “steering
him to meet the insideman,” to “fleecing him,” Leverage
is as much of a blueprint for conducting a con as it is for producing
an entertaining and successful television series.
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Contemporary
Television Conmen and The Yellow Kid
In
the season four episode of the TNT drama Leverage entitled
“The Boiler Room Job,” the cast find themselves up against
the fictitious grandson of real life con artist Joseph “The Yellow
Kid” Weil. “Quite possibly the greatest grifter of all time,”
Sophie Devereaux explains in the installment, while Greg Sherman—the
supposed descendent of the Yellow Kid—remarks, “My family
invented most every con that you’ve ever heard of.”
Born in
1875, Joseph Weil was indeed the preeminent conman of the early part
of the Twentieth Century. It was during this time period that such intellectual
criminals flourished, creating elaborate ruses that originated from
the simple Three Card Monte to the famed “wire” that served
as the narrative of the 1975 Paul Newman/Robert Redford film The
Sting, to even elaborate ponzi schemes and stock market deceptions.
Although the Yellow Kid may not have invented every single con known
to man as Leverage claims, he nonetheless mastered them during the fifty
years that he was a professional charlatan.
In 1948,
at the age of seventy and finally retired from a life of crime, Joseph
Weil co-wrote his memoirs with W.T. Brannon. The resulting Autobiography
of America’s Master Swindler was reissued in 2011 by Nabat
Books and the entertaining story of the Yellow Kid features numerous
stories of his adventures and elaborate money-making schemes. Just as
the early part of the Twentieth Century saw the rise of the modern day
conman, however, the early part of the Twenty First Century has seen
a growing number of fictitious practitioners of the trade on the small
screen. In addition to the team of former thieves on Leverage—who
utilize elaborate cons to bring down corporate criminals—there
has been James “Sawyer” Ford on the ABC drama Lost
and Neal Caffrey from the USA Network series White Collar.
Any one of these contemporary figures could easily be a direct descendent
of Joseph “The Yellow Kid” Weil.
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