The movie The Sting came out in the 1970’s. It is a story about fun loving con artists who successfully fool gangster Doyle Lonnegan with a trick called “the wire.” What some may not know is that the con in the movie was probably invented by a real person, Joseph Weil.
Joseph Weil died at the age of 100 in 1976. He estimated that, over the course of his life, he made about 8 million dollars conning people mostly in and around Chicago, Illinois. He justified his actions saying that he never conned anyone who was not greedy. He said about his victims, “Every victim of one of my schemes had larceny in his heart. An honest man would have had no part of any of my schemes. They all wanted something for nothing.”
Weil started his career in his early 20s selling Merriweather’s Elixir as a cure-all. Its chief ingredient was water. He acted as person in the crowd who would attest falsely to the curative powers of “Doc” Merriweather’s tonic. Soon after the turn of the century he got his nickname, the Yellow Kid, after a comic that his partner at the time liked. The Yellow Kid was a goofy sidekick to one of the main characters. Weil got better and better at swindling people and was able to mostly skirt the law because, at the time, Chicago law was that a swindle could only be done on an innocent person. He, therefore did a lot of his work in and around racetracks.
His con “the wire” which was the big take down used in The Sting involved setting up a fake gambling house with pretend employees and gamblers. His mark was convinced it was a real setting and that Joseph had bribed a Western Union operator to slow transmissions of race winners so that Weil could get the results of a race beforehand and place successful bets.
Some of his other big “achievements” allegedly were to take Italian dictator Benito Mussolini for 2 million dollars, sell a talking dog, and convincing people to buy oil-rich land that he did not own. Over his life time Weil served about six years in jail but kept all of his swindled money. He died a free man.