HAVE YOU WONDERED why some people nearly
always get what they want from other people, while
you can only manage to do so every now and then? I
certainly have, and that question had badgered me
for years.
Why can one person close the big business deal
where ninety-five percent of the people who tried
have failed? Why can some men charm and manipu-
late women into almost anything, when others
couldn't get the time of day from them? Why do certain women seem to get anything they want from
men? Surely it comes down to the fact that these
people are shrewd in the art of manipulating and han-
dling people. But how do they do it? What are their
techniques?
As an answer, this book reports the tactics these
manipulators use to get what they want in business
situations as well as in their personal lives-much of
it in their own words. And it's all tried-and-true
street wisdom, not the kind of thing you customarily
read in books. As a result, you'll find it natural to put
these tactics to work getting what you want from
people. They're more comfortable in action, anyway,
than they are lying dormant on the written page.
The sole criterion: Does it work?
Any method I report here can be judged by only
one criterion: Does it work well enough to get me
what I want? These tactics need not be moral, inspir-
ing, or philosophically sound. They just have to
work. Otherwise the manipulators who tutored me in
the art of "people-handling" would have long ago dis-
carded them. What remains is the distilled street wisdom of people who either prospered or starved
according to their ability to persuade others against
their will. I believe their straight-from-the-jungle
techniques will work better for you than the ivory
tower, armchair theorizing done by most books on
the subject.
Necessity forced me to turn to some rather unorthodox characters as sources for this book on manipula-
tion. I'd already exhausted the more respectable
alternatives by taking a master's degree in advertis-
ing. But studying Madison Avenue's methods in de-
tail taught me very little. I found that depending on
college and books to teach me how to handle people
was like going to church to learn how to sin. They
just didn't seem to know much about it.
Not until I put myself square in the middle of
street-wise hustlers, manipulators, and con artists did
I gain a working grasp of manipulation. In the pro-
cess my shady tutors conned me out of considerable
money. But I emerged after a year well versed in the
art of extracting what I want from people.
Learning the art
Manipulators and con artists flock to boom towns
w here the money comes easy and plentiful, and then
move on when the prosperity plays out. Houston,
Texas, was just such a boom town in the early 1970s
as the energy shortage in the rest of the country
pumped a deluge of easy dollars into this city built on
oil. By moving to Houston, I had no trouble contact-
ing con artists, because hordes of their numbers
roosted in the bars there.
Shortly after I arrived there, I took an apartment
with Hardy, a habitual drunk who, when sober, is
probably the most masterly manipulator I have ever
known or expect to know. Hardy was panting hot on
the heels of a cafe waitress he had chased into townHe had just departed Mobile, Alabama, in favor of
Houston when the easy money had played out in
Dixie.
The walking personification of the silver-tongued
devil, Hardy could talk anybody into nearly any-
thing-women included. And he had successfully
hawked everything from stock to land to en-
cyclopedias door-to-door. But despite the fact that he
always made fabulous money, I doubt that Hardy
ever worked over three weeks at a stretch before one
of his drinking sprees got him fired. He was my
major tutor while I studied manipulation.
We soon added another charlatan, who was eventu-
ally to gull me of a considerable amount of money, to
our living arrangement. He had drifted into town
from Dallas, Texas, as that city joined the rest of the
country in the recession of the 1970s.
Next door to our apartment lived a shyster from
California who claimed to be a millionaire's son, and
who had never done the proverbial honest day's
work in his life. He had either stolen or conned
someone out of everything he owned. The man had
so many aliases and bogus pieces of identification that
I never did figure out his real name.
Finally I enlisted as "visiting lecturers" on the
subject of manipulation two con artist friends of the
Dallas man. One had abandoned his New York en-
virons for Houston due to the recession back east.
And the other was a hot-check artist from El Paso,
Texas.
These made up my complement of experts in theart of people-handling. Bear in mind that none of
these men fit the category of the dangerous criminal.
As far as I know, there wasn't a criminal record in
the bunch. Although none except Hardy demon-
strated an inkling of honesty, they didn't turn their
fast bucks by outright thievery.
Instead they generally made their money by using
people with a jewel cutter's precision. (Mostly by
selling them cars, stock, land, or possibly a com-
pletely worthless item at exorbitant prices-all the
while convincing their hapless dupe that they were
doing him a favor.)
Nor do I mean to imply that the average person
would find these men despicable. Certainly a modi-
cum of charm is essential to the success of any mani-
pulator. And they had plenty of it. In fact I've never
been charmed as quickly by a group of people. With
only one exception they were all hilarious story-
tellers. Almost any normal person would be quite
taken by them, at least until their ruthless nature
reared its ugly head. But by that time it was usually
too late.
Women as a rule also found them irresistible, so
you can imagine that they kept up a constant parade
of females in and out of our apartment. In fact Hardy
was so confident of his abilities as a latter-day Casa-
nova that he paid for a motel room before he went out cruising the bars to pick up women.