J.R. Weil - Yellow Kid Weil: The Autobiography of Americas Master Swindler

Table of Contents

NABAT BOOKS is a series dedicated to reprinting forgotten memoirs by various misfits, outsiders, and rebels. The underlying concept is based on a few simple propositions: That to be a success under the current definition is highly toxic - wealth, fame and power are a poison cocktail; that this era of triumphal capitalism glorifies the most dreary human traits like greed and self - interest as good and natural; that the winners version of reality and history is deeply lame and soul-rotting stuff. Given this, it follows that the truly interesting and meaningful lives and real adventures are only to be had on the margins of what Kenneth Rexroth called the social lie. Its with the dropouts, misfits, dissidents, renegades, and revolutionaries, against the grain, between the cracks and amongst the enemies of the state that the good stuff can be found. Fortunately, there is a mighty subterranean river of testimony from the disaffected, a large cache of hidden history, of public secrets overlooked by the stale conventional wisdom that Nabat Books aims to tap into. A little something to set against the crushed hopes, mountains of corpses, and commodification of everything. Actually, we think, its the best thing western civilization has going for itself.

You Cant Win - Jack Black

Sister of the Road: The Autobiography of Boxcar Bertha - Ben Reitman

BAD: The Autobiogrophy of James Carr - James Carr

Memoirs of Vidocq: Master of Crime - Franois Eugne Vidocq

Beggars of Life - Jim Tully

Out of the Night - Jan Valtin

Five Years in the Warsaw Ghetto - Bernard Goldstein

Is the stoutly anarchist AK Press really reprinting an autobiography by a guy who celebrates a long life of lying, cheating, and stealing? Well, yes, but a little context is in order here. Happily, the trillions of dollars the US government has given to the largest financial institutions of late provides a nicely clarifying display of the principle that Yellow Kid Weil based his life of swindling on: You simply cannot be cynical enough about how the capitalist system really works.

Yes, the financial world, the commanding heights of capitalism, now resembles nothing so much as a rigged game, a giant con. Which is actually not all that surprising. It is helpful to recall that capitalism, when we are done celebrating what a protean, dynamic, wealth-creating engine it is, has a squalid history. There were the horrors and poverty and appalling working conditions of the industrial revolution (or in China now, but lets not think about it - we like cheap stuff). There have been the constant foul imperialist wars so we could and can cheaply extract the natural resources of less developed countries, all the death squads trained and the corrupt dictators and ruling elites propped up, all the alternatives to the capitalist way crushed, not to mention the repeated crises and crashes of the system itself.

Then there is the tirelessly suppressed fact that capitalism has always had swindling and rigging the system built right into it. While it promotes itself as a just and fair way to generate and distribute wealth, its really just the smoothest way for the few to divert the wealth of the many into their pockets. Swindling, irrationality, inefficiency, and exploitation are at least as essential to its nature as rationality or efficiency. All the fervent worship of the Free Market is strictly for the rubes, or the rationale that the owning classes use to feel good about how they acquired most of their ill-gotten booty. As time has gone on the capitalist system has generated so much and such concentrated wealth and power at the top that the swindling is now mostly done in a highly mediated and bureaucratic way through laws and governments. So, for example, Americas military industrial complex, which has to count as the greatest swindle of all time - literally trillions of dollars extracted over decades from American taxpayers, and still growing - is barely discussed. We have arrived at the time where the little issue of just how sensible and just how legitimate the capitalist system is has become the great naked elephant emperor in the room that dare not be spoken of.

What separates and elevates the Yellow Kid above the big boy swindlers that own and operate the system was that he chose to operate outside the law as an independent, who lived by his wits and imagination - not for him the insider corruptions of wealth and power where you get to make up the rules and laws to suit your needs. In talking to Saul Bellow years after he had retired, he had a couple of prophetic things to say about this. Of bankers he said: They are almost always shady. Their activities are usually only just within the law. And Bellow paraphrases the Kid as telling him ... your natural or talented confidence man is attracted to politics. Why be a criminal, a fugitive, when you can get society to give you the key to the vaults where the greatest boodle lies? The United States government, according to the Kid, runs the greatest give-away program in history.

The Yellow Kid was a consummate outsider who made sport of the greed and self-interest that drove people that had a nice wad of cash - there was no point in preying on people who didnt already have a goodly sum of money - but were hungry for more. He pretended to have a little illegit insider knowledge to stack the deck in the marks favor. He made a mockery of the craving for cash by any means. He often claimed he was actually offering a bracing and therapeutic experience to people who enthusiastically wanted to stoop to sleazy means to make a buck. It is hard not to agree.

In some ways the Kid fulfilled an American ideal of the restless, selfinvented guy who lived by being clever and adaptable. As he states plainly in this book, what drove him above all was the quest for excitement and adventure. Cooking up ever more wild and crazy cons and seeing just how far he could take them was his calling. A great con artist like the Yellow Kid really is an Artist. In fact in some ways the Yellow Kid harkens back to a more ancient tradition: that of the Trickster or the Shaman - the mischievous rogue who makes sport of all our worldly delusions and conventions. He was the guy whose actions made it clear that money cant buy happiness and that the capitalist emperor has no clothes.

Which is not to say he was unaffected by the seductive power of money. He could not hang on to the stuff and so had to constantly cook up schemes to get more - which is what he really enjoyed anyway, but still there was something compulsive about it. The problem was the Kid also preyed upon the knowledge that people are actually fundamentally decent and honorable to each other. He won their trust and then combined it with the (hopelessly contradictory) fact that, in the pursuit of money any amount of lying and cheating is ok as long as you can get away with it. The Kid made sport and money of the contradictions but he was not immune to them.

It is no coincidence that Yellow Kid Weil flourished in Chicago. Chicago was the great American crossroads a century ago, full of all kinds of money - making and the corruption it is still renowned for, but also full of waves of immigrants and all kinds of political and cultural ferment. It was the hobo capital of the US and also the headquarters of the Industrial Workers of the World, the most glorious homegrown radical movement America has ever produced. A hugely under-appreciated hobohemia thrived for a while with places like Bughouse Square, The Hobo College, and the legendary Dil Pickle Club, where the Yellow Kid was an invited speaker. You can check out