James Regan swindled his way through the city’s monied classes. The problem was, he seemed to believe his own lies
.. It was the morning before Canada Day 2016, and James Regan needed somewhere to live. A distinguished, even handsome, man of sixty-two with silver hair and a trim moustache, Regan presented himself at the Chestnut Park Real Estate office, a luxury brokerage in the heart of Summerhill, one of Toronto’s most desirable neighbourhoods. Smartly dressed, he approached the receptionist and inquired about renting an apartment.
His taste was exquisite. He had recently moved out of an opulent rental that he’d outfitted with close to $17,000 in furniture—a striking double-pedestal banded dining-room table set made of yew wood by England’s Bevan Funnell, two Regency armchairs, and a pair of chinoiserie cherry-wood nightstands. He drank good French wine and had his eye on an Audi A4. He seemingly knew everyone—judges, lawyers, politicians, nhl players and executives. He presented himself as a devout Catholic, a family man devoted to his son, Brandon, and Brandon’s mother. Claiming to run a thriving consultancy, he hobnobbed at the city’s most exclusive social clubs, hotels, and events.
.. When he was booted from the Sheraton Hotel, a police officer told hotel security that there were 128 police entries about Regan on file. His name appears in relation to twenty-nine different criminal-court matters in the city of Toronto alone. Regan would go on to be banned from every single Service Canada location for a year because of his “aggressive and disruptive behaviour” at its office on St. Clair Avenue.
.. He always eventually loses, but at a glacial pace.
.. Ennis was so frustrated by Regan’s imperviousness to the justice system that she went to the only institution left that she thought could help: the media. So she called the cbc.
.. Regan and Ennis finally went before the ltb. Regan caught wind of the fact that there were reporters on his trail and requested that the matter be heard privately. The tribunal denied his request. Regan then asked for an adjournment, claiming that he hadn’t received the notice of the hearing—which he was at that moment attending—in the mail.
.. But as he came out the front doors, he was met by a cbc news crew. “Why haven’t you paid your rent, sir?” the cbc’s Trevor Dunn asked him. As usual, Regan was impeccably attired—for this occasion, he sported a blue plaid blazer and matching tie. “Because the legal opinions that I’ve been given are indicating that there’s a breach of the landlord’s responsibility,” he said, referring to the air conditioner.
.. After a few days, Regan hadn’t been arrested, so Chik went to 53 Division to ask why. It was 53 Division, after all, that in 2008 had issued the bulletin about Regan being wanted for sexual assault. An officer there told her to forget about it. “His lawyer will rip you apart,” the officer told her. “You’ll regret it.”
.. Confidence men can sell you only those lies that you’re already prepared to believe. They are emissaries of our own optimism, bearing the promise that the world is as decent as we’d hoped.
.. In 1848, a dapper and genteel fellow named William Thompson took to the streets of New York with a simple ruse. After some pleasant conversation, Thompson would ask a stranger, “Have you confidence in me to trust me with your watch until tomorrow?” His marks didn’t just believe in him, but also in the premise behind his question—that cities weren’t Hobbesian jungles, but the sort of places where you could entrust your timepiece to a stranger. When he was arrested, a reporter for the New York Herald christened him “The Confidence Man.”
.. Confidence men are different from mere hustlers, whose tricks—such as pickpocketing—do all the work. Con men tailor their frauds to create a theatre of legitimacy. Bernie Madoff convinced thousands of savvy investors that he had intuited the secrets of the American financial system and could—against all common sense—deliver consistent, impossibly high returns.
.. What makes Regan unique, perhaps, is his seemingly genuine concern for his own reputation. When he’s accused of defrauding someone, stealing their furniture, cars, or rent, he fires back that the accusation is SLANDEROUS and has CAUSED DAMAGES. His confidence trick, then, isn’t just that he’s good for it—but that he’s good. His sense of dignity flows from himself into his victims, who are altogether unprepared to believe that a meticulously groomed white man is anything other than an honest gentleman.
.. Against the shabbiness of the tribunal room, he radiated not just style or wealth, but real authority.
.. Regan had spotted me making notes, and locked onto me with a predatory stare. He realized that, just as it had been for the original con man William Thompson, the press was an existential threat. Regan has learned to stickhandle everyone except journalists.
.. His cons have been machine-tooled to weaponize the justice system’s own sense of fair play and the safeguards of due process. He represents himself, but always claims to have a lawyer who can’t make his hearings, so he is allowed adjournment after adjournment.
.. he has learned that he doesn’t need to succeed in order to win a year’s rent.
.. Regan is the superbug produced by our legal hygiene, the crook cooked up by our civic decency. The journalist, however, can do what the courts cannot: expose his improprieties as evidence of bad faith in order to warn future victims.
.. His language is unlike anything I’ve ever heard—a pleonastic stream of legalese, which, if you’re not listening closely, can be hard to identify as the total and utter bullshit that it is. The words come so fast and sesquipedalian that they escape faithful transcription. It is the grammar of stalling, but it races right at you.
.. When Codjoe tried to keep Regan on point, he barked at her: “You’re being indignant, madam! You’re overstepping your boundary! We’re trying to accommodate the process, and it’s not your position—”
.. “I’m going to cut you off here—”
“No, I’m going to cut you off here!” Regan bellowed. “We’re putting you on notice!”
.. When Codjoe delivered her decision, she referred to Regan as “the tenant,” as is customary. This infuriated him. “Call me Mr. Regan.” She very pointedly continued to call him the tenant. He very pointedly insisted on being called Mr. Regan. “In life, you earn respect,” he growled. She dismissed his application. “I’ve been played here! I’ve been insulted! I don’t want to be accused in the cbc that I’m a person being seen to supersede process. I want to follow the rules!”
.. The night before, Regan had written the court to apprise it of the fact that he wouldn’t be able to attend the hearing because he’d scheduled a sports mediation for the same day. The court office ordered him to show up.
.. Regan said that he had representation, but that his lawyer hadn’t been able to make it to court on such short notice. He seemed insulted, adding, “I’ve put the counsel on notice and have reported them to the Law Society.”
So Justice Thorburn asked for his lawyer’s name. The question caused Regan to stammer. He offered the name of one lawyer, Howard Levitt, and then another, Allan Blott.
.. He started rifling through his papers, and they scattered and fell to the ground. Regan’s voice began to crack as he searched for something in his paperwork. “The problem with self-represented litigants like me…” I had to look up at his face to realize he was crying, his face red and swelling. Regan wept as he told the judge that he had a son and that his son was ashamed of him. “The only thing you have left in life,” he said through his tears, “is your reputation.”
Justice Thorburn cut in, reminding him to confine his remarks to submissions that would convince her of his appeal.
.. He normally swung from rental to rental as if from vine to vine, but the new Google search results associated with his name must have been making that next vine elusive.
Why does Trump keep making promises he can’t keep? The secret lies in his past.
the location provided a vivid case study in the dangers Trump will face as time goes on. This early in his presidency, he can still talk about the glittering future he’ll deliver. But at some point, he’ll have to reckon with what his policies have actually done and failed to do.
Trump is applying to governing the same theory that worked quite well for him in his business career. But the rules have already changed for him.
.. the Republican health-care bill will save Americans from the catastrophe of the Affordable Care Act. But it’s an odd thing to say in Kentucky, which may have fared better than any other state under the ACA. The state accepted the law’s expansion of Medicaid and saw an additional 443,000 of its citizens — a full 10 percent of the state’s population — get health coverage at no cost. The state also launched its own ACA exchange, Kynect, which was one of the most successful in the country. According to Gallup, the uninsured rate fell from 20.4 percent in 2013 before the law took effect down to 7.8
.. But hey, who needs Medicaid or subsidized health coverage if you’ve got a great job mining coal, where salaries are high and benefits are comprehensive? Trump repeated that promise, too — that once we get rid of some environmental regulations, all those coal jobs will come back:
.. In his particular corner of the business world, you really can create wealth just by managing public perception — or at least he could. This was the theory of his entire career
.. When he conned someone, like the attendees of Trump University, no matter how unhappy they were he could move on to other marks
.. It was a big world, and there were always other people who might be taken in by the next scam. But in politics, you have to go back to the people you made promises to the first time around, and ask them to put their faith in you again.
.. it’s obvious that Trump looks at his first legislative priority much like one of his buildings: What matters is that people think it’s the tallest one around, even if it isn’t. He doesn’t seem to know or care much about what’s in the GOP’s bill to repeal the ACA or what the effects would be. It’s just about getting a win one way or the other.
.. he met with congressional Republicans not to discuss the content of the bill, but to cajole and threaten them into voting for it. He told Mark Meadows, head of the far-right Freedom Caucus, to stand up while he told him, “I’m gonna come after you, but I know I won’t have to, because I know you’ll vote ‘yes.’ ” (Meadows says he’s still voting no.)
.. So what happens when Trump goes back to Kentucky in three years, and he has taken away voters’ health coverage but didn’t manage to bring back the coal jobs of yesteryear?
Two Americas: Why Donald Trump Still has a lot of Support
“How can Hillary Clinton be losing to a mentally unstable megalomaniac and sexual predator who doesn’t pay income taxes?”
.. George Packer wrote tellingly about last week in the magazine: an America bitterly divided along class, racial, and cultural lines.
To quote Benjamin Disraeli, the nineteenth-century British statesman, we now have “Two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets.”
.. Whatever their views of him as an individual, they like what he stands for: nationalism, nativism, and hostility toward what they consider a self-serving élite that looks down on them.
.. To the best of my knowledge, nobody has accused Clinton of operating a fraudulent business that bilked tens of thousands of dollars from people on modest incomes, stiffing trades people on a routine basis, making a mockery of the tax laws and not paying a cent of income tax for twenty years, boasting about charitable giving while not donating any of his own cash, or sexually assaulting women.
.. During the Republican primaries, some outlets, particularly on television, indulged Trump shamefully, while using him as a ratings booster.
.. it hasn’t done enough to exploit his other vulnerabilities, to paint the Republican candidate as a con man whose schemes have victimized many ordinary, hard-working Americans.
.. they should be ramming home every day the message that Trump is a serial chiseler of the little guy, not his savior. Why isn’t Clinton regularly appearing alongside some of the people who lost their savings to Trump University? Where are the ads featuring tradesmen and suppliers and charities that Trump has stiffed?
.. If you tune into conservative talk radio, as many Trump supporters do, you will hear a constant discourse of resentment, conspiracy theories, and alienation from the institutions of economic and political power—including the Republican Party establishment.
.. The Trump movement, like the Tea Party movement it supplanted, is a reaction to the socially liberal, polyglot America that is rapidly emerging in the twenty-first century. Representing an older, whiter, and more embattled tradition, it is constantly evoking what it sees as a lost Valhalla—a place of plentiful jobs, rising living standards, conservative social values, fewer immigrants, and minorities who knew their place.
.. And if, in the coming years, robots and algorithms provide another big shock to the economy, destroying tens of millions more decent-paying jobs, how many former truck drivers and displaced white-collar workers will be receptive listeners to a future Trump?
Donald Trump, Con Artist?
Underlying most any con is the desire for power—for control over other people’s lives. That power can take the form of reputation, adulation, or the thrill of knowing oneself to be the orchestrator of others’ fates—of being a sort of mini-god. The path to that end is entirely secondary. Ferdinand Waldo Demara, one of the greatest con men in history, was known as the Great Imposter. He never finished high school but impersonated everyone from a professor to a surgeon to a prison warden. Demara was often penniless, despite his scams—but he found ways to enjoy the admiration of multitudes and to exert power over the lives of others (very concretely, in the case of surgery). The racket itself mattered less than those ultimate goals.
If Trump were a con artist, he would be interested in politics only as a means to some other end. He wouldn’t believe in his political opinions; instead, he would see those opinions as convenient tools for gaining what he actually desires. Insofar as he believed in any of the policies he espoused, that belief would be purely incidental. Con artists aren’t true believers; they are opportunists. Trump, as a con artist, would give up on politics the moment that it stopped serving his purposes, moving on to the next thing that gave him the same level of attention and adulation.
.. Another thing that differentiates con artists from ordinary liars is their nuanced and targeted use of flattery. Confidence men know that the best way to achieve their desires is to tell people what they want to hear rather than what is true. The quickest way to gain a mark’s trust is to sell him a vision of the world as he wants, or believes, it to be.
.. Inasmuch as con artists are peddlers of hope who tell us what we want to hear, many politicians have taken a page from the grifter’s playbook.
.. It’s not a case of misrepresenting one’s policies, but of not actually having a policy.
.. “As the recent Ponzi-scheme scandals involving onetime financial luminaries like Bernard Madoff and Allen Stanford demonstrate, victims of con artists often sing the praises of their victimizers until the moment they realize they have been fleeced,” she wrote.
.. If Trump is indeed a con artist, and if he is, in the end, elected, we may end up not wanting to admit that we were scammed.