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With his pathological urge to reinvent himself, Drewe was one of a long line of con artists and fakers. London, like other major cities, had always been a magnet for dream peddlers. Over the years its detectives had seen some of the world’s great con men up close. In the 1920s, a Scottish scammer named Arthur Furguson discovered that it was child’s play to take visiting Americans for a ride: He sold Nelson’s Column to slow-witted souvenir hunters for 600 quid a shot, offered Big Ben for a £1,000 down payment, and fobbed off Buckingham Palace for a first installment of £200. When Furguson realized that Yanks made particularly easy marks, he set up shop in the United States. In 1925, he found a rancher willing to lease the White House for $100,000 a year. Later, less successfully, he tried to sell off the Statue of Liberty to a potential mark who got wise and turned him in. Furguson spent five years in prison but continued to ply his trade until his death in Los Angeles in 1938.

Then there was the Scottish con man Gregor McGregor, who lured hundreds of British investors and would-be settlers from London to the nonexistent country of Poyais in Central America. McGregor escaped with hundreds of thousands of pounds, leaving the settlers stranded in the jungle. A distinguished-looking British hustler named Limehouse Chappie, who worked both sides of the Atlantic, scammed passengers on ocean liners, and may have served as a model for the elegant card-sharp in Preston Sturges’s The Lady Eve.

The Bohemian-born con man Victor Lustig, who ran his scams with an American sidekick, engineered the sale of the Eiffel Tower to a group of naïve scrap-metal dealers. Lustig would eventually set his sights on the wide-eyed rubes of the New World. With his apprentice in tow, he hoodwinked the gullible in half a dozen U.S. states, ending up in Alcatraz. His death certificate listed his profession as “Salesman.”

The term “confidence man” was coined by a journalist at the New York Herald to describe the conduct of one William Thompson, a scammer and jailbird whose MO was a three-piece suit and a smile. Thompson would approach wealthy New Yorkers with a self-possessed air, strike up a conversation, and unleash an engaging line of prattle. “Have you confidence in me to trust me with your watch until tomorrow?” he would say, and the victim would cheerfully give up his timepiece. All well and good until July 7, 1849, when Thompson was collared on Liberty Street by an officer named Swayse just as he was taking off with his mark’s $110 gold lever watch. Thompson was returned to Sing Sing, where he’d learned his silken ways.

Eight years later Herman Melville adopted Thompson’s soubriquet as the title of his famously unreadable last novel, The Confidence-Man. Within a decade of its publication criminologists were reporting that 10 percent of professional criminals were confidence men. The sweet-talkers, they said, had taken over the sidewalks.

Professional bilkers often say that it is impossible to con a completely honest man, that the con man relies on the greed of his “vic,” on the poor fellow’s unbridled imagination and his wish to dream himself out of a jam. Social scientists who have tried to chart scammer pathology describe the con man as a combination sociopath and narcissist. Typically, he is impulsive, amoral, and uncontrolled, highly intelligent, detached, misanthropic, grandiose, and hungry for admiration. Alienated and often self-taught, the con man feels unique and superior until he is trapped. Then he claims to be a victim of circumstance or of an uncaring society. He tells police that he has been knackered by circumstance, that his bitterness is a function of society’s failures and the vagaries of fate. Then, on the way to the lockup, knowing that the game is up, he drops all pretense and declares that his victims deserved to be conned, that greed is a fox-trot and it takes two.

One such schemer, quoted in The Psychology of Fraud, a 2001 study