Games People Play

3 LET'S PULL A FAST ONE ON JOEY
Thesis
. The prototype of this game is "The Big Store," die big-time confidence game, but many 
small gifts and even the badger game are FOOJY. No man can be beaten at FOOJY unless he has 
larceny in his veins, because the first move is for Black to tell White that dumb-honest-old-Joey is 
just waiting to be taken. If White were completely honest, he would either back off or warn Joey, 
but he doesn't. Just as Joey is about to pay off, something goes wrong, and White finds that his 
investment is gone. Or in the badger game, just as Joey is about to be cuckolded, he happens to 
walk in. Then White, who was playing his own rules in his own honest way, finds that he has to 
play Joey's rules, and they hurt. 
Curiously enough, the mark is supposed to know the rules of FOOJY and stick to them. Honest 
squawking is a calculated risk of the con mob; they will not hold that against White, and he is even 
allowed a certain latitude in lying to the police to save his face. But if he goes too far and accuses 
them falsely of burglary, for example, that is cheating, and they resent it. On the other hand, there is 
little sympathy for a con man who gets into trouble by working a mark who is drunk, since this is 
improper procedure, and be should know better. The same applies if he is stupid enough to pick a 
mark with a sense of humor, since it is well known that such people cannot be trusted to play the 
straight man in FOOJY all the way down the line through the terminal game of "Cops and 
Robbers." Experienced con men are scared of marks who laugh after they have been taken. 
It should be noted that a practical joke is not a game of FOOJY, because in a practical joke Joey is 
the one who suffers, while in FOOJY Joey comes out on top, and White is the one who suffers. A 
practical joke is a pastime, while FOOJY is a game in which the joke is arranged to backfire. 
It is evident that FOOJY is a three- or four-handed game, with the police playing the fourth hand, 
and that it is related to "Let's You and Him Fight." 
NOTE 
Thanks are due to Dr. Franklin Emst of the California Medical Facility at Vacaville, Mr. William 
Collins of the California Rehabilitation Center at Norco, and Mr. Laurence Means of the California 
Institution for Men at Tehachapi, for their continued interest in studying the game of "Cops and 
Robbers" and for their helpful discussions and criticisms. 
REFERENCES 
1. Frederick Wiseman, in "Psychiatry and the Law: Use and Abuse of Psychiatry in a Murder Case" 
{American Journal of Psychiatry. 118: 289-299, 1961) gives a clear and tragic example of a hard 
form of "Cops and Robbers." It concerns a 23-year-old man who shot his fiancee and then turned 
himself in. This was not easy to arrange, since the police did not believe his story until he had 
repeated it four times. Later, he said: "It just seemed to me that all my life I was bound to end up in 
the chair. If that was the way it was, that was the way it would be." The author says it was farcical 
to expect a lay jury to understand the complex psychiatric testimony that was offered at the trial in 
technical jargon. In game terms, the central issue can be stated in words of no more than two 
syllables: A nine-year-old boy decides (for reasons clearly brought out at the trial) that he is bound 
to end up in the chair. He spends the rest of his life headed toward this goal, and using his girl 
friend as a target, in the end he sets himself up. 
2. For further information about "Cops and Robbers" and games played by prison inmates, see: 
Ernst, F. H. and Keating, W. C., "Psychiatric Treatment of the California Felon." American Journal 
of Psychiatry. 120: 974-979, 1964. 
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