50 pages • 1 hour read
John GrishamThe Racketeer
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2012A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Long Con
The Racketeer is a heist story featuring a long con, also known as a big con or a long game. It is a kind of confidence trick or deception in which the grifter (con man)—either alone or with confederates—gains the confidence of a mark (victim) and uses the mark’s own credulity, overconfidence, or greed to lure them into handing over money or other advantages. This is what Malcolm does when he lures the FBI into giving him the reward money and commuting his sentence in exchange for betraying Quinn, the supposed murderer.
Whereas a short con is completed in a matter of minutes or seconds, a long con often runs for weeks, months, or even years. Malcolm, for example, spends years planning his sting, then months running it once it begins. Such a scheme can involve props, sets, costumes, scripts, and bit players, such as the videographer Malcolm hires to convince Nathan Cooley of the reality of the supposed documentary film. Within the context of the novel, Malcolm’s scam involves two marks. He uses the greed and vanity of the FBI to persuade them to get him out of prison. Their careers and egos are on the line if they can’t find the judge’s killer, so they pay the smaller price of letting Malcolm go. With his second mark, Nathan, he plays on Nathan’s naivety and trust, first persuading Nathan that he is a great actor, then convincing him that he can trust Malcolm to help him get out of prison and share the gold.
Typically, con artists are characterized by the dark triad of personality traits: psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism. Con artists rarely feel remorse; they get a thrill from deception and power. Malcolm mostly lacks the first two dark-triad traits. He possesses empathy and even feels some sympathy for Nathan despite knowing what Nathan did to the judge and his mistress. However, Malcolm feels no remorse for allowing Nathan to kill the judge in the first place. He is not narcissistic, but he does demonstrate a wide streak of Machiavellianism—a penchant for plotting and manipulation. In Malcolm’s case, a sense of righteous justice takes the place of psychopathy and narcissism. His role is closer to that of Robin Hood, taking from the rich and corrupt and giving to the poor and persecuted (in this case, himself).
The FBI has been running long cons—with ordinary civilians as marks—for years. The novel’s representation of the agency as an entity links it to the three traits mentioned above. It shows systemic indifference to the suffering of people known to be morally innocent. Its agents in The Racketeer show narcissism in their focus on their own egos and furtherance of their own careers, and in the novel they demonstrate Machiavellianism in their plots to trump up charges against Malcolm to get him extradited from Antigua.
By contrast, Malcolm and company are cast in the role of noble outlaws. While traditional stories encourage the audience to champion the established institutions whose role is to mete out justice, the antihero of the heist story allows the audience to vicariously enjoy the titillation of being outside the law and acting without moral constraints. This is made easier by the fact that in fiction, the con artists are relatively benign and concentrate on marks who are even more disreputable than they are. The satisfaction of the heist story is therefore in the catharsis of seeing revenge exacted against a crooked system.
Injustice in the Justice System
With The Racketeer, Grisham demonstrates injustice within a justice system in which laws are often too arcane for the average person to understand, and in which an individual may suffer harsh punishments from violating obscure technicalities that they aren’t even aware of. Defendants may have no reasonable cause to think they are doing anything wrong.
To illustrate this tension, Grisham uses the example of the Carters, who are arrested for unearthing Civil War artifacts on their own land, something they had been doing legally for generations. Rather than informing them of the recent changes to the law, however, the FBI entraps them by waiting for them to commit the “crime” that was not previously illegal. Malcolm himself is convicted on similar grounds, for he was actually the mark in a racketeering scheme run by Benny the Backhander. Malcolm cooperated fully with the FBI, and they assured him that he would not be indicted. They reneged on that promise and arrested him anyway.
In both cases, the letter of the law states that ignorance of the law is not a defense. With the Carter family, the FBI entrapped them. The fair and reasonable thing would have been for the FBI to warn the family that the law had changed. Malcolm is convinced that the change to the law is not even constitutional, since it limits what people can do on their own property. In Malcolm’s case, the FBI is well aware that Malcolm was a victim in Benny the Backhander’s scheme. They admit as much when they discuss whether to take Malcolm’s deal to reveal the judge’s murderer. Even when admitting that he was morally innocent, however, they show no remorse or sense of injustice.
Having been betrayed by the injustices in the justice system, Malcolm has no compunction against using the same kind of manipulation on his own behalf. He uses several arcane details of the law to his own advantage. He first uses Rule 35 to secure his own freedom and the change of identity and appearance he needs in order to run his second con on Nathan Cooley. He and Quinn also use the rules for legal interrogation to hook the FBI into the game. He then uses the laws governing international travel to put Nathan in prison in Jamaica, giving Malcolm the leverage he needs to extract the location of the gold. Finally, he uses Rule 35 again to free Quinn.
Unlike the actions of the FBI, however, each of Malcolm’s manipulations leads to a restoration of justice; Malcolm should never have been convicted in the first place. He makes fools of the FBI, revenging himself on them for their misdeeds. He rewards himself punitive damages and thumbs his nose at the FBI by taking and keeping the gold. Finally, he captures the judge’s real killer and punishes him by getting him locked in a Jamaican prison, where he is beaten up on a regular basis, as retribution for torturing the judge’s mistress. One of Grisham’s most frequently used themes is the importance of public trust in the law and those who enforce it. When the law cannot be trusted, people react with protests and sometimes riots, or they turn to vigilantism. In this case, Grisham champions a protagonist who acts as an outsider to society to restore balance to a broken system.
The Cost of Punishment
A cultural fixation on punishment presents an enormous cost to the taxpayer and to society. Through his fiction and other endeavors, John Grisham is a vocal critic of the US justice system. In other novels, he has emphasized the frequency of false convictions. In The Racketeer, he also addresses the costs of the American prison system, highlighting the reality that while the US makes up only 5% of the global population, it is responsible for 20 to 25% of the global incarceration rate.
In connection with this reality, Grisham uses the character of Malcolm to emphasize the staggering financial cost of the prison system—hundreds of thousands of dollars per inmate, and more if the inmate has health-care costs, like Otis Carter’s father. A large percentage of those costs goes to housing nonviolent offenders who don’t present a threat to the safety of society. Malcolm gives examples of the many young men who turn to the drug trade because it is the only industry in their environment that offers more than a subsistence living. Grisham posits—through Nathan Cooley—that what those young men need is more and better opportunities to thrive and contribute productively to society. People like Malcolm and the Carters also represent a loss of productivity. Before his legal troubles began, for example, Malcolm had a small but successful law practice that supported him and increased the wealth of his community. Now he is a drain on the taxpayer. Likewise, the Carters have gone from productive members of society to being an unnecessary burden.
The prison system also loses an opportunity to avert future crime and send inmates back to society better able to contribute lawfully. As Grisham’s protagonist states, prisoners are used as labor with the full endorsement of the law, working for as little as 86 cents per day without learning any useful skill that would help them after they are released. Former inmates may also lose other rights, such as the right to vote or the ability to find decent work and housing. Through Malcolm, Grisham also discusses the real cost of the penal system being the loss of human hope, dignity, and reputation. He emphasizes that families are broken, costing more to society in terms of destabilization. After their release, former prisoners often emerge, like Malcolm, with wives and children who have moved on, leaving them without support systems to help them in their transitions. Without ties to a community, they are more likely to commit a crime—as Malcolm does—to support themselves.
Most research on the subject suggests that the bloated American prison system is the consequence of an American fixation on punishment and vengeance against perceived wrongdoers. Whereas in other countries the loss of freedom is the punishment, American culture seeks to impose additional suffering on inmates. As Grisham has emphasized in this and other books, the system is woefully prone to error and overreach.
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