Cheats, Charlatans, and Chicanery

Louis A. Knafla is a professor of history at the University of Calgary,
the co-editor of Law, Society, and the State: Essays in Modern Legal
History, and the author of Lords of the Western Bench.

Andreas Schroeder has been a regular guest on CBC Radio’s “Basic
Black,” relating tales of scams and rip-offs. Some of those tales
appeared in Scams, Scandals and Skulduggery (1996). The 17 tales in this
follow-up volume feature a cast of characters that includes butchers,
engineers, priests, and explorers. The stories reveal how easy it
is—in a world rife with greed and gullibility—to slip through the
cracks of society’s rules, regulations, and laws. Unfortunately,
conflicting evidence presented in the tales is not assessed, and there
are no notes to document the dialogue or quotations (although a short
list of sources is provided for each story.) Cheats, Charlatans, and
Chicanery is not so much an investigative look at scams as it is a
series of short summaries of stories that have been the focus of
individual studies.