Summary: Having to deal with yet another Bunco case provokes a discussion between Friday and Gannon on why it's becoming so common.
Disclaimer: Dragnet (1968) and Emergency! are the properties of Mark VII Limited and are used for entertainment purposes without permission or intent to profit.
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"The Big Discussion"
By; J.T Magnus, 'Turbo'
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This is the city, Los Angeles, California. Over three million people live in Los Angeles and sometimes they have emergencies. There are people who respond; firemen respond to fires and accidents; paramedics respond to medical emergencies, acting as field extensions of the doctors and nurses until a patient can be gotten to one of the city's hospitals where those doctors and nurses can take over treatment. When the emergency involves a crime, that's when I respond. I carry a badge.
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It was chilly that morning in The City of Angels, they were working the day watch out of Frauds division - Bunco section, their boss was Captain Lambert, his partner's name was Bill Gannon, his name was Friday. They were returning to the Police Administration Building after meeting with several victims of an O'Malley bunk. The O'Malley bunk was named after its inventor, a con man who had the idea that the cops were quick to notice frauds involving hundreds or thousands of dollars, so he had come up with the idea of a simple scheme that might only get him five or ten dollars at a time, but could be repeated quickly and without a great deal of elaborate set-up; all he needed was a jar with an insect in it and a mark. Approaching the mark, the con man claimed to be a member of the medical profession from a foreign country - the Phillipines or India, for example - and that he needed to deliver the bug to Stanford University immediately in the interests of medical science, but that he needed money for bus fare. To most people, five dollars didn't seem like much to pay in the name of scientific advancement and a con man could live comfortably on the accumulation of his ill-gotten gains. In this instance, the scam had come to the attention of the LAPD after one of the victims had, out of curiosity and some pride at their 'contribution' to medical science, gone to Stanford to ask what had come of the insect only to be informed by the University that no foreign doctor had delivered any insect to them and they had no knowledge of any foreign doctor or insect like those described by the victim. The University directed them to the Police Department.
"I don't know what to say, Joe," Gannon clucked his tongue, "As if those magazine-sellers claiming to be nurses - or nursing students - weren't bad enough, now we've got bunco-artists pretending to be doctors. Some people just have no sense of shame anymore."
Sitting behind the wheel, Friday glanced over at his partner for a split second, "You know something, Bill..."
"What, Joe?"
Focusing his eyes back on the road, Friday shook his head, "Some days, I just want to turn those girls pretending to be nursing students over to a real nurse, let her deal with them."
"Sounds like trouble," Gannon observed.
The driver gave a slight nod, "You could say that."
"So, you going to tell me what happened, Joe, or am I going to have to work it out of you all shift?"
"Met up with an old friend the other day; Joe Early, he's a doctor at Rampart Emergency," Friday remarked.
"And?" Gannon prodded.
"Head Nurse in Emergency is named Dixie McCall; it seems the day before Early and I ran into each other, McCall had come into work fuming."
Certain that it wouldn't be the correct answer, Gannon offered up, "Car trouble?"
"Door-to-door trouble," Friday corrected. "Someone tried to pull the 'selling magazines to pay for nursing school' bunco on her. She wasn't amused."
"I can imagine she wouldn't be," Gannon shook his head, "I know I'm not every time we come across some phony police officer or detective."
Friday snorted slightly, "Yeah, but we're protected - at least to some degree - by the fact that Impersonating a Police Officer is a crime; Doctors and Nurses, they're not sworn civil servants like Police or Firemen, they don't have that protection."
"Sure they do, Joe; Fraud, Misrepresentation." Gannon tilted his head to the side for a moment, "It's maybe not the best protection, but it's there."
"There was a time when they didn't need that kind of protection; they help people, sick people, injured people, children, the elderly," Friday's knuckles turned white as thinking about it made him tighten his grip on the wheel to keep from clenching his teeth. "At one time no one would have ever thought to impersonate someone like a doctor."
"Maybe, but not as recently as you might think, Joe," Gannon pointed out, "What would you call what was being done even as recently as the twenties and thirties by self-proclaimed 'Doctors' and 'miracle men', going around in wagons in the old days or even vans and trucks in more modern times, selling bottles of elixir out of the back to people who were ailing and that 'elixir' was usually little more than sugar water if they were lucky, moonshine that could blind them or kill them if they weren't."
"I don't know, Bill, maybe I like to think we've gotten somewhere since those times; that two World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, the Civil Rights Movement, everything we've been through since then, that it all means something, that we've come out of it better - better educated, better informed, better morals, better respect for ourselves and for others..." Friday shook his head, "And then I see magazine swindles, O'Malley bunks, phony repairman cons, blank contract scams, fake mines, fake faith healers, fake bank examiners, fake cops, fake doctors, rigged games on the street corners... and I wonder, are we ever going to learn? Really?"
Gannon sighed in depressed agreement, "I'll agree that it's a sad commentary on society, Joe. Do you remember a few weeks ago, we caught a bunco artist named Stone?"
Friday nodded, "Michael Stone. I remember."
"I was questioning him when you stepped out for a moment. Know what he told me was the secret to being a con man?"
Friday pursed his lips together before replying, "I'm sure you're going to tell me."
"He said that you can't cheat an honest man, it can't be done." Gannon shook his head, then elaborated, "The secret, he said, was to find someone who wants something for nothing and give them nothing for something."
"Sounds about right," Friday knew it was true, but that didn't mean he liked it.
"I think maybe that's the worse part, Joe; it's not the bunco artists, the con men and the phony 'professionals' that make things so bad. It's the number of people who think they can get something for nothing. Hard work, dedication, a desire to better oneself, they've all gone out the window in recent years. No one wants to earn anything anymore, they all want things given to them. They don't understand how to value anything because they haven't worked for it. Oh, I know that there are people who need a hand up; the elderly, the disabled, the families that just aren't bringing in enough to make ends meet no matter how hard they try, I don't blame any of them. It's the ones who think they should be paid more for sweeping floors and serving food without thinking about where the money's going to come from, the people who are going to be charged more; the ones who want to argue that a job should be a right, not a privilege or a responsibility. That's where part of the problem starts."
"And if they're not falling for bunk, they're turning to crime," Friday shook his head, "And we know what they'll say; 'I deserve it, not them', 'it should have been mine anyway', 'it was just one little thing', it's the same stories, every time, and they're usually just that - stories. We've heard them a thousand times and they never change and they're rarely the truth anyway."
"It's makes you wonder, don't it, Joe?" Gannon asked as the car stopped at a red light, allowing his partner to give him his full attention.
"Wonder what?"
"Where this country's going and how much longer we have before it ends up there," Gannon answered.
Friday looked at Gannon with a frown, "Well if things keep getting worse at the rate they are..."
Gannon raised an eyebrow, "Yeah?"
"We won't have to wait long to find out..." Friday shook his head before turning his attention back to the road as the light changed.
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Author's Note: The O'Malley con is a real con which was mentioned in Jack Webb's book "The Badge", though assigning it the name of its 'creator' was my own doing. The mentioned bunco artist 'Michael Stone', however, is pure fiction. He's actually named after one of the conmen from the show "Hustle", Micky Stone, alias 'Mickey Bricks'.
Also, has anyone ever noticed that when you reach one of Friday or Gannon's speeches, writing a Dragnet fanfic ends up feeling like you're writing a position paper for a Sociology or Civic and Ethics class?