Headscratchers / The Sting

• Just what was the original plan? Gondorff tells Hooker they have to keep playing Lonnegan even after the con. Essentially, Lonnegan can never know there was a con or else he'd have everyone killed. However, the whole thing with Hooker and the FBI raid was in order to con Snyder so he'd stop interfering by trying to catch Hooker. This gave them the option to leave both "Kelly" and "Shaw" dead from Lonnegan's standpoint, so he couldn't pursue the matter.
  • The original plan was to turn Lonnegan over to the Feds (fake) for bank fraud, where he'd be so desperate to avoid a federal charge....losing an illegal bet would be minor. Getting Snyder to do their "fix" was a small tweak to the original plan. Remember, Polk was in on the con from the get go, he was going to provide the blow off. Snyder just made it easier.
  • The original plan was for Lonnegan to never know he'd been conned, but instead to believe it was a screw-up over placing the rigged bet. The movie draws heavily on The Long Con, a nonfiction book about actual con artists of the era, which describes the exact "wire" con used in the movie and also notes how con artists running this game were so skillful at selling the "mistake" they could often take the mark several more times, as the mark himself would be the one to insist they try again and get it right.

• Wouldn't Lonnegan notice a lack of newspaper coverage of an FBI raid that left two people dead?
  • The Feds hiding two dead perps in Chicago, where Lonnegan does not live, would not be something Lonnegan would care about. He has a bank fraud problem.
    • I've seen this movie dozens of times and bank fraud is never mentioned. In fact such financial cons were dismissed early on because Lonnegan knows those businesses too well.

• Lonnegan insists that he meet Hooker's partner, the one who runs the central office of Western Union. However, he never said that he had to meet the partner at his office. Why did the Con Artists go to all the trouble of taking over the real Western Union manager's office? By doing so, they tremendously increased their risk for no real reason.
  • Why not just set up a meeting with Lonnegan at a restaurant, which is where they ended up anyway? Even if Lonnegan insisted on meeting the "manager" at Western Union for some reason, they could have legitimately refused due to the danger of the Western Union detectives finding out about it and the "partner" getting fired.
  • If Lonnegan absolutely insisted on meeting the "partner" at Western Union, they could have just arranged for him to meet Lonnegan in the public lobby of the Western Union office and left for the restaurant from there. If for some bizarre reason Lonnegan insisted on going inside the manager's office, their refusal would be even more justified and Lonnegan would have looked like a paranoid fool for questioning it.
  • The whole point is to avoid Lonnegan doubting the situation for any reason. Using a real office, or a facsimile if there'd been time to set one up, means one less thing for him to question. This is not a naturally trusting man. By having Twist in the office, it reinforces the legitimacy of the con without trying to make any excuses. The painting served two purposes. The first was to get the real manager out and the second was to make it seem he'd been caught by surprise with the meeting.
• How did Henry Gondorff know that his four Jacks would be enough to win the hand? He'd have looked a bit silly if Lonnegan had turned up four Queens..
  • That was actually covered, he'd been told that Lonnegan's style was to rely on 9's. (Which actually makes a lot of sense if we're talking about a regular routine and not a one-off stunt, since it would look much more suspicious to always have a good hand with the picture cards.)
    • Gondorff is also told (By J.J.) that when Lonnegan runs his quad nines cheat, he gives the mark quad threes or fours, so when Gondorff ends up getting the quad threes, it's a virtual guarantee Lonnegan is running the cheat and has dealt himself the quad nines.
• How could Hooker know that neither Lonnegan nor any of his associates could recognize his face despite sending assassins to kill him - or that he would never encounter those assassins - or, even more likely, those henchmen who'd directly contacted them and could presumably have Hooker's photo - while being with Lonnegan? That was awfully risky.
  • Hooker can't know this - but that's one of the things that shows his youth compared to Gondorff and the others. He takes foolish risks because he's young, arrogant and convinced of his own ability to handle things, even though it's either luck of others looking for out him that saves him more often than not.

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