Son of a Grifter Quotes

“Sante Kimes got people to do her bidding by flattery, by lying, by overwhelming weak personalities.”
― Kent Walker, Son of a Grifter: The Twisted Tale of Sante and Kenny Kimes, the Most Notorious Con Artists in America (True Crime

“It was hard to understand how two huge egos got along so well. Between them they’d use up all the oxygen in a room.”
― Kent Walker, Son of a Grifter: The Twisted Tale of Sante and Kenny Kimes, the Most Notorious Con Artists in America (True Crime

“But she saw the tears, so she put her hand on my arm in a consoling gesture. She had no way of knowing that not all my crying was for Ken. The tears were because I wished it were her on that metal table instead.”
― Kent Walker, Son of a Grifter: The Twisted Tale of Sante and Kenny Kimes, the Most Notorious Con Artists in America (True Crime

“Fatigue and disgust had transformed me from referee to combatant.”
― Kent Walker, Son of a Grifter: The Twisted Tale of Sante and Kenny Kimes, the Most Notorious Con Artists in America (True Crime

“Before the feds cracked down, Con was a full-fledged industry in Nevada.”
― Kent Walker, Son of a Grifter: The Twisted Tale of Sante and Kenny Kimes, the Most Notorious Con Artists in America (True Crime

“I became convinced that no one was ever going to believe me unless I delivered a videotape of my mother engaged in a criminal act, wrapped in her signed confession, with directions to her house and five bucks for gas. I gave up.”
― Kent Walker, Son of a Grifter: The Twisted Tale of Sante and Kenny Kimes, the Most Notorious Con Artists in America (True Crime

“You will hear people in law enforcement say that a con artist, a grifter, doesn’t kill. A grifter by definition isn’t a violent criminal, and there’s a line between fraud and murder that’s hard to cross.”
― Kent Walker, Son of a Grifter: The Twisted Tale of Sante and Kenny Kimes, the Most Notorious Con Artists in America (True Crime

“Elmer Holmgren had no such compunctions. He was a meager, skinny, malleable little man with a nasal voice, a night-school attorney who’d failed his way down the employment ladder till he met my parents.”
― Kent Walker, Son of a Grifter: The Twisted Tale of Sante and Kenny Kimes, the Most Notorious Con Artists in America (True Crime

“Prison time had made Mom far harder, more desperate, and more dangerous.”
― Kent Walker, Son of a Grifter: The Twisted Tale of Sante and Kenny Kimes, the Most Notorious Con Artists in America (True Crime

“Ken had been training his son to be irresponsible, impulsive, secretive, and destructive since the day Mom went to prison.”
― Kent Walker, Son of a Grifter: The Twisted Tale of Sante and Kenny Kimes, the Most Notorious Con Artists in America (True Crime

“She was not capable of introspection, even when someone else had done it for her.”
― Kent Walker, Son of a Grifter: The Twisted Tale of Sante and Kenny Kimes, the Most Notorious Con Artists in America (True Crime

“Mom was an impulsive, moody, paranoid narcissist and hypochondriac, loosely tethered to reality.”
― Kent Walker, Son of a Grifter: The Twisted Tale of Sante and Kenny Kimes, the Most Notorious Con Artists in America (True Crime

“Several years later, when Ken’s mother died, Mom screened Ken’s calls and didn’t tell him. He missed the funeral. In lieu of Ken, Mom sent flowers and signed his name to a “condolence” note. In so many words, it said, “I never want to speak to any of you again.”
― Kent Walker, Son of a Grifter: The Twisted Tale of Sante and Kenny Kimes, the Most Notorious Con Artists in America (True Crime

“He believed that as a successful businessman, he had learned one simple truth that was eluding me. They—everybody, the world—are all bastards, and they’re all out to get you.”
― Kent Walker, Son of a Grifter: The Twisted Tale of Sante and Kenny Kimes, the Most Notorious Con Artists in America (True Crime

“The idea that Mom no longer controlled my life, I realized, had been wishful thinking, plain and simple. If I stayed in Fredericton, I was disobeying a military order. If I took this bogus “emergency leave,” my career was ruined. I couldn’t come back until Mom decided Ken’s “heart problems” were better. I had been allowed to be a pilot as long as it suited Mom. Now it was over.”
― Kent Walker, Son of a Grifter: The Twisted Tale of Sante and Kenny Kimes, the Most Notorious Con Artists in America (True Crime

“The friends she made all had a few qualities in common. They tended to be Mom and Ken’s social inferiors and were easily impressed by any hint of wealth. They were gullible and soft-hearted. Mom searched far and wide for the right mix of passivity and kindness. Nine out of ten people might turn her down, but the tenth would reveal some exploitable weakness.”
― Kent Walker, Son of a Grifter: The Twisted Tale of Sante and Kenny Kimes, the Most Notorious Con Artists in America (True Crime

“Have you ever had a client,” I asked Weitzman, “as evil as my mother?” He was silent for a few seconds, thinking back, and then he answered. “Charles Manson,” he said.”
― Kent Walker, Son of a Grifter: The Twisted Tale of Sante and Kenny Kimes, the Most Notorious Con Artists in America (True Crime

“Ultimately, unfulfilled by the wealth she’d always sought, she began to work on a bigger scale. With the backing of Ken Kimes, Mom graduated from fraud and theft to outright murder.”
― Kent Walker, Son of a Grifter: The Twisted Tale of Sante and Kenny Kimes, the Most Notorious Con Artists in America (True Crime

“Most kids are taught not to talk to strangers. To Mom the most dangerous strangers of all were cops.”
― Kent Walker, Son of a Grifter: The Twisted Tale of Sante and Kenny Kimes, the Most Notorious Con Artists in America (True Crime

“Very few people stood up to her except in their own memories.”
― Kent Walker, Son of a Grifter: The Twisted Tale of Sante and Kenny Kimes, the Most Notorious Con Artists in America (True Crime

“Gentile’s office in downtown Las Vegas, I got on the elevator and turned around and there was a TV camera. It was just the two of us in the little box, me and the man with the big machine on his shoulder. He was filming me as I stood there silent. “Turn the camera off,” I said. He didn’t. I tried to move away from him in the elevator, and somehow in the maneuvering he bumped my chin with the black plastic end of his machine and I snapped. I slugged him, or actually I slugged the camera. He turned it off. The maids case was like a county fair compared with the Silverman disappearance, which had happened in the media capital of the world. It had happened within blocks of the studios of the three major networks and the New York Times. The tabloids reveled in the rich narrative of the case, and Mom and Kenny became notorious throughout the Western Hemisphere. Most crimes are pedestrian and tawdry. Though each perpetrator has his own rap sheet and motivation and banged-up psyche, the crime blotter is very repetitive. A wife beater kills his wife. A crack addict uses a gun to get money for his habit. Liquor-store holdups, domestic abuse, drug dealer shoot-outs, DWIs, and so on. This one had a story line you could reduce to a movie pitch. Mother/Son Grifters Held in Millionaire’s Disappearance! My mother’s over-the-top persona, Kenny’s shady polish, and the ridiculous rumors of mother-son incest gave the media a narrative it couldn’t resist. Mom and Kenny were the smart, interesting, evil criminals with the elaborate, diabolical plan who exist in fiction and rarely in real life. The media landed on my life with elephant feet. I was under siege as soon as I returned to my office after my family’s excursion to Newport Beach. The deluge started at 10 A.M. on July 8, 1998. I kept a list in a drawer of the media outlets that called or dropped by our little one-story L-shaped office building on Decatur. It was a tabloid clusterfuck. Every network, newspaper, local news station, and wire service sent troops. Dateline and 20/20 competed to see who could get a Kimes segment on-air first. Dateline did two shows about Mom and Kenny. I developed a strategy for dealing with reporters. My unusual training in the media arts as the son of Sante, and as a de facto paralegal in the maids case, meant that I had a better idea of how to deal with reporters than my staff did. They might find it exciting that someone wanted to talk to them, and forget to stop at “No comment.” I knew better. So I hid from the camera crews in a back room, so there’d be no pictures, and I handled the calls myself. I told my secretary not to bother asking who was on the line and to transfer all comers back to me. I would get the name and affiliation of the reporter, write down the info on my roster, and”
― Kent Walker, Son of a Grifter: The Twisted Tale of Sante and Kenny Kimes, the Most Notorious Con Artists in America (True Crime

“This is why cops shoot people in the back, I thought. They can’t keep up. Then”
― Kent Walker, Son of a Grifter: The Twisted Tale of Sante and Kenny Kimes, the Most Notorious Con Artists in America (True Crime