March 9, 1999

bunco (squad)

I've been watching old "Dragnet" reruns on Nick At Nite TVLand (they're very compelling), and I notice that very often, Sargeant Friday finds himself assigned to the "bunco" squad. I have a general sense of what bunco is, but are there hard rules about the types of crimes that fall into the bunco category? And where does the word come from? Just the facts, ma'am.

That's "just the facts, sir" to you, bub.

The bunco squad is those policemen who investigate confidence swindles.

The original bunco was a dishonest gambling game played with dice. Eventually the word evolved the sense 'the playing of a bunco game', and hence 'swindling or fraud of any sort'. As a verb, bunco means 'to swindle or cheat (originally at bunco); (hence) to fool' (example: "Say, young feller, you certainly bunkoed me!"--Rodgers and Hammerstein, Oklahoma!).

There are a number of related senses and compound forms. For bunco itself we have 'deceit or flattery'; 'a swindler'; and 'the bunco squad' ("The Bunko people are really carrying a needle for the Rube"--W.S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch). Some of the compound forms are bunco artist and bunco man 'a swindler'; bunco cop 'a police officer on a bunco squad'; and bunco-steerer 'a person who lures prospective victims to a bunco game'.

Bunco seems to have originally been a variant of banco, from Spanish banca 'a card game similar to monte'. The word first appears in America in the early 1870s, and became quite popular during that decade. Bunco squad is first recorded in the 1940s.