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88 SNAKES IN SUITS
true motivations and project carefully formed personas to capitalize
on the needs, expectations, and naïveté of individuals useful to them.
When finished with their victims, they move on.
When trying to manipulate several people simultaneously, particularly
in a group of peers, there is the risk that someone will suspect
the truth and raise doubts about their aims, possibly jeopardizing
their plans. Therefore, many psychopaths focus their efforts on one
person at a time because it takes a lot of effort to maintain multiple
façades in a group, each one custom-designed for the intended individual,
especially if the stories involve complex lies and deceit. Some
psychopaths, however, enjoy the challenge of running several different
deceits concurrently while assuring that their victims never share
information with other potential targets, or better yet, never even
meet one another.
Unless caught and prosecuted for breaking the law, psychopaths
suffer little consequence for the physical, emotional, psychological,
and financial abuses they leave behind. The sad fact is that few
victims—coworkers, partners, and spouses—report them to the authorities
(or to their friends, for that matter) because of the shame
they feel for being conned. Even in large firms, such as banks and
brokerage houses, frauds and scams sometimes are not reported for
fear of damaging the reputation of the firm. Psychopaths know and
use this to their advantage. Others are too intimidated by fears of
reprisal or litigation to speak up, being thankful that the psychopath
simply is no longer in their life but has moved on to some other unfortunate
person or firm.
Administrators and staff in prisons and psychiatric hospitals are
painfully aware of how psychopaths operate in groups. In these structured
settings, it takes little time for psychopaths to figure out the two
main participants in the power structure—inmates versus guards and
patients versus doctors or staff. Given this knowledge, they effectively
make use of the group dynamics and role expectations of the different
players. For example, some psychopaths successfully manipulate
prison officials to get themselves transferred to a forensic hospital,