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The Sting
In September 1936, amid the Great Depression, grifter Johnny Hooker and his partners, Luther Coleman and Joe Erie, con $11,000 in cash from an unsuspecting victim in Joliet, Illinois. Hooker loses his share of the con on a rigged roulette game, while Luther, buoyed by the windfall, decides to retire. He tells Hooker to seek out his old friend, Henry Gondorff, in Chicago, to learn "the big con". Corrupt Joliet police lieutenant William Snyder confronts Hooker, revealing that their mark was a courier for vicious Irish-American crime boss Doyle Lonnegan. Lonnegan's men murder Luther and the courier. After finding Luther dead, Hooker flees to Chicago.
Hooker finds Gondorff drunk and in hiding from the FBI, running a carousel that is a front for a brothel, and asks for help taking down Lonnegan. Initially reluctant, Gondorff relents and recruits a team of experienced con men. They decide to resurrect an elaborate, obsolete scam known as "the wire", using a large crew to create a phony off-track betting parlor. Snyder and Lonnegan's men track Hooker to Chicago; Gondorff warns Hooker that if either of them finds him, the con will have to be called off.
Aboard the opulent 20th Century Limited, Gondorff, posing as the boorish Chicago bookie "Shaw", buys into Lonnegan's private, high-stakes poker game, being facilitated by the train's conductor. "Shaw" infuriates Lonnegan with his obnoxious behavior, then cheats him out of $15,000 ($ 348,022 in 2025). Hooker, posing as "Shaw's" disgruntled employee "Kelly", is sent to collect the winnings and convince Lonnegan to help him take over "Shaw's" operation – a tactic Lonnegan has used repeatedly to build his crime empire. Hooker returns home to find Lonnegan's men waiting to assassinate him, but he avoids their efforts. Their attempt spooks Gondorff, but Hooker convinces him to keep the con alive.
Lonnegan, frustrated with his men's inability to kill Hooker for the Joliet con – and unaware that "Kelly" is Hooker – orders the job to be given to Salino, his best assassin. A mysterious figure, wearing black leather gloves, begins to follow and observe Hooker. Meanwhile, Snyder's pursuit of Hooker attracts the attention of undercover FBI agents led by Agent Polk, who orders Snyder to bring Hooker in to entrap Gondorff.
"Kelly" gives Lonnegan a tip on a 7-to-1 long shot in a horse race that pays off. When Lonnegan presses him for details, he reveals that he has a partner, "Les Harmon" (actually con man Kid Twist), in the Chicago Western Union office, who will help them topple "Shaw" by winning bets he books on horse races through past-posting. Lonnegan is convinced after being provided the trifecta of another race, and agrees to finance a $500,000 bet ($ 11.6 million in 2025) to break "Shaw" and get revenge. Shortly thereafter, Snyder captures Hooker and brings him before Polk, who forces Hooker to betray Gondorff by threatening to jail Luther Coleman's widow.
Feeling despondent the night before the sting, Hooker sleeps with a diner waitress named Loretta. The next morning, as she walks toward him in an alley, the black-gloved man appears and shoots her dead before she can shoot Hooker. The man reveals to Hooker that Gondorff hired him to protect him, and that the waitress was, in fact, Salino.
After "Harmon" telephones directions to "Place it on Lucky Dan", Lonnegan bets $500,000 at "Shaw's" parlor on the horse named Lucky Dan to win. As the race begins, "Harmon" arrives and expresses shock at Lonnegan's bet: when he said "place it", he meant that the horse would "place" (i.e., finish second). In a panic, Lonnegan rushes to the teller window and demands his money back, at which point Polk, Snyder, and a half-dozen FBI agents storm the parlor. Polk tells Hooker he is free to go. Shocked at the betrayal, Gondorff shoots Hooker. Polk shoots Gondorff and orders Snyder to get the ostensibly respectable Lonnegan away from the crime scene.
With Lonnegan and Snyder safely away, Hooker and Gondorff rise ("bleeding" only from fake bullets) amid cheers and laughter. "Polk" is actually Hickey, a fellow con man, who has been running a con atop Gondorff's con with his "FBI agents" to divert Snyder and ensure that Lonnegan abandoned the money without ever realizing he was taken. As the con men strip the room of its contents, Hooker refuses his share of the money, claiming he would lose it anyway, and walks away with Gondorff.