English

Alternative forms

• fagin

Noun

Fagin ‎(plural Fagins)

1. A person who entices children into criminal activity, often teaching them how to conduct those crimes, and profits from their crimes in return for support.
   • 1947, California News - Volumes 63-67, page 104:

     The indignation of the self-respecting deaf is aroused by the fact that nine-tenths of the mendicant peddling is engineered by slick Fagins who teach inexperienced deaf youths the tricks of the trade and then collect the lion's share of the profits.

   • 1967, Public Hearing: Subject: Licensing of Private Facilities, page 14:

     We sort of treat a situation whereby the proprietor or operator or person running a foster home, if he were to make a profit, we sort of regard him as sort of a Fagin because he has been making money off little kids.

   • 2009, Problems of Education, ISBN 8176489042, page 70:

     Each such group exercises a formative influence on the active dispositions of its members. A clique, a club, a gang, a Fagin's household of thieves, the prisoners in a jail, provide educative environments for those who enter into their collective or conjoint activities, as truly as a church, a labour union, a business partnership, or a political party.

   • 2010, Graham Vickers, Neal Cassady: The Fast Life of a Beat Hero, ISBN 0857121375:

     A few of its occupants were poor, law-abiding folk just trying to get by peaceably, but it was a heaven-sent recruiting center for Jack and Ralph who, Neal said, ran a Fagin-like academy for aspiring pickpockets, sneak thieves, and burglars.

   • 2013, Charles Samuel, Ghost of Honor, ISBN 130437338X, page 177:

     At Midwest there is a Fagin character, Quinton, who is running a school for terrorists or something on that order.

   • 2016 May 23, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, “Apocalypse pits the strengths of the X-Men series against the weaknesses”, in The Onion AV Club:

     Apocalypse also happens to be a Fagin figure, shuffling around the back alleys of Cairo, where he makes the weather-controlling pickpocket Storm (Alexandra Shipp) his first follower by offering her baubles.

Derived terms

• Faginesque

English

Noun

fagin ‎(plural fagins)

1. Alternative form of Fagin
   • 1911, Walter Hines Page, ‎Arthur Wilson Page, The World's Work: A History of Our Time - Volume 22, page 14847:

     From February until the following October, Latsky was daily in the streets with the "fagins," who made much of him; for at ten years of age he was admitted to be one of the very cleverest of all the young thieves on the East Side.

   • 1954, Galaxy Magazine - Volume 8, Issues 1-6, page 118:

     You can always find a fagin or a madam for a kid. I don't know how prices are now — when I was thirteen, I brought fifty dollars." Norvell, his hair standing on end, said, "You?" "I guess I was lucky — they sold me to a fagin, not into a house.

   • 2006, Hanna Wallinger, Transitions: Race, Culture, and the Dynamics of Change, ISBN 3825895319, page 67:

     Native Speaker does not present the United States as a promised land but as an "orphanage:" "It's an orphanage and there is a fagin"

   • 2007, Anu Garg, The Dord, the Diglot, and an Avocado or Two, ISBN 1440623090:

     Profiling the legendary biblioklept Stephen Blumberg ("the greatest book thief in U.S. history"), the New Yorker magazine writes, “He was a fagin. Many of his friendships were with adolescent boys. He gave them money to help him unload his truck and sometimes to steal things."