Swindle (novel)

Swindle is a 2008 book by Gordon Korman. The book is about a sixth grader named Griffin Bing who thinks he has found the answer to his family's financial problems when he discovers an extremely rare Babe Ruth baseball card in an abandoned house. However, when he tries to sell it to a local dealer named S. Wendell Palomino, (nicknamed Swindle, hence the title) he is told it is a replica and is tricked out of it. Now, in order to get the card back, Griffin must gather a group of local students with unique skills to break into Palomino's heavily guarded home to retrieve the card. The book has a 2 sequels titled Zoobreak and Framed. It also has a fourth book coming up that is called Showoff.

Plot

Griffin Bing, whose best friend, Ben Slovak, calls him, "The Man With The Plan", has parents who are struggling to patent his father's invention, an automatic fruit picker named the SmartPick. He thinks he has found the answer to all his financial problems after he finds an extremely rare Babe Ruth baseball card in the old Rockford house scheduled for demolition. He sells the card to a local dealer named S. Wendell Palomino who tells him the card is a replica and tricks him out of the card for a mere $120. Griffin's problems are even worse when he finds out his family is selling their house to move to a more reasonable priced neighborhood. If they moved, Griffin would be forced to leave Ben behind. Angry when he finds out the card is real, and that Palomino is planning to sell it for millions, Griffin, with Ben's help, make a plan to break into Palomino's heavily guarded store to retrieve the card from a safe. They break into the shop by using the Trojan horse method, getting in a big crate. Swindle's assistant, Tom Dufferin carries the box inside. When the boys are securely inside the shop, they discover that the safe has disappeared. To break out of the store, Griffin and Ben climb the fence, and break the alarm code using a video recording of Dufferin, as he punches the code in after he closes the shop. After the failure of the heist of the shop, they discover that Swindle might have removed the safe and moved the card to his house. The two boys produce an ultimate plan that needs six sixth graders in his homeroom. To get Swindle out of his house, Griffin and Ben buy him a ticket to a New York Rangers hockey game "accidentally" mail it to him contained in a child's birthday card. The team agrees to do it, and the ultimate plan begins. Logan Kellerman, an actor-to-be, takes care of a very nosy neighbor of Swindle's, Eli Mulroney. Antonia "Pitch" Benson is a climber, and they need her to climb up to a bathroom skylight to break in. They need Savannah Drysdale to calm the guard dog down, and Melissa Dukakis takes care of the security system and other technology. But Darren Vader, a burly boy who annoys Ben and Griffin, eavesdrops and blackmails them to let him join in on the plan for a cut of the profits. On the heist night, Pitch sprains her ankle, Ben falls asleep in a bush, and Darren tries to take the card for himself. Griffin manages to use the smart pick to retrieve the card from a high branch of an oak tree. There is not only one guard dog, but two. They find the safe, but the card wasn't in there, so they had to search for it until Griffin remembered from an interview where the reporter asked why the card was so cold. Griffin then ran to the freezer and finds it in the breast of a Thanksgiving turkey. However, something sets the security system on and the team hears the police sirens in the distance. In the teams shock Darren takes the card and tries to run. While outside, Darren loses grip and the card ends up high in a tree. Griffin goes home and gets the smartpick, his dads invention, and retrieves the card. Once the card is in his hands he and the team, except for Darren, make a run for it. Griffin has a Plan B. He puts the card in an envelope and mails the card to the house he found it in. Unfortunately, the team is caught, since Pitch left the climbing harnesses. Later, Griffin goes to retrieve the card, but he is immediately arrested by Detective Sergeant Vizzini. Swindle doesn't want to press charges (in order to avoid an investigation so he wouldn't risk getting in trouble when he cheated Griffin), and Winifred Rockford Bates, the last surviving member of the original Rockford family, gave the Babe Ruth baseball card to her youngest relative, Darren Vader (Ben mentioned earlier that Darren claimed to be related to the Rockfords). Griffin and Ben could not believe it (particularly because Darren tried to take the card for himself and that he was Griffin and Ben's nemesis), but Darren's parents make him donate the money ($974,000) making it the second most expensive collectible ever that makes Griffin very upset. So now they have to give the card to the Cedarville Museum. The money brought in from the card allows the museum to be fixed up. Griffin, Ben and the rest of the team members (including Darren) didn't get one cent, but all the publicity brought in by the heist allows Griffin's dad to have the SmartPick to be patented, therefore ending the Bings' financial problems. ^[1][2]

As of 2009, a movie deal on Swindle and Schooled, (another Gordon Korman book) was made public, although not many details have gone out.

References