Grafter

If the people are corrupt; if everybody is a grafter, as our pessimistic friends would have us believe, Roosevelt would be unpopular. His popularity is proof that the people, as a whole, are honest.

It is rather confused rhetoric to call a grafter a thief. His crime is not that he filches money from the safe but that he betrays a trust.

2007, Rebecca Menes, "Limiting the Reach of the Grabbing Hand: Graft and growth in American Cities, 1880 to 1930", in Edward L. Glaeser, Claudia Goldin (eds.), Corruption and Reform: Lessons from America's Economic History, National Bureau of Economic Research Conference Report, The University of Chicago Press, →ISBN, page 64. Rapid city growth rewarded the circumspect grafter with opportunities for what one famous Tammany Hall politician termed “honest graft” […].