skinning, n.² — Green’s Dictionary of Slang

skinning n.²

1. the fleecing of a victim, e.g. by a confidence trickster; also attrib.

1826		Natchez Newspaper (MS) 29 Nov. 3/2: Sacred to the Memory of Jonathan Jenkinson commonly called Skinning Jack, who spent a long life in defrauding his fellow creatures and grinding the face of the poor.
1859		Matsell Vocabulum 117: skinning A sure game, where all who play are sure to lose, except the gamesters.
1872		E. Crapsey Nether Side of NY 78: [S]ome garret or cellar, on the door of which he tacks a tin sign bearing the name of some grand consolidated mining or railroad company which is unknown in the street, except through skinning operations.
1899		C. Rook Hooligan Nights 36: The house to which you take mugs who have been marked for skinning.
1905		H. Green Actors’ Boarding House (1906) 261: One for the victim, with a scarcity of the useful seven, and the other for the exclusive use of the person conducting the skinning bee.
1944		D. Runyon Runyon à la Carte 127: If you call skinning marks on those phony tip sheets you peddle legitimate, maybe you are legit.
1958		R. Chandler Playback 164: If you want cold-blooded skinning, we got a bunch of people in this town.

2. (US) a beating, whether physical or verbal.

1885		Bulletin (Sydney) 6 Jun. 6/1: Then Webb took another 20 minutes at Parkes-skinning, and when Henry’s ‘life’ had been metaphorically ‘taken,’ [...] the remorseless Webb wiped the perspiration off the front of his thinking-box and squatted down for a spell.
1932		H.S. Truman letter 13 July in Ferrell Dear Bess (1983) 347: I got a skinning for not doing it some other way.
1984		I. Doig Eng. Creek 296: My mother would skin whatever was left of me after my father’s skinning.

skinning game (n.)

(US) any form of corrupt, crooked gambling, e.g. poker, faro and the establishment where it takes place.

1858		N.Y. Trib. 12 Feb. 3/2: This is the worst of all the skinning games of Broadway.
1873		J. O’Connor Wanderings of a Vagabond 212: They are located exclusively in our large commercial cities. Small towns will not support a skinning game.

skinning house (n.) (also skinning den, ...joint) [skin v.¹ (3) + SE house/joint n. (3)/den]

(US) a casino or any place of entertainment where confidence tricksters or crooked gamblers operate.

1858		N.Y. Trib. 12 Feb. 3/2: A complete list of [...] the ‘skinning houses’ — that is, places where the game is so played [...] that no man can win a bet unless permitted by the dealer.
1864		Dly News (London) 1 Sept. 2/2: ‘Skinning-houses’ [where] many a poor deboshed sailor has been [...] stripped to the skin.
1873		J. O’Connor Wanderings of a Vagabond 188: The proprietors of some of these aristocratic ‘skinning-houses’ have hired reporters to write articles [...] describing their establishments, setting forth their splendor and magnificence, and laudatory of the manner in which they were kept. [Ibid.] 204: It [...] throws them into the company of wealthy persons whom they can rope into their ‘skinning dens,’ and there rob them.
1927		H. Asbury Gangs of N.Y. 87: Jim Bartolf’s place, notorious as a skinning house, was at No. 10 Park Place.
1938		H. Asbury Sucker’s Progress 181: Another type of second-class skinning house which met with great success in New York was [...] operated only when a sucker was on hand to be trimmed.
1940		H. Asbury Gangs of Chicago (2002) 51: The little nest of gamblers dominated by the patrician John Sears had become, in 1857, a large and discordant colony of deadfalls and skinning joints.