Swindle
Gordon Korman
 In the beginning, Griffin, "The Man With the Plan", as his best friend Ben Slovak likes to call him, gets an idea to sleep in the old Rockford house scheduled for demolition. They then proceed to lie to their parents so they can go have a sleepover there before it gets demolished. They start snooping through the house and they come to a drawer; they open it to find an old Babe Ruth card. Wondering about it, they take it to a pawn shop owned by S. Wendell Palomino, nicknamed "Swindle"; they ask him how much Palomino would give them for the card. Palomino tells him the card is a replica and tricks them out for $120. Griffin’s parents are not doing well financially, due to Griffin’s dad's invention, a machine that picks fruit automatically named the SmartPick. Griffin also finds out his family is going to have to sell their house to move to a more reasonably priced neighborhood. If his family had to move, Griffin would have to leave his best friend Ben behind, and he also finds out the card was actually real, and that Palomino is going to sell it for millions. Griffin, with Ben's help, decides to make a plan to break into Palomino's store to get the card from the safe. They break into the shop by getting in a large crate. A man that works in the store, 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, he had moved the card to his house. Griffin and Ben make another plan to break into the house and steal the card back. The only problem is that they need six sixth graders to help. They recruit four in all. Logan, an actor-to-be, takes care of the suspicious neighbor of Palomino’s. Pitch is a climber, and they need her to climb up and get in from the bathroom skylight. They need Savannah, an animal lover, to calm the guard dog down, and make Melissa take care of the security system so they can get in. Suddenly, Darren, a boy who is loved by Ben and Griffin, hears about the plan to break in and blackmails them into letting him join in on the plan for some of the money. They need Swindle to get out of his house so the plan can happen and, knowing Swindle is a stealer, Griffin and Ben buy him a ticket to a New York Rangers hockey game and they "accidentally" mail it to him, faking it as a birthday card. Everyone agrees to the plan, and so it begins. On the heist night, Pitch sprains her ankle; Ben falls asleep in a bush, and they almost ruin the entire heist. Then Darren tries to take the card for himself. Only thinking of the one guard dog, they get inside to find two. After they manage the affair, they find the safe, but the card isn't in there, so they look around the entire house until Griffin remembers from an interview where the reporter asked why the card was so cold. Griffin then ran to the freezer. However, something sets the security system on and the team hears the police coming. In shock Darren grabs the card and tries to run. When running outside, Darren loses grip and the card ends up in a tree. Griffin remembers his dad’s invention, the SmartPick, and runs home to get it. They manage to get the card and make a run for it. Luckily Griffin has a Plan B. Unfortunately; they get caught, since Pitch left the climbing harnesses. Later, Griffin goes to retrieve the card, but he is arrested by Detective Vizzini. Swindle doesn't want to press charges (so he can avoid an investigation so he won't risk getting in trouble when he cheated Griffin), and Winifred Rockford Bates, the last surviving member of the original Rockford family, gives the Babe Ruth baseball card to her youngest relative, Darren Vader. Ben had said earlier that Darren claimed to be related to the Rockfords. However, Griffin and Ben did not believe him donate the money, in total $974,000, making it the second most expensive collectible ever. They then have to give the card to the Cedarville Museum. In the end no one got any money from the heist, though all the talk about the heist caused Griffin's dad to have the SmartPick patented. After that, Griffin and his family do not have any more financial problems. As of 2009, a movie deal on Swindle and Schooled (another Gordon Korman book) was made public, although not many details have gone out.