It's a word you might have heard a lot in the past four years.

"Truffa" is almost certainly the right translation, but "grift" has some specific connotations that I'm not quite sure I can pin down. In some usage it has a connotation of small-scale petty crime. Almost as if you're working very hard to defraud somebody out of a relatively small sum of money -- perhaps by association with the word "grind".

But when it comes to politics, it's much larger scale, while retaining the seediness associated with the small-scale version. It's not just simple bribery or large-scale fraud, but the constant day-to-day use of the office to siphon off money.

I may not really be characterizing it well. English is full of words with many synonyms, but each with a slightly specialized meaning that people feel but don't really show up in dicitionaries. So I don't really know if "truffa" captures all of the implications of "grift" or not. But in terms of understanding the article, it's sufficient.

"Grift" is one of those words that you rarely hear but then all of the sudden it became very popular. Oddly enough my spellchecker doesn't recognize "Grift", and I have no idea why.