Throughout the entirety of Better Call Saul, Jimmy McGill is known under many names, such as Saul Goodman, Gene Takavic, or Viktor Saint Claire. These personas have one fundamental thing in common: they are all founded on the skills and mischievous personality of Slippin' Jimmy, an alias that McGill went by back in his hometown of Cicero, Illinois.
Slippin' Jimmy was known for pulling all sorts of petty scams in Illinois as a way of earning easy cash. Once he moved to Albuquerque, James McGill may have abandoned his silly nickname, but the chicanery he continued to engage in during his time as a lawyer was deeply rooted in his experiences back in Cicero. Without Slippin' Jimmy, Saul Goodman would arguably have never come into existence, not to mention all the other scams McGill pulled off along the way.
7 Getting Fired From Davis & Main
Not long after he got hired as a senior associate on a partner track at Davis & Main in season 2 of Better Call Saul, Jimmy realized that the life of a corporate lawyer just wasn't for him. However, quitting the company out of his own volition would have meant giving up the hefty bonus he received when he started on the job, which was something that Jimmy was simply not willing to entertain.
In order to get Clifford Main to fire him without cause, Jimmy McGill began trying to make life at Davis & Main as unbearable as possible. This included showing up to meetings in inappropriately colorful suits, playing bagpipes in the middle of the workday, and even repeatedly refusing to flush the toilet. Eventually, Main gave in and showed Jimmy the door, and since "being too annoying" isn't a justifiable cause for firing an employee, the trickster managed to retain his cash bonus.
6 The Fake Rolex Scam
This is a con that Jimmy and his best friend Marco would frequently engage in back in Cicero. As Marco pretended to be passed out drunk in a dark alley wearing a fake Rolex, Jimmy would befriend an unwitting victim at the bar and get them a little drunk.
When leaving the bar, Jimmy and his companion would "accidentally" stumble upon Marco and his fake watch. The entire con was based on enticing the drunken mark to take the Rolex in exchange for whatever cash they had in their wallet at the time. While it wasn't the flashiest of McGill's cons, it provided viewers with valuable insight into Slippin' Jimmy's origins.
5 Saving the Billboard Worker
The early days of Jimmy McGill's law career were neither lucrative nor particularly fulfilling. Working as a public defender for a measly $700 per case wasn't cutting it, and early on in the first season, Jimmy put up a billboard next to a highway, partially as a way to advertise his services and partially to play a trick on Howard Hamlin by mimicking his law firm's signature style.
Expectedly, Jimmy was forced to take down the billboard due to plagiarizing HHM's logo and visuals. The worker responsible for removing the ad conveniently slipped and was left hanging over 100 feet above ground just as Jimmy was filming a video underneath the billboard. He climbed up and "saved" the worker, who was revealed to be in cahoots with Jimmy. Caught on tape, the "heroic act" generated plenty of opportunities, helping McGill kick-start his career in elder law.
4 "Nippy"
The tenth episode of Better Call Saul's final season is focused on one of the most meticulously planned scams Jimmy McGill has ever undertaken. As Gene Takavic, he used Jeff (the taxi driver who recognized him as Saul Goodman in the intro to season 5) to steal luxury clothing items from a department store in the very same mall he worked at.
Prior to the heist, Gene befriended the mall's security guard responsible for overseeing the cameras. To divert his attention away from the screens, he would bring the man cinnamon rolls and then measure out the time it took the guard to eat one. Then, Gene would train Jeff to grab the items in under 3 minutes in order to fit that brief window of opportunity. Thanks to its careful and clever orchestration, the "Nippy" heist definitely secures a spot as one of Slippin Jimmy's best-ever scams.
3 The Courtroom Battery Scam
In the season 2 finale, Chuck records Jimmy admitting to a forgery that resulted in HHM losing a very lucrative client in favor of Jimmy's girlfriend, Kim Wexler. This recording was used as evidence when Chuck sued his brother in hopes of getting Jimmy disbarred. During Jimmy's trial, Chuck was called to testify. Unbeknownst to him, his brother planted a cellphone in one of Chuck's pockets and a fully charged battery in another.
During questioning, Jimmy gets Chuck to take out these items, revealing that the "electromagnetic sensitivity" he claimed to be suffering from was, in fact, a self-induced mental condition rather than a truly debilitating physical illness. This enraged Chuck, who went on an unhinged rant, during which he admitted that his main motivation behind the lawsuit was making sure Jimmy never practices law again. As a result, Jimmy's only punishment was a one-year suspension.
2 The Huell Scam
In season 4, Huell, Jimmy's long-time "business associate," got in legal trouble for assaulting a police officer. In order to save him from jail time, Jimmy and Kim orchestrated one of their most complicated and difficult schemes to date. The pair have single-handedly made up a Louisiana church that claimed Huell was the main pillar of their community, as well as wrote and mailed hundreds of postcards to the District Attorney's office.
They also registered dozens of phone numbers (one for each member of the community) in order to be able to "confirm" the story when the DA inevitably called to follow up. The scam worked out perfectly, and Huell walked out of the court as a free man.
1 Hamlin's Character Assassination
In order to get back at Howard Hamlin for years of perceived injustices, Kim and Jimmy decided to run a lengthy scam aimed at irreversibly ruining Hamlin's reputation in the eyes of the legal community. This scam took an incredibly dark turn in season 6's mid-season finale and resulted in Howard's unintended death. However, there is no denying that Jimmy and Kim executed all of it to perfection.
The scam included Hamlin getting bothered by sex workers for payment during a business lunch, as well as Jimmy impersonating him and stealing his car to act out a scene to get one of Howard's peers to believe in the carefully orchestrated ruse. All of these tricks had Slippin' Jimmy written all over them, but as it turned out in "Plan and Execution," his careless approach to hurting people ended up in real, irreversible consequences that reached far beyond Jimmy's comfort zone.