 A person who's known as an artful dodger is someone who gets away with things. And this comes from a literary reference, which is from Charles Dickens' novel Oliver Twist, from the early 1800s. And in that, one of the characters is a man named Jack Dawkins, who's a cunning pickpocket. But as part of the story, Dickens names Dawkins the artful dodger, and the expression came to mean anyone that gets away with things.