Fooling houdini, p.11
Fooling Houdini, page 11
I’d decided it probably wasn’t such a good idea to keep hanging around the monte men on Canal Street, so instead I’d signed up for a class on street scams, three thousand miles from my home, at the Magic Castle in Los Angeles. It met every Monday for four consecutive weeks, and this was my third trip out west this month. The class was run by a group of magicians and former con artists who called themselves the School for Scoundrels—by all accounts the world’s leading experts on the short con.
The school’s motto: Inspiring Confidence Worldwide.
BUILT FROM THE RUINS OF an old Victorian mansion, the Magic Castle looks exactly like what you would expect a magic castle to look like. Spooky, strange, cartoonishly gothic, it looms above the hillside, a stark outcropping of turrets and crenellation, ornately trimmed gables, steep roof pitches with zinc cresting and wraparound balconies. A driveway lined with cypress snakes up the hill, bringing you to a pair of mahogany doors set beneath glass-and-iron friezework.
Dimly lit by torchères scavenged from old MGM sets, the Castle’s interior is a cabinet of curios, a pastiche so dense it spills over into burlesque. Harry Potter-esque paintings follow your footsteps with their eyes. The furniture seems to shuffle around and reposition itself of its own volition. Barstools change size while you’re sitting in them. Near the main salon bar, a piano-playing ghost named Irma serenades guests—and even takes requests. The rooms are dark, decorated with stained glass from fallen churches and doors from dead mansions.
When you first step into the Castle’s red-flocked antechamber, it looks like a dead end—until someone stands before a gilded owl and says, “Open sesame,” which cracks open a secret passageway hidden behind a wall of bookcases. The owl’s eyes blink red, heralding your entry. The Castle also has its own hotel, but it’s a bit pricey, so I was staying at a cheaper place down the street.
The first time I’d ever been to the Castle was with my father, some twenty years ago, and to this day it’s one of my fondest memories. Returning after all these years sent pulses of excitement jolting across my every synapse. The goose bumps on my arms had goose bumps on their arms.
The scams workshop was being held at the far back of the Castle, next to the library, in an area called the Inner Circle. The course was being taught under the auspices of the Castle’s Magic University, and the irony that in taking it I would be missing my classes at Columbia University did not escape me.
This sector of the Castle also contained a ballroom, reserved for special events; a bar once featured in the film Hello, Dolly!; and a trove of memorabilia. A framed advertisement for the early-twentieth-century American stage illusionist Charles Carter, aka “Carter the Great,” graced the entryway. Next to it hung a poster of the turbaned mentalist Alexander, a vaudeville star who performed under the stage name The Man Who Knows. There was a lifelike model of a Harry Kellar levitation in a glass display case, a black box with a Pepper’s Ghost—one of the first optical illusions—and a rare portrait of close-up legend Charlie Miller, modern master of the cups and balls, on the western wall.
There were ten students in all. The classroom, with its track lighting and plastic deck chairs and individual folding tables, had a distinct adult-education vibe. Everyone except Whit Haydn, our teacher, looked as if they’d come directly from work. I was sitting next to a middle-aged man who was wearing a tie with gold coins on it, and a husband and wife from Temecula who were taking the class as a team. Couples who scam together stay together, I guess.
Whit “Pop” Haydn, the handsome, silver-tongued rogue who runs the School for Scoundrels, wore a black knee-length frontier wool frock coat, broad in the shoulders and tapered at the waist, over a gunmetal gray brocade waistcoat with pearl buttons, a scarlet silk cravat tied in a four-in-hand knot, and a black derby. Everything about him was round: his face, his eyes, his torso. His straw-colored hair was slicked back over his perfectly round head. Golden double Albert watch chains, centered by an oval stone, hung over the convex curve of his belly. Even his voice was round, slow and smooth with southern ease. Listening to him talk was like drinking sweet tea from a Mason jar, or watching pie cool on a windowsill. Calm and comforting, it lulled you into complacency.
The only straight lines on him were the vertical strands of his moustache, orderly as a column of soldiers or crop rows, the ends waxed so sharp they could pop a balloon. I imagined him grooming them with a comb of whalebone or jade. On his right hand was a heavy gold ring engraved with a question mark. “It stands for the dilemma of magic,” he told me when I asked him about it later. “In magic, you’re never supposed to know the answer. It should always be a question.”
Cons and questions have long been Haydn’s specialty. He shuffled shells on the streets of New York before becoming a full-fledged magician—an honest cheat, as he likes to say. Haydn founded the School for Scoundrels in 1996, together with magician and champion pool player Chef Anton, and the two of them would be our teachers tonight. Other faculty members included Bob Sheets—the porkpied man I’d seen demo’ing a shell game at the Magic Olympics—and British busker Gazzo, formerly a member of the notorious Cracker Parker monte mob in London, which worked the con from the early 1950s to the late ’70s. Before a stroke partially disabled his left hand, Gazzo was one of the top card men in the world.
Looking out at the audience, Haydn pulled a gold fob watch from his vest pocket and checked the hour: 7:30 p.m. Time to start. He cleared his throat. “How do we develop our grift sense?” he began, face ruddy, eyes asquint—“grift sense” being the con man’s knack for getting inside people’s heads. This, of course, was the million-dollar question. And the answer, according to Whit, was to study the classics.
There are three classic street scams: the fast-and-loose, the three-card monte, and the shell game. The fast-and-loose is a primitive hustle that dates back to the Middle Ages and survives only in print. (Shakespeare makes several references to it.) We’d covered it during the first scams class and were now knee deep into the monte.
Whit and Chef passed out cards and coached us one-on-one as we went through the moves. We learned the proper way to mix the cards and how to switch the queen for a joker. We practiced secretly unbending the corner of a card while bending the corner of another. We learned how to make a queen and a joker look like two jokers. We learned the three different types of monte bends—the one I’d seen on Canal Street, Whit told me, was called the snake bend. Whit taught us how to cover the bad viewing angles—the worst being directly to your left, at around nine o’clock. We learned Gazzo’s famous Charleston maneuver, a fake switch designed to lure in the mark. We learned different tosses, throwing patterns, and switches. Special attention was given to Dai Vernon’s Optical Move and John Scarne’s devious Monte Slide.
With our teachers looking on and offering suggestions, we practiced switching out cards in the act of turning them face up. Though it may sound counterintuitive, this sort of move isn’t used to switch the money card for a loser if the sucker guesses right. That’s too chancy when cash is at stake. Instead, Whit explained, it’s used to make you think you were right when, in actuality, you guessed wrong. Say the mark gets cold feet just before laying down a large wager. The con man doesn’t want him thinking he would’ve lost, so he switches the joker for the queen. The classic bit of gab here is “You had the eyes, my friend, but not the heart.”
“When you’re developing a magic trick,” Chef explained, “to make the trick really powerful, to really kick someone’s butt, you have to understand what they’re thinking each and every step of the way. And then you have to be able to make sure they’re going down the path that you want them to go down, that takes them off a cliff. And that’s what a good con man does. This is true in every magic trick. If you want to hold people’s attention, you let them think they know something. You let them have a hint, so they think they’re following you. Now they want to prove that they’ve got it. They’re hooked for the next time.”
In essence, the monte is something more than a con. It’s a form of theater. There’s a large cast, and everyone plays a role. The performance is blocked and scripted, precisely choreographed, a well-orchestrated act. The actors have to draw in a crowd, seize their attention, and keep them watching. And it must be seamless enough that the sucker doesn’t realize it’s a performance—or that he’s the hapless star. “The practitioners of these ancient swindles have much to teach us,” Whit said. “Our study of street swindling can lead us into a better understanding of what we are trying to accomplish as magicians and how best to go about it.”
A typical monte operation requires a mob of about eight co-conspirators, each playing an assigned role: an operator, or broadtosser,* who deals the cards and executes the sleights; a pair of beefy lookout men at the wings, keeping an eye out for cops; and four or five confederates, called shills—preferably of mixed ethnicity and gender—who reel in and embroil the victims. Sometimes there’s also a smoother, who sooths the sting after you lose. The mobs I’d seen on Canal Street ran it by the book, with each person playing his or her part to the note.
As a potential sucker draws near, the mob sizes him up to see if he looks like someone with cash. If so, they’ll clear a path and let him approach the game. Then they’ll close in around him like an amoeba swallowing its prey. Once the sucker is isolated from the herd, the mob begins to run a series of well-rehearsed plays, like a football team. Each play builds up the sucker’s confidence and chips away at his scruples, setting him up for the final takedown.
Before each round of betting, the operator shows all three cards and throws them facedown in a row on the table, with the money card (usually a queen) in the middle. The other two cards will be a pair of jokers or low-number cards. After the cards are on the table, the operator mixes them, often very quickly, as though trying to confuse you. In reality, he makes sure it’s easy to follow the queen. The mix only looks like sleight of hand. The real sleight—the one that actually fools you—is an invisible switch executed while tossing the cards on the table. This deadly move, called the hype, is reserved for the moment when the sucker is willing to hazard a large chunk of change.
To further lower your guard, the operator will typically feign incompetence. Often he’ll pretend to be half-blind or drunk or stoned or just plain stupid. Like the bird that feigns injury to lure predators away from its nestlings, the con man snares his victims by playing the fool. The broadtosser for London’s Cracker Parker mob wore thick glasses and a hearing aid. On Canal Street, the operator’s ragged clothing and chaotic movements give him an air of drunken recklessness.
To set the game a-rollin’, one of the shills will bet and win, while another will lose, apparently fooled by the mix. The sucker, for his part, has no trouble following the action. One of the shills may now turn to the mark and say something like “They won’t let me play anymore, because I was winning.” Then he’ll hold out some cash and ask the mark to bet for him. If he agrees, the operator will let him win. Now he’s felt the money in his hands and the thrill of victory. His greed starts to simmer.
At this point the operator feigns a slip-up. Maybe he’ll drop the cards or look away for whatever reason, and while he’s distracted one of the shills will lift up the cards and show everyone the queen. The cheating shill bets and wins. He’ll try cheating a second time, but now the operator spots him. Rather than call him out on it, though, he waits until the cheater is distracted and swaps the queen for another card. Everyone sees this except the cheater, who can’t believe it when he loses. All of this is an act, of course.
The biggest myth about the three-card monte is that it works because the sucker doesn’t realize it’s a scam. In fact, the monte depends on the sucker realizing it’s a scam—and then wanting in on it. The con man flatters the sucker’s intelligence, encouraging him in his conviction that the game is rigged. Convinced he sees all the angles, the sucker thinks he can beat the hustler at his own game. As a wise old grifter once said, “Gyps and cons are all cases of the biter being bitten.”
Another common misconception about the monte is that the operator will let you win once or twice to butter you up for a big take. This almost never happens. If you happen to lay a wager on the queen, a shill will quickly swoop in with more money and outbet you. “I take the highest bet,” the operator will say as the shill claims the payout. Or perhaps the shill will lose. Either way, it bolsters your confidence and raises the stakes. Oftentimes, as one shill outbets you, your friend—the one you bet for earlier—will come in closer and whisper some wisdom in your ear. “Those two are in on it,” he’ll say. “Every time you win, he comes in and shuts you out.” The good-con-man/bad-con-man routine is a common scam strategy. In a popular jewelry heist, for example, a fake cop will pretend to bust the thief and confiscate the merchandise as evidence.
To seal the deal, the operator will usually throw out a veiled insult, known as an ego hook, in order to rile up the mark and make him feel like he’s got something to prove. “When I did the shell game on the streets in New York back in ’68,” Whit told us while elaborating on the finer points of ego hooks, “my southern accent seemed to really piss them off. ‘You know what, I already took you for forty bucks. Why don’t you just sit back and watch for a while, get a better handle on the game, let me play with these Puerto Rican boys.’ Oh God, they’d get so mad.” He slammed an invisible wad of money on the table and howled. (“You gotta have a hundred to play,” the Canal Street operator had told his bridge-and-tunnel target, before looking at the girlfriend and adding, “I bet she’s got eighty.” Oooh zing.)
This same sort of technique is frequently used in marketing and sales. When car dealers chide potential clients for consulting with their spouses before signing a purchase agreement—“You need to ask your wife for permission?”—they are employing an ego hook. In the monte, it’s no different. The con man arouses the sucker’s anger and invokes his insecurities while offering an easy way to mollify both. Meanwhile, money is flying around in sweeps of green, inflaming the sucker’s avarice. He’s up against the ropes. It’s time for the final takedown.
Still playing the fool, the broadtosser turns his head once more and one of his shills—most likely your “friend”—picks up the queen and bends the corner. (In thieves’ cant, this is called a lug.) He turns to you and winks. Now we’ve got him. The broadtosser wheels back around, failing to notice the obvious bend. He tosses the cards like before—only this time he pulls a switch, bending the corner of another card and unbending the queen in an invisible instant. This move is imperceptible even to the trained eye, so the operator signals the location of the queen to his accomplices by means of a secret code, like a catcher signaling the pitcher. If the ace is on the right, he might say, “You can’t get paid off if you been laid off.” If it’s in the middle: “I’m gonna hide it, you try and find it.” And if it’s on the left: “I don’t get mad when I lose.” All of these are stock phrases you will hear on Canal Street.
The hardest thing for the sucker to do at this point is not bet. “He’s convinced that he got it right,” Chef explained. Usually he can’t get his money out fast enough. He thinks he’s got the edge. His juices are flowing. He’s found a sure thing—a phrase that, incidentally, arose with street hustlers.
He puts his finger on the bent card and hands over the cash—it’s a $100 minimum bet in New York, but I’ve seen people shell out as much as $500. This is the only time the operator will let him touch the cards. “Turn it over yourself,” he says, stepping back from the game so no one suspects a last-minute switch. The sucker turns it over, but to his dismay, he finds a joker smiling up at him, scorning his lack of judgment.
Who’s the fool now?
Upon seeing the card, he usually yowls like someone who’s just been kicked in the gut. Chef calls this the bent corner moment. “Of all the things in three-card monte,” he said, “the bent corner will give you the ultimate joy.” Reality starts to penetrate as the money vanishes into the hands of the operator. The sucker’s whole world is collapsing. But before he has time to reconstruct the chain of events that led him to this calamity, someone yells out, “Cops!” and the crowd evaporates like a puff of smoke. Poof, gone.
What recourse does the victim have at this point? The law, unfortunately, won’t offer much in the way of justice. The flatfoots in the bunko squad know the sucker got burned trying to outgamble someone he thought was half-blind or smashed or stupid. “Cops don’t really have any sympathy for the victims,” Whit explained. “They know as well as anybody that the victim was trying to take unfair advantage of the other guy.”
About the only time the police will take action is if nearby merchants—a dollar store, say—complain that the monte mobs are crowding the sidewalk or robbing them of potential customers. Just to make sure the sucker doesn’t go to the police, a friendly smoother will usually come around and pat the victim on the shoulder. “Oh man,” he’ll say. “They got you, too? It’s gambling, you know. Can’t tell the cops.” This is known as cooling out the mark.
The poor sap has no one to blame but himself, and more often than not he knows it. I’ve seen suckers curse and cry and even laugh, but violence is rare. (If a hey rube does develop, in come the burly lookouts.) Most of the time the sucker walks off in a daze. All the fight goes out of him the moment he sees that joker smiling up at him.
The whole scam, from zero to payday, takes less than ten minutes. The mob waits for the heat to die down, and then regroups. In one afternoon, a lone crew can swindle dozens of victims, with two or three crews usually working a block. Though it may look like an anachronism, the monte mob is an efficient small business. Some ringleaders even offer their employees free transportation to and from work.
