Miracles on Thirty-fourth Street
Wes was Wesley James, a whiskery sleight-of-hand master and fifty-year veteran of the New York scene who all but lived at a grimy pizza parlor near Herald Square in the heart of Houdini’s old stomping grounds. Cafe Rustico II is one of those places with a mop and a bar of soap in the bathroom, where even the grease stains are prewar. From the mid-1940s through the 1960s, if you wanted to learn the real work, you’d have gone to the cafeteria of the Wurlitzer Building on Forty-second Street to hang with Dai Vernon and his disciples on Saturday afternoons. In the 1970s, the crew migrated three blocks north, to the Governor’s Cafeteria, then to Reuben’s Deli in Midtown, which shut down in 2001 after its owners failed to make their numerous health code violations disappear. After Reuben’s closed, the Saturday posse reconvened at Rustico II, which had ample space and a scarcity of customers and was apparently up to code.
Now there were actually two Saturday afternoon sanctuaries, the second being the private downstairs room at Maui Tacos on Fifth Avenue, where local IBM president Doug Edwards held court. Wesley James was the reason for the schism. A few years back, in a rabid dispute over the provenance of an old magic trick called Cling Clang (wherein a flower petal or a piece of tissue paper is transformed into an egg), Wes slugged Doug Edwards—who is twenty years his junior and a black belt in karate—sending him flying across the room and splitting the community in two.
Wes had worked alongside some of history’s greats. He was one of the few surviving members of an ultrasecretive underground community led by Dai Vernon and Chicago card genius Edward “The Cardician” Marlo. Wes was also one of the early invitees to the FFFF gatherings led by Obie O’Brien, the head judge who voted me offstage at the Magic Olympics. Wes still went most years to the FFFF convention upstate, but claimed it was no longer elite enough for his taste. “Back then it was really small, and you had to perform,” he later told me. “Today they’ll let anybody in.” Some say Wes is the greatest underground magician alive. Others say he’s just an asshole.
I’d met Wes once or twice before, but never made much of a connection. His personality was somewhat akin to the sound a truck makes while backing up. For many years he refused to lecture, even to magicians. But I was told that, now retired and probably nearing his own Broken Wand Ceremony—he sucked down menthol cigarettes like candy—he had started unloading bits and pieces from his vast stockpile of secrets. Maybe he’d be willing to break off some knowledge in my general direction?
I found Wes at Rustico II, sitting at the head of the table, a fisher king flanked by his disciples, some of whom I recognized. To his left was Bob Friedhoffer, a foul-mouthed Brooklyn magician who uses magic to teach science to kids. Friedhoffer was, a short, stout, fireplug of a man with thin strands of silver hair slicked back in a tight ponytail. Woolly tufts of chest fuzz sprouted Chia-like from under his polo shirt, and his breathing sounded effortful. Next to him was a former mathematician named Jack Diamond, a wan, retiring guy with curly white hair and powder blue eyes.
John Born, a twenty-six-year-old Wichita transplant who’d recently won the IBM close-up competition, was at the other end of the table, sporting short sleeves and a leather newsboy hat. (Apparently some of the IBM folks occasionally patronized Wes’s salon despite the schism.) A silver half dollar danced and rolled in Born’s right hand, seemingly on autopilot. He closed his fist over the coin, then opened both hands again, palms out, fingers splayed like a starfish—empty!
In the middle of the action sat Wes, leaning back in his chair like he’d seen it all. Grizzled and haggard, he was almost seventy but seemed older in a way, his face drawn and cratered, lengthened by a mangy doorknocker beard the color of sandstone and rust. What remained of his silver hair clung to his temples by sheer force of will, arcing across his rutted brow like broken telephone wires and down the hulking span of his back in a yard-long Manchu queue. But his hands were those of a much younger man, having been preserved, it seemed, at the expense of the rest of his body, and they moved with the elegance of a concert pianist’s.
I edged my way to the table, gnawing on a slice of mushroom pizza that tasted as if it were from the Jurassic era. Wes was showing Jack Diamond an obscure “hand mucking” technique, a diabolical switch of a facedown pair during a round of poker. Say the game is Texas Hold ’Em, the most popular variety of serious poker, and you don’t like your hole cards, the two facedown cards dealt to each player at the start of every hand. Mucking is a way to improve on fate and tilt the odds against your opponents by slyly subbing in a better pair secretly copped from the deck and palmed away earlier in the game. In this particular mock deal, Wes had found 2-7 off suit, the worst starting hand in Hold ’Em. He casually peeked at his cards, partially obscuring them for a split second beneath both his hands—nothing unusual. Except that when he turned the cards over again moments later, he now had a pair of aces in the hole.
Burning with curiosity, I pulled in closer. Wes acknowledged my presence dimly, if at all. I unsheathed my cards and warmed up with a few double lifts and riffle shuffles. Inching into his field of vision, I executed a spread pass, a move for transposing two halves of a deck, and one that I felt I’d pretty much mastered.
“You’re flashing,” he said.
What?
“When your thumb juts out like that it’s a dead giveaway. The thumb should stay tucked in at all times, like this.” He showed me his take on the move. He was right. The thumb was a tell. Oops.
Still trying to impress him, I whipped out my ribbon-bookmarked pocket edition of S. W. Erdnase’s The Expert at the Card Table, the card cheater’s bible. I’d bought it at Tannen’s only an hour earlier. It was a virginal copy, its spine still unbroken. I hadn’t even read the table of contents. Hopefully he wouldn’t notice.
If Wes was impressed, he didn’t show it. Instead, he let me know right off the bat that his knowledge of Erdnase was vastly superior to mine. “There are fifteen mistakes in Erdnase,” he said, gruffly. “Eight that are universally acknowledged, four more that only a few people know of, and three that only I know about.”
Frustrated, I put down the Erdnase and took out my physics book, Jackson’s fearsome Classical Electrodynamics. If I wasn’t going to learn any magic, I thought, I might as well get the jump on this week’s homework. The man responsible for my assignment was Professor Miklos Gyulassy, of Szolnok, Hungary, a notorious hard-ass who once threw away an entire class’s midterm exams in disgust when he deemed them unworthy of being graded. You might say Gyulassy was Columbia’s answer to Wes James.
To my surprise, the physics book piqued Wes’s interest more than my magical overtures and lame attempts at talking shop. “What are you studying?” he asked, raising an eyebrow. I told him, and he gave a low groan. “If nothing else, a PhD gives you some credibility,” he said, meeting my gaze for the first time. “Whether or not it should is another matter.” Wes, I was surprised to learn, had a PhD in computer science (although during his multidecade professional magic career, he billed himself as a “Professor of Enchantments”). Soon we were talking about quantum mechanics, computers, card counting, the mathematics of shuffling, and deck memorization. Science turned out to be our common ground.
Pivoting off our discussion of physics, I mentioned that my presentation of the Ambitious Card routine—the famous trick that fooled Houdini—drew on my knowledge of quantum physics. Creating your own Ambitious Card routine is a rite of passage among magicians, for whom the effect often serves as both a calling card and a secret handshake. (“Show me your Ambitious Card” is a common refrain among conjurors.) The Ambitious Card is the 100-yard dash of magic, the SAT. It’s to sleight of hand what the Beethoven sonatas are to concert piano. And while the basic template is more than a century old—a card bubbles to the top after being placed in the middle—magicians are constantly reinventing the effect. In 1982, for instance, a version surfaced, and won gold at the World Championships in Lausanne, that culminated with the signed card escaping from a deck that had been hog-tied Houdini-style in a three-foot coil of rope.
My spin on the trick was all about the patter—the story I told while performing it. “In the quantum realm,” I would say, as I put the card in the middle of the deck, “particles can tunnel through impassable barriers, the microscopic equivalent of David Copperfield walking through the wall of China.” (That’s right, I was combining magic and physics. Watch your back, Tom Brady.) Wes seemed to like the idea but was less than flattering about my technique.
“No, no, no,” he rumbled, grabbing my hands. “That’s not right.” He molded my fingers into a more forward grip, freeing them up to cover the bottom half of the deck, protecting it from exposure. This way, the lower two fingers of my right hand screened the move, making it undetectable. “I spent a whole day trying to teach Johnny Thompson this,” Wes said, sipping his diet soda. “But he was so used to doing it the other way that he just couldn’t get it.” (Johnny Thompson, aka The Great Tomsoni, was a seasoned Vegas showman now in his late seventies.)
I gave it another shot. “No, straight back,” Wes said. “Keep these fingers relaxed.” He gestured at the lower three fingers of my right hand. “Always point your index finger directly to the left of the left-most line of vision.” This, I later learned, was a general principle for neutralizing angle issues.
I kept drilling, straining my hand muscles and stretching my fingers out as far as they would go. I felt as if I were doing splits, and it actually hurt. “You’re too tense!” Wes bellowed at me. “The spectator will spot any tension!” This was another general principle, I came to realize. Moves should look and feel natural, Wes insisted, because even if the spectators don’t detect the move itself, they can sense the exertion behind it, which lessens the believability.
Wes’s pedagogical method didn’t exactly help me relax, but I took a deep breath and gave the sleight another try, and another, practicing over and over again for more than an hour. It was a knacky move, but finally, after doing it a hundred times or so, I felt something click, like a dead bolt latching into place. Wes’s face brightened. It was the first time I’d seen him show any hint of excitement. “Yes,” he said. “That’s it! You’ve got it!”
I worked with Wes for the rest of the afternoon, four arduous hours of intense training. By the end of that grueling first day, my hands were throbbing, my back was as stiff as a poker, and I was exhausted. “Keep practicing,” Wes told me as I turned to leave. “It takes me twenty-one days to train a muscle.” But I knew it would take a lot longer than that to master what he was teaching me.
Still, my meeting with Wes had been inspiring, and it motivated me to work harder. It felt good to have found a potential mentor. Maybe I was deluding myself, but even after one day, I felt I’d improved. Later that night, while hanging out at a bar with some fellow magicians, I heard through the grapevine that Wes thought I showed potential, but that I was “rough around the edges.” I recalled the scene in The Empire Strikes Back when Yoda tells Luke, “Control! Control! You must learn control!” I chose to take it as a compliment. Coming from a Jedi master, it was a ray of hope.
ONE WEEKEND TURNED INTO MANY. Saturdays at the pizzeria became my newest ritual—harking back to the one that began in my early childhood, when my father would take me to the magic store on the weekends. My friends and family soon learned not to call me on Saturdays; I observed the magic Sabbath more faithfully than the Hebrew one. (I may be half Jewish, but I’m all magician.) Little by little, Wes took me into his confidence.
A typical weekend started at Tannen’s magic store, formerly in the heart of the Garment District and now on Thirty-fourth Street. After that, I’d usually head a block south to Fantasma, the hip new magic and toy emporium that opened its doors in May 2004, in direct competition with the bellwether Tannen’s. There was a lot of bad blood over this. The owners of Tannen’s talked about Fantasma as if it were a hostile army advancing on their turf, fearing that an around-the-corner rival might push them into Chapter 11. And they had a point. Tannen’s was a lot like the record store in the film High Fidelity. It was small, nondescript, a lightly trafficked shop that never advertised. There wasn’t even so much as a sign outside to alert the foot traffic on Thirty-fourth Street that miracles were for sale inside on the sixth floor. The kids who manned the counters were foul-mouthed slackers who made no attempt to please the customers and push their inventory. Instead, they insulted the clientele and made dick jokes while arm-punching each other.
Fantasma, on the other hand, was all about eye candy. Pictures of celebrities adorned the walls, the floor was crowded with original Houdini artifacts—including his famous substitution trunk—and a rabbit named Rambo scurried around in a cage by the left counter for all to pet. (Most days, Rambo looked like he had combat shock from all the petting.) Every few minutes, an animatronic Houdini descended from the ceiling and unstraitjacketed himself. Roger Dreyer, the store’s owner, was a smooth-talking salesman who was tireless in promoting his brand. He hosted magic parties for A-listers and hawked his wares at all the major conventions. The store even had a sign, a great big one smack in front of the subway entrance on Thirty-third Street, the better to lure in tourists who, once inside, rarely left empty-handed. There was always a novelty item or a children’s magic set on sale.
After picking up experience points at both shops, and dropping cash into their tills, I’d head over to the pizzeria and rendezvous with Wes. He was always there. In the aftermath of a nuclear war, cockroaches would continue to flourish and Wes would still be at Rustico II every Saturday. His motto might easily have been that of the U.S. Postal Service: Neither snow nor rain . . .
The only time he wasn’t at Rustico II was on the last weekend in April, when he attended Obie O’Brien’s FFFF convention in upstate New York. He never went on vacation. On Memorial Day weekend, when the pizzeria was closed, I half expected to find him sitting outside with his back against the corrugated storefront security door. While others came and went, Wes was a constant, the first to show up and the last to leave. He came at around noon, as if it were his job, and left just after six without having to consult the time on his Casio calculator watch. After more than fifty years and thousands of Saturdays, the rhythm had been starched into his ganglia.
Brackish and brooding, Wes smiled rarely and laughed even less. He barked more than he talked, his gravelly Brooklyn prizefighter’s baritone an homage to Burgess Meredith. His eyes were like dog tags pierced with bullet holes. He professed contempt for David Blaine—who used to inhabit these Saturday haunts before he became famous—and cherished grudges like pets, including one against Roger Dreyer, owner of Fantasma. “I’ll never set foot in there,” he said to us one afternoon, his face darkening and his voice cracking like dry cigar paper. And yet, for all his cragginess, Wes presided over his ragtag team of weekend wizards with unassailable dignity. Solomonic in his bearing, he radiated wisdom. I couldn’t help but admire the guy.
Originally from Florida, the eldest son of an airplane windshield mechanic who was stationed in Jacksonville during World War II, Wes moved to Brooklyn in 1945, at the age of nine. “I grew up in a very tough neighborhood,” he told me with an air of pride. “I may have a PhD, but I’m a street kid.” He earned his doctorate from NYU in computer science, a field that, in the 1950s, was still in its infancy. Wes’s dissertation was on something called modular programming, and until a few years ago, his thesis was still on display at the Boston Museum of Computing.
After graduate school, he took a job in IT before becoming a full-fledged professional magician, working trade shows and nightclubs and hospitality suites for the next two decades. During those years, he was often on the road seven days a week. When he eventually grew weary of traveling, he retired from professional magic and started a custom hardware and software development company, which he sold after the death of his partner in 1993. But magic has always been his one true passion, the torch he carries through life.
This passion first took hold, as it often does, on the weekends. “It was always Saturdays,” he said. “Back then we met on the Lower East Side. After that I’d usually go to Flosso’s store.” Al Flosso was the legendary “Coney Island Fakir” who owned Martinka and Co. magic store from 1939 until his death in 1976. “Every Saturday I would show up there and listen to the guys talk about things. Al would throw me out—‘get out of here and don’t come back, ya hear!’—and the understanding was I’d buy coffee for everyone and come back. Then he’d secretly pay me. He’d always ask, ‘You got enough money to go home?’ Because a lot of kids would spend every dime.”
Wes met Dai Vernon in 1946, at the age of ten, when his mother began allowing him to take the Fourth Avenue local into the city after school. “I used to go up to Max Holden’s Magic Shop. His wife took a liking to me and she introduced me to Vernon. I didn’t know Vernon was anybody important. We would go downtown to the Forty-second Street Cafeteria during the week, when Holden’s would close at five p.m. Vernon would ask me to do this or that and then he would give me pointers. He’d critique what I was doing. Or he’d show me stuff and ask me if I could figure it out. And that was kind of the basis for our relationship. Very few of the older guys would even talk to kids. So Vernon was an exception in that regard. It’s sort of not by accident that he got the nickname the Professor, because he liked teaching.”
It was the beginning of a relationship that would last until Vernon’s death in 1992, at the age of ninety-eight. A year before he died, Vernon sat in on a performance of Wes’s at the Magic Castle in Hollywood. “He’d never actually seen me do a whole formal close-up performance,” said Wes. “He sat there with a big shitty grin on his face, just pleased as punch. And that’s the last I saw of him.” Wes’s voice seemed to catch on the last few syllables, and his eyes took on a filmy aspect. “At least he got a chance to see what I turned into.”
Like his master, Wes also seemed to enjoy teaching. Every time I’d show up, he’d hunch his shoulders and shuffle in his seat and ask me what I was working on. Saturdays at Rustico II reminded me a bit of my weekly piano lessons as a kid. If I’d been practicing, I’d march up to the Steinway and sweep the back of my shirt out from under me with a maestro’s poise. But if I’d slacked off, I’d sit in shame and listen to Mrs. Goldsmith sight-read the nocturnes I was supposed to be learning, mentally checking off the minutes until my mom swung by to pick me up.
On one of those cheerful white-tie-and-tails-type days at Rustico II, I flaunted a fancy one-handed cut I’d recently taught myself in the hope that it would catch Wes’s eye. When I was sure he was paying attention, I broke the cards into three even blocks with my left hand and hinged them into an equilateral triangle, grinning like an idiot. I’m sure I looked as happy as a schoolboy on a brand-new Huffy while showing off this new move, but Wes only scowled. “That’ll get you killed,” he said, turning away. Clearly he didn’t share my enthusiasm. But murder seemed a little harsh, even for Wes.
Wes went on to explain that an open show of skill, however brief, is deadly during a magic act, because it gives the audience a reason not to believe. Even if they don’t figure out the method, he explained, they’ll attribute the effect to manual dexterity and not magic. “You’re giving them the secret to everything you do,” he said. I had to admit, I’d never thought about magic in this way before. “Magic is not about selling your prowess,” he hollered at me, when I pressed him on the issue. “It’s about the effect you create—a profound violation of the natural laws of the universe. I don’t want them to think I’m skillful. I’m a magician, not a juggler. A juggler is selling skill. I want to get credit for the magic, not the skill.”
World-class jugglers know to drop at least once during a performance, Wes told me, because it makes their act appear all the more difficult, drumming up suspense for the finale and driving home the message that they’re operating at the extreme edge of human potential. This is known as juggler’s logic. But a magician has a different mission. This is not to say that technique isn’t important in magic—it’s crucial—but must remain invisible at all times. There can be no man behind the curtain. There can’t even be a curtain.
In a sense, this is true of many endeavors. The best actors and dancers and musicians toil endlessly so that, come opening night, people will say they make it look so easy. Audiences are swept away by the magic of the performance—the sublime mysteries of the muse—not the power of rote. No one applauds the ten thousand hours of practice, only the ninety-minute chef d’oeuvre that is the end product of those hours. This is especially true for magicians, because magic, by definition, must betray nothing of its cause. Only then will people give themselves over fully to the experience.
This philosophy, which Wes hammered into all his underlings, wasn’t really Wes’s to begin with, or any other magician’s, for that matter. It had originated in the world of gamblers and card cheats, where flaunting your skills can literally endanger your life. “If you blow a card trick, they don’t shoot you for that,” Wes grumbled. “Usually.” Wes, after all, was a student of Dai Vernon, who won his spurs in the underground gambling dens of Chicago’s Levee district, alongside the cardsharps and blacklegs and four-flushers of the Windy City’s thriving demimonde. The Vernon Touch, as it came to be known, arose from magic’s fruitful intersection with gambling and grift. “Vernon would look at an effect and bring something to it that would make it special,” Wes told me. “The Vernon Touch—that was real.” (“The Vernon Touch” was also the name of a column Vernon wrote for twenty-two years in Genii magazine, one of the top trade journals.)
Historically, some of the best ideas in magic were concocted out of a desire to beat the house, and many great masters honed their skills in the underground gambling world. Magic, after all, is cheating for amusement, to borrow a phrase from the nineteenth-century French watchmaker and godfather of modern magic Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin (whose last name Harry Houdini, né Erik Weisz, cribbed in tribute—and later disowned). Professional card cheats are among the most gifted sleight-of-hand artists around because of the unforgiving sword-of-Damocles conditions under which they work. When you’re caught in a high-stakes poker game with your hands beneath the table—as I was at the Magic Olympics—you don’t just get hustled offstage.
Magic and gambling share a common language and a common lineage, and magicians—particularly those who specialize in sleight of hand—are the spiritual descendants (and, in some cases, the actual descendants) of the great cheats who thrived on the culture of speculation and greed that took hold during the latter part of the nineteenth century, when wealth and power were consolidated in the hands of tycoons and traders, and enormous fortunes were made. As America emerged as an empire and money flowed across the land with record speed, gambling quickly became the nation’s favorite pastime. Unsurprisingly, the rise of gambling in America also coincided with the widespread investment of private funds in financial markets. (The first stock ticker was introduced in 1867.) What is Wall Street, it is often asked, if not a high-stakes casino—and a rigged one at that—where every gain is yoked to another’s loss?
This connection did not escape Erdnase. “[T]he vagaries of luck, or chance,” he wrote, long before the financial shenanigans we’ve witnessed in the last few years, “have impressed the professional card player with a certain knowledge that his more respected brother of the stock exchange possesses, viz.—manipulation is more profitable than speculation; so to make both ends meet, and incidentally a good living, he also performs his part with the shears when the lambs come to market.”
Nor was Erdnase the only person to make this connection. Volumes have been written on the kinship between gambling (especially poker) and finance. Both require nerves of steel and a deep understanding of, and tolerance for, risk. Both encourage bluffing and the occasional random ploy designed to throw your opponents off balance. Both are guided as much by luck as by skill—with people frequently confusing the two—and fueled by greed. Both favor those with privileged information. Both tend to enrich the few at the expense of the many. Both can mint you a fortune overnight and bankrupt you twice as fast.
“Almost anything that’s used at the card table can be used in magic,” Wes had me know. “The amount of overlap is tremendous.” What’s more, because gambling sleights are some of the most demanding moves in magic, mastering them means you can pretty much do anything. So my first assignment in those early days with Wes was all about learning to think and act like a cheat.
“The first thing I’m gonna have you do is try and learn this false cut,” Wes said during one of our early meetings, as he broke the deck into three stacks and shifted them around in a way that looked chaotic but was carefully orchestrated to bring the cards back to their original order. Erdnase called this move Fancy Blind Cut to Retain Complete Stock. (Erdnase was bad with names.) After demonstrating the move, Wes coached me. “Cut the top. Okay. Cut the third. When you do it, you want to come to a point where the deck is seemingly square.” I reversed the top card so I could keep track of what I was doing—if the faceup card isn’t on top after the move, you know you’ve done something wrong. Meanwhile, Wes continued to spout suggestions.
“Try to get a cleaner release,” he said. “It’ll take some work to become smooth. You want the thing to be smooth, but sloppy. If you do this right it seems like you don’t care, and the less you seem to care the less likely you’re trying to do something.”
“Is this right?” I asked.
“Again,” he spat. “A little crisper.”
I worked on this one move for a good thirty minutes. Eventually Wes looked over at my hands and nodded. “You’re lifting before you come out with that third, and to me that looks too studied,” he said. “But other than that you seem to be doing okay.”
Wes showed me a dozen other false cuts: the Cooper cut (invented by a hermit in North Carolina), the Slydini cut (after the great Tony Slydini), a bluff cut, and several by Wes himself. “You’ll still see cheats all over use it,” he said of another. “This will fly in almost any situation. It’s an optical illusion that has to do with the continuity of motion.”
“Didn’t Frank Garcia have a thing like that?” asked one of the old guys sitting at the table.
Wes grunted. “I’ll show you that in a minute.”
After false cuts came a lesson in how to rig the shuffle—an essential skill for any card cheat. A rigged shuffle is a move that preserves the order of the cards or arranges them in a particular sequence under the guise of shuffling. Wes showed me a number of diabolical false shuffles, one of which he’d pieced together from two separate slices of Erdnase, and which turned out to be incredibly useful for my Ambitious Card routine.
Once the deck has been shuffled and cut, it’s time to deal the cards, and this is where crooked deals come into play. A crooked deal is one in which you pretend to deal cards off the top of the deck while actually dealing from somewhere farther down in the pack. Wes showed me how to deal seconds (that is, to deal the second card from the top), bottoms (i.e., the bottom card instead of the top), and, toughest of all, middles (in which a card from the center of the deck is secretly dealt down)—although the only one I was able to grasp was the so-called strike second deal. The others were just too tough.
To do a strike second, you push the top card over a hair with your thumb, pivoting it to the right and back, exposing the top right edge of the card beneath it. This exposed edge is called a brief. The right hand swoops in as if it is about to peel off the top card, but instead the ball of the right thumb contacts (“strikes”) the exposed brief and deals down the second card. When done smoothly and at speed, the strike second is almost undetectable. Expert hustlers like Wes can catch a very fine brief of about a sixteenth of an inch. But Wes prefers an even more deceptive move known as the New Theory second deal. Here the top card is pushed far off to the side and then pulled back just before the (second) card is taken. It’s all in the timing. Wes showed me his one-handed version, wrist bobbing gracefully up and down as cards fell gently to the table—a perfect subterfuge. The room echoed with murmurs of admiration. “That’s New Theory,” said Wes.
Wes also taught me how to secretly glimpse cards in the deck, the equivalent of inside information, which, when combined with false shuffles and crooked deals, gives you a frightening advantage over other players. You might, for instance, glimpse an ace or two and control them to the top of the deck, then secretly deal seconds to everyone except yourself, although this is likely to arouse suspicion—it looks bad if you get too many aces when you’re the one dealing—so it’s best to have a partner you can deal the aces to instead.
Finally, I learned about switching cards, the least common category of gambling maneuvers, because of the risks involved. There are dozens of methods for improving your hand by replacing it with a better one—including the hand-mucking technique I’d seen Wes showing Jack Diamond on the day we met. “Guy I taught this to made a hundred thousand a year in Puerto Rico with just this one move,” Wes said with a satisfied look on his face. Wes showed me several ingenious methods for palming cards off the top and bottom of the deck, and he engaged the table in a lengthy diatribe on the proper action of the thumb during the top palm. “Vernon preached that you should not move your thumb,” he said, weighing his words, “and Vernon was wrong.” A hush fell over the table.
“Are you sure you’re allowed to say that?” asked one guy. There was a rustle of laughter.
Wes glared at him. “Yes,” he said gravely. “I was one of his direct students, and I argued with him about it. So I have the right to say it.”
You don’t mess with Wes when it comes to Dai Vernon—or anything else for that matter, as Doug Edwards will tell you.
Like Vernon, Wes had devoted years to mastering the weapons of the cardsharp. He could quote The Expert at the Card Table chapter and verse, and when he did, his voice took on an almost ecclesiastical tone. As with all things, Wes had strong opinions about the book. I’d learned this the first time we spoke, when he informed me of all the errors in Erdnase. Looking back, I realized how foolish I’d been trying to impress him with my brand-new, unworn copy. I’d brought a knife—nay, a red plastic water pistol—to a gunfight.
A century after the book was published in 1902, magicians are still mining The Expert at the Card Table for material. When David Blaine riffles through the faces of the cards and says, “Just remember one,” he’s doing Erdnase. The hardcore card guys pore over the book much in the way that rabbinical scholars study the Talmud, arguing over every phrase, unpacking every word.
And just as no one knows who wrote the Talmud, no one knows who Erdnase was, despite intense effort on the part of many to ascertain his identity. One theory is that Erdnase was a small-time swindler surnamed Andrews (S. W. Erdnase spelled backward is E. S. Andrews) who was wanted for murder and shot himself when the long arm of the law finally caught up with him. Others have suggested that the author was a well-educated man of high social standing, a pillar of the community who hid behind an alias to shield his reputation. (This would explain the inkhorn prose.) Spanish maestro Juan Tamariz, leader of the Madrid School, is of the view that the nineteenth-century Peruvian magician L’Homme Masqué, a shadowy figure who lived by his wits and never performed without a mask, wrote the book. In the absence of any definitive evidence, the hunt continues.
Inspired by Wes’s own obsession with the book, I began reading my leatherette-bound pocket edition of Erdnase on the subway and at school. The dense descriptions and highly technical passages were tough to follow, like a physics book, and the gilt edges and ribbon placeholder often led people to mistake it for the Bible. “Bless you,” an old woman said on the train one morning, eyeing the little tome. “It’s so nice to see a young boy reading the good book.” Stifling the urge to stand up and start preaching from the legerdemain section, I flashed her an innocent altar boy look. Hallelujah.
REFINED OVER DECADES, THE MOVES I learned from Wes are behind the high-stakes hustles run by top card mechanics all around the world, professional thieves who earn a living by robbing other players blind in dimly lit rooms rank with the smell of cigar smoke, scotch, and testosterone. More often than not, these men are freelancers for hire. Some rich heel will decide to rig his home game, so he rings in a mechanic to cheat for his team. The buy-ins will range anywhere from a few hundred dollars to a hundred grand.
Wes had spent a good deal of time in this shady milieu, and our conversations often consisted of my listening to him reminisce about the many cheats he’d known. One such story concerned a Brooklyn man who played with a group of loan sharks in the back room of a pizzeria not unlike Rustico II. “These guys would hurt you because they didn’t think twice about hurting people,” Wes explained. This particular hustler worked the game all by himself, without a partner, and he wore a safari jacket loaded with zippered compartments. In one of these compartments he would hide a prearranged deck, called a cooler. All night he’d play clean, no moves, until finally, after he’d put in the hours and it was time to get paid, he’d point at the wall clock and yell, “Holy shit! Look at the time! This has gotta be the last one, guys!” While everyone turned to look at the clock, he’d reach in his pocket and switch in the cooler. “It was one move,” Wes snorted. “And that was a week’s pay.”
A more popular scam these days, although the idea is at least a century old, is something known as the dealback. In a dealback scam, the dealer and one or more of the players conspire to steal the pot by secretly recycling hands back into play. A prearranged signaling system is used to orchestrate the moves. Let’s say you’re playing Texas Hold ’Em. The hands are dealt, a pair of cards to each player. You look at your hand and commit it to memory—then you fold. The dealer casually scoops up your cards, controls them to the bottom of the deck, and in the next round deals those cards off the bottom to one of the other players—usually the person with the biggest chip stack. As a result, you now know their hole cards. Over the course of an evening, this is a crushing advantage.
The same technique can be used to recycle a good hand after a bad flop—the first three faceup community cards. Say you’ve got black pocket aces—normally a premium hand, except that the flop is all hearts. This is a dicey situation. Another heart, and your aces are toilet paper next to a flush draw on the board. So instead of playing your hand, you fold while covertly signaling the dealer to give you back your aces in the next round. In a single cycle of betting, this gives you a slight edge, but over the long haul, it’s devastating.
A similar set of principles is behind the sophisticated scams used to cheat in real casinos, although it’s much more difficult to cheat at a casino than in a private game because of the many countermeasures in place designed to thwart illicit play. For one, casinos have expensive security systems and paid personnel who monitor the games closely. Furthermore, casinos keep mathematically precise tabs on how much money each table gives out. Any anomalies trigger alarm bells and prompt a phalanx of bull-necked men with earpieces to crack their knuckles and flex their guns. Gambling is all about statistical certainty. “Luck may be a fickle mistress,” observes gaming expert David Britland, in his book Phantoms of the Card Table, “but probability is a firm friend, at least if you are a casino owner.” From a large number of random events—each spin of the wheel, each roll of the dice, each turn of the card—a predictable pattern emerges, like the image in a pointillist painting. In physics, this is the essence of the second law of thermodynamics, which governs, among others things, the flow of heat, the decay of order into chaos, and perhaps even the directionality of time. Unlike Newton’s equations, the second law is not a deterministic set of rules that governs the behavior of the universe, but rather a statement about what’s most likely to happen over time when your sample size is extremely large—the so-called thermodynamic limit. That said, you wouldn’t want to bet against it, because the same probabilistic laws also prevail at the casino. Which is why, when one blackjack table is paying out more than the rest, the evidence points to cheating. Crooked dealers know this, and in order to evade suspicion, they’ll take in as much as they give out. In the casino universe, luck is conserved. When a shady dealer engineers a bit of good fortune here, by delivering good cards to his confederate, he has to eliminate it elsewhere by dealing bad cards to another player. If a cheater wins big thanks to the dealer’s largesse, you can be fairly certain the cards will fall cruelly for the unsuspecting businessman who sits down at the same table a few moments later. Like the stock market, it’s a zero sum game, and someone has to foot the bill.
AS I BECAME MORE VERSED in card magic, I began to see my monthly poker game in an entirely different light. Temptation was everywhere, each hand an opportunity for dishonest play. It became difficult to follow the action, because all I could think about was how easy it would be to cheat. I never did, though. Well, not exactly.
I got the idea from Wes. Back when he was honing his chops, he would go to games and cheat the entire time. But he’d do so in such a way as to avoid giving himself an edge. “I lacked the larceny but not the skills,” he told me. “I just wanted to see if the moves would fly.” Like a good scientist, Wes devised a method to test out his technology of deception under fire. “The only way to know if what you’re doing works at a game with money on the table is to test it in a game with money on the table. So I came up with a solution that satisfied my ethical constraints and at the same time satisfied my intellectual curiosity.” The solution for Wes was to execute the moves merely as a means of practicing the sleights, but without profiting from them. This way, he could test his mettle without compromising his integrity or feeling like a crook.
It seemed like a good strategy, and one night, while playing poker at a friend’s house in the West Village, I decided to give it a try. There were eight players in all, mostly writers and actors. We were playing Texas Hold ’Em, and the host had a casino table in his living room, which gave a nice sense of verisimilitude to the game. Scotch was poured and, in a less androgenic vein, freshly baked cookies were served.
I lay low at first, not wanting to arouse suspicion early on in the game. I was doing well for once, catching good hands on the board and making sound position bets. I even won a couple of pots with all-in preflop raises. Before long I was up a couple hundred bucks—all the more reason not to cheat. But by then, everyone had settled in and was a little drunk, and I was feeling cocky, so I decided to make my move.
“These are mixed,” said Nathan, the curly-haired novelist to my right, as he passed me the deck. It was my turn to deal. I sailed the first two cards off the top, then switched to dealing seconds for the rest of the players. Little did they know, but they were receiving the wrong cards. Then I dealt myself the top card and went back to dealing seconds. I didn’t know what any of these cards actually were, because I hadn’t peeked at them prior to the deal, so there was no advantage to be gained from all this trickery. But, like Wes before me, I wanted to see if the moves would pass muster.
Everything was going smoothly until I dealt player number three, a successful comedian named John, his second hole card. This time my hands slipped as I executed the move, applying a bit too much pressure, and two cards came whirling out instead of one, giving John an extra card. Not only that, but I’d left a third card behind, sticking partway out of the deck, pulled loose by the excess friction. Wes had warned me about these so-called hangers. I was fairly certain that no one in the room was packing heat. Nevertheless, my heart was pounding against my rib cage as John gave me a puzzled look.
“Oops,” I said quickly, trying to cover. “Sorry about that. Don’t drink and deal, right?”
He shrugged it off, and I took a deep breath. That was a close one.
I played it safe for the next hour, letting my courage recharge. Once my confidence came back, I went for something even bolder. I copped a card off the bottom of the deck and palmed it for an entire hand, then tossed it into the muck (the discard pile) without checking what it was. Emboldened by this shade, I threw in some false shuffles when it was my turn to mix the cards. I did a Zarrow—a brilliant fake riffle shuffle invented by an accountant from New Jersey—and one of Eddie Marlo’s favorite false cuts. I played this way the entire night—cheating on and off without actually cheating—just to see if anyone would notice.
And no one did.
It’s not like I was playing for big money. Hundred-dollar buy-in, table stakes, Baby No Limit–type stuff. On a good night, the winner went home with a few hundred dollars. But when is it ever about the money? Hardcore hustlers say they’re in it for the cash, but somehow I doubt that. When you consider the risks involved and the effort it takes, there are easier ways to make a living. Like getting a job.
But it’s an incredible rush. I felt as if I were freebasing rocket fuel during the game, which made for an exciting evening. Even Texas Hold ’Em is too slow for an adult ADD case like me. I lack the patience to be any good at legit poker. Even though I wasn’t benefitting from these sneaky moves, I knew they’d be hard to explain away were I to get caught. This was at once frightening and exhilarating.
A lot of the motivation behind cheating must come from the charge you get. To truly understand the psychology of a cheater, you need to see the world like a con artist. In this worldview, everything is rigged—the casino, politics, Wall Street, life—and there are only two types of people: grifters and suckers. (It’s a lot like in magic, where you’re either a magician or a layperson.) If you look around the table and don’t see a sucker, then, according to an old saying, the sucker is you. It’s fool or be fooled, only the stakes are higher.
One experienced hustler told me a story about a young cheater who regularly risked his life bilking dangerous men out of their hard-earned lucre in no-limit games, and who had recently done a one-year stretch in prison for trying to rig a slot machine. “The funny thing is,” the old hustler told me, “this guy has a heart of gold. You can leave your wallet full of hundred-dollar bills on the table, and he wouldn’t take anything out of it. Or, if you dropped it, he would hunt you down to give it back. But when it comes to playing in a game, there’s just something about it that is an addiction. It’s hard to resist.”
It seemed odd at the time, but I’d come face-to-face with my first magic-related ethical dilemma: to cheat or not to cheat, that was the question, and trying to answer it triggered a bizarre mix of emotions. What began as cautious curiosity had escalated into a gale-force adrenaline rush. But now, during my victory lap, moral qualms were nipping at my heels. Call it hustler’s remorse. Even though I’d stolen nothing, I couldn’t shake the lurking feeling that I’d somehow crossed a line, and what troubled me most about it was that part of me liked it. I’d fooled everyone at the table that night, and like any well-plotted deception, this sent a surge of euphoria rippling through my veins.
The next day I immediately bragged about my exploits to Wes, further potentiating the high. “Cool,” he said. “That’s the thing to do when you’re learning. You find out if your technique stands up. And you find out whether you got the cojones or not.” Afterward, I wondered if I could resist the temptation to cheat in future games. Would I ever be able to play straight again? In gaining these new skills, had I not also lost something? This much was clear: I’d tasted a powerful new drug, and I wanted more.