A wiry man in a tattered gray North Face coat and black skullcap worked the cards on a makeshift table made from cardboard boxes. His arms crisscrossed Charleston style as he mixed two black Bee-brand jokers and a red queen. “I’m gonna hide it—you try and find it. I’m gonna hide it—you try and find it.” A cordon of onlookers—three men and two women of different ethnic backgrounds—were placing bets, clacking and hooting at the action, while a pair of lookout men stood at the flanks. The police had already shown up twice, momentarily dispersing the mob in what seemed like a well-choreographed dance. Minutes later they regrouped and fired up the game again. Someone was on the take.
It was a chilly March afternoon in New York, though about five degrees warmer in the crush of people trolling Canal Street, haggling over counterfeit bling, bootleg CDs, contraband pashminas. A tiny, energetic Chinese woman screeched from the street corner, “Dee-vee-dee-dee-vee-dee-dee-vee-dee!” The sidewalk was littered with all manner of urban spoor: cigarette butts, ATM receipts, half-eaten sticks of street meat, cardboard boxes trampled flat. It was the boxes that had led me to them.
After my encounters with card mechanics like Richard Turner, and my own flirtation with cheating, I’d felt I was inching closer to the thin line that separates magic from crime. Finally I decided to take the plunge and investigate the shady realm where magic meets corruption, and where sleight of hand is employed for illegal ends.
I’d started coming to Canal Street a few months earlier on a tip from David Roth, the greatest living coin magician and a New York native. (Roth also mentioned that he had been the magic sales rep at FAO Schwarz from 1978 until 1988, meaning that in all likelihood he had sold my father the magic kit that started me down this path.) Ten years ago, said Roth, the home of the three-card monte—that classic unwinnable street scam involving three cards and giant cojones—was Times Square, a once-throbbing red-light district since bleached to a hazy shade of pink during Rudy Giuliani’s quality-of-life crusade. For a time it seemed that the monte might disappear completely. But the hustlers merely resurfaced fifty blocks south, in what has proved to be a boon. Not even amid the neon prurience of the old Times Square was the monte man more in his element than in the cash-only fool’s paradise that is Canal Street west of the Bowery. “Some of the best monte workers I’ve seen are in New York,” Roth told me with a hint of pride in his voice. “They’re very, very good.”
My research had proved him right. By my estimates, a single monte mob can rake in upwards of $5,000 in cash over the course of an afternoon. After casing Canal Street for several months, I’d decided it was time to make contact. I wanted to see if I could approach the monte guys and gain their trust as a fellow practitioner of magic. After all, didn’t we speak a common language: the language of trickery? “You don’t want to do that,” Roth had told me over the phone. “That’s very dangerous.” Wes echoed this viewpoint when I mentioned it to him at the pizzeria. The monte mobs, he told me, were violent gang members who often did their postgraduate work in prison. It was no more a game to them than armed robbery or drug dealing. If they so much as suspected that I posed a danger to their operation, I was liable to be stabbed or even shot. But my mind was already made up.
I’d been watching the action for five minutes when a guy with Gotti hair and D&G shades and a girl under his arm bellied up to the game. The crowd quickly hemmed them in. A graying man with an unfiltered cigarette between his lips pulled up next to him. “I just won two hundred bucks,” he said. “But he won’t let me play no more.” After a series of bets by some of the other players, the operator turned his head, and while he wasn’t looking, one of the onlookers put a big fat bend in the corner of the red queen. A mistake? The money card would be easy to follow with that crimp in it. Any bet would be a lock. At least that’s what it looked like.
“Two black and one red. Win on the red, only on the red, never the black.” The operator slung the cards. “Just point and you win.” The sucker pointed at the bent card, and the operator lifted his head. “You win—it’s yours! You got the money? A hundred dollars?”
He spread open his wallet. “I only got twenty.”
“You gotta have a hundred to play.” He eyed the girl. “I bet she’s got eighty.”
The sucker squared his shoulders and stared at his girlfriend as if he were about to propose. “Baby, I fucking picked the red one. Give me some money!” Reluctantly, she took out her wallet and counted four twenties. He grabbed the bills and slammed the wad down on the box. In a blink, the card was turned over. Not a red queen but a black joker. His face went white. “Double or nothin’!” screamed the operator. “Double or nothin’!” The mark was put on the send to a nearby cash machine—the monte mob was conveniently stationed in front of a Citibank—and he came back minutes later, eager to redeem himself. I wanted to stop him, but I knew better. In less than a minute he was down by $500. “I’m gonna be sick,” said the girl, putting her hands to her mouth. Flushed with rage, the mark made a grab for the money, but the wall men swiftly boxed him out. He shouldered up against them, heaving his chest, and for a moment it looked as if there might be violence. “Let’s go, baby,” his girlfriend said, pulling at his bicep. “Baby, let’s go.”
All of a sudden someone yelled, “Veeeee!”—for Vice—and the crowd dispersed. This was my chance, I thought. I trailed the operator and one of his accomplices, a husky African American man in work boots and jeans, down the street.
“Hey, man,” I said, overtaking them. “You do magic?”
They turned and looked at me as if I were nuts. “What’d you say?”
“I’m a magician,” I said and unholstered my cards.
“Oh, yeah?” The operator thumbed his nose and looked around. “Well, I’m a magician too.” (I knew it!)
“I know, I’ve seen your work,” I said, trying to act cool. “You’re good.”
My plan, as I’d formulated it in my head prior to chasing after him, was to see if I couldn’t use magic to win his trust. But when his partner crossed his arms and gave me a threatening look, I began to wonder if I hadn’t made a terrible mistake.
“Um . . . name a card,” I said squeakily, trying not to show fear.
“What?” he asked, looking at me askance.
“Name any card,” I said again. “Out loud.”
“You want me to say it out loud?”
I nodded as he looked at his partner, then back at me. “Queen of clubs,” he said.
“Cool. Do you want me to do it fast or slow?”
“Better do it quick cuz I gotta go,” he said, looking back toward the corner, where the crew had started to regroup.
“Fast it is.” I waved my hand over the deck and executed a pass to bring the queen to the top, my heart racing. For a second I thought I’d messed up. I turned over the top card and—phew—there was the queen. The operator looked at me, then down at the cards, then back up at me again. The tension in his face faded, and he grinned, revealing a row of gold teeth.
“Damn! This boy’s good!” He laughed and extended his hand.
I shook it and smiled. “I want to learn your game,” I said, still clutching the deck in my left hand.
He tilted his head slightly and squinted. “You don’t wanna learn this,” he whispered, as he turned to leave. “Motherfucker go to jail for this shit.”
I FIRST ENCOUNTERED THE THREE-CARD monte when I was eleven years old, while in Spain visiting relatives. I was walking down La Rambla, the tree-lined promenade in the heart of Barcelona, when I spotted a large group of people crowded around a clumsy-looking man in a faded blue suit. He had oily hair and a thin moustache, and he was tossing cards on a flattened piece of cardboard. Everyone around him was cheering and waving money. They all seemed to be having a good time. I was drawn in quickly, and before long I found myself laying down my entire January allowance on what I thought was a queen. I was sure of it, in fact, because the corner of the card was clearly bent. Moments earlier, I’d seen one of the bystanders bend it.
In my mind I was already spending the winnings. I’d decided I was going to use the money to buy my mother a bracelet she wanted. I couldn’t wait to tell my father, who was off buying newspapers at a nearby kiosk. He’d be so proud of me. Today was our lucky day.
When I turned the card over and saw it was a joker instead of the queen, my stomach lurched and everything around me seemed to fall silent. I looked up at the man behind the cards. His eyes were now cold and menacing, his teeth flashing in a sinister smile as he snatched up the cash. Blinking back tears, I staggered off without a word, terrified of the scolding I was sure to receive.
It was an expensive lesson, but if anything it only stoked my curiosity. To me, the monte man was an irresistible character, a timeless trickster who’d changed little since the days of gin mills and frontier train lots. He was a criminal, for sure, but also an excellent magician, using sleight of hand to steal money from his audience. And the greatest trick of all, the pièce de résistance, was that the audience never suspected he was a magician.
The monte has been a fixture of New York City’s criminal underworld for well over a century. The New York Times first reported on the scam back in 1870, noting that Coney Island had been overrun with “glib-tongued” monte men who conned greenhorns fresh off the steamboat landing. The article described in detail how one well-heeled visitor lost his watch to the game, and the author made the following observation, as valid today as it was then: “It is absolutely certain that anyone dealing with them will be gulled and cheated.”
How is it, then, that nearly a century and a half later, in an age of identity theft and high-tech hoaxes, a scam like the three-card monte—one of the oldest tricks in the book—is still going strong? Clearly it isn’t the moves themselves that make it so seductive, but the psychology of the scam, the uncanny way in which the con man jailbreaks our insecurities and flatters our intelligence, stokes our greed and clouds our judgment, inflates our trust while raising our expectations.
These talents, of course, are no more unique to Canal Street than they are to Wall Street. We see them on television, in shopping malls, and on used-car lots, in Washington and on the campaign trail; the same psychological sleights of hand—bait and switch, shortchange, pump and dump—used to artificially inflate stock prices, hide off-balance debt from shareholders, sell wars to Congress, and convince consumers that they need things like ThighMasters and Psychic Friends and that Cocoa Puffs really are part of a nutritious breakfast.
“Whatever we want,” notes attorney Steve Weisman, “there’s a scam for it.” An expert on investment fraud and identity theft, Weisman has studied everything from bank robberies to Ponzi schemes to mortgage fraud. But whether it’s shell games or shell companies, he tells me, almost every confidence scheme shares certain universal features. “The scam artist appeals to the desire for a quick and easy solution to life’s problems. They appeal to our greed and sometimes they exploit that little kernel of dishonesty everyone has. And when people get greedy, they get manipulated.”
The monte and its sister the shell game are often cited as generic metaphors for every brand of hustle. But the monte is more than a metaphor; it’s a model, a recipe for persuading people to entertain risky or even ethically dubious propositions, whether it be the Nigerian bank scam—which, along with its variants, costs Americans more than $200 million a year—or Bernie Madoff’s $65 billion Ponzi scheme. “The person on the street doing the three-card monte is doing things differently than Bernie Madoff, but it’s the same psychology,” says Weisman. “Madoff was able to use the same principles magicians use. He misdirected people. He forced their choices. When people go to a magic show, they want to be fooled. With a Ponzi scheme, when something is too good to be true, they want to believe it.” Understand the monte, in other words, and you’ll understand not just a great magic trick, but also the basic architecture of every hustle.
THE THREE-CARD MONTE PROBABLY ARRIVED in Europe by way of gypsies, who fanned out west from the Balkans across the Continent during the fourteenth century, their bindles loaded with clever little takedown games that yielded a profit in the chaos of medieval streets and marketplaces—hence the word gyp. By the seventeenth century, the monte had taken root across most of Western Europe. One finds references to the classic street scam in the Spanish literature of that era and in French works going back to Louis XV. By the mid-1800s the scam had become enough of a nuisance in Paris to incur a citywide ban. Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, the father of modern magic, in his 1861 treatise on con games, Les Tricheries des Grecs Dévoilées—in typical French fashion, he blamed the Greeks—provided a detailed account of the monte, which he saw being dealt directly on the cobblestone streets, and of con men who hooked suckers by “playing the peasant”—that is, feigning ineptitude. Now as then, this little gambit is the heart of the hustle.
But the three-card monte truly came of age in America—so fully, in fact, and with such gusto, that it practically deserves U.S. citizenship. No Old World scam ever rivaled the exploits of the great American bunko artists, in whose hands the three-card monte and the shells became the foundations of the first great criminal empires, forerunners of the modern Mafia. As icons go, the monte deserves a place alongside baseball, apple pie, McDonald’s, Elvis, nickel-plated handguns, and crack cocaine. America will forever be the scam’s spiritual home. This scam is your scam. This scam is my scam. This scam was made for you and me.
The monte first appeared on American soil in New Orleans during the early 1830s and soon found its way north, aboard the steamboats paddling up the Mississippi. (The word monte comes from a popular Mexican card game, el Monte, and was used to make the scam sound more legit.) It was a time of big scores. In the early 1850s, a four-man monte mob cleared what today would be $25 million on a three-year stint aboard the riverboats. The leader of the group, a glandular giant named George Devol, who got his start fleecing soldiers during the Mexican-American War, raked in twice that much during his career, though he squandered it all and died penniless. One of Devol’s protégés, an African American steward named Pinckney Pinchback, used his prodigious monte war chest to bankroll a political career that eventually landed him a seat in the U.S. Senate, although he wasn’t allowed to sit in it because of his race.
When the steamboat racket dried up during the Civil War, monte men rode the rails out west, spreading the scam along the American frontier. By the mid- to late-1800s, mining camps from Colorado to Alaska were overrun with monte mobs, gambling supply companies were selling ready-made monte kits to aspiring crooks, and Pinkerton agents were being stationed on train cars to protect the passengers from men named Rattlesnake Jack McGee, Slim-Jim Foster, Louis Posey Jeffers, Clubfoot Hall, Jew Mose, Doc Baggs, Dad Ryan, Cowboy Tripp, and my personal favorite, Big Alexander.
Then there was the pitiless Benjamin Marks, a former Civil War courier who, in 1867, at age nineteen, hiked from Iowa to Wyoming dealing monte on a wooden plank slung from his neck. An ancestor of the modern mob boss, Marks built a small empire out of con games and shady business deals. He erected his infamous Elks Grove casino and brothel, remnants of which are still standing, on the county line, so that dodging police raids was a simple matter of moving to a room in another jurisdiction.
But Marks’s greatest legacy was an idea that would revolutionize con games and forever change the face of price point retail. The concept sprang to his mind in 1870, after he arrived in Cheyenne with dreams of a big score only to find the outdoor gambling tents overcrowded with rival grifters. Marks needed a better way to trap his victims, so he leased a small storefront and filled the window with luxury goods priced at preposterous discounts. He called it The Dollar Store. Once inside, bargain hunters were quickly shepherded away from the window and steered toward the back of the room, where a game of three-card monte was being dealt on the face of a wooden barrel. “Since no customer ever left the monte game with any money,” notes one historian, “none of the merchandise was ever sold.”
Marks’s flagship venture was a huge success, and it spawned a raft of imitators. Dollar stores began cropping up all around the country. Eventually someone figured out that they could make just as much money selling junk as they could illegally scamming their customers, so they went legit.
Marks’s dollar shop was also a crude prototype for the sophisticated “big store” scams that flourished during the early twentieth century: the suite of offices with the fake safe, the fly-by-night investment house, the sham betting parlor. In these elaborate long cons—memorialized in such films as The Sting, Grifters, The Spanish Prisoner, and Boiler Room—a sucker’s better judgment is beguiled away by fancy set pieces and a cast of well-trained shills. Though less common than in the past, these types of hustles are still being run today.
I HAVE HEARD IT SAID that there are only four things you need to fear in California—earth, air, fire, and water. The day I found myself driving north on 101 bound for the Magic Castle in Hollywood, it was fire—and, to a lesser extent, air—that was wreaking havoc on the West Coast. Governor Schwarzenegger, the voice on the radio told me, had declared a state of emergency in Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, and Orange counties as a scourge of wildfires, fanned by the dry Santa Ana winds, lashed across Southern California, charring thousands of acres of land and engulfing hundreds of homes. It was the worst fire to hit LA since 1970.
At the rental lot, I’d found my car peppered with ash, and for a moment I thought someone had been puffing a cigar on the roof. (The Governator himself, perhaps?) But it was nature flouting the smoking ban and using the City of Angels as an ashtray, pelting soot and smoldering embers down into the LA basin and shawling the wide lap of the valley in a doom-gray smog. A shrill carbon stink clung to the air like a bad habit.
If anything, I’d come to LA to learn how not to get burned. After watching the New York monte men run their rough hustle on crowded sidewalks, I was convinced that anyone could fall victim to the scam. These guys weren’t pulling in chump change either. They were making lawyers’ fees—and lying half as much.
I’d made some headway studying the Canal Street mobs and practicing on my own, but I needed to go deeper. I wanted to understand the scam at its core. How does the con man control your thinking? How does he hook your interest? How does one master these powerful tactics of social influence and develop a feel for the hustle? And, most important, how could I use these principles to improve my magic?
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.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to romanticize street crime or elegize con artists as noble thieves. These are conniving and often ruthless people. But there’s a reason why, as scam expert Steve Weisman likes to point out, con artists are the only criminals we refer to as artists. It’s one thing to steal a wallet at gunpoint or snatch a purse. It’s quite another to convince a person to empty his wallet and walk away without pressing charges. This takes a considerably lighter touch.
AFTER THE MONTE CLASS LET out, I elected (with nary a pang of guilt) to go to Las Vegas for a few days and see some magic. Driving east through the desert, I couldn’t get scams out of my head. Everywhere I looked, I saw rip-offs. Why do car rental agencies urge you to buy optional insurance when in most cases your own insurance, or credit card, covers any damage? Why does jock itch cream cost more than athlete’s foot medication, even though they’re the same thing? Is it because companies know they can charge a premium for a more embarrassing product? Why do Americans spend $8 billion each year on bottled water, when the two top-selling brands (Aquafina and Dasani) come from municipal sources? Why do so many investors buy mutual funds when most funds underperform the markets they’re supposed to one-up? (There are more funds than stocks. Think about that for a moment.)
Cruising down Interstate 15, I came upon a sign that read SPEED LIMIT 70 MPH ENFORCED BY AIRCRAFT and wondered if that, too, was a scam. What were they going to do, shoot a missile at my car if I was speeding? I felt bad for those poor suckers who joined the navy with visions of piloting F-14s off aircraft carriers, only to wind up on traffic detail in the middle of the desert. Sorry, son, but the highway to the danger zone is literally a highway, and the danger zone is actually a reduced-speed zone. The recruiting ads were wise to leave out that part.
It dawned on me that one often encounters these types of signs along desolate or shoulderless stretches of road where squad cars have no place to hide. Could it be that law enforcement agencies were using warning signs as scarecrows, posting them in lieu of patrolling black spots, hyping high-tech enforcement in areas where they couldn’t snare you? Was it all a big highway bluff?
Local law enforcement agencies are strongly incentivized to dole out as many tickets as possible, much in the way that credit card companies routinely solicit clients with a history of late payments who will likely shell out an arm and a leg in interest. (I know: I’m one of them.) Traffic tickets are big business, generating much-needed state and municipal income. In the United States, more than 55 million traffic violations are issued annually, accounting for roughly 50 percent of all state court cases. By one estimate, speeding tickets bring in more than $6 billion a year.
It’s no secret that law enforcement agencies alter their policing practices in response to financial pressures and incentives. Research shows that cops issue more moving violations in years following a drop in local government revenue. When asked in 2010 why his officers were writing more than three times as many tickets as they did the previous year, the police chief of Canton, Ohio—the speed trap capital of America, and host of the yearly International Battle of Magicians—answered with a candor that might once have created a scandal but is now welcomed for its refreshing lack of guile. “You could say that it was born out of the deteriorating economy,” he told reporters. “We were facing layoffs, and we were trying to think outside the box. I’ll be very blunt about that: It does save jobs. It was kind of a no-brainer.” And yet, while a slump in local government revenue leads to a ticketing spree, a rise in road casualties does not. (This trend isn’t limited to traffic tickets, either. The proportion of drug busts among total arrests increases by 20 percent when the agencies making the arrests are allowed to keep whatever assets they seize—be it cars, money, or weapons.)
Only 3 percent of traffic tickets are contested in court, even though there’s a 75 percent chance that the ticketing officer won’t show at the trial, in which case the scales of justice will likely tip in your favor. (If they radar you from an airplane, the cop and the pilot must appear in court.) Still, fighting a ticket is a headache. If you live far from the jurisdiction in which the citation was issued, it may not be feasible at all. Unfortunately, paying the fine is a legal admission of guilt and will jack up your premiums. No one loves speeding tickets more than insurance companies. On average, a single citation will drive up your premiums by $900 over the course of three years. According to one estimate, auto insurers accrue an extra $37 billion annually from speeding tickets. No wonder Geico used to donate radar guns to police departments.
The all-time award for highway robbery goes to a tiny speck of dust on the map called New Rome, Ohio, population sixty, the most infamous speed trap in America, king of the small-town traffic scam. By exploiting a precipitous and well-concealed drop in the speed limit from forty-five to thirty-five miles per hour along the thousand-foot stretch of its main road, New Rome’s fourteen-man police force wrote thousands of citations each year, raking in $400,000 annually in fines, most of which was siphoned back to the village lawmen. For years this fast-cash bonanza worked like gangbusters, swelling local coffers and enriching the town’s tiny police force. So epic were the city’s exploits that they made national news. But all empires must run their course, and in the end New Rome crumbled beneath the weight of its imperial ambitions. In 2004, citing rampant corruption, a local judge legally dissolved the town, swatting it off the map with a swoop of his gavel. Poof, gone.
But the spirit of New Rome lives on in the Great Republic. After the crash of ’08, facing stalled revenues and spurred on by a bad case of fiscal road rage, major jurisdictions across the country are taking a page from the small-town playbook in hopes that fines and court fees will jump-start the rusted engine of economic prosperity. On the brink of insolvency, California, already the fourth most radar-happy state, has stamped a thirty-nine-dollar surcharge on all traffic tickets in order to fund the renovation of forty-one courthouses. Facing budget shortfalls, Arizona added speed cameras on highways to generate a projected $90 million. (They were later turned off amid thunderous public outcry.) And in 2009, cash-strapped Colorado doubled fines for speeding in work zones in the hope of raising an extra $3 million per quarter.
WHILE IN VEGAS, I TOOK in nine magic shows and, on the final night, went to an event called Wonderground, a monthly spectacle of magic, music, and performance art, now in its tenth year, emceed by kimono’d Man of a Thousand Masks and founder of the Mystery School, Jeff McBride.
I walked in at around midnight. Onstage, the celebrated fakir Zamora was about to show a roomful of wide-eyed faces how he came to be known as The Torture King. Thin, muscular, shirtless, and sweating, he brandished a long metal skewer. “What I’m about to show you may be too intense for some,” he said as he swung back his gray ponytail, flexed his left bicep, and jammed the spike through the meat of his arm. High-pitched screams and low intestinal groans drowned out the DJ’s trance mix as Zamora pushed the metal deep into the muscle, feeding it into his flesh until it poked through to the other side. He grabbed both ends and pulled the skewer back and forth like dental floss. “Oh get the fuck out of here!” yelled a man in the third row, and I’m pretty sure he meant it. A vanguard of the modern sideshow revival, Zamora ate fire, slept on beds of knives, walked on broken glass. He’d once put 106 pins in his body. “I could have done twice as many,” he said. “But the cameraman fainted.”
After Zamora’s act, the lights dimmed and the music turned tribal—a squall of ocarina over water drums. The chairs were cleared away, and Jeff McBride, in chieftain’s robes, took the floor. Standing at the center of the room, McBride lit a small goblet of fire on a circular table draped with red cloth. “What we’re doing here is very ancient and very tribal,” he said loftily, eyes aflicker. “Some of us have been doing this for thousands and thousands of years, so welcome to this fellowship.” No rings, though.
Electronic bass kicked in, and it was party time. Everyone clapped in unison. Psychedelic films were projected on a large screen. A pointillism of lights danced on the ceiling. People wore capes and powdered makeup, black boots and PVC. A lachrymose woman with dreadlocks was selling art at a small stand. A hippie with a long rattail was doing coin tricks at a nearby table. I saw a gangly man in a loose gray suit and wide-brimmed hat who looked like William S. Burroughs circa Naked Lunch. There was a drunken midget. A whiff of stage smoke brought sandalwood attars drifting over the fainter smell of incense. Bumping into Jeff McBride on the dance floor, I asked him why New York, with its twin magic fraternities, never hosted such parties. “They’re old and boring,” he said, twirling his cane, and flitted off with a smile.
STILL SPINNING FROM MY TRIP to Las Vegas—Fear and Loathing it wasn’t, but it was still pretty weird—I sped back to LA for the final day of the scams class. Our last lesson was on the shell game, an old con that challenges the sucker to locate a pea-size ball beneath one of three shells. Like the monte, this game can be found all over the world. On the street, you’ll often see it played with bottle caps or matchboxes and balled-up wads of paper or foil from a pack of cigarettes.
The shell game is essentially the con man’s version of the cups and balls—the oldest recorded magic trick, dating back to Roman conjurors known as acetabularii (literally, “cuppers”)—but it’s a no-frills version with one aim in mind: to get the poke. Like the monte, the shell game was spread by gypsy mountebanks across medieval Europe. It, too, became pervasive during the Renaissance, when grifters started using thimbles and dried peas, instead of the heavier cups and balls, making the scam more portable. “The advantage of this is you didn’t have to carry those heavy props around with you,” Whit explained. “You didn’t have to set up in the marketplace. You could just walk into the local tavern.” Thimbleriggers were ever present in England throughout the 1700s, and in Les Tricheries des Grecs Dévoilées, Robert-Houdin, gives an account of seeing a magician fleece an entire French tavern with three soup bowls and a crust of bread. (Robert-Houdin affectionately called these sorts of cons “little feats of crafty science.”)
Many of the great American bunko artists got their start shuffling shells. During the California gold rush, a vicious man named Lucky Bill Thornton made millions skinning prospectors with three brass cups shaped like walnuts and a small cork ball he manipulated with his long fingernails. Thornton rode across the scuffed frontier in a wagon train with a tray suspended from his shoulders and a pair of thirteen-year-old girls he’d kidnapped along the way. When the girls’ father finally caught up with them and threatened to kill Thornton, the two sisters, having apparently fallen under the con man’s spell, pleaded for their assailant’s life. The father, himself a man of some cunning, offered to spare Thornton on the condition that he wed one of the girls. Forced to choose between death and matrimony, Lucky Bill took to his heels, trailing dust in his wake. But his luck eventually ran out and in 1858 he was hanged as a murderer and a horse thief.
Along with the monte, shell game operations financed the earliest American crime syndicates, engines of corruption that laid waste to entire cities. The greatest operator of them all was Soapy Smith, a one-time cattle drover and marksman who learned the shell game at age twenty from a sideshow roustabout named Clubfoot Hall (after Clubfoot took him for a month’s wages). Smith parlayed small-time hustles like the shells into a criminal empire that stretched from Denver to Alaska and employed hundreds of trained grifters. Smith was the richest and most feared outlaw of his day.
To modern magicians like Whit Haydn, Soapy Smith stands out as the finest con artist ever to trim suckers with a “tripe and keister” (a portable tripod and display case used by traveling grifters and modern-day buskers). “He was the true master of the game,” Haydn told us. “He had a lot of gangs out doing the same thing, taking people for just a little bit of money at a time, not for the big stings. And that was what created the first American gangster.”
Every year, on July 8, Soapy Smith’s great-grandson, a longtime friend of the School for Scoundrels, hauls his great-grandfather’s tombstone to the Magic Castle for the annual Soapy Smith Party, a ye olde casino night where winners get a free set of sterling silver shells. A portrait of Soapy Smith—dark beard, gray suit, Winchester rifle—painted in 1898, shortly before he was gunned down in broad daylight by a victim of the monte, hangs outside the door to the Magic Castle’s classroom, where today, his disciples were about to show us the real work on the shell game.
“Everybody knows the secret of this trick,” Whit said, rolling his eyes. “That’s what makes them such suckers.” He took a sip of wine—he always had a glass of white handy—and removed his coat, revealing French cuffs with opal-and-gold links and a paisley arm garter that matched his vest. He produced a small deerskin sack, laid it on the table, and withdrew a set of shiny silver shells. “I’ve been playing this game a long time,” he said. A tight-lipped grin lifted the tips of his moustache. “I had my nuts cast in silver.” He clinked two of the shells together and they chimed brightly. Diiiiiing!
In essence, the psychology of the shell game is identical to that of the monte—with the same cast of shills and the same crooked come-ons—except that instead of the hype and the lug, the operator “accidentally” flashes the pea under one shell and surreptitiously steals it out at the critical moment when the sucker is willing to lay down a lot of coin. Just like the monte, it only looks like betting. In reality: you can’t win.
When I was a child, around ten, I had a set of shells, and I used to do a very basic version of the game for friends and family. I knew one move, which was how to steal out the pea and load it under a different shell. (It fooled my dad, at least.) Since then, I’ve seen it played on the street many times. But I’d never seen anything like what Whit showed us. After he’d fooled us all several times, he put the pea underneath a shell and covered it with an overturned shot glass. Then he had the woman from Temecula place her finger on the glass. I waited for the move, some sleight or feint—but nothing came. Whit never went near the glass. And yet, when it was lifted, the pea was gone. “Don’t feel bad,” Whit said with a smile. “Everybody falls for that one.”
An hour into the class, Chef walked in sporting a new haircut and distributed shells to all the students. The sets we used had been specially crafted by the School for Scoundrels, with the discriminating con man in mind. They were easy to grip, with sharp handling, plush suspension, and a full gloss undercoating. The pea slid in and out silently without rocking the shell back and forth, thanks to a ground-hugging curve on the rear lower fascia called a Chanin dip—like a spoiler or diffuser trim. Whit had rooted through an entire bushel of walnuts before finding the perfect shell from which to cast his mold. Though originally designed with collectors in mind, the School for Scoundrels shell sets—which come in plastic, pewter, bronze, and executive-class sterling silver—have been spotted in the hands of actual street hustlers halfway across the globe. To Whit, this was the ultimate testimonial.
We started practicing the basic moves, while Chef walked around giving us tips.
“Don’t put your finger over the shell,” he told the class as we slid our shells around like bumper cars. “Try to get in the habit of holding it off-center, at two o’clock, so you show as much of the shell as possible.”
We learned how to steal and load on the same move, how to turn over the shells and show both hands empty while secretly holding the pea. We learned Soapy Smith–inspired methods using multiple peas. Though it may sound counterintuitive, this tactic is actually quite deadly, because it allows you to split a person’s attention. “Soapy Smith would bring out three shells and a pea and he would secretly have another pea hidden in his hand,” Whit explained.
We learned how to flash the pea under one shell, show the other two shells empty, and then secretly drop the extra pea under one of the empty shells, a move called the Sheets acquitment—after Bob Sheets. “This is a very insidious idea,” Whit chuckled. “Magicians fall for this.”
We learned hooks and come-ons, and then we learned about magnetic shells and peas with little iron filings in them and other gimmicks like hollowed-out poker chips and hollow pens and magnetic cigars for hiding extra peas, and by the end of the workshop I felt like an expert. I was ready to bid farewell to Squaresville and spend the rest of my life on the grift. I bought a set of plastic shells from Chef. He was the businessman to Whit’s gentleman scholar. No matter what, I thought, I’ll never starve.
The following day, I lit out for Malibu to see the antiquities at the Getty Villa museum. After a walk through the peristyle and a long soul-searching stare at the ocean from the balcony, I found myself in a gallery that housed a number of ancient cups and ceremonial vessels. I wondered if some of these cups had been used by the acetabularii of old, outside the great walls of the Colosseum or in the clamor of the Forum.
Afterward, I drove to the shore and walked along the beach. It was just after 5:00 p.m., and the late sun shone with the grainy light of old photographs. I stooped by the edge of the water and watched the light dance on the surface of the waves. A spur of rocks trailed off in the distance. A few gulls tacked downwind.
For a long while now I’d felt like I was edging away from the real world and toward the margins of society. Not long ago I’d been gainfully employed, tethered to a straight job and my own little quadrant of office space. Then came the looser, more polyrhythmic life of a grad student. But even that seemed structured compared with where I was now, skipping classes at Columbia, commuting for the past month between Vegas and New York, living on what seemed like the periphery of adult life.
I was still receiving e-mails about grad student mixers and meet-the-speakers and particle fests and particle seminars and messages from the nanotechnology lab I’d quit working in so I could devote more time to magic. I was still trying to keep a foot in that world—showing up for the occasional class when I could fit it into my ever-busier schedule as a budding magician, cramming madly for the qualifying exams—even though that world had never seemed more distant. I hadn’t seen my physics buddies in eons. We used to hang out almost every day. It was a weird feeling, and the farther I traveled down this road, the weirder it got and the less likely it seemed I’d ever return.
* Monte operators are called broadtossers not, as is sometimes claimed, because they frequently use queens as money cards, but because of their preference for broad-faced poker decks over narrower bridge cards, the wider cards affording better overall handling.