Ahhh, Tropea! that’s what all the Italians said when they heard that beach town would be the last stop on our journey through the sole of Italy. So beautiful!
The quaint town is high above the beach.
It sure is. So popular is Tropea that the B&B I wanted to stay in was fully booked six weeks before our visit. This is the story of a “sister property” switch, a mean step-sister that does not live up to her sterling siblings, and false claims made by the property owner. There’s also a TripAdvisor mystery, which I’ll save for another post.
Bottom line first: when you go to book a room at Residenza Il Barone in Tropea, don’t be fooled into booking the “apartment”, as I was. Let me tell you about the apartment. Its location is excellent, over a restaurant at Piazza Tre Fontane, a few blocks away from the advertised location. You unlock a heavy door and ascend 14 steep stairs. This brings you into a drab and charmless room with adequate furniture: a dining table and chairs, a sofa, and a sideboard. There’s a mini-kitchen, too, with fridge, sink, and stove.
To use the air-conditioner, you must leave the tall door open a good six inches, letting hot air in.
Poor lighting: In all this space, there is ONE lightbulb. The lamp, hanging over the table, was barely enough for me to do my paperwork.
This is a balcony? Not much wider than one shoe.
No Air conditioning: The apartment claims to have air conditioning. And yes, it had a portable unit on wheels standing in the room, with an extension cord nearby. (See my photo.) It was 85° (see photo), so we turned it on. Cool air came out the front; hot air came out the large exhaust hose, which was loose on the apartment floor—inside! We went to visit the owner, Roberto. Yes, he said, you have to open the door. So we stuck the wide exhaust hose out the door, leaving the tall door open a good six inches—through which came plenty of heat. In actuality: the apartment does NOT have functional air-conditioning.
No Balcony: The apartment claims to have a balcony. It does not. It has a four-inch ledge. (See photo.)
No toiletries: The apartment claims to have “free toiletries.” It does not. Not even a single bar of soap.
14 steep and narrow stairs up to the bed. Do you get up at night? Bathroom’s downstairs!
Climb up to bed: The bed is up a very narrow spiral staircase. (See photos.) There are 14 stairs, each 15” wide. If you are anything larger than slim, if you are elderly, if you have the slightest problem with stairs, you will not make it up. You cannot bring a suitcase upstairs. In fact, it’s difficult to carry anything up the tight stairs. Think about this if you usually get up during the night. The bathroom is downstairs.
Hot sleep: There is no air conditioning upstairs. (Not that there is any downstairs, either…)
Top view of stairs. Imagine it at night.
No breakfast: This is not a B&B. There is no breakfast.
Residenza Il Barone gets consistently good reviews. Watch out if you are routed to this B&B’s apartment as an alternative. It’s not in the same league and is sold with false claims.
Even more strange is TripAdvisor’s response to my review. I’ll write about that next.
It was really hot upstairs. 86°F by our digital thermometer. No air conditioning in the bedroom (not that there’s any downstairs, either.)
This photo is a crime! (yeah, right). Security checkpoint at Nairobi airport.
My sister had the most terrifying experience in Nairobi a few weeks ago.
“As you know,” she said to her jet-setting family members, “flying out of Nairobi there’s a security checkpoint where all passengers have to get out of the cars in the middle of a five-lane road and walk through a security inspection. Meanwhile, the drivers of the cars go through their own check. It’s a confusing mess and takes time to identify your car and driver after you have been cleared.”
That alone freaks me out. I usually refuse to be separated from my luggage, though sometimes during international travel there is simply no choice.
“After we passed through security and were waiting for our car, I started to video the chaos. I should have known better…
“With some difficulty, we finally identified our Uber and got in the car, relieved to be reunited with our stuff. Suddenly, a military police officer with some big-ass machine gun stopped the car and demanded to know why I was videoing the security checkpoint.
“I explained that I had never seen a process like this before and I found it interesting. He replied that it’s a crime to film there and that he is going to charge me with a crime and I will have to go to court on Monday!
“I apologized and said I would delete all photos. He said no—I committed a crime by using a camera at a security checkpoint. He said he is charging me with the crime and I will have to go to court and I will miss my flight.
A still from my sister’s illicit video at the Nairobi airport security checkpoint.
“In the meantime, our driver is whispering to Drew [our nephew] in the front seat that the officer wants 500 shillings ($5) but he was now demanding US $50 to me through the back window. At this point we’d have given him anything. We were even ready to give him our phone! We were also so worried we’d miss our 11 p.m. flight!
“We were literally shaking. I saw my future working in a labor camp in Kenya for the next 12 years!
“We continued to apologize, saying it was a mistake. The officer continued to insist that he had to charge me regardless; he would not let us delete any pictures and we would miss our flight and will have to go to court Monday.
“Of course it was all about the bribe, but when you’re in the moment, in the middle of the situation with a jerk, in a foreign country, you never know how far he’ll take it.
“I asked if I could pay the ‘fine’ now and skip the ‘court’ date so that I could make my plane. He made me delete the video then, and $60.00 later (I wasn’t about to ask him for change!) it was done. But at that moment, I would have paid much more!!!!
“The Uber driver then got out of the car and shook hands with the officer. I’m sure money was exchanged.
“The Nairobi airport security officer put his face in our window again, smiled, and told me to let my friends know what a wonderful time I had in Nairobi!
“And I still had the video, which would stay in my deleted file for a month!”
A wonderful time in Nairobi, duly and publicly reported here!
Nuncio, the “businessman” pickpocket, on a tram in Naples
Trust me…
The gentlemen thief of the strategist variety is a consummate con man. By design, he thwarts suspicion and earns his intended victim’s confidence by his dress and demeanor. He puts on respectability and trustworthiness as if they were a jacket and tie, then garnishes the look with manners and decorum, like cufflinks and a spit-shine. But his garments are mere costumes, uniforms donned for gainful occupation, flimsy facades contrived to trick us into allowing him access to our spheres.
How can one beware the wolf in sheep’s clothing? It’s our nature to trust first, suspect later; and it’s darn difficult to overcome our nature. We almost always give the benefit of the doubt, assume one is innocent until proven guilty. Especially in a foreign country—where we’re ignorant of the local customs—we hesitate to doubt a motive for fear of offending.
Cynicism is an unnatural state for a traveler who has come far to experience a new land and unfamiliar traditions. We arrive prepared to embrace our local hosts, however alien or exotic they seem to us. After all, it’s their country. We want to like them. Yet, we don’t know how to read these foreigners, even though they may seem just like us. We can’t always interpret their body language, their facial expressions, their gestures. Neither do we recognize their outsiders. We’re at a distinct disadvantage as tourists and travelers, due to our nature as much as our innocence. How then, can we be alert to that insidious impostor?
The claveleras use whatever aggression is required to give their flower gifts.
Bob Arno and I are loath to imply that strangers cannot be trusted; most can. Yet, for every crook and scoundrel we meet, for every victim’s story we hear, we feel ourselves harden. Our antennas get longer, our trust diminishes. We advise: protect your sphere. Don’t let a stranger penetrate your personal space. Suspect the unknown person who suddenly wants to be your friend—the stranger who wants your confidence.
The strategist pickpockets are clever. Unlike the opportunists who wait for a lucky chance, the strategists create their own opportunities, and make participants of their victims. You, the savvy traveler, will simply refuse to participate.
That requires the intentional cultivation of your under-developed kernel of cynicism, growing it until, at least, it is large enough and accessible enough to kick in when needed. That would be just when the deal-that’s-too-good-to-be-true finds you; the moment you are offered a free flower, and when approached by pseudo-cops (fake police), bucket bandits, and sandwich thieves (who do not steal sandwiches). “Look over there!” Ha-ha, got your goodies!
The pigeon poop pickpocket.
Deception in Thievery
Deceptive pickpockets and con artists are skilled in the art of social engineering. They develop (and clone) strategies to trick you into making your valuables available. They perform tiny plays, micro-choreographed from intricate scripts, in which you are a participant. Meet the smartphone thieves, magicians in their class. The whole act is over in an instant or two. There’s no applause, but if the thief has done well, he’s got something better. And then it’s “exit, stage left.”
Especially devious are those I call the pigeon poop perps. These thieves surreptitiously dirty their victims, empathetically point out the stain, then volunteer to clean it off. Unsurprisingly, they’re armed with a bottle of water and tissues—tools of their trade. As they clean them off, they clean them out, in one variation or another. And the victims? They allowed that stranger to touch them all over—brilliant!
There’s nothing like a thieving good samaritan to erode one’s faith in humanity.
Pinstripe-wearing pickpocket works while his accomplice, in the background, looks into our camera.
Birds and their excrement seem to figure frequently in the world of street thievery. While pigeon pooping is unrelated to pigeon dropping—a scam in which greed trumps logic over found money—both require a gull, someone easily tricked or cheated, a dupe, a person who is gullible. When we hear about people taken in pigeon drop scams, Bob and I wonder how anyone could be so naive. Yet these swindles proliferate relentlessly, constantly reinvented to suck in the greedy. Beware: someone, somewhere, has devised a pigeon drop just for you.
Con artists who practice the pigeon drop and the bait-and-switch and all the many variants of these scams are the epitome of their label. They are the ultimate confidence men, both seeking and pretending to offer the trust of a stranger. We’re in this together, they intimate. It may be wrong, but it’s you and me against the bad guys. Pavement wager gamers who run the three-shell game and three-card-monte rely on their shills to inspire confidence while they promise the chance of easy money. As the victims of these con artists count cash into the hands of their covert tricksters, they expect to receive value for money. They expect to get rich, get a killer deal, win big.
The moral of con artist story might be if it seems too good to be true, run! But greed drives the victims of these cons, and greed trumps reason. For the con men, that spells advantage: because a gull blinded by greed is a victim indeed.
Poor us—we’re pretty much trained to trust first, doubt later. We have a definite deficit in the cynicism department. And that’s no contest against the deceptive thieves.
Suitably spooky site for a psychic school: Arthur Findlay College in Essex, England.
A year ago, psychic swindler Rose Marks was sentenced to more than ten years in federal prison for fleecing clients of her fortune-telling business out of more than $17.8 million. She was 62 years old; she and her family had built a network of psychics, many of whom worked under the professional name Joyce Michael in Ft. Lauderdale and New York City.
One of Rose Marks’s best scams was to “see” the awful (and outrageously convoluted) future of a client, then solicit millions of dollars from the client, bit by bit, in order to perform rituals over the money before returning it. Except, the money was never returned.
At trial, victims testified that Marks “exploited them during vulnerable times in their lives. Victims said the women of the psychic’s family were masterful in their ability to use people’s spiritual or religious beliefs to get them to hand over money and other valuables.”
I always thought psychics had a “gift.”
Turns out, no. They just go to psychic schools. Or seance schools. Or clairvoyant colleges. These institutions have complete curricula of course study in, uh… conning. Courses called Unfoldment into Mediumship, Using Past Life Information in Present Time, Applying Clairvoyant Tools in the Psychic Playground, Trance: How to Sit for its Development, and So You Want to be a Medium are a small sampling from the few psychic schools I surveyed.
Rose Marks is infamous enough to have her own Wikipedia page, and lucky enough to have been trained by her own mother in the Gypsy tradition. She began her psychic career by age nine and later trained her own daughter.
If you don’t have the benefit of maternal training, there are psychic schools. All of them offer comprehensive instruction from beginner to advanced levels.
Psychic Schools
In the class called Stepping into Mediumship at MontClair Metaphysical School in New Jersey, the focus is learning how to “contact someone on the Other Side and to provide proof of their identity, personality and proof of life.”
Proof of life? The “Other Side” means the dead, right? So they’re teaching students how to contact the dead. And they must really teach that—otherwise the school is a sham.
Next, the students are taught how to prove they’ve contacted the correct dead person. Hmmm… mistakes can happen. Kind of like getting your neighbor’s mail in your box. Oops. But it’s the last bit that confuses me most: students are taught how to provide “proof of life.” Of a dead person? Is there life on the “Other Side”? From my perspective then, as an afterlife-nonbeliever, the school teaches how to scam. It is a school of scams, a college of cons, if I comprehend the concept correctly.
Or perhaps I need spiritual help.
Just last month, Psychic Gina was arrested in Fort Collins, Colorado, for bilking $37,000 from a client, with the collusion of her accomplice husband. Psychic Gina Marks is a member of another Marks family’s fortune-telling business; if and how they are related to Rose Marks is unknown.
Who would pay a psychic thousands of dollars for aura-cleansing, curse-lifting, love-finding, or to get through the ordinary difficulties of life? Usually those desperate in the areas of love, loss, health, or career. In the usual progression, the victim visits a psychic storefront for an inexpensive palm reading. Talented fortune-tellers assign homework to their clients, and persuade them to return repeatedly for convoluted rituals that escalate in price. Often, the psychic promises that the funds will be returned when the client’s problems are solved. Countering the failure of promised results, psychics convince clients to return by threatening certain catastrophe, calamity, and misfortune.
It is these advanced fortune-making skills I’d like to read about in the psychic schools’ syllabus: the inveigling, up-selling, cold-reading, deceit, and trickery. Which classes teach those vital skills? What about marketing, costuming, decor, and special effects?
The Psychic School in northern California offers many classes, all by telephone. One is Create Magic and Miracles. Is that the one in which you learn how to make teacups tip over and tables float? Most classes are $200, or you can take the two-year Teachers Program for $4,800. The Psychic School’s site carefully describes each course as self-healing, self-improvement, self-knowledge, and self-awareness. You study to be a psychic in order to read only your own chakra, energy, and dead people, right?
See your money-making abilities skyrocket
However, the Psychic School does point out that “with the development of your clairvoyant abilities, the decisions through which you create your life come with ease, your creativity and money-making abilities skyrocket….” I take that to mean that as a graduated “psychic” (the Teachers Program ends with a “Psychic School Certificate of Graduationg” [sic], there’s no end to the creativity you can use and fees you can charge to scam your clients. Becoming a clairvoyant, you will “create a life filled with insight, creativity, and miracles.” Sounds great!
Let’s have a look at the Berkeley Psychic Institute’s Clairvoyant Training Program, which the institute also refers to as “psychic kindergarten.” It must be child’s play! But no. It’s a two-year, four-phase program of intensive learning and “hands on training from high caliber gifted psychics,” and concludes with “Uncovering your deepest challenges, moving through the fire and slaying the dragons.”
Berkeley Psychic Institute operates the DejaVu Psychic Hotline, where graduates can get instant employment doing telephone and email readings. Email readings? Yes, for $25, one can order an “Email Trance Medium Channeled Healing.”
“We do not consider ourselves as fortune tellers. We are fortune creators,” says the DejaVu Psychic Hotline website. Whose fortunes are being created?
Arthur Findlay College, pictured above and about an hour north of London, calls itself “The Worlds Foremost College for the Advancement of Spiritualism and Psychic Sciences.” Not only can one study mediumship, but also trance mediumship, in which “you will be connected to spirit working with spirit and supported by spirit.” Sounds complicated. And that is the clearest line in the entire course description. Is that an example of the obfuscation taught in the institute? Vital skill for a clairvoyant.
Perhaps the most important course for a psychic medium is Mediumship – Polish Your Performance. Since mediumship is learned—not an innate gift—one must study and practice to become convincing when channeling a spirit from the Other Side. This is “essential for customers not only to return but recommend you to others,” the Arthur Findlay College site says. I’m guessing there’s some overlap with trance mediumship. Arthur Findlay College is international and holds week-long sessions in a multitude of languages including Japanese, Swedish, Italian, Norwegian, German, French, and Finnish. It even markets a course especially for senior citizens.
What do Psychic Schools cost?
What does it cost to become a clairvoyant? A basic week-long course at Arthur Findlay College, say Mediumship & Spiritual Development, costs £570 (about $845) with room and board, double occupancy. Add £9 per person if you want a room with your own bathroom. With more than 80 courses available, a wannabe-psychic can spend a pretty penny.
But everyone knows that a solid education leads to a solid career. Just a few years ago, Psychic Michelle Morgan, of Tarzana, California, raked in almost a million from a single client, a young man whom she determined was suffering from a love curse. Psychic Michelle was patient; she kept her 25-year-old mark dependent on her rituals for two years, urging him to borrow more and more money to fund his psychic sessions. The skills she honed allowed her to entrap and ensnare her victims and exploit them for much more than they were worth. Like all those in her field, silver-tongued Psychic Michelle’s talent was unctuous smooth-talk, glib persuasion, and creative conning. Presumably, the 25-year-old million-dollar-client wasn’t Psychic Michelle’s only client.
So what does a clairvoyant college curriculum really teach? How does an institute prepare a student medium for a career in clairvoyance? Does it really teach curse-lifting, money-purifying, and soul-swapping? Are the students taught how to scam and con their clients? Or are the students themselves scammed by the schools?
Closing up our Stockholm house, I’ve been selling things on the local version of Craig’sList. Many items sell in the first day, even in the first hour after an ad goes live. Most buyers don’t try to bargain; they simply pay the asking price. Sure, that’s partly the Swedish character. Pricing items low has a lot to do with it, too.
After success with many items, I decide to list our car, a 15-year-old Saab in almost-new condition with only 83,000 miles and not a thing wrong with it.
The phone rings a few minutes after the ad is posted. The caller wants the car! He makes a half-hearted attempt to lower the price and Bob, who has taken the call, agrees to the little discount. The caller says he’s in Uppsala, a nearby university town, and it will take him a little more than an hour to drive down with a friend. Okay. The caller asks for explicit driving directions, and Bob gives it. The caller tells us to take the ad offline, since he’s coming to get the car. Bob says sure and finally hangs up.
Car Scam!
Bob relates all this to me and I become a little testy. What do you mean you agreed to a discount? Of course I’m not going to take the ad down! Not until I’ve actually sold the car. And who calls to say they’ll buy the car sight-unseen, instead of saying they’ll come take a look at it?
Several minutes later, I get an email from “Joel,” who writes that it sounds like a good deal, when can he come see the car? I tell Joel that we have buyers on the way, but come tomorrow morning unless I write that it’s been sold.
The scammer kept his car idling the entire 40 minutes he tried to rip us off.
Uppsala guy calls again. He’s driving, and in a chatty mood. He asks Bob endless personal questions. Overhearing Bob’s replies, alarm bells begin to toll in my head. The guy asks for driving directions again. Bob gives him turn-by-turn instructions. It sounds as if they’re close, since Bob is naming nearby streets and landmarks. They couldn’t be here already, all the way from Uppsala.
Anyway, what kind of people don’t have GPS nowadays, I’m wondering. Why are they asking for the same simple directions over and over? It occurs to me that they’re simply tying up the phone line, trying to prevent competing buyers from getting through.
The Uppsala guy and his friend arrive. They couldn’t have driven all the way from Uppsala so quickly. Bob goes outside to show them the car. I observe from the upstairs window like a suspicious witch.
The car scammer showed a “database” on his phone that proved how bad our car actually was.
It’s dark and below freezing outside. An icy wind numbs my face at the open window. They’re speaking Swedish below. Long conversations. Wild gesticulating. Brief looks inside the car and under the hood. The guy from Uppsala starts the engine and complains about the look of the exhaust, but he never asks to drive the car. Meanwhile, the friend’s SUV is idling.
Bob tramps upstairs. “The car has a ton of problems! It’s a year older than you claim in your ad. The odometer has been rolled back. It’s had ten owners before us. And there’s water in the oil. He made a low offer, but I think we should take it.”
I explode. “Why do you believe him? He’s a scammer!”
“He showed me the car’s history on a website.”
“Right—on his smartphone! His phone with internet and GPS and maps. Why do you think he kept you on the phone for 20 minutes asking excruciating details about how to get here? He just wanted to keep the phone busy so you couldn’t take any other calls!”
“Let’s take it. Saab’s bankrupt, the car might not sell at all.”
“It’s the first day! The first hour! And I already have another interested person. A guy who wants to see the car before he buys it.”
“I’ll try to get the price up a little then…”
“No. In fact, forget that discount you agreed to on the phone. For this guy, the price has just gone up. Full price in cash, or nothing.” I am a witch.
Don’t sell your car to this guy? He’s a scammer, a fraudster, and a con artist.
Bob goes back downstairs disappointed. The witch put in the ad, photographed the car, and therefore gets final word on the sale. The SUV has been idling all this time. Ready for a quick get-away? Foul fumes float into my face at the window. The scammer persists and keeps Bob in negotiation for another 15 minutes before he finally speeds off.
I email Joel and tell him the sale didn’t go through. He comes over immediately to look at the car, test drives it, asks to see its “besiktiningar,” an official document showing any work done prior to the car’s last registration. Joel tells me the car is a great deal at the asking price, and buys it. He pays cash.
Sold, in under two hours.
And the next day Joel returns to help us with an errand for which we need a car. We did not expect the car to sell so quickly. Nice guy, Joel.
I wonder how Uppsala guy would have paid, had we made a deal. Just guessing: he’d flash cash, but not enough—oh, sorry, that’s all I could get from the cash machine—then offer to pay more than the agreed price via PayPal—a phony account. Or… no. Why then, bother to negotiate at all? Because by then, we’d be convinced we’d never sell the car, it’s such a mess. Or is he a “short-changer” who knows how to fold cash to make it look like more than it is? This part, we’ll never know.
Most interesting: what happened to Bob’s scam-sensor? Why did he fall for this con artist’s story? Okay, the scammer must have been smooth. (They all are.) He was prepared with fake “evidence.” And we’d dealt with so many honest buyers before this one. And Swedes are pretty decent, on the whole. Bob’s guard was down. Yeah. Excuses, excuses. Reminder: we can all be taken. Stay alert!
Could be you after following Mike Richard’s advice.
Steal. Drink and snack from the hotel mini-bar, the unethical blogger advises in his unethical December 10, 2014 article. Go ahead and have a beer and a candy bar, then deny it at check-out. You’ll get it free!
Swindle. Use a depleted debit card to buy drinks on a plane. Free booze, yay, worth committing fraud for!
Cheat. Walk into a luxury hotel you’re not staying in and take advantage of guest services like free breakfast, the concierge, and luggage storage. They’ll never know!
After-effect of using a knowingly depleted debit card to buy drinks on a plane.
Unethical blogger’s advice will likely get you handcuffed.
Was the free beer worth it?
Lie. Tell the airline gate agent you have a peanut allergy and need to board first to wipe down your tray. Yeah, get that overhead bin space before the honest people get there!
Scam. If your “expensive” item breaks prematurely (an iPad is hinted), go buy a new one, repackage the broken one, and return it for a refund. Sweet dreams, if you can sleep after that one.
And on and on. Like, buy travel gear and return it for a refund when you’re done with it, the unethical blogger advises. Take an empty first-class seat on a plane and try to get away with it. Pay $20 to have your tires rotated when you need parking in a high-priced city.
Unethical blogger
Some people should not be journalists. Some journalists should be decommissioned. This guy, this Mike Richard, is one of them.
I’m not in the habit of slamming other bloggers. But it is my custom to report thefts, cons, scams, and the fraudsters who commit them. Mike Richard may or may not use the methods he espouses; he does call them “useful travel hacks.”
I try to live by a simple little motto: “What if everyone did this?” Would I want that world? If everyone shouted, littered, took a stone from someone’s yard, lied, cheated, stole…. Just…try to be decent.
I grew up with several versions of The Golden Rule. Simply put, treat others as you’d like to be treated. Reciprocity. It makes the world go ’round.
I have little issue with paid placement presented as personal opinion—that’s the way of the world. The way of blog-whores. But this unethical blogger will apparently say anything for money. He calls it paid advertising. No wonder his blog has only one advertiser, despite his plentiful pleas for ads. Well, he has three if you count Anthony Bourdain and a quick-print service.
Unethical and illegal. Steal. Cheat. Lie. Commit fraud. But sure, Mike Richard says, they are, “entirely useful… for shameless budget travelers”. I must not be the only one who finds this to be irresponsible journalism. And not the only one to find it repugnant.
The salesman who overcharged me in Rome’s Mercato di Campo de’ Fiori
Kitchenware for sale at Rome’s Mercato di Campo de’ Fiori
Overcharge Scam
“Do you take credit cards?”
“Si, signora,” the salesman replied.
“How much is this pepper grinder?”
“€12.90.”
So why was the credit card slip made out for 15.90 euros? Accident? Or was this a little scam the market man thought he could pull on an idiot tourist? On a hurried customer, one who might not examine the credit card slip.
This was in Rome’s bustling outdoor market in Campo de’ Fiori, at the large kitchenware stand right next to a man pressing pomegranate halves as fast as he could and selling €6 cups of juice to an endless line of customers.
When I called him on it, the salesman wordlessly handed me three euros in coins. Not sheepishly. Just wordlessly.
Like a pickpocket who silently drops the stolen wallet on the ground. Not me… there it is… no harm done, right?
I can’t say for sure that this was a systematic overcharge scam used—perhaps vengefully?—on customers who have the audacity to pay with a credit card. But I have my opinion…
They’s ony three kinda men I won’t play with: That’s a po’ man, a blind man, an a police-man!
Rod the Hop, my Las Vegas three-card-monte informer, died last month, aged 56. He was a card tosser whose demonstrations proved that drills teach skills for life. He set up in areas with less police presence, favoring the sidewalks outside large factories, especially on payday, “where there’s eight hundred people going to lunch and they have to walk by you,” he said.
“A real good spot is outside military bases, where you’ve got a lot of young, naïve kids with nothing much to do and a little bit of money to spend.
“The moves are easy. You can learn it in a day and be good in a week. It’s the presentation that’s important. You have to have unflinching audacity and unmitigated gall. I don’t get intimidated.”
I love the way Rod spoke.
He was renown as a “card mechanic,” which is a card manipulator, as entertainment and teaching, and/or cheating in card games. As a card mechanic, Rod the Hop worked both ends. He was loved by the worldwide magic community; and had four felony convictions for casino cheating.
He was also renown as a “slot mechanic,” which could mean slot machine repairman but, in Rod’s case, meant he was a convicted slot machine cheat. Just last year he had the honor of becoming person number 34 in Nevada’s Excluded Person List, aka “the Black Book.”
He told us he tore apart and studied slot machines in his apartment, so he had to use a friend’s place as his “official” address so his parole officers wouldn’t find them.
Travelers may encounter three-card monte games anywhere. Players are purposely given a glimpse of the target early in the scramble, a skillful slip is performed by the tosser, and players thereafter carefully track the wrong object with confidence.
I’ve called three-card monte a “game” but, like the three-shell game, they’re games of no chance: tricks and traps. You’ll see other players win and walk away, but they are, in fact, shills. You cannot win. If you win once, it’s at the tosser’s pleasure in hope you, or someone in his audience, will bet big.
Advice from a three-card monte expert
In the words of Rod the Hop
The object of three-card monte is to make money. Each person in the crew gets an equal end. Some days it’s good and—it’s a street game so obviously you can only make as much money as what a person has in their pocket. But if you make two or three hundred dollars apiece a day, then you’ve done what you set out to do. Most of it has to do with grift sense, and your con and your presentation. That’s more than the skill factor, I would say.
It’s just a hustle. I mean, you just do the best you can and you prey on tourists or suckers that don’t know they’re breathing air.
Rod the Hop
Rod the Hop ropes suckers into three-card monte
What I look for in a sucker is, they’ve got money, number one. And that they’re a sucker. I don’t have a conscious thought pattern that goes through my mind when I see a sucker. I know a sucker when I see one. I just do. I’ve been doing it so long, I know a candy bar when I see one. That’s all there is to it.
But by the same token, I know someone that’s not a sucker, or might be a cop, or somebody that knows the game. I can just feel it. I just know a sucker when I see one and my crew does too. You know that when you pick a crew. I don’t go out and say, yeah, he looks like a pretty good thief and has a lot of grift sense, I’ll get him. The deciding factor whether you have a good crew or a bad crew is how much grift sense all your partners have. But most of the time you’re not going to hook up with someone that doesn’t have grift sense.
You’ll find the game in the back of buses, train stations, things like that. Very seldom do you see it in the streets, cause if it’s windy it’ll blow the cards open.
I used to go outside a factory. Believe it or not, all you have to do is set up a box and start throwing cards and people will just stop by to see what you’re doing. You don’t have to say anything. Then you start betting with the shills. And pretty soon people get to realize that it’s a betting game. I’ll keep throwing it, and my shills will be betting, and they’ll be winning and the sucker sees them winning, and so they want to bet. And I might even let the sucker win some if I see other suckers that might have more money.
So, the red card’s on the bottom of the two cards and the black card’s on top. When I throw the cards down, I’ll throw the top card instead of the bottom card, which is the red card. But first, just to get into the rhythm of it, I’ll do it for real. I’ll throw the red card on the bottom, and let them watch where it is, very slowly, and they’re watching and wondering where the red card is. And there’s no question where the red card is.
And they’ll want to bet, so I’ll say, well here, let me do it again. And then I’ll pick them up and they’ll say, oh gosh, I was right. I knew where the red card was. And then I’ll do it again, and now they’ll want to bet. When I don’t want them to win is when I’ll throw the top cards. And then obviously they’ll lose.
You would think that a normal person would think, wait a minute, I knew where the red card was. I bet on it and I lost. Why? Well you’d think a guy would just quit. But no, not suckers. Suckers go, ‘wait, this time I’m really going to watch him.’ And then they’ll bet more money, and it just goes on and on until they don’t have any more money. So I try to entice as many suckers as I can to bet on it. Then, when everybody’s out of money, I take the cards, stick them in my pocket, and walk away. And then we’ll go somewhere else.
I’m where there’s people. Where there’s people there’s money, and where there’s money there’s me. And that’s where you do con games. You can’t do it if there’s no customers. Where there’s people, there’s suckers, and where there’s suckers, there’s people like me.
The reason people try to beat this game is because of the skill of the operator. It’s my presentation. I say, ‘look, I want to show you something.’ First off, I say ‘this isn’t three-card monte.’ Because then you’re thinking, this is not three-card monte. I tell them that you win on the red and you lose on the black. Now watch. Here’s a red card. I’m just going to set it right there. Then here’s a black card and I want to set it right there, and just switch them. Now where’s the red card? Will you bet on something like that? Well sure you would, if you were a betting man. But if you’re not a betting man, you’re not going to do it.
And this is a cliché that everyone uses, that you can’t beat an honest man. Well, you can’t beat someone that’s not trying to win your money. You can remember that. As a hustler, and doing the three-card monte, I cannot get my money from someone that’s not trying to get my money first.
Rod the Hop throws three-card monte
This is a real old game, this three-card monte. I know it’s at least a hundred years old. It’s in a book a hundred years old, published in 1902. But each generation that’s never seen it before thinks they can beat it. There will always be suckers.
Look, three-card monte is a great little hustle in the street. And frankly, I don’t do it any more because there’s not enough money in it for me. It’s only as good as how much money a person has in their pocket at that time—right now. How many people walk around nowadays with eight hundred dollars in their pocket, or a thousand? Or even three hundred? You know what they got? They got about six dollars and fourteen credit cards. That’s what people have nowadays. They don’t carry around cash. The only people that carry cash nowadays are criminals.
The one good thing about three-card monte and the three-shell game and the short cons like that, is it’s a good training ground for con men, for grifters. It’s a prep school, if you will. Most people grow out of it.
If you’re a tourist and you see a three-card monte, don’t stop and look at it and think, well I know that he throws the top one sometimes and maybe sometimes he throws the bottom one, or whatever. I’m telling you right now. Do not play it. Cause it’s a guarantee, you cannot win. It’s simple as that. And that’s my advice. I can promise you, you cannot beat it. Just go on down the road when you see it.
Like Rod the Hop, Bob Arno, the famous pickpocket, is also known in and has deep knowledge of the worlds of magic and crime. Watching Rod work, Bob was impressed with his coolness, his social-engineering, his roping-in of “suckers.”
I was impressed with his patter. Here are a few of his lines, usually delivered in a rapid-fire drawl while his hands were flying and his mind was sizing up potential marks:
“This here ain’t no three card monte, this here’s the Mexican pitti-pat, where you win on the red and you lose on the black…
“Watch me now, I’m gonna race ’em and chase ’em, so watch where I place ’em…”
“If you gotta lotta nerve and you gotta lotta plenty, five’ll getcha ten and ten’ll getcha twenty…”
“I’ve played this game with Yankees and Southerners, Senators and Governors. Money on the card or no bet, where’s the red? If I can bluff you I can beat you. Come on bet five, bet ten! Ho down now, get your chicken dinner in the center, where’s the red?…”
[Thanks to Paul Chosse, who thought to put these lines in writing back in 2005.]
Hard to tell fact from fiction when researching “the world’s scariest drug” called Devil’s Breath, burundanga, and scopolamine. The second- and third-hand reports, of which there are many, seem to be well-intentioned warnings and FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt).
The dosing methods and effects on the victims are duly terrifying. But what good is a warning if there is no possible way of protecting against the event? How can one prevent a stranger from blowing a bit of powder in one’s face? Or tainting a card or paper with the dust and showing it to the mark? “Excuse me, do you know this address/store/location?” —and you’re done for.
One thing is certain though. This 35-minute documentary about Devil’s Breath is fantastic, whether true or dramatized. The characters in it are all credible. The victims are believable and the perpetrators are colorful and convincing. Why would perps reveal the awful details of their criminal trade? Well, that doesn’t surprise me, given my experience making documentaries about thieves.
You probably know scopolamine as a drug for motion sickness. Perhaps you’ve worn the patch on a boat or ship. Although reports of criminal use of scopolamine are not new, and the video’s been around for a while, I’ve posted it here because I think the documentary is so good.
My friend Carolyn Hamilton, who lives in Ecuador, just mentioned that warnings of Devil’s Breath are swirling. Reports or rumors, I’m not sure. Carolyn photographed the brugmansia tree soon after moving to Ecuador, simply because of its beauty. Later, in a native plants class, she learned that “people plant it outside their bedroom windows so they will sleep better at night! Among the indigenous peoples it’s considered good luck to have one planted at your doorstep. And it’s known to be poisonous.” The photo above is from Carolyn’s neighbor’s yard.
Have any of you been drugged with Devil’s Breath? Have any of you heard a first-hand report from someone else who was drugged?
Edit 12/13/15: The New York Times just published an article, The Swindled Samaritan, which tells a first-person account of burundanga-drugging. The victim’s apartment was totally emptied by the drugger-thieves and the victim had no memory of the event. Her apartment lobby video showed her bringing the thieves in, and the doorman described how those thieves carried out her possessions.
