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Whit Haydn: Any technology that is sufficiently
unknown looks like magic. [Music comes in.]
00:00:06
Arthur C. Clarke said that. Well, it's the
same thing, really. We have a technology
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that people are not knowledgeable
about. The technology of deception. Phoebe Judge: This is Whit Haydn. He goes by
Pop. And he's a professional magician living in
00:00:21
Los Angeles. He's almost 70 now and started
doing magic when he was only 10 years old,
00:00:27
growing up in Clarksville, Tennessee.
Whit Haydn: I was a preacher's kid, and this
00:00:33
old man moved into our neighborhood. He was in his
80s, but he'd been a gambler his whole life, back
00:00:42
in the '20s and so. And he was a total reprobate.
He drank whiskey right out of a bottle and chain
00:00:51
smoked these little black cigars and cussed like a
sailor. And being a preacher's kid in Clarksville,
00:00:56
Tennessee, naturally I gravitated toward his
society. And he taught me a lot of things, and
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one of them was... He taught me some little magic
tricks, but he also taught me the shell game.
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Phoebe Judge: Pop Haydn is one of
the greatest shell game operators in the world. It's a game you've probably seen
before. It requires three half-walnut shells,
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and you put a little pea or a little rubber ball
underneath one of them and mix the shells around.
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The person watching tries to keep up with you,
and then guess which shell the pea is under.
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People bet on it.
Whit Haydn: Yes, and that's a mistake. Phoebe Judge: Why? Because
you'll never get it right?
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Whit Haydn: You cannot win. It's a swindle.
It's a swindle. It's a sleight of hand swindle,
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but you can't beat it by watching it.
[Music fades out.] Phoebe Judge: Pop Haydn invited us to meet him at
The Magic Castle in Hollywood, which we were very
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excited about because it's a private club for
magicians only. It's in an old mansion dating
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back to 1909, and has been a Mecca for magicians
since 1963. We went during the day, so we had the
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place to ourselves and could wander around slowly.
It's like a maze. There's a secret door hidden in
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a bookcase, five different bars, lounges, a dining
room with a $42 pork chop and very strict dress
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code, and also a classroom where pop teaches
what he calls 'a school for scoundrels.' And
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sometimes he teaches a class specifically to
teach police officers how to catch con men.
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Whit Haydn: They're still playing these games
on the streets today. So the police need to
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know as much as they can about it, so that
they can keep an eye on it. And we like to
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let them know that most of these gangs are not
dangerous. They're crooks, but they're usually
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not terrible crooks. But the police need to know
how — it's very hard for them to break up the
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games or to know how to approach the games
or even know what's going on. For example,
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most people think that it's just one guy behind
the table, taking all the people at the table.
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Actually everybody at the table is in on it.
There's only one sucker at the table at a time.
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[Music comes in.]
If you don't know who it is, it's probably you. [Laughs.]
Phoebe Judge: At The Magic Castle, big
00:03:15
theaters give way to small theaters and then tiny
theaters where you can watch the magicians very
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close up. The largest performance space in The
Magic Castle is called the Palace of Mystery.
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Will you just tell me again, what's it called?
Whit Haydn: The Palace of Mystery. That was
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the Parlor of Prestidigitation.
This is the Palace of Mystery. I'm coming back around this way. These
are all the dining rooms. This is our
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seance room. Phoebe Judge: What is this?
Whit Haydn: This is our seance room. We have
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seances in here to contact Houdini.
We have seances almost every night. We always get him... Because
it's a magic castle of course,
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and this place is rigged to the hilt
to replicate a spiritualist seance that you might've seen in the '20s.
Phoebe Judge: It's rigged in here?
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Whit Haydn: It's rigged in here. Oh yes. Things
float, the table rises and floats around,
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and all kinds of neat things happen.
Phoebe Judge: What happens when Houdini shows up?
[Music fades out.]
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Whit Haydn: Oh, well, you know, you hear his
voice... It's his real voice, actually. And all
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kinds of mysterious appearances and apparitions
and movements and things. It's very exciting.
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Phoebe Judge: It's full of tricks like this.
And every night, people come to deceive one
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another and be deceived. A secret button under
a bar makes an owl screech. There's a piano
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that's haunted by a ghost named Irma. Irma will
immediately begin playing any song you request.
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The walls of The Magic Castle are jam-packed
with portraits of magicians, past and present.
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Some have requested to have their ashes
hidden in the frames of their own portraits,
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and The Magic Castle agreed. So there are eight of
these, as Pop calls them, 'permanent residents.'
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And he takes us to the portrait of Jefferson
Randolph Smith, also known as Soapy Smith.
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Whit Haydn: He was one of the
first true American gangsters. Phoebe Judge: So why would you have a gangster's
picture in The Magic Castle? Whit Haydn: Because
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of his facility with the shell game.
Phoebe Judge: This is the man we came to hear
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about. The magicians of The Magic Castle honor one
of the earliest American organized crime bosses
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and con men, because he was also an absolute
master of the shell game. He revolutionized the
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technique and made himself quite rich off
of other people's money in the process.
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[Music comes in.]
When you start asking questions about Soapy Smith, everything begins to bleed together in strange
ways: magicians teaching police officers,
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crooks teaching magicians, and a very blurry line
between a delightful trick and a dirty one.
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I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.
[Music up full for a few seconds.] I wasn't sure if I was allowed to ask a magician
how the shell game works. But Pop says the shell
00:06:12
game is not a magic trick, it's a con game.
Whit Haydn: What makes it really a con game is
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that there are other people involved that you
don't realize are on his side, and they help
00:06:21
you make mistakes and help you get involved,
and that's where it becomes a con game. You're
00:06:26
being swindled by the people around you without
knowing it. But the actual sleight of hand, what
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he would do that was very... When he was ready
to kill somebody, he would reach in his pocket,
00:06:36
take some money out and get a second pea. And then
he would show the shells all empty and show the
00:06:42
pea on the table, but he had a pea in his hand.
So when he set the shells back down, he would load
00:06:48
that pea under one of them as he was setting it
back down, and he showed a pea under the first
00:06:52
shell. And he would move it around and steal it
out and throw it on the floor amongst the peanut
00:06:58
shells and sawdust. And it would just be lost. But
there's that one pea still under a shell that he
00:07:04
has never touched. So nobody would ever guess that
shell. And they would go for the other two shells,
00:07:09
and that's where he put the ax to their necks.
Phoebe Judge: This was Soapy Smith's innovation
00:07:14
to the game: the addition of a second pea.
And that's how it's done to this day. It's
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a felony in California: larceny by trick.
And just last month, a New York man named
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Andrew Jones was arrested for the 17th time in
30 years for scamming people out of their money
00:07:33
with a version of the shell game called the
Three-Card Monte. It's amazing to think that
00:07:39
we're still falling for these games today,
forking over our cash to charming strangers.
00:07:45
Soapy Smith didn't stop at the shell game. He
also ran a famous soap scam. It's what got him
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the nickname Soapy.
[Music fades out.] Catherine Spude: Well, what he would do is he
and some confederates would gather a crowd and he
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would start wrapping up bars of just plain soap.
Phoebe Judge: This is Catherine Spude,
00:08:06
an anthropologist and historian who
studies the American West. She has a book about Soapy called That Fiend in Hell.
Catherine Spude: And as he's doing it,
00:08:16
he would wrap one of them in a $5 bill before
he wrapped it up into the colored paper.
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And he said, "Now for a dollar
apiece, anybody who wants to can come up here and pick out which one it is
that has the $5 bill in it." So he'd go through
00:08:35
this rigmarole and someone in the crowd would
say, "I can do it. I can do it." And sure enough,
00:08:39
it turned out that person picked out the $5 bar
of soap. And so Soapy would go through the thing
00:08:45
again. But it turned out that the first guy who
got it was usually one of his confederates.
00:08:50
[Music comes in.]
So that's the way he made his early fortunes, was just conning people by making them believe
that they could win $5 from a bar of soap.
00:09:02
Phoebe Judge: This presence of an accomplice,
or a set of people who are in on it with you,
00:09:07
is the most important feature of a con game. And
leading people to believe they're smarter than
00:09:13
you — that's the real confidence trick.
Whit Haydn: We call them confidence games
00:09:17
because they're built on the idea that I put my
confidence in the sucker. A real confidence game
00:09:24
can only be done with somebody who has
cupidity in his soul. Somebody that is larcenous in his soul. Swindles, you can
do a swindle on anyone. You can swindle
00:09:35
some old lady out of her savings. But that's
not the same as a confidence game. Confidence
00:09:40
game's where you make somebody think they
have an unfair advantage on somebody else.
00:09:44
They're willing to take that unfair advantage
of somebody else, and then they get taken.
00:09:48
Phoebe Judge: Soapy Smith traveled all
over the American West with his men, running all kinds of scams, like setting up
a fake telegraph office where no messages
00:09:58
were actually sent or received. They'd just
take your money and never send the message.
00:10:04
[Music ends.]
He had a fake army recruitment office where his men would steal a
recruit's wallet right out of his pants while
00:10:11
he was being checked out by the doctor. He was
making a lot of money and often used it to pay
00:10:17
the police, politicians, and judges to leave
him alone and let him do what he wanted.
00:10:23
This corruption was so well known that Soapy was
often included in political cartoons. Catherine's
00:10:30
favorite is from the Rocky Mountain News in 1892.
In it, Soapy's in the middle of a group of men,
00:10:36
sitting around a table. The men seem
to be arguing or discussing something, doing business of some sort. We see the
governor of the state of Colorado at the time,
00:10:46
some candidates for mayor, and the sheriff.
Catherine Spude: Soapy is front and center,
00:10:50
is standing up, and appears to be directing
everything. But it's my opinion that one reason
00:10:58
Soapy was chosen for that role in the cartoons
is because he's wearing a beard. At the time,
00:11:04
beards were seriously out of fashion and it makes
him a good person to caricature if you're drawing
00:11:13
political cartoons. In a way, Soapy became
the symbol of the underworld for Denver,
00:11:18
simply, I think, because he had the beard.
Phoebe Judge: When the Klondike gold rush hit,
00:11:23
Soapy moved from Denver to Skagway, Alaska,
where he opened a saloon that people called
00:11:29
'the real city hall.' And as the story goes,
in 1898, a miner traveling through Skagway
00:11:36
was conned out of his gold by Soapy's men.
Catherine Spude: The townspeople hear of it, and
00:11:44
they've had enough of Soapy.
They're going to take over. [Music comes in.]
Frank Reed, who was one of the surveyors
00:11:49
of the town, has a gunfight, basically. The
popular story is that there's kind of a gunfight
00:11:56
and Soapy... Both of them are shot, Soapy dies
immediately, and Frank Reed takes another 12 days
00:12:03
to die. And through the death of Soapy... Skagway
has no more crime [laughs], basically. That's
00:12:14
the way the legend went.
Phoebe Judge: Catherine Spude says Soapy Smith has just become more and more
mythic in our imaginations over the last 118
00:12:23
years. Stories circulate about his incredible
generosity, that he was the kind of guy who built
00:12:29
drinking troughs for thirsty homeless dogs and
passed out turkeys on Thanksgiving. And the more
00:12:36
these stories were repeated, the more important
Soapy became. By the 1950s, we were calling him
00:12:43
the Robin Hood of America. But Catherine Spude
says that when you actually do the research,
00:12:49
you find that Soapy Smith was just a handsome,
smooth-talking guy who stole a lot of money from
00:12:55
a lot of people. The classic confidence man.
[Music fades out.] Pop Haydn doesn't deny that Soapy Smith did
a lot of terrible things, but he says, isn't
00:13:07
there something fascinating about someone who was
so creative about it? Every summer, on July 8th,
00:13:13
the magicians of The Magic Castle gather at
9:15 p.m., the approximate time Soapy was shot,
00:13:20
to make the same toast: Here's to Soapy's ghost.
Whit Haydn: I believe that magic is really kind of
00:13:27
a celebration of the archetype of the trickster.
Brains over brawn. The trickster is a character
00:13:34
like Bugs Bunny...
[Music comes in.] Who's always being hunted by a guy
with a gun, a human being with a gun,
00:13:39
but he always outsmarts you. In fact, it's
so easy to outsmart that he doesn't even
00:13:45
run away. He could get away at any time, but he
sticks around. Why? For the joy of manipulating
00:13:49
and making a fool out of Elmer. He enjoys
playing with it. And the magician is kind
00:13:55
of a celebration of that part of us that uses
our brains to survive and trickery to survive.
00:14:03
The difference is the con man, he puts the
mask on his face and never takes it off.
00:14:09
He'll be the sorcerer, or he'll be the mind
reader, or he'll be the honest politician,
00:14:16
or the sincere salesman. He'll be all kinds
of things. But that mask has to stay on
00:14:22
his face all the time. A magician puts on
the mask and then lets it slip all the time,
00:14:27
where he's winking at you out of it. You always
know that he's screwing with you somehow,
00:14:33
but he's just doing it for the fun of it.
[Music comes up full for a few seconds.]
00:14:35
Phoebe Judge: Criminal is produced
by Lauren Spohrer, Nadia Wilson, and me. Audio mix by Rob Byers. Alice Wilder is
our intern. Julienne Alexander makes original
00:14:55
illustrations for each episode of Criminal.
You can see them at thisiscriminal.com.
00:15:01
Criminal is recorded in the studios of North
Carolina Public Radio, WUNC. We're a proud
00:15:07
member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collection of
the best podcasts around. Radiotopia from PRX
00:15:15
is supported by the Knight Foundation and
MailChimp, celebrating creativity, chaos,
00:15:20
and teamwork. And thanks to Adzerk for providing
their ad-serving platform to Radiotopia.
00:15:26
I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.
Jingle: Radiotopia. From PRX.