Criminal - The Shell Game

Episode Date: November 18, 2016

The Magic Castle in Hollywood has been a private club for magicians since 1963, and its walls are lined with portraits of magicians past and present. Among them is a portrait of one of the earliest American organized crime bosses and conmen, Jefferson Randolph "Soapy" Smith. And though it may seem strange that this "mecca of magic" honors a criminal, Soapy's legacy reveals just how blurry the line is between a delightful trick and a dirty one.  Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop.  Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts. Each month, Apple Podcasts highlights one series worth your attention, and they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums,

and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. Botox Cosmetic, Adabotulinum Toxin A, FDA approved for over 20 years. So, talk to your specialist to see if Botox Cosmetic is right for you. For full prescribing information, including boxed warning, visit BotoxCosmetic.com or call 877-351-0300. Remember to ask for Botox Cosmetic by name. To see for yourself and learn more, visit BotoxCosmetic.com. That's BotoxCosmetic.com. Any technology that is sufficiently unknown looks like magic. Arthur C. Clarke said that. Well,

it's the same thing, really. We have a technology that people are not knowledgeable about, the technology of deception. This is Whit Hayden. He goes by Pop, and he's a professional magician living in Los Angeles. He's almost 70 now and started doing magic when he was only 10 years old, growing up in Clarksville, Tennessee.

I was a preacher's kid, and this old man moved into our neighborhood. He was in his 80s, but he'd been a gambler his whole life, back in the 20s and so. He was a total reprobate. He drank whiskey right out of a bottle and chain-smoked these little black cigars and cussed like a sailor. Being a preacher's kid in Clarksville, Tennessee, naturally I gravitated toward his society. And he taught me a lot of things, and one of them was he

taught me some little magic tricks, but he also taught me the shell game. Pop Hayden 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, and you put a little pea or a little rubber ball underneath one of them and mix the shells around. The person watching tries to keep up with you and then guess which shell the pea is under. People bet on it. Yes, and that's a mistake.

Why? Because you'll never get it right. You cannot win. It's a swindle. It's a swindle. It's a sleight of hand swindle, but you can't beat it by watching it. Pop Hayden invited us to meet him at the Magic Castle in Hollywood, which we were very excited about, because it's a private club for magicians only. It's in an old mansion dating back to 1909 and has been a mecca for magicians

since 1963. We went during the day so we had the place to ourselves and could wander around slowly. It's like a maze. There's a secret door hidden in a bookcase, five different bars, lounges, a dining room with a $42 pork chop and very strict dress code, and also a classroom where Pop teaches what he calls a school for scoundrels. And sometimes he teaches a class specifically to teach police officers how to catch con men. They're still playing these games on the streets today, you know, so the police need to know as much as they can about it so that they can keep an eye on it. And we like to let them know that, you know, most of these gangs are not dangerous, you know, they're crooks, but they're, you know, usually not terrible crooks. But the police need to know how, it's very hard to, for them to break up the games or to know how to

approach the games or even know what's going on. For example, most people think that it's just one guy behind a table, you know, and taking all the people at the table. Actually, everybody at the table is in on it. There's only one sucker at the table at a time. You know, if you don't know who it is, it's probably you. At the Magic Castle, big theaters give way to small theaters and then tiny theaters where you can watch the magicians very close up. The largest performance space in the Magic Castle is called the Palace of Mystery. Will you just tell me again, what's it called?

The Palace of Mystery. That was the parlor of Prestidigitation. This is the Palace of Mystery. I'll come back around this way. These are all the dining rooms. This is our seance room. What is this? This is our seance room. We have seances in here to contact Houdini. We have seances almost every night. We always get him because it's a magic castle, of course,

and this place is rigged to the hilt to replicate a spiritualist seance that you might have seen in the 20s. It's rigged in here. It's rigged in here. Oh, yes, things float. The table rises and floats around and, you know, all kinds of neat things happen. What happens when Houdini shows up? Oh, well, you know, you hear his voice and it's his real voice, actually.

And, you know, all kinds of mysterious appearances and apparitions and movements and things. It's very exciting. It's full of tricks like this. And every night, people come to deceive one another and be deceived. A secret button under a bar makes an owl screech. There's a piano that's haunted by a ghost named Irma. Irma will immediately begin playing any song you request. The walls of the Magic Castle are jam-packed with portraits of magicians past and present.

Some have requested to have their ashes hidden in the frames of their own portraits, and the Magic Castle agreed, so there are eight of these, as Pop calls them, permanent residents. And he takes us to the portrait of Jefferson Randolph Smith, also known as Soapy Smith. He was one of the first true American gangsters. So why would you have a gangster's picture in the Magic Castle? Because of his facility with the shell game. This is the man we came to hear about. The magicians of the Magic Castle honor one of the earliest American organized crime bosses and conmen because he was also an absolute master of the shell game.

He revolutionized the technique and made himself quite rich off of other people's money in the process. When you start asking questions about Soapy Smith, everything begins to bleed together in strange ways. Magicians teaching police officers, crooks teaching magicians, and a very blurry line between a delightful trick and a dirty one. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. I wasn't sure if I was allowed to ask a magician how the shell game works, but Pop says the shell game is not a magic trick. It's a con game. What makes it really a con game is that there are other people involved that you don't realize are on his side,

and they help you make mistakes and help you get involved, and that's where it becomes a con game. You're being swindled by the people around you without knowing it. But the actual sleight of hand, what he would do when he was ready to kill somebody, he would reach in his pocket, take some money out, and get a second pee. And then he would show the shells all empty and show the pea on the table, but he had a pea in his hand. So when he set the shells back down, he would load that pea under one of them as he was

setting it back down, then he'd show the pea under the first shell, and he'd move it around and steal it out and throw it on the floor amongst the peanut peanut shells and sawdust and it would just be lost but there's that one pea still under a shell that he has never touched so nobody would ever guess that shell and they'd go for the other two shells and that's where that's where he put the axe to their necks this was soapy smith's innovation to the game the addition of a second pea and that's how it's done to this day. It's a felony in California, larceny by trick. And just last month, a New York man named Andrew Jones was arrested for the 17th time in 30 years for scamming people out of their money with a version of the shell game called the three-card money. It's amazing to think that we're still falling for these games today,

forking over our cash to charming strangers. Soapy Smith didn't stop at the shell game. He also ran a famous soap scam. It's what got him the nickname Soapy. Well, what he would do is he and some Confederates would gather a crowd and he would start wrapping up bars of just plain soap. This is Catherine Spoodie, an anthropologist and historian who studies the American West. She has a book about soapy called That Fiend in Hell. And as he's doing it, he would wrap one of them in a $5 bill before he wrapped it up into the colored paper. 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.

And so he'd go through this rigmarole and someone in the crowd would say, I can do it, I can do it. And sure enough, it turned out that person picked out the $5 bar of soap. And so soapy would go through the thing again. But it turned out that the first guy who got it was usually one of his confederates. 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. This presence of an accomplice, or a set of people who are in on it with you, is the most important feature of a con game. And leading people to believe they're smarter than you, that's the real confidence trick. We call them confidence games because they're built on the idea that I put my confidence in the sucker. You know, a real confidence game 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 some lady out of her savings. But that's not the same as a confidence game. Confidence games where you make somebody think they have an unfair advantage on somebody else. They're willing to take that unfair advantage of somebody else, and then they get taken. 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 were actually sent or received. They just take your money and never send the message.

He had a fake army recruitment office where his men would steal a recruit's wallet right out of his pants while he was being checked out by the doctor. He was making a lot of money and often used it to pay the police, politicians, and judges to leave him alone and let him do what he wanted. This corruption was so well known that Soapy was often included in political cartoons. Catherine's favorite is from the Rocky Mountain News in 1892. In it, Soapy is in the middle of a group of men 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, some candidates for mayor and the sheriff. Soapy is front and center, standing up and appears to be directing everything.

But it's my opinion that one reason Soapy was chosen for that role in the cartoons is because he's wearing a beard. At the time, beards were seriously out of fashion, and it makes him a good person to caricature if you're drawing political cartoons. In a way, Soapy became the symbol of the underworld for Denver, simply, I think, because he had the beard. When the Klondike Gold Rush hit, Soapy moved from Denver to Skagway, Alaska, where he opened a saloon that people called the Real City Hall. And as the story goes, in 1898, a miner traveling through Skagway was conned out of his gold by Soapy's men. The townspeople hear of it, and they've had enough of Soapy. They're going to take over.

Frank Reed, who was one of the surveyors of the town, has a gunfight. Basically, the popular story is that there's kind of a gunfightfight and Soapy, both of them are shot. Soapy dies immediately and Frank Reed takes another 12 days to die. And through the death of Soapy, Skagway has no more crime, basically. That's the way the legend went. Catherine Spoodie says Soapy Smith has just become more and more mythic in our imaginations over the last 118 years. Stories circulate about his incredible generosity, that he was the kind of guy who built drinking troughs for thirsty homeless dogs, and passed out turkeys on Thanksgiving.

And the more these stories were repeated, the more important Soapy became. By the 1950s, we were calling him the Robin Hood of America. But Catherine Spoodie says that when you actually do the research, you find that Soapy Smith was just a handsome, smooth-talking guy who stole a lot of money from a lot of people, a classic confidence man. Pop Hayden doesn't deny that Soapy Smith did a lot of terrible things, but he says, isn't there something fascinating about someone who was so creative about it? Every summer, on July 8th,

the magicians of the Magic Castle gather at 9.15 p.m., the approximate time Soapy was shot, to make the same toast. Here's to Soapy's ghost. I believe that magic is really kind of a celebration of the archetype of the trickster. You know, brains over brawn. The trickster is a character like Bugs Bunny, you know, who's always being hunted by a guy with a gun, a human being with a gun. But he always outsmarts him.

In fact, it's so easy to outsmart that he doesn't even run away. He could get away at any time. But he sticks around. Why? For the joy of manipulating and making a fool out of Elmer. He enjoys playing with him. And the magician is kind of a celebration of that part of us that uses our brains to survive and trickery to survive. The difference is that a con man, he puts the mask on his face and never takes it off. He'll be the sorcerer or he'll be the mind reader or he'll be the honest politician or the sincere salesman.

He'll be all kinds of things. But that mask has to stay on his face all the time. The magician puts on a mask and then lets it slip all the time where he's winking at you out of it. You always know that he's screwing with you somehow, but he's just doing it for the fun of it. Criminal is produced by Lauren Spohr, Nadia Wilson, and me. Audio mix by Rob Byers.

Alice Wilder is our intern. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC. We're a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collection of the best podcasts around. Radiotopia from PRX is supported by the Knight Foundation and MailChimp, celebrating creativity, chaos, and teamwork. And thanks to AdServe for providing their ad-serving platform to Radiotopia. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Radiotopia from PRX. to severe frown lines, crow's feet, and forehead lines look better in adults. Effects of Botox Cosmetic may spread hours to weeks after injection causing serious symptoms.

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