True Crime Campfire - The Gift of Grift: With Pickpocket Magician James Harrison

Episode Date: September 18, 2020

Join us for our very first special guest episode! The first half of the episode is a lot of talk about cool tricks and cons, and the second half is more traditional TCC--and of course we give you a great villain to hate on in the last story. It wouldn't be TCC without that. As long as there have been humans, there have been scams. We’ve been perfecting the art of the steal for thousands of years. From the cutpurses and pickpockets of ancient times to the faux Nigerian princes of today, we’ve been robbin’ and scammin’ and griftin’ our way across the millenia, and we show no signs of stopping. Different hustles require different skills, of course, and different levels of skill. Today we welcome our first special guest on True Crime Campfire, a guy who’s something of an expert on artful thievery. He’ll teach us a bit about the skills involved, and we’ll tell you some wild stories about people who were blessed with the gift of grift. James Harrison's Instagram--check out his amazing videos: https://www.instagram.com/pickpocketjames/?hl=enSources:https://forzonimagic.com/mindreaders-history/alexander-man-knows/https://www.lybrary.com/modern-magic-p-121.htmlhttps://www.atlasobscura.com/places/lily-dale-spiritualist-communityhttps://geniimagazine.com/wiki/index.php?title=Thomas_Nelson_Downshttps://skepticalinquirer.org/newsletter/spirit-painting-2/Breaking Vegas: The True Story of the MIT Blackjack Team (documentary)CNBC's "American Greed," Episode "Psychic Fiend's Network"Follow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfireFacebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail] a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello, campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie and I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. As long as there have been humans, there have been scams. We've been perfecting the art of the steel for thousands of years. From the cut purses and pickpockets of ancient times to the faux Nigerian princes of today, we've been robin and scamming and grift in our way across the millennia, and we show no signs of stopping. Different hustles require different skills, of course, and different levels of skill. Today, we welcome our first special guests on True Crime Campfire, a guy who's something of an expert on artful thievery.

He'll teach us about the skills involved and will tell you some wild stories about people who are blessed with the gift of grift. So, campers, today we're welcoming our very first guest on True Crime Campfire. James Harrison is a Toronto-based sleight-of-hand performer and pickpocket magician, and you can definitely steal your wallet and your watch without you knowing. He's performed all over North America, he's been nominated twice for excellence in the arts, and he was named A1 Radio's Magician of the Year in 2016. He's given talks at the SECT Hacking and Security Conference in Stockholm, Sweden, and at DefCon in Las Vegas.

All that is incredibly impressive, not to mention just impossibly cool. And we are more than excited to have you on our show. So hi, James. Hi, thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate this. We're excited. So you do a lot of close-up magic in addition to stage magic, right? Which I would imagine is way harder and requires more sleight-of-hand expertise.

The best way to put it is that I do specialize in what's known as close-up magic. And being a pick-pocket magician, you have to be up close. So it seemed to go hand-in-hand quite well. But performing on stage is its own beast. I would say that they definitely have different skills for both. But personally, I am a huge fan of being up close and personal. Yeah, which is why I said you could steal my wallet and my watch without me noticing, right? And I imagine you're just a nightmare to your poor family to be here.

I've dumbed it down. I don't take advantage as much as I used to when I was younger. My wife has found me staring at men uncomfortably going, what are you stealing? and I'm just in my head. I'm like, I've gotten into their wallet. I've turned them and got this. I just do mental gymnastics a lot. But you give everything back, right?

You're not like an actual thief. No. Not that you would admit it. No, I am an honest thief. Pardon the pun there, but I like that. I do give everything back as I like to tell everyone as I'm not a fan of a forced roommate that the government would give me. So I try to make sure that I give everything back.

If I... And you're Canadian. Yes, I am. So that just takes it to a whole other level of politeness that we're not used to here in the States. Oh, very much so. It was a lot of fun when I visited the States and I'm apologizing to people and they're like, why are you apologizing? And then I give them their stuff back and they're like, oh, okay. So it was a lot of fun.

That's such a power move, though. like seriously like to just go up to somebody and be like hey check your back pocket like what do you say to that that's like the coolest thing anybody's ever done ever and you're immediately like it's it's a flex admit it well it's funny to um try and talk to people about it because they don't know what to say i have like 40,000 followers on facebook and i go live quite often and i'm usually just talking to myself because everyone's like, that's cool, but they don't know what to say to me. Does everybody just want you to explain how you do it? Well, the funny thing is about pickpocketing is that it's not magic.

You're not giving away a trick. You're giving away a skill. So even though I tell you exactly how I steal something, I'm just showing you the bare basics of it. I can still steal it. It's sort of like asking a boxer, how do you defend yourself from being punched? That's true because you're right. It's not a trick. It's just something that you've practiced and practiced and practiced and practiced. Is there a lot of training with like coats with bells on it and stuff? Well, as much as Hollywood would like you to think, that's a little bit of a myth or urban legend.

An actual fact, the bells don't improve your skill. Believe me, I've tried. But it's honestly, it's just boring repetition. that gets the job done, just like anything that you want to be good at. But I do, in my house, I do have a dummy set up with clothes on it because... Do you for real? That's too cool. I really do. I don't have the money to buy like a mannequin or anything like that. So a nice trip to Home Depot and some ABS pipe later, I have myself a working skeleton to play with. I thought you were going to say for a second, I thought you were to say, I don't have the money to buy a man.

And I was like, whoa, dude, let's back that up. We cannot say that on the podcast. No, not at all. We don't host this on the dark web, James. Okay. So, yeah, but that's amazing. So you... My mind didn't go there.

I'm just saying. I know. I'm sorry. It's me. So you kind of specialize in pickpocketing, although, you know, you do lots of different, very cool magic. And your videos are incredible. Tell us a little bit, how did you get into artful thievery?

And then campers, we're going to tell you some. really fascinating stories about con artistry, which is a special interest of James's. So how does one get into pickpocketing for fun and profit? Well, I didn't get into magic in the normal way. Most people talk about how a magician got the magic hit when they were a child and all this kind of stuff. Right. I was being groomed to be a martial arts instructor. No way.

I am a second-degree black belt and karate, a black belt in judo, and I was ranked second in Canada for amateur mixed martial arts. Damn, you're like, you're stupid cool. I can't stand it. I'm too jealous now. We can't have it. You're showing us both up. That is so cool.

Cut the mics. Cut the mics. Yeah. Oh, dear. I should have kept those cards close to my chest there. I can see a parallel, though, actually, though. Like, when you have a really good control of your body, I could see how you could slip a wallet out of somebody's pocket without them feeling it.

Well, it is a bit of a bit of a. dance that one does when you are taking things because you do have to understand kinetics and you understand body kinetics a lot when you do martial arts and people are trying to especially under pressure usually when it's your partner trying to take your head off but um i blew my knee out and i was bedridden for what was supposed to be six weeks turned into six months because they found a blood clot Oh, shit, dude. So my leg swelled up in the whole thing, and I couldn't do anything.

Oh, no. So I just sat at home and watched TV, very upset that I couldn't practice or do anything. And then David Blaine popped on the Discovery Channel. Oh, yeah. I always used to love his show. Yeah. He actually did a recent performance on YouTube. So a lot of people are saying it's one of his best, so it's definitely worth checking out.

But he's the reason I got into magic, like, legitimately because I saw his episode and I was like, you know what? I've watched too many episodes of Crocodile Hunter, and I think that maybe I might try and wrestle an alligator. So this looks a lot safer. Yeah, good choice. So you've been doing it for how long? When was this? So this year will be 20 years. Damn. Okay. So you've literally been at this for two decades. That's why you're so ridiculously good at it. And you have an interest in con artists and scammers, which we do too. I mean, our con artist episodes have been among my favorites that we've done so far. And Campers, as we were getting ready for this episode, James told us about this guy that neither of us had ever heard of before. Alexander, the man who knows. This guy was a trip. So Claude Alexander Conlon, aka.

A. This guy has more names than Prince. So here it comes. See Alexander. Alexander the crystal seer. Alexander the man who knows was a mentalist, spiritualist, and magician. He was born in South Dakota in 1880, but spent most of his childhood in Alaska. And this is funny. His parents had two sons. So they had Clarence Berthold, who they called C.B. And then our boy Claude Alexander, who they called C.A. Which just kills me. It's like, child A, child B. In case you were getting confused. And both the brother, grew up to be stage mentalists, which is bonkers, because it's not like their parents were. Their dad was a doctor. C.B. was a lot less successful at it than his bro, but I mean, it must have just been in the blood or something. C.A. spent most of his childhood hunting, fishing, and looking at pictures of naked ladies in his doctor father's medical books, which I suspect explains a lot about his later behavior, but we'll get to that in a minute. When he wasn't peeping at the lady parts in Gray's anatomy, though, young CA was going to watch the traveling magic shows that passed through the town on the regular.

He became totally entranced with magic. The local library had a copy of a book called Modern Magic by the mysteriously named Professor Hoffman. This was basically a how-to guide on methods, staging, and all the state-of-the-art secrets that a budding magician needed to know. He started to study up, and then, when he was 17, for unknown reasons, CA got expelled from school. We couldn't find out why, no matter how hard we looked. So let's pause a second and figure this out. Why do we think CA got kicked out of school?

I think he brought in some of those diagrams from Gray's Anatomy. Like his teacher probably caught him showing off a drawing of the inside of a boob or something. James' theories about why he got expelled. I tend to lean towards that. I mean, when you're a teenager and you have access to stuff that people don't. don't. You definitely want to show off that you have it. But personally, I kind of want to lean towards just not trying to knock off any mystique with him or anything like that, but I honestly think that he probably just thought he was too smart for the teachers and mouthed off too many

times. That sounds about right. Yeah. Yeah, it was probably something mundane like that or playing hooky. I mean, you have all of the beautiful wilderness of Alaska and you expect a kid to sit in a classroom. Yeah, he wanted to go wrestle bears. It was the 1800s. What did they expect? It was the 1800s. You gave him a fishing rod and a rifle and said, this is all yours, but we're going to stick you in a room for like a decade. Yeah, exactly.

So shortly after being expelled, he moved to the Lily Dale spiritualist community in Casadega, New York. Cassadaga is the mecca for psychics, and it's still going strong today. Oh, good. Good to know. So glad. Yeah. There's a planned episode of my brain for the spiritualist movement, and this plays a huge. part in it. Fascinating.

I was just going to interject that something for your research of capabilities on that episode. There is a great book called The Psychic Mafia. What? I love it already. And it basically pulls the curtain back on groups like the one that you had just mentioned. Oh my God, I can't wait. It tells you exactly what they do to reel in people with money, how to keep them coming back. including lying, cheating, stealing, and, yes, even pickpocketing. And all kinds of fun stuff like that, right?

Interesting. Yeah, there's also a fantastic book by one of my favorite nonfiction authors named Deborah Bloom called Ghost Hunters about the spiritualist movement. It's fantastic. She also wrote The Poisoners Handbook. She's a fantastic author. Oh, yeah, I read The Poisoners Handbook. That was super fun. So the community was founded by Lily Dale in 1879 and offered such fun activities as mediums,

communicating with spirits via defunct megaphones and paid performances where spiritualists did cold readings for visitors. Yeah. And when we say cold readings, this is, of course, where you say stuff like, I'm getting, is there's someone with a D in your past? A D? No? Oh, no, I didn't mean D. I meant J. Yes, Jay? Was it your grandma fog? Great aunt. Yes? Good. Well, she says hi. She's standing right behind you right now. You know, they're reading your body language and your nods and your head shakes and everything and just reading you. I have to say that that's usually the great comical version of it. I've seen people that have just destroyed people's minds by just being able to look people

up and down and just knowing things about them. It's amazing. The people that are really good at it, it's a legit, like, really impressive skill, even if a lot of people are using it for evil, in my opinion, but it's an amazing skill. I've seen people literally break down in tears, ask if they can talk to them again, like literally almost handing them their wallet. And it just makes me go, wow, their job is so much easier than mine. I have to try and get it off them. They just give it to them.

Yeah, it's crazy. And if you get a chance campers, I'll probably post it on our Facebook. there are fantastic, like, montages on YouTube of cold readings done by, like, a John Edward, Sylvia Brown, those level of mediums. And they are really smooth with it. And it is, like James said, it is infuriatingly impressive. Yeah, when it's done right, which often times it is. It's almost an art form when it's done right. It transcends when you see it done right. they do things like, so you look at a person, okay, they're clearly in their 40s. Okay, so the decade that they were born, the most popular names were X, Y, Z.

So they can take these like cues and then use like actual statistical research to work it out. It's impressive. It's crazy impressive. There's a book that I'm sure you will all enjoy. It is a book called Passages. It's been updated several times, and it outlines every milestone that the majority of people go through in their entire life. And it applies to everyone. If you read that book, then you would literally be able to walk up to people when you find out their age.

You usually can pinpoint exactly what obstacles are going up against in their life. Yeah, absolutely. And that's the thing. I mean, it's really probably when you break it down, not that hard. It's just adding the showmanship to it and figuring out how it works, and then you've got people eating out of your hand. Oh, very much so. And it's something that in the wrong hands can be very devastating, as we'll find out with the great Alexander here. Yes.

So if you feel the spirit's calling you today, you can go join, but you first must pass some tests put together by the assembly that runs the joint. I'm sorry, the what? The assembly. Okay, you say that like the A is capitalized and that makes me nervous. Yeah, it is. It's got me nervous. It sounds like something out of that like witchy season of American horror story, which I don't want any part of the assembly things.

No. Pass. While at the Lily Dale community, Alexander worked as a, quote, boat boy and cleaner. And he learned about all the little tricks that the spiritualists used to con their audiences. It was great training. Yeah, I bet. When he left Casadega, he headed west, but not before stopping to study under the King of Coins.

Two K's, by the way. Coins is a K. Oh, that's kitschy. Yeah, his name is Thomas Nelson Downs, a renowned coin manipulator and author who used his tiny little hands to his advantage. CA, now going by Alexander, found himself back in Alaska just in time for the gold rush. And it didn't take him long to run into a spot of trouble. You see, Jefferson Randolph, Soapy Smith, was allegedly a bad dude, a gangster who had it out for Alexander's best buddy. And Alexander allegedly shot him dead.

But he was never charged with the crime. And there's some question as to whether the story was made up to add to Alexander's mystique. Actually, Alexander makes a great point of saying that he was at the actual gang fight where Soapy Smith died. and he took great pride in actually saying that he was hiding in a dockside shed and was actually sharpshooting from there to shoot Soapy Smith. Well, what a little craven bastard. That's not sportsman like. Well, and especially given the time, not very manly.

No, absolutely not. So he bragged about this shit. He bragged that he was hiding in his shed and shot this guy. Well, I guess he's saying like I was, he was, far away and like this is a 1900s gun so I'm assuming it's not very accurate. I wouldn't brag about that if I were you out of Vandah. That makes you

sound like a bitch. Right? At the ripe old age of 18 17 I believe. Yeah you'd think he'd be like in the in the brawl getting his hands dirty. He's 18 filled with testosterone. No impulse control in that 18 year old brain of his. Dang. All right. So he

like legit killed this guy. It does show forethought on his part though. That's true. Premeditation to think about that. Absolutely. He like laid in weight. So one of Alexander's many hustles during this time was to make psychic predictions to prospectors about where they could find gold. People paid him for this. So I have no idea if anybody actually got rich based on his predictions. I'm guessing probably not because, you know, he didn't actually have any psychic powers. So there was an obvious expiration date on a gig like that because eventually people are going to notice that you know you suck at it

and you're a big phony fraudster and i imagine it's easier to get away with that if people are scared shitless that you might be hiding in a dock shed waiting for them and shoot them in the head if they come to ask for their money back right well it's the 1800s so when you are trying to sell a con and keep in mind con is confidence so he could go one of two ways He could either say that you were so close, you missed it, you just got to go back out there. And it's probably weeks before that guy would be able to get there, double check and come back to check him. And by that time, he's already left. Right, right, sure.

Or if the man won't listen and he's ready to go, then he's just going to probably stand up straight, get real huffy. Yeah. and try and basically out-yell the person and make him back off. Confidence. Exactly. Yeah. And, you know, that's really how a lot of modern carn artists operate as well. I think just charm and glibness and that ability to kind of manipulate people.

And they also tend to get around a lot, which is what Alexander did. He would just kind of move on to the next town, like you said. Oh, you don't have too many physical mementos, let's just say. Make sure everything fits in the suitcase. Yeah, you got to be on the move. You got to have a bug out bag. So at 18, Alexander performed on stage for the first time, but he didn't decide to become a pro until 1902 when he moved to Seattle.

He used the stage name Alexander the Great, which is original. And so his vaudeville career began. Now, can you give us just a brief thumbnail sketch of what his act was like. Oh yeah. Well, when Alexander actually first started, he did what every great performer does. You steal from other great performers. So one of the most successful performers at the time was Harry Houdini. So he was doing his escape art act over in Europe. So he decided to do the same thing. But of course, it didn't get the same success. So he kind of padded his show with hypnotists and mind readers and all different sorts,

a variety act, one would call it. And eventually he finally found his fit with different, considered now classics of magic. One of my personal favorites that he did was called aerial fishing. Okay. And what that is, is that one of Vegas's, performers, Matt King does this trick where he will take a fishing rod and pretend to go fishing on stage and then all of a sudden there's a fish on the end of the line. What? That's bonkers. I've never seen that. And takes it off the hook, plops the fish in the

water and there you go. You have a fish swimming right there. That's crazy. He would borrow a ring from someone who was nice enough to let him borrow it. He'd make it. He'd make it. vanish, and then all of a sudden it would appear in what's called a nest of boxes, literally like 10 boxes inside each other. All locked, like a Russian doll. Exactly. And by the time he got to the end, he would open it up and, oh, look, all your stuff's impossibly inside this huge pile of boxes. That's very cool. Just great tricks. Now, the one thing that Alexander was really good at was understanding that while every performer that was doing mind reading or magic were trying to figure out ways to make their show fit in a briefcase, Alexander decided to go the opposite

route and make everything bigger than life. So he just kept adding more things to the show. Right. But eventually it became very much about the faux psychic stuff and the readings and basically scamming people. That's where he found the money. Right, of course. Not only did he find his niche with reading minds and all the rest of it, but then he was also one of the first performers that found out that you could make a lot of money at the back of the show selling books and little tricks and all that kind of stuff.

So he just added income upon income. He was a great entrepreneur back in the day. He was definitely a hustler. And this was also the year that he began what we can only call wife a Palooza, because this man had more marriages than Liz Flip and Taylor. The first one lasted less than a year. The second one was a 14-year-old girl, which is gross. And I'm pretty sure that was even considered pretty gross in 1903. I mean, obviously people got married young back then, but 14.

Damn, you know, that's not great. It's young. Her parents loathed Alexander. I wonder what. They knew that Alexander had like literally brainwashed her into thinking it was her idea. They loathed him. Oh, God. Oh, gross. What an asshole. Oh, for sure.

Creep. Yeah, and he was physically incapable of keeping in his pants. I mean, conservative estimates put his number of marriages at eight, but it's been estimated as high as 14, many of which occurred at the same time. So really, his greatest trick was big a me. 14 marriages I mean it's Katie and I were talking It's like that's simultaneously like a hell of a lot of marriage And also none at all

Because obviously you cannot possibly be genuinely invested in all those relationships Right? So it's kind of like every one of those women was Schrodinger's wife Oh I've got a lovely surprise for you when you got closer to retiring Don't you worry Oh God So they're sort of married to this chode bucket But then also not at the same time

And in his 30s, Alexander moved away from doing the big prop heavy tricks and returned to his first love, scamming. Specifically, he started using his innate talent as a mentalist. And he also started dressing kind of racist here, too, which was gross. He put on a turban and a robe and painted his skin brown, which is charming, but I'm sure the Victorian audiences ate it up. Oh, yeah, he was actually the first person in the entertainment industry to put, like, random Chinese symbols at the bottom of his playbills to really sell the exoticism of his show. And God knows what they said, you know, hopefully stupid-ass white man is a racist prick. That's what I hope they said. So a huge part of his act was getting sealed questions from the audience and answering them on stage. And this would

launch him into international tours with sold-out shows all over North America. And he became a millionaire doing this. So can you, James, please, give us an example or two of how this played out on stage and what is the trick here like how do you do this well i'm not going to go into exact specifics on how it's done in the way because the magician mafia will kill you it's it's a little gross to uh sort of reveal working magician secrets he's afraid they're going to break his kneecaps that's what it is oh totally is that being said though it it was a it was a technique of finding out information that was not privy to him beforehand.

Sure. And he would relay it back to, like, he got it from the ether, when in reality he just, he peaked it without your knowledge. Right, right. You used electronic transmitting devices, is what it said in the article we read, yeah. This is where I would say that this sort of places him on the map, Mainly because he invented a way to get information from someone off stage before people had radios. Like a person off stage would talk into like what we would now consider a microphone and it would be transmitted up into his ears on stage without people's knowledge.

Too cool. That alone is amazing. I just wish all the other stuff wasn't a part of it. He also used a trick called Spirit Painting, which was used in seance rooms for hundreds of years. It's a trick in which a painting suddenly appears in a frame. Alexander used local politicians who couldn't legally advertise, and so paid him to make their pictures appear in front of a sold-out audience. He was an evil genius. That is simultaneously so trashy.

yet so smart, and so I hate it and love it at the same time. And the transmitter thing, I mean, that is just so ingenious to think of that at that time, where it's not like we had walkie-talkies back then. And so he's got somebody feeding him information about his audience. Now, I mean, stage charlatans still do this, but they have access to social media. And, you know, it's much, much easier. And it's been done, obviously, for, you know, 100 plus years. So, yeah, very, very cool. So Alexander retired at 43, but not before making 4 million flippity flapping dollars

and that's in like 1900s money. That's 60 mil in today's money. And he spent his retirement hunting, fishing, and taking nude photos of women which he then sold to nudie calendar companies because of course he did. And he died at 74 in 1954. So he retired at 43, died at 74.

He had a good 31 years to just faff around and take pictures of naked chicks. But Whitney, damn. This is where it gets even more interesting. I'm scared. Okay. What else do I do?

Because he retired. He had a lot of money and a lot of time on his hands. Right. So he decided to get into rum running. Oh, of course. That makes perfect sense. So he bought a house near the. Canadian border

and he got to relive his joy of boats right okay so he would run he bought a specially designed boat that was designed to have no reflective surface so you couldn't see it with lights like when you had

police boats trying to check the border and everything it was low down so you couldn't see it by actual eye and he would run it back and forth from Canada to get rum he would load up his boat bring it back and he bought a house specifically for that reason so he's like a magician mentalist con artist and flipping like boat pirate oh yeah slash rum runner

that what the hell again i i feel like i'm accomplished if i can do laundry and like put the groceries away in the same day and then you hear about these people i just am convinced people were just better back then that stuff. We just had more energy. We're just all exhausted now. They were doing cocaine, Whitney. That was just for headaches. That's true. You could just go to Walgreens and get cocaine. Oh, yeah. For sure. That's it. James, is this the guy that also he owned an island? Is that correct? Yes. For his rum running? He owned an island and he had, I guess the polite term was, was a Swinger's Island. What the hell?

How'd we miss this? He had people, I think at one point it was like a little commune. It was like at least 20 to 30 people. And he buried a lot of his fortune on that island. There were coffee cans all over that place. And fake holes when people found out about that stuff just to sort of stop them from trying the rest of it. Oh, my God. So is that money still there?

Is that what you're telling me? It could very well be. Oh, my God. Treasure hunt. Get in losers. Let's go. We're going on a treasure hunt. There you go.

But here's the best part about that boat, the whole boat thing. Eventually, he got caught. And just like a movie, the cops set it up. They had a chain that they pulled up. up for him to run into so they could stop him. Out, okay. It cut the boat in half. Oh, my God.

Somehow, he was not injured other than bruises and cuts, and he survived it. It seems like the cops were worried about that. It's like, let's just literally cut this man in half. Right. Because we got a warrant. We got a warrant. We got to stop alcohol getting into the States. We got to do it right.

So they literally pulled a charge. across for him to run into that is insane so this was during prohibition i assume like during the yeah yeah and this is the part that i think you're going to hate slash love he was he was tried or and uh sent to jail for supposedly was supposed to be for 15 years but they found out he had pancreatic cancer and the judge decided to let him go so he could live out his life. In reality, he bribed the guard to change the results. Of course he did.

Of course he did. And walked out a free man. Oh, I hate him. You're right. I hate him and also I admire the hell out of him for his ingenuity. And that brings me to my next point, which is that, you know, one of the interesting things about con artistry is how people tend to. to view it with almost a grudging admiration or even not a grudging admiration, even just

admiration. And I think it's because the really successful ones have to have mad skills to do what they do. I mean, if you think about the dude from Catch Me if you can, the book and movie about the real-life scam artist Frank Abagnale, this guy from his mid-teens until his early 20s managed to fake like eight different identities. He posed as a doctor, an airline pilot, a lawyer, and the whole time, of course, he's forging checks. He's running all kinds of con games. He escaped from police custody twice. And he got a movie made about him with Leonardo DiCaprio. So he's kind of a folk hero. And I think we often look at con artists that way. It's interesting, right? That we admire them, even though they're committing crimes left and right and stealing stuff. Well, we can all

imagine being that person, living off our wits, being able, being the smartest person in the room and being able to con people. Like, we all. want to imagine that we can be that person. Yeah, it's like an ego fantasy. Oh, it is for sure. And that's happened out through millennia of human history. Not just recently

with the romantic age of carn artistry in the 20s and 30s. It's happened throughout, they even have reports of it being considered a good skill to have back in the Anderthal times.

I'll be damned. I I always thought they just mostly hit stuff on the head with clubs. But if you can get away without using so much expended energy, it was even considered bold. So it runs in our genes. That's really interesting. And Frank Abagnale, by the way, he works as a security consultant now. So now he actually helps people avoid getting screwed. And, you know, good for him.

But when we talk about him, we're a lot less interested in that, aren't we? We want to talk about the time he pretended to be a pilot. everybody believed him. And even on a smaller scale, there's something just kind of fun and fascinating about con games. James, a lot of these use the exact kind of skills you're a master at. Slide of hand, close-up magic stuff, for lack of a better word. Tell us about a couple of cons that you'd kick ass at.

Well, of course there's the pickpocketing, which unfortunately on an audio medium is very hard to do. We are going to post your videos, of course. I appreciate that. But one of my favorite things is the change raising scam. And all you need is 10 $1 bills and anyone can walk into a store and get $10 back and do it again and again and again. And all it is is that you just need $10, $1 bills. You walk in and say that you have a bunch of ones and you want a $10 bill. so you're not walking around with so much change in your pocket. They get the 10 out of the till, you drop down your ones, and you ask them to count it to make sure.

And they count it, and they realize there's only $9.1 bills. So you go, oh, shoot, I'll tell you what. You grab the 10, put it in your pocket, and reach into your other pocket to pull out of one. You go, you know what? Here, do me a favor. Here's one more dollar. That makes 10.

here's another $10, that would make $20, could I have a $20 bill for that? Oh, and you've already got the $10. You're using their $10 to pay for it, so you've netted $10. And you just get change again and go to the next store or the next bar or wherever you want to go. And when it's done in person, you will swear that everything is kosher. Everything's fine. It's a buckboard. But because there's so many different numbers going back and forth, it's just too hard to keep track of.

So you're trying to sort of disorient the person that you're... Absolutely. You're talking to. Yeah, that's fascinating. So the next story we want to tell you is the epitome of the cool con. Although you could argue that it's not even a con. There's some debate about that. Anyway, we are talking about the MIT Blackjack team. Blackjack is a card game that is very popular with gamblers.

It works like this. Initially, each player and the dealer are. are dealt two cards per person. Each player can choose to get more cards or keep their hand as is, bearing in mind that the end goal is to get the total of your cards as close to 21 as possible without going over. If you go over, or if someone gets closer, you lose. As all gambling games do, Blackjack favors the house. But in the mid-90s, a group of folks from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, aka MIT, decided they were going to try and tweak those odds. MIT is one of the most prestigious, competitive schools in the world for science, technology, engineering, and math.

So we're talking about seriously smart people. What would come to be known as the MIT Blackjack team was founded by a professor named Mr. M, aka the Mastermind. They all had really cool nicknames because of fucking course they did. Of course they did. It's like a heist movie. Mr. M was a standard issue nerd slash genius with, according to one investigator, a mind that is based. basically a computer. And according to one of his former students, really bad personal hygiene. Getting a mental picture yet? Yeah, me too. The guy is undoubtedly brilliant, and he'd been

obsessed with card counting since he first discovered it in the late 70s. In card counting, you keep track of the high cards that have been played already. And if you can manage to do it right, it's a pretty damn good way to win at Blackjack. Blackjack is one of the only games you can manipulate like this. With a game like roulette or craps, the past rolls or spins don't affect the outcome of the future rolls or spins. In Blackjack, the cards drawn on the table absolutely affect the outcome of the next draw. For example, once the ace of clubs has been dealt, it can't be drawn again. So there's one less ace in the deck.

You know that. Mr. M wanted to beat the system. And in 1993, he started recruiting students to form a team. He was really deliberate about it. He wanted to be above board. He wanted to turn it into a business, complete with a limited partnership. They'd pay taxes on their winnings. So he ended up persuading some investors to get involved.

And they formed Strategic Investments LP. Then it was time to recruit players for the team. And MIT was the perfect place to find people who would have the intelligence, attention span, and drive to be great at this stuff. and find them he did. They're all super secretive about their time on the team. In the documentary we watched, most of them were in silhouette, still going by the nicknames they had on the team. The Russian, the big player, the partner, the mastermind, the spotter.

It was mostly a sausage fest, but there was one woman on the team, and her name was Katie, which we love. I do love that. The training that they went through was brutal. They had to first learn the strategies for card counting, which is hard enough, but they also had to learn to deal with the biggest barrier to success for a card counter, the casinos themselves. Despite the fact that card counting isn't technically illegal,

the casinos consider it cheating, so they will toss you right out on your ass if they catch you at it. Some of them might pop your kneecaps for you while they're at it too, though that's a lot less common than it used to be. And they have sophisticated measures in place to catch you. First of all, they have hundreds of cameras that watch every inch of the floor from different angles, and they are designed to be disorienting. Like, have you ever been in a casino?

You start to lose all sense of time. It can be hard to find your way out. It's like the friggin' labyrinth. You keep expecting to see the Minotaur, like, sidle up with a tray of drinks. And their people are trained to suss out cheaters. So the final part of the team's training was a checkout stress test, which sounds like the worst thing in the world. They simulated a casino environment in one of the MIT classrooms.

They'd have, like, the blackjack table sets. up and then the players would have to try to concentrate on the cards while people swarmed around and jostled them and interrupted them and blue air horns and yell woohoo and like everything that you might expect to actually happen in a real casino where there's a bunch of drunk people right and i swear to god just watching a reenactment of this was like one of the most stressful things that i've done in my recent past so i can only imagine how hard this was and in fact one guy said it was harder than getting his Ph.D. But it was necessary because it really showed if the players could apply the strategies that they were taught in a real-world setting. Yeah, I mean, you've got to pay attention

and count cards and watch for your partner's subtle little hand signals and avoid casino management and bet the right amount of money and focus, focus, focus. Yeah, focus was the key. And nobody passed this test the first time. But eventually, most of them got it and they were off and running. And for a while, it was just high-fly in heaven, just adrenaline rushes and comps luxuries and just feeling like the coolest kids on the block. Taking advantage of these big casinos that were spending so many resources just trying to stop you. One guy got his wedding comped at Caesar's Palace. And they all had cool personas like Katie and the Russian would often pose as a Russian arms dealer and his girlfriend and they'd get all dressed up and everything. It was like acting. And the team had a few rules. Money

stays on your person at all times. Never drink. If you're clocked, don't argue with them, don't cash out your chips, just get up and leave. And for the most part, they just treated it like a business. Very exciting business, but a business. And by August of 93, they had made $800,000 in profits at casinos all over the world. But at a certain point, the casinos are going to start to notice that you're not an average high ruler. So enter Andy Anderson, an employee of Griffin Investigations. And Griffin consults with casinos about cheaters and card counters. The MIT kids called him the silver-haired man, and he was as scary good at what he did as they were at counting cards. Yeah, he had a photographic memory for faces, for one thing. And finally,

the Russian got caught or clocked, as they called it. And he got banned from that casino. Whomp, wom. And over the next few months, that started happening more and more. Andy Anderson really had a hard on for the team. He wanted to get them so, so bad. Yeah, it was very, very Tom and Jerry. It just seemed to bug him that these kids were just hosing these casinos using their big brains. And I kind of get it. It's like super impressive, but also a little annoying because I can't do it. So I'd probably want to get them too, to be perfectly honest. I'd be right there with Andy, like, let's get on these little nerds. At one point, the casino bosses were convinced that the MIT team were using computers to count the cards. And two of them had to strip down in the back room

to prove they weren't. The group leader says this is the first story he'll tell his grandkids someday. He thought it was hilarious at the time. I don't think I'd think it was too damn hilarious. But as it turned out, it wasn't. The team had been made. Griffin Investigations put a book together for known cheats in Vegas. The team was included.

Not to be defeated, the team started using disguises. One dressed up as a nurse, another used a wheelchair. one of the men dressed in drag. This didn't work that well. And it just all kind of started unraveling. The players didn't feel like they were getting paid enough of the proceeds. Tensions were bubbling. And they were obviously under scrutiny from the casino's security.

And then they lost a shit ton of money, just due to a streak of bad luck. It was all too much, and the team disbanded with nothing much left to show for all their work. Damn. So, again, impossibly cool. Can't help but admire them. Do you think both of you that counting cards should be considered cheating or is it just being really, really good at the game? Because there's a big debate about this and the casino certainly consider it cheating. What do you think? Now, myself personally, do I think it's cheating? Well, yes and no. I do think it's cheating because casinos are a private company. They get to make the rules. But you're not doing anything that the game isn't allowing you to do. If I was to steal cards

out of the deck and then use them for a different hand, that's very much cheating. Yeah, right. But in this case, you're just using your memory. I don't understand why you're getting in trouble for that. Well, I understand why they're getting in trouble for that. Well, I understand why they're getting in trouble for that. But it's, I think, the fact that it is a privately owned company that decides whether or not you get to play is where it really does bother people when they figure that part out. Yeah, because they're telling you don't do this and you're doing it anyway and they have a right to like make the rules. That's a fair point, yeah. I guess. To me, it's just paying attention though. Absolutely. You're absolutely right on that. Games should have equal odds

for it to be considered a game. And as long as you're not breaking the rules, like you said, you're not stealing cards, you're not adding cards to the deck. Any advantage you take for yourself is fair. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, that makes sense, too. I mean, it's kind of like how certain friends of mine who are probably listening right now have accused me of cheating at Scattergories just because I'm really damn good at it.

And they're just jealous. And here's the thing is like, so my mother is a renowned card shark from a line. of renowned card sharks. I cannot play cards with them. They play every Thanksgiving. Your mother and my father should get together. Oh, it would be a bloodbath. And my college coach was able to count cards.

And, you know, he liked playing cards on the bus to games and stuff. And, like, he told me once he was counting cards. I was like, this is why it's not fun because you always win. And so at a certain point, like, if it's a game between two people, I get it. But you're playing a multi-million dollar company. Yeah, you're playing against the casino, not against each other. So I'm like, that's just kind of fun. Yeah.

Well, absolutely. But again, it is a business and they have to find that bottom line. And I'm not trying to defend them. I'm merely throwing that out there because let's be honest. James, James wants to marry the casinos. Don't be a Karen, James. Oh, my gosh. If I only could marry a casino.

Right? You'd be set for life. So as I was kind of getting at a second ago, the MIT team is a great example of the kind of con we tend to sort of admire, but we have to be careful about romanticizing the idea of scamming, gaming the system, whatever you want to call it. Because more often than not, the people who make their living by deception, not super nice people. Case in point, our next story. In 2004, in the wilds of Oregon, there's a tree farm that's been around for generations run by a family called the Raines. It's a beautiful place, a sustainable forest that welcomes hikers and hunters, and it's profitable, too, worth millions. In 2004, the elderly Ralph Raines Sr. was running the farm as he always had, and his son, 57-year-old Ralph Jr., was doing a lot

of the planting and maintenance work. This was Ralph Jr.'s passion. He loves trees. He estimates that he's planted more than a million by his own hand so far. Ralph Jr. is one of those people who marches to his own drumbeat. His family and friends describe him as the kindest person in the world. And bright, definitely intelligent, but a little bit gullible too. Ralph Jr. grew up on the farm and he never had much of a social life. He didn't get out a lot, just kind of lived an insulated life with his family among the trees. So he's a little bit trusting, maybe a little naive. And despite his family's wealth, he's never given a shit about money. Couldn't care less about designer clothes, expensive cars, big houses, any of that stuff.

One thing he is interested in, though, is the paranormal. And that doesn't surprise me much from somebody who grew up around the old forests of the Pacific Northwest. I mean, I'm a huge skeptic when it comes to anything supernatural, but those ancient woods, you step in there and anybody could get a feeling like there might be something unearthly going on, right? So Ralph had always sought out opportunities to learn more about the paranormal, and in 2004, he noticed that a psychic shop had opened up in the town of Canby nearby. He was all over it. So he went there, he got ushered in by a youngish, attractive woman who introduced herself as Rachel. And on that first day, Rachel ended up giving him an hours-long reading, for which she only charged him $10. And

later on telling the story to the show American Greed, Ralph laughed and said, I only paid her $10. It was a bargain. Yeah, in reality, that first visit to Rachel's shop was the most expensive thing he'd ever do in his life. See, Rachel Lee was a master of the sweetheart swindle, an especially evil type of long-game con, where the scammer takes advantage not only of the victim's bank account, but also their lonely heart, wooing them with promises of lasting love while stealing them blind. The successful sweetheart swindlers are almost like profilers. They're great at reading people, picking out the vulnerable members of the herd like a lioness chasing her prey. Rachel had a history of successful swindles under her belt by the time she met Ralph Jr.

She'd recently taken another poor bastard for about 100K in a car. This guy too had just shown up in her shop one day for a reading, sad about a girlfriend who'd just broken up with him, and Rachel had pounced. Unfortunately for our guy Ralph Jr., he spent a good portion of that first psychic visit telling Rachel all about how much he wished for a wife and she'll at 57 he was afraid that ship had sailed and he wanted the psychics help and oh boy was she ever willing to help but she said in order to really get a good read on him she'd need to see his home and tree farm first now is this for some kind of mysterious mystical reason of course not it was to give her a chance to clock his worth and as soon as she saw his property she knew she had a live one so quickly rachel moved in on ralph junior making herself indispensable to him

She got him feeling like he shouldn't make a move without her psychic guidance. She became his best friend and trusted advisor. And over the next few years, she accepted one expensive gift after another from her new buddy, a humvee, for one thing, and loads and loads of cash. And then on Valentine's Day in 2006, Ralph, who never spent this kind of money, who shopped for his clothes at Walmart and Goodwill, dropped over $900,000 on a brand new house outside Portland. And Rachel had convinced him it would be a good investment for him, but then she just moved in with a bunch of her relatives and just lived there rent-free for like years and years.

So how that was an investment, I'm not really sure. When his father suffered a stroke and couldn't run the business anymore, suddenly Ralph was in charge. And he was pretty overwhelmed. He wasn't really a business guy. He just wanted to be out among the trees. Lucky for him, though, his best buddy Rachel was there to take care of everything. Isn't that great? She told him, you know, when my husband was dying of cancer, I took care of him.

Let me take care of your dad. So Ralph hired her on as his dad's home health care worker. And when he talked to her about how daunting he found the business side of the tree farm, Rachel had a solution for that too. It just so happens, she said, that she'd also helped this late husband of hers with his business back in the day. So not only is she a great nurse, she was an expert bookkeeper. Ralph was only too glad to hire her on his bookkeeper, too. Of course, these were all massive fucking lies.

Rachel didn't have the empathy to take care of a dog, much less a human being recovering from a fucking stroke. And she was no more of a bookkeeper than I am and I can't do basic math. Well, she did know how to do subtraction. Yeah, she was real good at subtraction. But Ralph wasn't a numbers guy, and he had no way of knowing whether she was doing a good job or not. And even if he had been good with numbers, he trusted her so much by now that he didn't even check to make sure she was taking good care of his family's business. When Rachel put a blank check in front of him and told him to sign, he signed. And that was it.

He'd agreed to pay her $9,000 a month, but apparently that was enough for her. She'd regularly pay herself twice in one month, sometimes three or four times. That's just freaking obscene. Like, who can't live comfortably on $9,000 a month? And by the way, it's interesting to look back at what we were talking about earlier with, well, really, I think you could say this about the Blackjack team and about Alexander, that these people have to develop these charms. Charming skills. And, you know, Gavin DeBecker, our favorite guy, he always says, remember, charm is a verb.

So it's not just an innate quality. It's a skill. And if you can get somebody trusting you to the point where they will just hand over their bank accounts, then it's just like taking candy from a baby. Well, I'll be honest with you. It is a skill. It's something that can be learned because I've learned it. I have no problems getting into people. people's personal space. I've asked for personal information to be written down for me so I can use it for a magic trick. I've found out people's codes to get into their phones. I've found them to write down bank account numbers, pin codes, all this kind of stuff under the guise of entertainment. And if I was not an entertainer, this could go very bad very quickly. So... I wish you could see the look on my face right now. Good God, you are a dangerous man.

But I'm Canadian. You're an evil genius. But you're Canadian, that's right. So with someone like this Ralph person who is lonely, just wants someone to take care of him so we can go play in the forest like you always did. Rachel's just the God-given answer for him. So I can see why you would just jump at it. It's like, this is perfect. You do, you take care of everything and I still get to go do the thing.

Yeah, that's a massive red flag. If anybody comes into your life like God's gift and says, I'll solve all your problems. All you got to do is give me access to your accounts. Run. Absolutely. Well, and on top of her free reign over his books, how was she doing as a nurse? According to neighbors and friends, Ralph Sr. was often filthy,

wearing dirty clothes, unbathed. Before long, in what I'm sure was an effort to get him away from prying eyes, Rachel moved senior into the Portland house. There, in a $900,000 home, this kindly man lived in a gurney-style bed in a hallway. Can we all just take a minute to quietly fantasize about how we'd like to murder this woman? Because I just really need a couple seconds to imagine her being fed to like a churning tank of sharks. I will say this, though, Whitney, death is too good. You have to draw this out. Yeah, we should, like, lower her very slowly into the tank of sharks. And then pull her out.

An inch per year. Get her closer and closer. Oh, we have to make it ironic. It's just mean to the sharks. It has to be ironic. We have to use trees in some way. Oh, down. See, well, we do have a true crime camp fire brand wood chipper.

There we're working on. So we could put her through the woodchipper. inch by inch. You're good at this. I have my moments. Rachel was really good at isolating Ralph Jr. too. Friends would call, leave messages, and never hear back, which was unusual. Come to find out, Rachel was erasing the messages before Ralph could hear them.

Now, she had her two victims isolated and her grubby little mitts were all up in the tree farm's books. Now, Rachel could really roll up her sleeves and get down to business. I can only imagine how her mouth watered when she found out that the Rainses had $5 million investments that they'd barely ever touched. Rachel's first move was to talk Ralph into taking $300,000 out of that account. I assume she told him it was for some business expense or another, but in reality, she just socked it away in her own bank account. And she and her husband Blancy, just let that sink in for a second, Blancy, which I have no idea what kind of name this is.

It sounds like some dude named Clancy got caught breaking into someplace, he wasn't supposed to be, and somebody demanded to know his name and he couldn't think of anything on the fly. Blancy, my name is Blancy. That is exactly what it sounds like. So she and Blancy, who, as you may have noticed, was not dead of cancer, but a. obscenely expensive cars, watches, jewelry, clothes, all on Ralph's dime. And all this would have been bad enough, but our girl was just getting started. Since the beginning of their friendship, Ralph had been telling her about his dream woman, a fair-skinned blonde from another country, with a pretty accent.

The UK would be perfect. Well, lo and behold, campers, in October of 2007, Ralph was at the Portland airport waiting to pick up Rachel after a flight when a beautiful young blonde woman approached him. When she introduced herself as Mary Marks, he was delighted to hear a lovely, posh-sounding British accent. As the wife of a Brit, I can attest to the power of that accent. Well, I shouldn't imply there's only one. There's lots of British accents, and almost all of them are panty-peelers, in my opinion. So it's no surprise that Ralph was putty in Mary Marks' hands pretty much for a minute one.

She told him one hell of a story there in the Portland airport. She said, is your name Ralph? And he was completely stunned, obviously, and said, Yeah, it's Ralph. How did you know? And she said, well, I have supernatural gifts. And something just told me to approach you. Which for most of us would be, and I'm out. But Ralph believes in the supernatural. So to him, this was a sign. And as they continued their conversation, Mary told him she was on a little bit of a pickle. See, she was in the U.S. illegally. She needed help in order to stay. So Ralph's dream girl had pretty much just dropped into his lap.

And better yet, she needed his help. Now, I'm sure you're all going to be shocked and disappointed to hear that Mary was a plant. She was Rachel Lee's daughter, Portia, spelled P-O-R-S-H-A, for God's sake, in a bad blonde wig and a hat and a fake British accent that I suspect was probably God-Offle. And please allow me to explain. We cannot overstate how fucking awful this wig was, y'all. It looked like something out of the, like, discount defective bin at Halloween Express, which is probably why she always wore a hat over it.

bad. And by the way, Portia was 17 at the time. So Rachel is essentially using her own teenage daughter as bait to hold on to her mark. It's a family business. It's a family business. That's exactly what it was. So just take a breath and remember the shark tank.

That's better. And Mary Marks wasn't just a fake name, by the way. It was Rachel Lee's mother's name because, see, they needed a real person's name in order to open bank accounts and whatnot. So this was very strategic. And I'm sure you already figured this out when we told you that Mary supposedly needed help

to stay in the country. Soon, Mary proposed to Ralph. And Ralph was, bless his heart, deliriously happy. And we should be clear, by the way, that he had no idea she was 17. I mean, he thought she was a full-grown adult. I mean, he knew she was a lot younger than he was, but he had no idea she was underage. Yeah.

Now, the details are fuzzy on this, but I assume they had a fake wedding ceremony that Ralph thought was real. Anyway, he thought that this was his wife now. and in 2008 Portia slash Mary fell pregnant now she and Ralph were not sexually involved because Mary had told him that she wasn't comfortable with sex

and Ralph was fine with that because he was just happy with the companionship so obviously Ralph wasn't the father so whoopsie doodle Portia now what are you going to do I bet Rachel was so pissed can't you oh man I bet she was so mad but it ended up working out because Mary went to hubby Ralph and told him there was a terrible void in her life. She wanted so badly to be a mummy.

Would he please father a child with her through in vitro fertilization? And of course, this is Ralph's dream come true. This is what he'd always wanted. So, of course, he said yes, and they gave him a cup to put his sample in. And before long, lo and behold, success, you're going to be a daddy. Nice safe, Portia. I can just imagine her mom just lining out. everything she has to say for it.

It's like when he says this, you have to say this. Oh, I'm sure. I can plant it in my head. It's so gross. Yeah, very. Yep. When Portia popped, unfortunately, the biological father was like, uh, no, and he took full custody of the kid.

Thank God. Well, shit. Now what was Portia slash Mary going to do? She had no baby to give Ralph. Luckily, though, one of Rachel's other daughters, Pebbles, I'm not kidding, that's her fucking name, had just had a baby too. So Rachel just said, hey, hey, give me that. Give me that. Give me it. God. And enlisted Pebbles's kid as Ralph's son. They named him, Georgio Armani, because of fucking course they did. Her next kid's name probably would have been

Sacks Fifth Avenue. So let's do a quick sketch of the family. We've got Blancy, Portia, Pebbles, and Georgio Armani. I cannot believe that the woman working as a fucking psychic had the most normal name in the family. Like, shouldn't she have been named, like, Mysteria or something? Jesus Christ. Rachel now added another gig to her. bookkeeping job for the tree farm.

Giorgio's nanny. All Ralph had ever wanted was a family, and now he had it. He told American greed, this was the happiest I ever was in my life. Except, like some even more twisted version of the Truman Show, none of it was real. It was all an elaborate lie for his benefit. Also, Rachel and her family could steal him blind.

and steal him blindly did. Ralph was so busy being a new dad, he didn't notice that Rachel had sold $2.1 million worth of his family's investments and taken all of it for herself. Luxury trips, cars, jewelry, gambling. And then, in 2011, World War II veteran and self-made millionaire, Ralph Sr. died at 91. In April of that year, the Lee family managed to spend $336,300,000. which just boggles the mind.

In one month, y'all. I can't even imagine. But it wasn't enough for Rachel. When Ralph Sr. died, the farm went into the normal probate process to authenticate process to authenticate his will and finalize his finances. Rachel and Mary told Ralph that because of this, he owed taxes on the property. She told him the only way they could pay the taxes was to sell off a huge chunk of the tree farm. What? Ralph. Ralph. Come on, buddy. But Ralph was grieving, and he was far too trusting at the best of times. He believed what his wife and his best friend were telling him. Remember campers, he has no idea that Rachel and his wife are related. Isn't that fucking bananas?

So, as Whitney says, bless his heart, Ralph lets these hags start selling off parcels of his beloved, beautiful family farm. By the time Rachel was done, he'd sold off most of it, netting Rachel a cool $12.3 million, that fucking bitch. The new owners cut down all the trees. The trees Ralph had loved so much that were meant to last for generations. As if this wasn't bad enough, Mary slash Portia told Ralph she had to go back to England for a visit, and shortly thereafter, he got a call informing him that his wife had died. So now, so soon, after losing his dad, Ralph was thrown into deep grief over his beautiful young wife. You know, grief? Great way to keep somebody distracted, I bet. For their part, Rachel and her shit-stained husband, Blancy,

I have to say his name like that, kept on spending money. They got vanity plates for their ridiculous cars that said Mr. Big and Mr. Big won. Gross. They went to Europe. They stayed in a luxury hotel that cost $1,800 a night, which is a thing that exists. They gambled in black tie. They partied at the Billionaires Club. There's this disgusting home video of their trip that's one of the most vomit-inducing things I've ever seen. Because these two trash bags are grinning like fools and passing by the fucking Louvre in the Pantheon to take videos of cars. and Louis Vuitton stores.

Oh, look, it's the biggest Cartier store I've ever seen. God, you people are trash. Anyway, so it all unraveled for poor Rachel and company when a local police detective noticed the Ferrari in the parking lot of Rachel's shitty little psychic shop and started digging, because her spidey senses were tingling. She's like, why is this elderly man Ralph's name all over the paperwork on this woman's business?

Then she drove up to the Raines Tree Farm, which was a local landmark, and saw the devastation of the property. She spoke to some of the rain's friends and neighbors. She got an earful, of course, because they'd all been worried sick about him for years. Then she pulled the financial records for the farm. Then she got the IRS involved. When they broke the news to Ralph that he actually hadn't needed to sell his farm at all and that these women were scammers and by the way his wife wasn't dead and by the way she was also Rachel's daughter and also she wasn't his wife. Can you even imagine, he was, of course, devastated, because this had been the happiest time of his life.

So, of course, at first, he didn't want to believe it, and he really took some time to come around. But just 48 hours after that initial meeting with him, authorities seized more than $2 million from Rachel Lee's bank accounts and served a warrant at her shop. They found five Rolex watches, several blank checks with Ralph's signature, and the wigs, hats, and glasses that made up Porsche's Mary Mark's disguise. By the time the detectives got involved, Ralph had just over $200,000 left in his accounts of millions and millions. And one afternoon, Rachel and Portia invited Ralph to the psychic shop.

This is wildest investigations going on. They wanted to go for a drive, out in the desert. So Ralph showed up to the shop. Somehow, he had still not realized that the dark-haired Porsche was the same person as his, quote, dead wife, Mary Marks. He just wasn't wrapping his head around it. And they were just about to get in the car and go on this road trip to the desert when just like something out of the show, criminal minds,

at the last minute, the detective showed up to arrest Rachel and Portia. And they believe 100% that if Ralph had gotten to that car with them, he'd be dead now. Like they were going to take him out to the desert and kill him because they were done with him now. So talk about saved in the nick of time, right? Bonkers. And I know this is going to hurt to hear campers because we all believe their love was eternal. But as soon as Rachel's husband Blancy realized he was in serious shit, he flipped on his lady love and decided to help the FBI with their investigation.

So Blancy pled guilty to money laundering and tax charges and got a grand total of two years in the clink, which sucks. Rachel pled guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud, money laundering, and failure to pay income taxes. She was sentenced, this is a little better, to eight years and four months in prison, which is about a year and a half less than the amount of time it had taken her to strip Ralph reins of his fortune. Portia pled guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and got two years, nine months in prison. Ralph was starting to understand the full implications of what had happened to him, but he was still having a hard time wrapping his head around the fact that Mary Marks never existed.

He's still having a hard time with it, poor guy. Ralph did get some of his stolen money back, but the tree farm is still gone. So there you have it, campers, a nice mix of scammer stories from the relatively harmless MIT blackjackers to the subhuman scum that is Rachel Lee and Associates. We want to give James a big thanks for joining us today and educating us about all kinds of cool stuff. James, tell us what you're going to be up to in the near future

and how everybody can check out your amazing, amazing videos. Well, thank you. Right now, you can probably find me just on TikTok. I'm the TikTok pickpocket, it seems like. So if you just look up Pickpocket, James, you will find me on all my socials. And I have merch, if that's all right to plug just for one second. I have a, my friend of mine was so kind and made a t-shirt with all this nice old-timey. It is gorgeous.

I love that t-shirt. Thank you. It has all this nice, old-timey different. different names for pickpockets on there. My personal favorite is... It's so cool. My personal favorite on there is Finger Smith.

Like a blacksmith. Finger smith. And the store is tpublic.com. If you just look up Thieves Den, you'll find the shirt. Thieves Den. All right. Very cool. Well, thank you.

This was really fun. And that, as usual, was a wild one, Camper's. You know, we'll have another one for you next week. But for now, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe until we get together again around the true crime campfire. And we want to send a special happy early birthday shout out to our boy, John, who's on deployment in the Persian Gulf right now. Happy birthday, John. Thank you for your service. We hope you're listening with the rest of the troops in your unit, too, because that would be rad.

So hi, y'all. Stay safe over there. And by the way, if you're not yet a patron, you're missing out. Patrons of our show get every episode ad-free, at least a day early, sometimes more, plus an extra episode a month, and a free sticker. We've also got red enamel pins while supplies last for patrons in the $5 and up categories. So if you can't, come join us. You can follow us on Twitter at TC Campfire, Instagram at True Crime Campfire, and be sure to like our Facebook page. If you want to support the show and get access to extras, please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com slash truecrime campfire.