The Shell Game | Criminal Podcast | Forensic Files

Whit Haydn: Any technology that is sufficiently unknown looks like magic. [Music comes in.]
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. Phoebe Judge: This is Whit Haydn. 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. Whit Haydn: 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. And 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. And 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.
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,
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. Whit Haydn: Yes, and that's a mistake. Phoebe Judge: Why? Because you'll never get it right?
Whit Haydn: 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. [Music fades out.] Phoebe Judge: Pop Haydn 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.
Whit Haydn: They're still playing these games on the streets today. 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 most of these gangs are not dangerous. They're crooks, but they're usually
not terrible crooks. But the police need to know how — it's very hard 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 the table, 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.
[Music comes in.] If you don't know who it is, it's probably you. [Laughs.] Phoebe Judge: 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? Whit Haydn: The Palace of Mystery. That was
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
seance room. Phoebe Judge: What is this? Whit Haydn: 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've seen in the '20s. Phoebe Judge: It's rigged in here?
Whit Haydn: It's rigged in here. Oh yes. Things float, the table rises and floats around,
and all kinds of neat things happen. Phoebe Judge: What happens when Houdini shows up? [Music fades out.]
Whit Haydn: Oh, well, you know, you hear his voice... It's his real voice, actually. And all
kinds of mysterious appearances and apparitions and movements and things. It's very exciting.
Phoebe Judge: 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.
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
of his facility with the shell game. Phoebe Judge: 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 con men, 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.
[Music comes in.] 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. [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
game is not a magic trick, it's a con game. Whit Haydn: 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 that was very... When he was ready to kill somebody, he would reach in his pocket,
take some money out and get a second pea. 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, and he showed a pea under the first
shell. And he would move it around and steal it out and throw it on the floor amongst the 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 would go for the other two shells,
and that's where he put the ax to their necks. Phoebe Judge: 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 Monte. 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. [Music fades out.] Catherine Spude: 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. Phoebe Judge: This is Catherine Spude,
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,
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." 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.
[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.
Phoebe Judge: 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. Whit Haydn: We call them confidence games
because they're built on the idea that I put my confidence in the sucker. 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 old lady out of her savings. But that's not the same as a confidence game. Confidence
game's 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.
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
were actually sent or received. They'd just take your money and never send the message.
[Music ends.] 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's 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. Catherine Spude: Soapy is front and center,
is 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. Phoebe Judge: 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. Catherine Spude: The townspeople hear of it, and
they've had enough of Soapy. They're going to take over. [Music comes in.] 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 gunfight
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 [laughs], basically. That's
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
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 Spude 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. 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
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. Whit Haydn: I believe that magic is really kind of
a celebration of the archetype of the trickster. Brains over brawn. The trickster is a character
like Bugs Bunny... [Music comes in.] Who's always being hunted by a guy with a gun, a human being with a gun,
but he always outsmarts you. 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 it. 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 the 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. A magician puts on the 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. [Music comes up full for a few seconds.]
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
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
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I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Jingle: Radiotopia. From PRX.

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.

Music in the episode: “Ritual Nine” by Jason Leonard “Photo Album” by David Szesztay “Ritual Eight” by Jason Leonard “All The Pretty Horses” by Podington Bear “Discovery Harbor” by Blue Dot Sessions “Ritual Three” by Jason Leonard

Criminal is a show about people who’ve done wrong, been wronged, or gotten caught somewhere in the middle. Hosted by Phoebe Judge. Part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

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Episode transcripts are posted on our website https://thisiscriminal.com/.

Episode 55 originally published 11/17/2016 https://thisiscriminal.com/episode-55-the-shell-game-11-18-2016

Brief Summary

Whit Haydn discusses the shell game and Soapy Smith's legacy as a notorious con artist at The Magic Castle.

Key points

The Magic of Deception. Whit Haydn discusses the technology of deception and the shell game.
Soapy Smith: The Confidence Man. Exploring the life of Soapy Smith, a master of the shell game and con artist.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

Any technology that is sufficiently unknown looks like magic.

Whit Haydn on technology and magic

WatchDec 1, 2022

Tension

45/ 100Some tension

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