The Confidence Game Read online

The put-up is all about mind reading, learning to elicit the personal from the seemingly impersonal, to convince your mark to open up without realizing she’s doing it. And so it’s no surprise that actual “mind readers” are oftentimes the most dangerous type of confidence artist there is: their technique, at its best, is so perfectly honed that almost no one is immune to it. So dangerous is the effect that there are actual statutes trying to guard against it—an exception in the world of the con. In New York State, fortune-telling, powers of the “occult,” and pretensions to “exorcise, influence, or affect evil spirits or curses” are classified as a misdemeanor, unless they come with a big “for entertainment or amusement only” disclaimer. (As one psychic quipped, “I call it CYA—Cover Your Aura.”) Though it’s been on the books since 1967, Offense 165.35—“Fortune Telling,” punishable by ninety days in jail or a fine of $500—is rarely invoked. Since 2010, according to the New York Times, ten people have been charged under the statute. Some places, though, go further. Warren, a suburb of Detroit, requires its psychics to undergo criminal background checks and have their fingerprints taken before they can peddle their wares.

  It’s an attempt at protection from the power of the put-up masters—those people who can read us like a book and convince us they see the “real” us behind the mask. But no matter what we do to legally ramp up against the errant mystics, we don’t have protection against the principles they operate on—which are the underlying principles of any successful con. Each put-up is tailored for you, so while you may understand its operation in general, in your particular case you are unlikely to see it coming.

  That’s why psychics are so dangerous: no matter what, it can be difficult to convince people that they aren’t real. One former mentalist I spoke with—a magician who performs mind reading tricks instead of the usual visual illusions—ended up quitting the business. No matter her disclaimers, no matter how often she told her audience that these were all tricks, some believed even more the more she denied. In the end, she said, her conscience couldn’t allow it.

  Harry Houdini spent the later part of his life going after psychics and mystics; he, too, felt that they were a danger beyond the simple criminal. Earlier in his career, he’d tried his own hand at mysticism. “As a side line to my own phase of mystery shows I have associated myself with mediums, joining the rank and file and held seances as an independent medium to fathom the truth of it all,” he wrote in the 1924 book that catalogued his efforts, A Magician Among the Spirits. “At the time I appreciated the fact that I surprised my clients, but while aware of the fact that I was deceiving them I did not see or understand the seriousness of trifling with such sacred sentimentality and the baneful result which inevitably followed,” he continued. “To me it was a lark. I was a mystifier and as such my ambition was being gratified and my love for a mild sensation satisfied.” But when he saw the reactions he was provoking, and stopped to think about them in greater earnest, he realized it was more than a lark. “As I advanced to riper years of experience I was brought to a realization of the seriousness of trifling with the hallowed reverence which the average human being bestows on the departed, and when I personally became afflicted with similar grief I was chagrined that I should ever have been guilty of such frivolity and for the first time realized that it bordered on crime.” For the next quarter century, after he quit his own mentalism-for-entertainment efforts, he devoted his life to ferreting the practice out more broadly.

  Mysticism, he argued, was a game as powerful as it was dangerous. “It is perfectly rational to suppose that I may be deceived once or twice by a new illusion,” he wrote, “but if my mind, which has been so keenly trained for years to invent mysterious effects, can be deceived, how much more susceptible must the ordinary observer be.”

  In 1923, Houdini consulted for a panel, organized by Scientific American magazine, not unlike the decades-long endeavor by James Randi, known as the Amazing Randi: it offered a prize to anyone who could prove genuine psychic powers. None were able to claim it. Houdini then offered a second prize, of $10,000, available at any of his shows. If anyone could demonstrate a psychic phenomenon that he couldn’t replicate, the money was theirs. Again, none could.

  But as hard as he fought, just as hard the believers flocked—even when mysticism was the furthest thing from his mind. After a performance in Boston, to which he had invited Sarah Bernhardt, who was herself performing there that week, he found himself in a car with her. Apart from being one of the most acclaimed actresses of her time, Bernhardt was an amputee. “Houdini, you do such marvelous things,” she told him. “Couldn’t you—could you bring back my leg for me?”

  Houdini was startled. “You cannot be serious,” he replied. “You know my powers are limited and you are actually asking me to do the impossible.”

  “But you do the impossible,” she answered.

  Psychics, mystics, clairvoyants, mediums: they are, in some ways, the heart of the confidence game. The put-up is their fundamental building block. They don’t mess with just any beliefs; they mess with the deepest beliefs we have.

  And the most intelligent among us succumb all too easily. The psychologist Daryl Bem made a splash in 2011 when he decreed that psi—precognition—is real. But he is far from the first scientist to fall for the lure of the paranormal. In the 1970s, John Mack became convinced of the power of UFOs. Chairman of the Harvard Medical School’s psychiatry department and Pulitzer Prize–winning author, he grew increasingly certain that alien invasions were real and that there were, at present, aliens among us. He met his first UFO survivor, Budd Hopkins, in 1989. As he later told Psychology Today, “Nothing in my 40 years as a psychiatrist prepared me for what he had to say. I was impressed with his sincerity, depth of knowledge, and deep concern for the abductees. But what affected me even more,” he continued, “was the internal consistency of the highly detailed accounts [of abduction] by different individuals who would have had no way to communicate with one another.”

  And on a smaller level, we experience something similar all the time. Even if you aren’t religious, for instance, your chances of falling for superstition are high. In the middle of the 2014 NFL playoffs, the Public Religion Research Institute conducted a survey to determine how many fans were seeing the hand of, well, something that wasn’t the football players in the games’ outcomes. Turns out, the answer was about half—or roughly fifty million Americans. A quarter thought their team had, at one point or another, been cursed. Another quarter had prayed to God for help for their team, and one fifth thought that their actions would determine whether the team won or lost.

  There are, as well, the smaller gestures of faith. Twenty-one percent of fans performed a ritual prior to each game: dancing in a circle, sitting in the same seat, giving a pep talk in front of the television screen. If you don’t do it, who knows. You might be the one to throw the curse.

  “If there had been any real unalloyed demonstration to work on, one that did not reek of fraud, one that could not be reproduced by earthly powers,” Houdini concluded, “then there would be something for a foundation, but up to the present time everything that I have investigated has been the result of deluded brains or those which were too actively and intensely willing to believe.” But it’s not the fault of the brains; it’s the strength of the put-up. If you read someone correctly, and do your research thoroughly enough to know her deepest desires, hopes, fears, and dreams, you can make her believe most anything.

  * * *

  In 2011, Debra Saalfield and Lee Choong banded together to sue Sylvia Mitchell. In July of that year, she was arrested on charges of grand larceny.

  As Saalfield entered the court, she wore an elegant striped skirt, black shirt with tan jacket draped on top, a single strand of pearls at her neck. She was here to see that no one else fell for Mitchell’s lies.

  As the trial wore on, more cases came to light. Robert Millet had borrowed $7,000 from his father, adding it to $3,000 of his own to pay Mitchell’s fee. Wha
t she offered: a red thread with knots that symbolized the “karmic blocks” in his life. Go home, she instructed him, hold the string tightly, and pray for the knots to dissolve. When he opened his hand, he told the jury, the knots had seemed to disappear.

  Another woman, anonymous by choice, walked in for a crystal reading ($60). She, too, had some “blockages.” But if she wore white to bed every night for a week, and slept with a special jar under her pillow, the blockages would dissipate. Inside the jar: a list of goals—a “prayer list,” Mitchell called it—wrapped in $900 cash, a bit of water, and a wad of spit. After a week, this time dressed all in black, the woman was to return to Mitchell, jar in hand.

  When the woman came back, Mitchell took the jar and asked her to step out into the waiting room. When she was called back in, the water in the jar was red. Mitchell said the red represented the “impurities” in her life.

  Mitchell’s game was coming apart. Adam Brown, one of the lawyers suing her, called what they were seeing “organized psychic crime.” And one anonymous juror later told the New York Times, “She was clearly robbing these people in a heinous way.” She “is not in the business of cleansing spirits. She’s in the business of cleaning out bank accounts,” as Assistant District Attorney James Bergamo put it. “She finds people’s weaknesses, and she exploits them to her advantage.” She is, in other words, the master of the put-up: read someone’s vulnerabilities well, and their confidence is yours for the taking. “You’re dealing with a confidence scheme,” Bob Nygaard told the AP. “It becomes clear to you the script [the psychics] are following.”

  At the trial’s close, the jury heard two written statements, one from Choong, the other from Saalfield.

  “I have always believed in compassion, but Sylvia Mitchell preyed on that to steal from me,” Choong wrote in a statement. “I suffer guilt and sorrow whenever I think about this. I constantly wish I could do more for my mother.” In her statement, Saalfield wrote, “She has destroyed a piece of me that I will never get back. She has taken my self-respect away from me. She has affected my health, my family relationships, and my honor.”

  In her defense, Mitchell said she was only trying to help. Who knows—maybe things would have been far worse without her assistance.

  The trial drew to a close. For two days and six hours, the jury deliberated. On Friday, October 11, 2013, Sylvia Mitchell was found guilty of ten counts of grand larceny and one count of scheming to defraud. As the verdict was read, Mitchell appeared to scowl.

  By November, the scowl was gone. She’d been in jail for a month. Her hair frizzled, outgrown roots showing dark beneath the blond. On Thursday, November 14, she received her sentence: five to fifteen years in prison and restitution of approximately $110,000 to Choong and Saalfield. Justice Gregory Carro couldn’t be clearer. Mitchell had focused on people undergoing “some dramatic stress,” and then she took them for all they had. Of all the bad con artists out there, she was the worst there was.

  * * *

  Unlike many victims, Debra Saalfield got her happy ending. Two years after she’d lost $27,000 in Mitchell’s clutches, and a year before she would take her to trial, she entered the Pro/Am American Style World Ballroom Dance Competition at the Ohio Star Ball. Everyone who was anyone in dance was there. As Debra Rolquin, her stage name, she danced the night away, partnered by her instructor of seven years, Tomasz Mielnicki. And at the end of the evening, she went home with the Rising Star Award for her age group. She’d beaten out thirty-two couples.

  In September 2011, two months after Mitchell’s arrest, she married.

  CHAPTER 3

  THE PLAY

  Be a patient listener (it is this, not fast talking, that gets a con man his coups).

  —THE FIRST COMMANDMENT OF THE CON MAN, FROM VICTOR LUSTIG, CON ARTIST

  It was early fall 2013, October 10 for those counting. The weather that day had been unseasonably cold, hovering in the forties, the first whiffs of the chill of the season filling the air. The streets of downtown Dublin were filled with tourists ducking in and out of stores, posing with wide grins underneath the Spire of Dublin. People leaving work early, others, out for a quick cup. In their midst, one young woman stood out. She seemed dazed and distressed as she wandered down O’Connell Street, looking around timidly, a helpless-seeming terror in her eyes. It was a quarter past four in the afternoon. She stopped in front of the post office, or, as locals would have it, the GPO. In between the thick columns—it would take three of her, at least, to put her arms around one, and a good ten to stand head to head to reach its top—she looked even more forlorn. She was dressed in a purple hoodie under a gray wool sweater, tight darkly colored jeans, and flat black shoes. Underneath, her face was ashen. She was shivering. She wasn’t talking.

  A passerby, stunned by her appearance, asked if she needed help. She looked at him mutely, as if not quite grasping the essence of the question. Somebody called the police. An officer from the Store Street garda station, the closest to the child—she seemed so small and frail that to call her a young woman didn’t feel right—answered the call. He took her to a hospital. It seemed the best thing to do.

  She was a teenager—fourteen or fifteen, at most. At five feet, six inches, she weighed just over eighty-eight pounds. Her long blond hair covered a spiny, battered back. Once she did talk, some days later, it became clear she had only the most rudimentary grasp of English, a word here or there, no more. Not enough to say who she was or why she’d appeared as she had.

  But the girl could draw. And what she drew made her new guardians catch their breath. One stifled a gasp. One burst out crying. There she was, a small stick-like figure, being flown to Ireland on a plane. And there she was again, lying on a bed, surrounded by multiple men. She seemed to be a victim of human trafficking. One of the lucky ones who had somehow managed to escape.

  Three weeks later, the girl still wasn’t talking, or nothing that made much sense, at least. The state was throwing everything it had at getting her help. Who was she? Where was she from? Into early November, the Irish authorities poured over two thousand man-hours into 115 possible lines of inquiry. Door-to-door queries. Reviews of CCTV footage. Missing-persons lists. Visits to airports, seaports, rail stations. Guesthouse bookings. Did anyone fail to turn up, or fail to return? It was costing a pretty penny—€250,000—but every cent was worth it if it brought them closer to helping a child regain her lost home and, as well, her fragile sanity. It was dubbed Operation Shepherd. Eventually, the police came up with and systematically tested over fifteen possible identities for their charge. All had come up short.

  On November 5, the Garda Síochána won the right to undertake an extraordinary step. It would distribute the girl’s image publicly. (The picture itself had been taken on the sly; she’d refused to be photographed and had shied away from anyone in anything resembling an official uniform.) The girl was not only a minor but in a highly vulnerable state; the decision was an unprecedented one. But nothing else had worked.

  As the child’s picture was broadcast across television and newspapers, the Irish National Police told the world what they knew about the teen. “She has limited English. We’re unable to decipher her nationality at the moment,” a sergeant told cameras. And anything anyone knew would be most welcome. “Any information is vital to the investigation, and the welfare of the child,” the police implored. “Any information passed to us will of course be treated in the strictest of confidence.” The girl’s temporary guardian, Orla Ryan, concurred: “I am extremely concerned about the welfare circumstances of this young person. What we know about her, at present, is limited. It is in the child’s best interests to be identified, and I fully support An Garda Síochána in their continuing investigation.”

  The media frenzy began right on cue. It was such an odd case, and everyone had a theory. The teenager was quickly dubbed “GPO Girl,” for the place she’d first turned up.

  And then, ten hours later, there was a lead. And it came from an unlik
ely source: Interpol. Could anyone in Australia, they asked, help out?

  Why Australia? Wasn’t the girl supposed to be Eastern European? The media grew confused. But the garda perked up. Though they hadn’t yet revealed its nature, they had their first real, plausible lead.

  * * *

  The put-up is all about choice of victim: learning what makes someone who she is, what she holds dear, what moves her, and what leaves her cold. After the mark is chosen, it is time to set the actual con in motion: the play, the moment when you first hook a victim and begin to gain her trust. And that is accomplished, first and foremost, through emotion. Once our emotions have been captured, once the con artist has cased us closely enough to identify what it is we want, feeling, at least in the moment, takes over from thinking. As any good confidence man will tell you, someone who is emotional is someone who is vulnerable. And so, before a single element of the actual con is laid out, before a single persuasive appeal is made, before a mark knows that someone will want something, anything at all, from him, the emotional channels are opened. And as in that first rush of romantic infatuation, we abandon our reason to follow our feeling.

  Governing our reality are two systems, one emotional, one rational. And the two don’t follow the same rules. Or, as William James, the father of modern psychology, put it in his essay “Brute and Human Intellect,” in slightly more poetic fashion, “To say that all human thinking is essentially of two kinds—reasoning on the one hand, and narrative, descriptive, contemplative thinking on the other—is to say only what every reader’s experience will corroborate.”

  Whereas the rational concerns itself with the “right” choice, the proper impression, the correct course of action, emotions, says psychologist Seymour Epstein, cause us to think in “categorical, personal, concretive, unreflective, and action oriented” fashion. They have us thinking reflexively instead of reflectively, reacting instead of considering. They have us just where someone who may wish to take advantage wants us.