Ava and the Pickpocket

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1:05What was the first magic you learned? Probably how to tell someone's credit card number without seeing it. Wait a second. So you couldn't right now tell me my credit card number? Well, not on radio. That would be legal. But you could... Yes. This is Ava Doe. For a while in her 20s, she was a pickpocket. I had stolen a guy's watch on the Vegas Strip. And it was a good three, four minutes after I had stolen it. And he realized that his watch was missing. And he was shocked. So you were practicing on the Las Vegas Strip? Sometimes, but not all the time. It's very dangerous to do so. I wouldn't recommend it.

2:01Ava didn't keep the watch. She wasn't stealing for money. She was stealing because she was good at it. She was so good at it that people would pay to watch her work. But she says that got old, so she came up with a new idea. I figure I could pickpocket information. Then that's what you do now. That's right. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

2:38My parents wanted me to be a doctor, obviously. They eventually found out what I'd do, but not after I ensured that I could make a really good living. You know, immigrant parents and all. I'm not a doctor, but... Yeah, but I bought a house. Until she was 13, Ava and her parents lived in Vietnam. I should say there's no Vietnamese word for magic. There's only a Vietnamese word for illusion, and there's a Vietnamese word for miracle. Eva was born four years after the Vietnam War. In Vietnam, it's called the American War. After American troops left, a communist government took over and started trying to unify the country.

3:24I grew up with staunchly anti-communist parents, but I went to school under the communist regime, which means that I was exposed to my teachers who would teach me propaganda, and I would go home and my parents would say everything I've just learned was wrong. She remembers her teachers talking about the communist leader Ho Chi Minh. You know, we were asked to call him Uncle Ho, and there were all these things that Uncle Ho did for the country. And we sang songs to him, and I would go home. My parents would say he was a mass murderer, and he had committed all these war crimes. And so I was exposed to these different perspectives on the same set of reality very early, which was confusing for a child.

4:16Right, because you go to school and your teachers are, I mean, you trust that your teachers are teaching things that you should know. I mean, this is why you go to school. Absolutely, yes. And it was emotionally confusing as well because I liked my teachers, I liked my parents, I liked everyone, you know. The day the war ended, a communist military leader said, You have nothing to fear. Between Vietnamese, there are no victors and no vanquished. Only the Americans have been defeated. But Ava's mother and father worried. They knew people who'd been sent to prison camps, also known as re-education camps, because they were thought to be anti-communist, including Ava's grandfather.

4:59Ava learned not to talk about her parents' politics. There was this stretch after the war where a lot of Vietnamese people were escaping by boat, the boat people. and my father was part of those people who would smuggle people out of Vietnam. Ava didn't know it at the time, but her father's job was to get people to the boats at the Vietnamese shoreline. In order to do this, instead of staying as far as possible from the police, he started trying to get close to them. He had immersed himself in police culture. He bribed them to hang around them, to learn how they talk. He would feign a deeper northern accent.

5:42He would use the words that they would use. She says he once paid an officer for a uniform. And if the police ever caught up to him and his escapees, he would pretend that he was one of them. There were other things Ava didn't know, like her grandfather's real name. Her whole life, she'd known him by his fake name. He'd moved from North Vietnam to South Vietnam, trying to run from the communists, and changed his identity. Ava's mother told her this when she was around 10 years old. I didn't see why it was a secret. I already knew how to keep secrets by then, so I was surprised. I think I thought maybe she didn't think I could lie well enough.

6:31Ava remembers her parents were always talking about moving, leaving Vietnam. I wanted to believe that there was possibly maybe a place in the world where people did say everything that they think and that they weren't running two threads of reality. Maybe there are people who just tell you everything. When she was a teenager, her family got the papers they needed to immigrate to the U.S. She remembers saying goodbye to their friends and family. We had put on tennis shoes. I had never worn closed-toe shoes before in my life. We had socks on, and I had a jacket on like I do now, but it was 80, probably 80 to 90 degrees with 90 percent humidity, and I just remember being hot.

7:24They arrived in Seattle in 1992, three days before Halloween. I remember thinking that America didn't have any smells. It just smelled like nothing. I didn't smell food. I didn't smell the streets. I didn't smell sweat. And I hadn't ever seen so many yellow leaves. They soon moved to California. Ava was a good student. She went to UCLA for college and wanted to become a psychiatrist. And when she graduated, she stayed in Los Angeles. And then one day, she visited Las Vegas for a bachelorette party, and a man approached her and her friends. He stole my friend's engagement ring after just what it seemed to be, shaking her hand and saying a few sentences with her, and then he gave it back.

8:19And I thought this was the most bizarre thing, to give it back. If you could steal something, why would you give it back? I've never met an honest thief, I guess. I mean, did you immediately, once he gave the engagement ring back, say, how did you do that? I said, why did you give it back?

8:41She was very off script for the typical person. And she had questions about why I was doing what I was doing, what got me into it. And she was very intense. And she says, can you steal something from me? She asked me, can I say? Yes. Okay. She asked me to steal a chocolate covered strawberry for her. steal it from a VIP table full of people. And he did. This is now maybe 4 a.m. at an after-hours Las Vegas nightclub. And everything felt a little bit half-tinged with fabrication, you know? He told her his name was Apollo Robbins. I think he said that I'm a theatrical pickpocket, to which I had no idea what that meant.

9:29I didn't know what to make around the premise of stealing for entertainment. Apollo had been working as a kind of magician specializing in theft. He's been called the best pickpocket in the world. After that first night, what was the next thing you two did together? Did you go on a first date or do you remember the next time you saw each other? Before we saw each other again, because I lived in LA at the time and Apollo lived in Las Vegas, we had phone calls that lasted an average of four hours. It was anywhere between two to nine hours. We had very long conversations about everything, but a lot of it was about psychology.

10:18I thought it was a really peculiar thing to be interested in deception if you didn't have to grow up with it. And I thought that if you grew up in America and the living was easy, then why would you be interested in cons and scams and, I suppose, heists? But I knew very little at that time. What did Apollo tell you about why he'd become a magician? He said that his brothers were thieves. He told her he was from Missouri. His father was a minister, and he had two half-brothers. I had idolized them when I was growing up. They're my much older brothers, and I saw them do stuff like pickpocketing at a zoo and other things.

11:14Apollo says when he was 14, one of them got into trouble. He was functionally a drug smuggler, working for a cartel, also moving into firearms and smuggling firearms into the Midwest. And when he realized that it was escalating, he was trying to get out of it, and he was turning into a state witness. And I happened to get exposed to some of that, seeing those deals going bad and seeing what was going on. Around that time, he remembers their house flooding. And in my basement, while we were cleaning up some stuff, I found a plastic finger. And I asked where it came from. Is it Halloween prop or is it?

11:53And my mom said it's from a magic kit that somebody had given me. So I called a magic shop and I asked if I could come by and if they could tell me what this is. And they said, yeah, come down. Apollo says that a man at the magic shop sold him a book about coin magic. And he started studying it and practicing tricks. When I was like 12 or so, I shoplifted some cigarettes, and this clerk was checking me. He stopped me in the store, and he went to check me, and I took the cigarettes, and I put them in his apron. They had been underneath my arm, in the back of them, and then when he started to check me, I dropped them in his apron.

12:30And it got me out of the store, and it's reverse pickpocketing. I was putting something on him. So when I started magic, I decided, let me see if I can bring some of that putting things on people, taking things off people that I had seen. I had seen it mostly with my brothers. And I didn't have the nervousness. I saw other magicians who tried to do those things. And if you get caught during a magic trick, it doesn't have the kind of stakes that it does if you get caught stealing something. When he was 22, Apollo left Missouri and moved to Las Vegas. Years later, he got Ava's number at the bachelorette party.

13:11And then they started getting to know each other during those long phone calls. It functionally moved pretty quickly after those calls to a meeting in L.A. and going to the Magic Castle for a first date, I think. The Magic Castle is an invitation-only club for magicians. We actually visited for our episode, The Shell Game. It's in an old mansion in Hollywood. What stood out to me that evening was Apollo made a point to turn off his cell phone and put it away. And I don't know that I had been on a date. I didn't date a lot, but I hadn't been on a date where someone did that. Did the fact that Apollo was a professional in this deception and pickpocketing make you nervous when you first started seeing each other?

14:03Did you find yourself thinking, well, maybe he's just using me, deceiving me. He's good at this. It definitely made me nervous. It made me nervous thinking about what else does it mean if I continue this relationship long term?

14:25We'll be right back.

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16:02Every story you love. Every invention that moves you. Every idea you wished was yours. All began as nothing. Just a blank page with a blinking cursor. asking a simple question. What do you see? Great ideas start on Mac. Find out more on apple.com slash Mac. After their date at the Magic Castle, Eva Doe went back to Las Vegas to visit Apollo Robbins. He asked her if she wanted to go see his friends, Penn and Teller. We went to go see the show, and then after the show, Penn and Teller invited us backstage to hang out with him. And as we're hanging back there, I said, I have something special for you.

16:52And I dropped down one knee and I brought out a ring box. And this is like our second or third date. And Penn, who knew me really well, was really surprised. Like, what on earth? Tyler was in the know, so he was just kind of laughing. But I dropped down one knee. I had the ring box, so it looked like I was going to propose. And she was very shocked. And she opened the ring box and inside is a blindfold. And I said, do you trust me? And she said, yes. So she put it on. I lied. I didn't trust him. But she put it on. They ended up driving up to a mountain cabin he'd rented to surprise her. And the surprises didn't stop.

17:29Well, he stole my watch. He stole my jewelry often. So I stopped wearing jewelry just to see what else he would steal. When I met her, she was a crisis counselor. So she was doing a job that was very intense. She was answering a hotline for people calling in. And I, at that time, was hanging out with a bunch of thieves, because while I was entertaining, I was also interested in the history, the genealogy of what was part of what I did. Apollo had read an old book called Whiz Mob, which explains slang used by teams of pickpockets on the street. He read a lot of books about magic and crime. The provenance or the history of sleight of hand mostly comes from thieves.

18:17The reason why a magician can do a card trick is because they are borrowing from techniques that card sheets use. So what a cool thing to go out in the wild and find out what's the origin of this move if it didn't come from magic. What was before? If it came back 200 years ago, where did it come from? He started thinking about putting his own team together. And I was forming this kind of collective of different types of thieves, and I was trying to find the detectives who arrested them or their counterparts in legal. And I was starting to bring those folks together. And at that time, that's when she met me.

18:48You know, we started hanging out with all these different people. So some of them were thieves. One was a hacker. One was a cannon, which is the lingo for a thief who can steal all by himself. He doesn't need anyone else on the team. One was a really renowned card hustler. His name was Rod the Hop, and he was very famous for this one move called The Hop. He was on the blacklist, and the blacklist only had 36 people. It was officially called the list of excluded persons. The casinos would collect their biometrics and try to keep them out of the casinos. The hacker was a very notorious hacker. His name is Kevin Mitnick.

19:35We had Joe, Ponshub Joe, who was very good at running crooked carnival-type scams. We had Joe Moves, who was one of the last guys who worked with Titanic Thompson, who was a famous conman, and he would talk about how they would run teams for these long-form cons. At one point, it was 10-plus people that the FBI would have on their watch list, all coming over to our house at once. Ava had moved to Las Vegas, and she and Apollo were living together. They called the group their brain trust. They said there wasn't a real structure to their meetings at first. They just wanted to get people talking to each other.

20:12They've made observations about people for all of their life and for high consequences. So I'm trying to learn what is it that they're seeing in people, because I'm trying to learn to see the same thing. Eva says she asked a lot of questions. Because what magic and crime share is the, you, whether it's whatever the consequences, and the consequence in crime is much more severe than it is in magic. But you are trying to, you know, to put it in plain language, get away with something. You know what it's like to try to get away with something. And when you meet each other, when you meet another person who's been trying to do that, you feel it.

20:57The idea for the Brain Trust was that they would consult for security companies, speak at law enforcement conventions, put on demonstrations and lectures. Everyone leaves it at the door. Where you work, who you steal from, what you steal, we leave it at the door when we talk about skills. But Apollo says that not everyone in the group got along. You'd see this judgment that others would have for each other, who was opportunist, who was not. But D.I., the canon, he would, I mean, he was cool with stealing from certain age brackets of people. And for a lot of the guys, they just thought that was very low-handed.

21:38Do you remember, Ava, a time when you asked another magician or thief or con artist, you know, one of these guys, why they did what they did and what their answer was? yes i remember asking rod who was in full transparency a really good friend of ours um i said to him i said rod you could do anything else you want probably why why are you cheating slot machines um and he said he never gave me the answer i wanted but what he said was I'm just going to do this until this. And it was always some variation of that, that he's just going to do this until this time. He did have that kind of perpetual goal of, but if I could just beat the bill validator on the slot machine, because I got that one little thing, I just got to accomplish that before I end.

22:36We always talked about how it was like the old Grifter movies where they just have to pull this one last con. Eva and Apollo also traveled around the world looking for people for the brain trust. Once, they went to Spain to try to talk to pickpockets. There's a tourist street that goes right down Barcelona. And as we walked down, we saw some teams doing three-shell game on the street, but they were playing it with matchboxes. They call it domino. I noticed that the ball that they were using was made out of cigarette papers that they had rolled up. And it's not the best way to do it. It's an older way.

23:09And so I went off to a beauty shop that was nearby, grabbed a latex sponge, cut it up to look like a pea, and it would work a lot better for their game. But I was going to use that as an offering, as a gift. So when their team split up, I noticed one signal they used is tugging on the sleeve. And that indicates, tug on the sleeve, I need you to meet me back at a spot. So when I saw that, I tugged on the sleeve of the operator, and I said a gift, and I just put the ball in his hand. And he tugged on my sleeve for me to follow him. So him and I walked off to the side, and I took money out, said bring some money out.

23:42And we did this game, it was an old slap game. And he saw that he could make money with that without even seeing it, so he had a translator who said, have him meet me for dinner. When we had dinner with him, it was fascinating because I asked him, do you hang out with any pickpockets? And he said, no, I don't know any of them. And his tone was interesting. And I said, okay. And he said, oh, you think I'm like them? I said, no, not at all. He said, yeah, I'm not like them. I don't steal from people. And I said, you don't? And he said, no, people play my game. They will take the money out of their pockets and put it down and play my game.

24:29I don't put my hand in their pockets. Apollo and Ava say that the members of the group had an unspoken agreement. While they were involved in the brain trust, they wouldn't break the law. If they started to cross that line, they'd have to let us know so we could pull them out of the team. Eventually, it started falling apart. There was a pickpocket that we had introduced to a cop, and the cop, because we had introduced him, took his, kind of under his wing, the pickpocket started hustling him and getting him to do certain things. I felt responsible for facilitating that relationship. I kind of tried to break it.

25:09The initial model of just kind of being a consulting agency had subject matter experts on deception. As I went along, I started to see that there was an itch that a lot of those guys had that wasn't going to get scratched on the legal side of it. By then, for Ava, things had changed. When I met Apollo, I was still thinking that I would become a psychiatrist, that I would work in a clinical setting. I didn't think that I would shift gears. But as she was getting to know Apollo, she changed her mind. I've always been a watcher. So I just watch. And then one day, he was performing something. I walked away because I had a phone call.

25:55When I came back, I saw a detail in the way he handled something, and I figured out how it worked. She was interested in how people responded to him. There was this vulnerable moment where people are exposed to a shift in what they thought is real. So I wanted to do that. She started off learning how to pickpocket, but then she got tired of it. It was a gender problem. The performing space that I often performed in was corporate parties, which had many men. And I didn't love the responses I would get when someone realized I had been in their pockets. Instead, Ava became a kind of magician called a mentalist.

26:50All of the routines you would see a mentalist perform are more things that your mind fools you. Not so much in sleight of hand. It uses some sleight of hand, but mostly psychological. Give me an example. I mean, of a simplistic. Someone might pretend to read your mind. Someone might pretend to have psychic phenomenon. Someone might move an object with their mind on the table. That kind of thing. She remembers one time when she was working a party. She'd ask someone to think about their mother's maiden name. And the person, the lady that I was performing for, when I said her mother's maiden name back in full, she said, okay.