Not this day.
I am writing about a real life pickpocket. Perhaps the best pickpocket in the world. His name is Apollo Robbins and he was recently profiled in an article in The New Yorker written by Adam Green. It is a must read. A few short excerpts.
A few years ago, at a Las Vegas convention for magicians, Penn Jillette, of the act Penn and Teller, was introduced to a soft-spoken young man named Apollo Robbins, who has a reputation as a pickpocket of almost supernatural ability. Jillette, who ranks pickpockets, he says, “a few notches below hypnotists on the show-biz totem pole,” was holding court at a table of colleagues, and he asked Robbins for a demonstration, ready to be unimpressed. Robbins demurred, claiming that he felt uncomfortable working in front of other magicians. He pointed out that, since Jillette was wearing only shorts and a sports shirt, he wouldn’t have much to work with.
“Come on,” Jillette said. “Steal something from me.”
Again, Robbins begged off, but he offered to do a trick instead. He instructed Jillette to place a ring that he was wearing on a piece of paper and trace its outline with a pen. By now, a small crowd had gathered. Jillette removed his ring, put it down on the paper, unclipped a pen from his shirt, and leaned forward, preparing to draw. After a moment, he froze and looked up. His face was pale.
“F***. You,” he said, and slumped into a chair.
Robbins held up a thin, cylindrical object: the cartridge from Jillette’s pen.
In more than a decade as a full-time entertainer, Robbins has taken (and returned) a lot of stuff, including items from well-known figures in the worlds of entertainment (Jennifer Garner, actress: engagement ring); sports (Charles Barkley, former N.B.A. star: wad of cash); and business (Ace Greenberg, former chairman of Bear Stearns: Patek Philippe watch).
He is probably best known for an encounter with Jimmy Carter’s Secret Service detail in 2001. While Carter was at dinner, Robbins struck up a conversation with several of his Secret Service men. Within a few minutes, he had emptied the agents’ pockets of pretty much everything but their guns. Robbins brandished a copy of Carter’s itinerary, and when an agent snatched it back he said, “You don’t have the authorization to see that!” When the agent felt for his badge, Robbins produced it and handed it back. Then he turned to the head of the detail and handed him his watch, his badge, and the keys to the Carter motorcade.
In the book, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell states that for anyone to be a phenom or an extrordinary talent it normally takes at least 10,000 hours of concentrated training and practice to get to that level of expertise. It also helps if it is done at a young age. It doesn't matter what the skill is. It could be golf (Tiger Woods), hockey (Wayne Gretzky), chess (Bobby Fischer) or the piano (Van Cliburn). However, research indicates that it is going to take at least 10,000 hours of concentrated effort to be an elite world-class talent at anything.
How did Robbins hone his pickpocket skills? More importantly, how did he do it without spending 10,000 hours in prison?
At age 22, Robbins was a struggling magician in Las Vegas. He had married young, had a son and his marriage was already unraveling. He was living off the sale of his collection of magic books that he began collecting when he was age 15.
One day, Robbins got a call from the head of entertainment at Caesar’s Magical Empire, a now defunct Roman-themed dinner-theatre extravaganza at Caesar’s Palace, offering him a two-week job filling in for a magician. On his first night at work, a woman in the crowd, from whom he hadn’t stolen anything, shouted, “My rings! I had a diamond and a sapphire—where are they?” The woman and her husband accosted Robbins and threatened to call hotel security.
“Don’t walk away,” Robbins said calmly. “Let’s go together, because if I had your rings I could just get rid of them while you were gone. So let’s have them search me in front of you.” He continued in a soothing tone, “I understand how you feel. Once we eliminate the possibility that I stole your rings, then you’ll be able to think more clearly and figure out what happened to them.”
“I was using an old sales technique called ‘Feel, Felt, Found,’ where you empathize with the customer,” Robbins told me. “Also, the improv technique of never using a negative—agree and add on instead.”
While Robbins was being searched, the woman went to check her room and discovered that she had left her jewelry there. Robbins was offered his first permanent gig.
Robbins describes his years at Caesar’s Magical Empire, where he worked from 1998 until it closed, in 2002, as his “college and graduate-school education” in picking pockets. His job was to dress as a wizard and provide seven minutes of entertainment for tourists waiting to be led to dinner by a toga-clad hostess. “I decided I wouldn’t do any magic tricks—just stealing,” Robbins said. “That way, I had to work without a net.” He estimates that he met twenty-four people during every show, and that he stole something from three of them. At six shows an hour, five hours a day, five days a week, forty weeks a year, that works out to at least eighty-one thousand pockets picked. “It was a hyper-learning experience,” he said.
How much pickpocket practice was that? That's close to 4,000 hours of picking pockets right there and Robbins has almost exclusively been a pickpocket entertainer since that time. 10,000 hours of picking pockets has long since passed for Apollo.
What does this all mean and why should be care about a pickpocket in Las Vegas?
It is another example of the incredible abilities of human beings. There is almost nothing that can't be done by someone who puts their mind to a task, practices and works at it with total focus.
It might be picking pockets, spinning plates or walking on a cable across Niagara Falls. It might be transplanting a human heart, inventing the iPhone or landing a man on the moon. It might even be a child born with no arms who can do everything with their feet as well as anyone else does with their hands.
So, how come it is so hard to balance the federal budget?
See a video of Apollo Robbins picking the pockets of New Yorker writer Adam Green.
Here is another video of Apollo on the Las Vegas Strip with a little sleight of hand.
Here is final video on Robbins from Scientific American "Neuroscience meets magic".
What could you accomplish with 10,000 hours?
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