Apollo Robbins
Appearances
Criminal
Ava and the Pickpocket
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.
Criminal
Ava and the Pickpocket
The provenance or the history of sleight of hand mostly comes from thieves. The reason why a magician can do a card trick is because they are borrowing from techniques that card sheets used. 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?
Criminal
Ava and the Pickpocket
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.
Criminal
Ava and the Pickpocket
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 was Kevin Mitnick. We had Joe, Ponchop Joe, who was very good at running crooked carnival-type scams.
Criminal
Ava and the Pickpocket
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.
Criminal
Ava and the Pickpocket
You'd see this judgment that others would have for each other, who was opportunist, who was not. 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.
Criminal
Ava and the Pickpocket
He did have that kind of perpetual goal of, but if I could just beat the bill validator on the slot machine. He says, I got that one little thing. I just got to accomplish that before I end. We always talked about how that was like the old grifter movies where they just have to pull this one last con.
Criminal
Ava and the Pickpocket
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 rolled up. And it's not the best way to do it. It's an older way.
Criminal
Ava and the Pickpocket
And 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 use is tugging on the sleeve. And that indicates, tug on the sleeve, I need you to meet me back at this spot.
Criminal
Ava and the Pickpocket
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. And we did this game. It was an old slap game. And he saw that he could make money with that without even seeing it.
Criminal
Ava and the Pickpocket
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.
Criminal
Ava and the Pickpocket
I felt responsible for facilitating that relationship. I kind of tried to break it. The initial model of just kind of being a consulting agency that 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.
Criminal
Ava and the Pickpocket
That was a promise I made when we married that I would do it every day. I would always give her a surprise every day.
Criminal
Ava and the Pickpocket
Small ones or big ones, but it's always been an important part, I think, for us to keep each other on the back foot.
Criminal
Ava and the Pickpocket
We asked them, you know, we couldn't come to a name and we need your help. And we asked everybody to write down a name that they like and we trust them as friends and we trust their opinions. And to drop them in a box and we're going to draw the name out of a box and that will be our daughter's name. And it made everybody very tense. And then we had one of them draw the name out of the box.
Criminal
Ava and the Pickpocket
And they said, Maya. I said, that's amazing. That seems like, I'm so happy you've chosen that name. Because it matches everything we have. And then we showed the balloons and we showed these banners and everything. They all came out that all said Maya.
Criminal
Ava and the Pickpocket
A lot of parents want to teach their kids critical thinking. And we often say that critical thinking isn't a good enough term. So for her, we want her to question reality.
Criminal
Ava and the Pickpocket
You know, we're all puppets. We all have strings. Here are the strings that you should know that can be pulled. And now it's her choice. Does she pull strings or does she recognize when her strings are being pulled?
Criminal
Ava and the Pickpocket
I think that's if we were to tell ourselves the same stories that those guys that we met before did. That's the stories they would tell themselves, that I just need to do this one more con, this one more thing. It probably wouldn't be pickpocketing. It'd probably be something else. But do we have the toolbox and the skill sets? Probably yes.
Criminal
Ava and the Pickpocket
But the cost and the risk associated with that, plus we have a daughter. What do we want her to grow up to be? So I think those are things that stop us.
Criminal
Ava and the Pickpocket
Yeah, most people have an illusion of invulnerability. I'm too smart or I'm too aware. And I think what we have is that we know what is possible.
Criminal
Ava and the Pickpocket
She 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?
Criminal
Ava and the Pickpocket
I had idolized them when I was growing up through my much older brothers. I saw them do stuff like pickpocketing at a zoo and other things.
Criminal
Ava and the Pickpocket
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.
Criminal
Ava and the Pickpocket
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 a Halloween prop or is it? And 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.
Criminal
Ava and the Pickpocket
When I was like 12 or so, I shoplifted some cigarettes, and a 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. Um, they had been underneath my arm and the back of him. And then when he started to check me, I dropped him in his apron and it got me out of the store. And that's, it's reverse pickpocketing.
Criminal
Ava and the Pickpocket
I was putting something on him. So the, when I started magic, I decided, let me see if I can bring some of the, that putting things on people, taking things off people that I'd seen. I had seen it mostly with my brothers and, um, I didn't have the nervousness. I saw other magicians who tried to do those things.
Criminal
Ava and the Pickpocket
And if you get caught doing a magic trick, it doesn't have the kind of stakes that it does if you get caught stealing something.
Criminal
Ava and the Pickpocket
It functionally moved pretty quickly after those calls to meeting in L.A. and going to the Magic Castle for a first date, I think.
Criminal
Ava and the Pickpocket
We went to go see the show. And then after the show, Penn and Teller invited us backstage to hang out with them. And as we're hanging back there, I said, I have something special for you. And 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?
Criminal
Ava and the Pickpocket
Teller 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.