Fool Me Once: Hustlers, Hookers, Headliners, and How Not to Get Screwed in Vegas - Softcover

Lax, Rick

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312545703 ISBN 13: 9780312545703

Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin, 2011

Synopsis

Rick Lax was paranoid to begin with. He saw lies everywhere. And when he saw them, he spoke up. But when his girlfriend gets conned by a violent drug dealer, nothing Rick does seems to help. So what if he misses the next lie? What if spotting them isn't enough to protect against them? What if exposing lies puts him in even more danger?

Terrified of being conned himself, Rick bolts for Vegas, deception capital of the world, to learn the game and how to guard against it. Rick meets deceivers of all kinds, from back-alley hustlers and poker pros to the biggest headliners on the Strip. During the course of his unconventional education, which includes passing himself off as an octogenarian, being exposed as a card counter, and picking up a hooker (inadvertently, of course), Rick gets closer to becoming a human lie detector...but at what cost?

By the end of Fool Me Once, you'll know why seventh graders make better liars than college students, how to use a handful of rice as a polygraph, and how to bluff a poker pro. But above all, you'll understand why some things in life are a lot worse than being fooled.

About this title

About the Author:

Rick Lax, author of Lawyer Boy, is not only a staff writer at Las Vegas Weekly, but he can get from his front door to the Wynn poker room in twelve minutes flat.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

1. An Earful of Cider
These women weren’t dressed like your typical prostitutes. They were dressed like prostitutes who, for Halloween, had decided to go out as slutty hookers. You name the prostitute cliché and these two were on it like leopard print on a miniskirt. Fishnet stockings? Check. Thigh-high leather boots? Check. Sophia Loren eye shadow? Check.
They were sitting at a table for four and the other two seats were free, so I asked them whether my mom and I could join them for dinner.
“Of course, sweetie,” the blond one said, mentally preparing herself for what was sure to be the weirdest request of her professional career.
We set our Panda Express trays down and my mom got the ball rolling:
“Where are you nice young ladies from?” she asked.
“We’re both from Oakland, but we met on the Strip,” the redhead said. “How about you?”
“Michigan, then Chicago,” I told her.
“Yeah, you seem like a midwesterner,” she replied. “Well, be careful who you trust out here. Especially on the Strip. Everybody’s working an angle.”
She delivered the line with no apparent irony.
“What brought you to Vegas?” I asked the blonde.
“I needed a change. Needed to get away from some things. Plus I’ve always loved it here.”
“I’ve got two kids,” the redhead said. “Two-year-old and a five-year-old. This is where the business is, so this is where I am.”
“And how is business?” I asked.
“Bad,” she replied. “Economy—you know? Everybody’s talking about ‘bailout’ this and ‘bailout’ that. All I know is I can’t get a [slang term for a unit of currency] for a [slang term for a sex act].”
“That’s terrible!” my mom said, leaving it unclear as to whether the terrible thing was the prostitute’s vulgar language or the fact that the economy was so bad that she couldn’t get a whichever for a whatever.
I told the hookers that I needed a change, too, that I loved Las Vegas, too, that I planned to spend a couple of weeks in the city, and that I planned to write about it.
The redhead said, “Ishould write a book. I’ve got more stories than everybody else in this city put together.”
“Well, you have to tell me,” I said. “Once my mom’s gone, I mean. Give me your number so we can meet up sometime and you can, yeah, tell me about ... your business.”
“Sure, sweetie. So I can”—air quotes here—“tell you about my business.”
“Really,” I said. “I mean, I’m not interested in doingbusiness.”
She shot me a look of offense.
“No ... not ... it’s not that I don’t think you’re attractive. That’s not ... I just meant that I’m not in the market—”
“Not in the market...?”
“I’m not gay. It’s not that. I just want to talkabout—”
“Here’s my number.”
The prostitutes excused themselves and walked out of the Palms Resort & Casino food court. I watched them make friends with some guy at the adjacent casino bar, and within a minute his arms were around their waists. Within two minutes, all three of them were throwing their heads back and laughing, looking as if they were being filmed for a Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) TV spot.
The LVCVA is the group responsible for the “What happens here stays here” ad campaign, which centers around a handful of TV commercials promoting explicit lying.1 Most people know it as the “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” campaign, but from a business point of view, the point is, most people know it.
When city advertising executives discuss what makes the “What happens” ads so successful, they say things like, “The beauty of the ‘What happens’ campaign is that it means different things to different people. It can mean everything from going to a risqué revue show to splurging on a fancy dinner.” That characterization is as deceitful as the ad campaign itself; the “What happens” ad campaign’s implication is crystal clear: If you come to Las Vegas and gamble away your children’s college fund and cheat on your wife with, say, two prostitutes you meet at the Palms food court, the city’s tourism board will credit your bank account and fly you home in a time machine so you can un-cheat on your wife and preserve the sanctity of your marriage. That message hits home with a lot of people; every year 40 million visit Las Vegas, and do their best to hang on to their money in the process.
Not all succeed—I saw that much firsthand, after I’d left the prostitutes and my mom back at the Palms.
Between Monte Carlo and New York New York, I came across a group of twenty or so tourists gathered in a tight cluster around a stack of milk crates. It was a three-card monte game. Now, two years ago, if you had told me you’d seen a real three-card monte game on Las Vegas Boulevard—not just a gambling demonstration performed by a magician—I’d have called you a liar. I’d have told you that three-card monte games exist only in outdated movies in which fast-talking men in bowler hats and high trousers recite antiquated poems that include phrases like “Hey Diddle Diddle” and “Hanky Poo.”
The operator, a forty-something black guy wearing a Mighty Ducks jersey and Breitling watch—possibly a Brotling or a Breitline—was quick with his hands and with his words. He was friendly and funny. And I suppose he needed to be; he was taking everybody’s money. Well, everybody except some white guy with long sideburns and a fraternity T-shirt.
Frat boy, I deduced, was a shill. He was working with the operator, and his job was to convince passersby that the game was winnable. The difference in age and race was no accident.
I stood behind the operator and watched the game for fifteen or twenty minutes. These guys were pros. At one point, the operator turned his back to the impromptu table he had constructed from two milk crates and a cardboard box top and asked me if I wanted to move to the front to get a better view. While he was saying this, an Asian lady wearing a Mandalay Bay T-shirt and Mandalay Bay baseball cap reached forward and bent up the upper-right corner of the “money card.” The queen. The bend was slight but unmistakable. The operator turned back to the table, picked up the cards, but failed to notice the bend. He mixed the three cards and then asked for bets.
“Who’s gonna bet? Someone’s gonna bet. One bet to the highest bidder.”
The Asian lady slapped a fifty in front of the center card, the one with the bend in its upper right-hand corner.
“Fifty dollars bet. Anybody want to bet more?”
Everybodywanted to bet more, including a dad who reached into his wallet and pulled out a stack of twenties.
“I got one forty on the middle card,” he said, laying seven bills on the table.
“Sorry, lady,” the operator said as he returned the Asian woman’s fifty. “You know the rules: only one bet at a time, to the highest bidder.”
She protested—in Japanese, I think—but to no avail.
“If you don’t like it, take your money inside. They’ll let you bet however much you want on whatever you want. Okay, we got one forty on the middle card. Any higher bets?”
I pulled out my wallet. I had more than three hundred dollars in it.
But I also had a piece of advice I’d picked up from my high school’s production of Guys and Dolls. The advice comes from Sky Masterson and it was passed on to Nathan Detroit, a gambler who wanted to bet Masterson that Mindy’s restaurant sold more strudel than cheesecake:
One of these days in your travels, a guy is going to show you a brand-new deck of cards on which the seal is not yet broken. This man is going to offer to bet you that he can make the jack of spades jump out of the deck and squirt cider in your ear. Now son, do not bet this man, for sure as you stand there, you’re going to wind up with an earful of cider.
The moral is that if a bet seems too good to be true, it probably is. I knew this advice, yet I was still very tempted to bet. I had the money, I had the edge, and I knew exactly where the queen was.
It was on the left, not in the middle.
You see, I knew that the Asian tourist in the Mandalay Bay shirt and hat wasn’t really a tourist; she was another shill. I knew that the bent corner was part of the act, that the operator had removed the bend from the queen with his right pinky and that he put another one in the four of clubs by pressing it against the table.
“Any more bets? Any more bets?”
I stuck my pinky in my ear to check for cider and then returned my money to my pocket. The operator turned over the center card and showed that it was the four of clubs. The queen was on the left. I’d been right.
Still, I probably made the right choice in not betting. Even if I did throw my cash next to the queen, it’s unlikely I would have walked away three hundred dollars richer. The operator probably would have picked up the two of clubs, the card that hadn’t been bent at any point, and used it to execute a Mexican turnover,a move in which you use one card to turn over a second and switch the two in the process. And what would I have said in response? “That’s a Mexican turnover”? Oh, I’m sure thatwould have persuaded him. If I had thrown my money down and turned over the card myself, he would have ...

About this edition

• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0312545703
• ISBN 13: 9780312545703
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304