Harel and Sarmiento: double trouble
(Credit: Shot by Paul Redmond at the Well)
Harel and Sarmiento co-wrote (with Todd Robbins) "The Modern Con Man: How To Get Something for Nothing," a book that aims to effect a renaissance in these peculiarly American dark arts. These gentlemen are experts in the pool-hall hustle, the train-station grift, the boozy bar bet and every other sort of elegantly fixed wager from days of yore—with a modern twist.
"[It’s] about how you can do these things now," says the smiling Harel, who is dressed in a blue plaid work shirt and resembles a skinny, more naturally comedic Clive Owen. "It's not like you have to be on a steam-engine train 100 years ago."
Since a con is worth a thousand words, the guys set out to educate me in the ways of their world. They produce a box of matches.
"Picking the mark is almost harder than doing the con," says the ultra-calm Sarmiento, who sports a track jacket and looks like a cross between Matthew Broderick and Greg Germann. "If someone's smoking, you know they're gonna go outside and have matches. We have two match cons."
They demonstrate one, asking me to hold a lit match upside down for 10 seconds. It's a challenge I think I'll win easily thanks to a trick I learned years ago involving a gob of spit between the thumb and forefinger. Unfortunately, my method breaks the game's rules; I drop the match early, get a bad case of hot fingers and am then rewarded with the deceptively simple trick to winning this con every time. (The secret is to move the match back and forth a few inches while keeping it inverted.)
"There's one key thing with all these," notes Sarmiento. "There's alcohol involved." You see, cocky drunks aren’t very astute.
Lest you think the majority of the cons are basic or obvious, there are several that are confounding in a backroom-high-jinks sort of way. Australian Blackjack involves picking cards laid on a table, adding up their numerical values and being the first to hit 31. The house, in this case Harel, wins every time, even though he gives me the choice of going first or not.
"A guy sitting in some roadhouse since noon is either gonna be your best friend or your worst nightmare," says Sarmiento. Harel elaborates: "You have to have a conversation—the more natural, the better. Scamming a total stranger can be the hardest thing in the world, but with most cons, you want them to ultimately laugh."
The book covers different environments—bars, card games, college, dating, work, traveling—and features sidebars on a variety topics, such as how not to be a victim, talking your way out of a con gone bad, how to find the right mark and how to up-sell your win (for instance, how to stretch free drinks into free food). While refreshments and a few dollars are standard spoils for a con artist, there is a whole other sort of victory to be had.
"With girls, it's a great icebreaker," Sarmiento says. "Guys never know how to start a conversation with a girl, but when you're doing a con, suddenly there's a crowd around and people are asking what you're doing."
