Description

Wayne B. Yeager has been the victim of pickpockets, and having been burned, developed a burning desire to learn how pickpockets work.This is not about illusionist’s tricks, street or stage magic, or any other entertainment. This book is about how criminals work. There is a lot in common between a sleight of hand artist and a pickpocket, but the ends are very different. This book shows the gamut of techniques for acquiring wallets and watches, along with some other criminal methods in great detail. Yeager also goes into methods pickpockets use for practicing their craft.Conceptually, this interested me for several reasons. I’m an amateur illusionist, and have toyed with adding sleights from this area to my repetoire. In the military, camouflage, denial, and deception are of great professional interest, and pickpockets use similar concepts at a micro- rather than macro-level. And I travel in big cities and outside the U.S. from time to time and am interested in the mischief criminals can get up to, and how to avoid it.I’m not quite ready to work on this sort of effect, yet, but for the other two areas, this book is brilliant. For camouflage, denial, and deception, each technique in this book could be used as a case study, and can be related to techniques employed by foreign militaries (as discussed in Surprise Attack: The Victim’s Perspective). As a book on self-protection from petty criminals, it is first rate, as it explores how the criminals look at ‘marks’ and how they operate rather than just a grab bag of dubious techniques.