Sherman Powell - Pickpocket School 

 

 

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. [audience chuckle] My name is OT and I'm a retired pickpocket. [audience laughter] I see a lot of you reaching for your wallets right now. But I did say retire, because if I wasn't, you'd be too late anyway. [audience chuckle] Let me tell you how I became acquainted with this sort of way of life.

 

I'm in St. Louis, Missouri, and I was about 15 years old. It was in the summer, around May or June. working in Ray's pool room and these guys came in. There were about six of them. Multi colored outfits, looked like human peacocks coming through the door. [audience chuckle] Beautiful girls with big asses. [audience chuckle] I said, "Oh, shit." Diamond rings on their hands, the cars match the suits, they had bankrolls big enough to choke a horse. I had been confused about what I wanted to be in life.

 

But when I see these guys, I say, "That's the fuck what I want to be. [audience laughter] Whatever they is, that's what I want to be, you know?" So, these guys came in and as faith would have it, they stayed right around the corner from my mother. Where I was staying with my mother, they stayed right around the corner from there. So, I made myself acquainted with them and I became their errand boy. I would run to the store and get the food. I would go take the car, get it washed. I would walk the dogs and all this stuff. And in the process, I would get a little few dollars and I was learning how to cheat in cars. And I was learning how to cheat in dice. I could shoot four pair of dice and I can deal off the top of the deck, and I can deal off the bottom of the deck.

 

And so, I'm sitting there and one night the girls come in and I hear the girls talking about how much she took. She took 1200 out this guy's pocket and the other one says, "She took 600 out this guy's pocket." I say, "Fuck, this car dice shit ain't getting me no money. I want to be a fucking pickpocket. [audience laughter] So, this is what I want to be”. So, I goes to my tutor, I tell him, I say, "I want to be a pickpocket." He said, "You don't know nothing about pickpockets." I said, "I didn't know nothing about cards and dicing. You taught me that, taught me how to pickpocket, right?"

 

 And so, he commences to teach me, but he don't know that much about it himself. You understand what I'm saying? [audience chuckle] And so, I get the basics. But I'm not that good. So, Mardi Gras season rolls around, so we all gets together and we go down to Mardi Gras. And so, he tells me, "Look, I want you to go buy five different costumes." I said, "What?" "Yeah, buy five different costumes. Batman, Superman, all these different types of costumes. You understand what I'm saying? Mickey Mouse and all this stuff." I said, "What? I'm getting out." He said, "In case you get hot in one costume, you could run to the hotel and turn it into another costume. Because it's Mardi Gras time and everybody's in costume."

 

And so, I put it on my Batman costume. And I'm walking down the street and I'm waiting to pick some pockets. And you see this redneck foreman with these beer overalls on and a flat ass. And he's walking down the street, and the wallet is jumping in and out of his pocket like fish out of the stream. You ain't got to do nothing but time the motherfucking grab it. You understand what I'm saying? [audience laughter] Time the mother-- grab the mother-- 

 

And so, I see the police. I know I'm getting hot. So, I run back to the hotel, I change my costume and come back out with a Daffy Duck costume. I get some more while I get hired. I run back to the hotel, come back with a Bugs Bunny costume. Look. So, I'm steady taking wallets to change the costumes, right? And so, at the end of the night, I tell my tutor, I said, "This ain't shit. This was a piece of cake." He said, "Let me tell you one thing. If you think that you was that good, take your ass to New York." He said, "That's what. If you can do it in New York, you can do it anywhere." [audience chuckle] I started packing my fucking bags that night, right? [audience laughter] I'm headed for New York. So, he came and told me, say, "Look, here's a letter of an introduction. You got $500?" I said, "Yeah." "Here's a letter of an introduction. When you get to New York, I want you to go looking for Ralph. He's a gypsy. He'll smooth out your edges because you're not really a pickpocket yet." So, I said, "Okay."

 

So, I get to New York, and I check in the Howard Johnson Hotel on 8th Avenue and 52nd Street. [audience chuckle] The gypsy place is about three blocks down the street there on the same street, 8th Avenue. And so, the next day, I go to the Gypsy Place and it's this little storefront with these two ladies in the front and got Cabot, and they're just reading palms and all this bullshit. [audience chuckle] So, I go in and I tell them, I said, "Look, I'm looking for Ralphy." So, she said, "Wait right here." So, she goes to the back, and Ralphy comes out, and I give them the letter. I give them the $500. Now, Ralphy is a thin, smooth guy. Silk black hair, looks something like Errol Flynn, Pilfer mustache. So, he tells me, "Come on the back." He takes me in the back, and goddamn, all you could see was mannequins everywhere. Mannequins with coats on, mannequins with no coats on, and mannequins with just pocketbooks and mannequins with just pockets. And there's a bunch of little gypsy kids in the corner ranging from 5 to 10. They were picking pockets. No wonder they so goddamn good. They start early, right?

 

And so, he introduces me to this guy called the fat man. And the fat man was to be my teacher, right? So, the fat man comes out, he says, "You a pickpocket?" I said, "Yeah." He said, "Let me see what you know how to do." Now on all these pocketbooks and on all these wallets, if you know there's a bell that you put on baby booties. Well, everything has a bell on the wallets, the pocketbooks. And if you pick something and the bell ring means you're caught. And so, he said, "Let me see what you can do." So, I'm going through these crowd, picking the wallets and picking the pocketbooks and bells ringing like a motherfucker. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. [audience laughter] He said, "You're not a pickpocket." He said, "Yeah, we better start from the beginning."

 

So, fat man teaches me how to and he was graceful. I mean, I could see he would go through a crowd of mannequins, and I mean, like, he was smooth as the panther. And he would go on the ball of his feet like a ballet dancer. And he would go through and wouldn’t have the bell ring, and he'd come out on the other end of the crowd with six or seven wallets. I said, "That's what I want to be like, right? I want to be just like that”.

 

So, every day I would come from 9:00 to 12:00. You understand what I'm saying? I would practice every day from 9:00. Every day from that-- every day with Sunday from 9:00 to 12:00, [audience chuckle] I was there. And he taught me and I learned right in a rug. Sooner or later, I was getting it together. And sometime I would mess up, and he would slap my hand. He'd say, "Gently, boy, gently, like a pianist, you know, you're a fucking pickpocket. If there's only three walls in the world and the Pope has one and The President has one, you supposed to have one. You understand?" [audience laughter] "Yes, sir, I understand." "You know, so you're a pickpocket. That's your art. If you go to heaven and there's professors listening up there, and he says 'I'm a professional doctor.' 'I'm a professional lawyer,' you say, I'm saying, 'God, I'm a professional pickpocket,' so you be a professional with this thing that you're doing." So, after three months of this hard drive from fat man, I finally graduated. He told me, says, "Nothing else I could teach you. You're on your own." I was off the run and the first place I went was Grand Central Station. [audience laughter]

 

I went to Grand Central Station. It was like a pew, it was like a Muslim. It's in Mecca. It was all these people. [audience laughter] I said, "Jesus fucking Christ." So, I went to picking wallets. I was just going through the crowd, hitting wallets, getting wallets. And I stayed there for about two-three weeks until I got hot. I know I got hot because police started watching me and stuff. So, I said, "It's time for me to leave." So, then I picked another spot, 57th Street and Third Avenue. So, that became comfortable with doing bus stops and stuff. So, I was picking pockets there, but I stayed there quite a while, and people went to complain. So, the police set up a bus for me. They sent some undercover police to get me, right?

 

So, I'm on the bus one day. It's crowded, packed like this place is now. It's packed. You understand what I'm saying? And I'm going through the crowd, and I hit this old lady. She got on the pearls and beautiful diamond earrings. So, I hit mom and get this while I close her back. And when you close back, you have to call ah-ooh to make sure you don't hear the sound, right? [audience chuckle] Close that back. So, I hit this guy inside pocket. I spin around and get this guy's back pocket. So, I'm coming through, and at the corner of my eyes, I see these lights turn. And I noticed this is police light, right? I say, "Oh, shit." Then the bus driver starts to pull it over to the curb where it ain't no bus sign at. I said, "Oh, shit. I'm fucking busted. Right?”

 

Then I look at the corner of my eyes again. Here comes the guy with a crew cut. I know he's the fire bowl, I know he's the police. He's trying to get to the crowd to get to me. So, as he's rushing toward me, I'm rushing toward the front. But as I'm rushing, I'm putting wallets back. Bop, bop, bop, [laughter and applause]. I put everything back, right? I put all the fucking wallets back.

 

So, by the time I get to the front door and the sergeant get over, he said, "Grab him. We got inside, we got him." So, the side of grabs. I said, " Let me go. I haven't did anything." "Fuck it, you ain't did it. Search him." So, he searched himself side. "He don't have no fucking wallets on him." "I thought you said he had wallet." He said, "I'm telling you, I am watching him." So, he said, "Wait a moment." So, he goes to the lady, said, "Check your pocketbook." She said, "I got my wallet." She said, "Check it." "I got my wallet." "Get off the fucking bus. [audience chuckle] Get off the bus." He said, "Look, I don't want you in this precinct anymore. You understand? If I catch you in this precinct--" I said, "This is a free country." "Do you understand what I'm saying?" I said, "Yes, sir." So, I goes around the corner and I walk out. By the time I get around the corner, I kind of speed up my walk. And I said to myself, I look up, I said, I start laughing. "Well, big man, you might have taught me how to get them out the pocket, but you sure as hell didn't teach me how to put them back. You understand what I'm saying? And if there is just three wallets and The President had one and the Pope, I'll damn sure had a third one."

 

[chuckles] But now I want to tell you that I didn't stop picking pocket by choice. It was due to a deterioration of my health and too much of cocaine and alcohol, [audience chuckle] not to mention a pretty little old lady by the name of Judge Kirkpatrick. She told me, "If you come in this courtroom one more time, I'm going to send you to a tropical island called Rockers." [audience laughter] And so, I felt it was better to stop while I was ahead. So, today I haven't did drugs in about two years, I haven't smoked in two years, I'm with AA. I'm studying now to be a home care attendant, and I go to church every Sunday. And that's my story.