Ava and the Pickpocket
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Probably how to tell someone's credit card number without seeing it. Wait a second. So you couldn't right now tell me my credit card number? Well, not on radio. That would be illegal. But you could? Yes. This is Ava Doe. For a while in her 20s, she was a pickpocket. I had stolen a guy's watch on the Vegas Strip. And it was a good deal.

three, four minutes after I had stolen it. And he realized that his watch was missing. And he was shocked. So you were practicing on the Las Vegas Strip? Sometimes, but not all the time. It's very dangerous to do so. I wouldn't recommend it. Ava didn't keep the watch. She wasn't stealing for money. She was stealing because she was good at it. She was so good at it that people would pay to watch her work. But she says that got old.

So she came up with a new idea. I figure I could pickpocket information. That's what you do now? That's right. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. My parents wanted me to be a doctor, obviously. They eventually found out what I do, but not after I ensured that I could make a really good living. You know, immigrant parents and all. I'm not a doctor, but... Yeah, but look, I bought a house. Until she was 13, Ava and her parents lived in Vietnam...

I should say there's no Vietnamese word for magic. There's only a Vietnamese word for illusion, and there's a Vietnamese word for miracle. Eva was born four years after the Vietnam War. In Vietnam, it's called the American War. After American troops left, a communist government took over and started trying to unify the country.

I grew up with staunchly anti-communist parents, but I went to school under communist regime, which means that I was exposed to my teachers who would teach me propaganda. And I would go home and my parents would say everything I've just learned was wrong.

She remembers her teachers talking about the communist leader Ho Chi Minh. You know, we were asked to call him Uncle Ho, and there were all these things that Uncle Ho did for the country. And we sang songs to him, and I would go home. My parents would say he was a mass murderer, and he had committed all these war crimes. And so I was exposed to these different perspectives on the same set of reality very early.

Which was confusing for a child. Right, because you go to school and your teachers are, I mean, you trust that your teachers are teaching you things that you should know. I mean, this is why you go to school. Absolutely, yes. And it was emotionally confusing as well because I liked my teachers, I liked my parents, I liked everyone, you know. The day the war ended, a communist military leader said, you have nothing to fear. Between Vietnamese, there are no victors and no vanquished. Only the Americans have been defeated.

Ava's mother and father worried. They knew people who'd been sent to prison camps, also known as re-education camps, because they were thought to be anti-communist, including Ava's grandfather. Ava learned not to talk about her parents' politics. There was this stretch after the war where a lot of Vietnamese people were escaping by boat, the boat people.

Ava didn't know it at the time, but her father's job was to get people to the boats at the Vietnamese shoreline. In order to do this, instead of staying as far as possible from the police, he started trying to get close to them.

She says he once paid an officer for a uniform. And if the police ever caught up to him and his escapees, he would pretend that he was one of them.

There were other things Ava didn't know, like her grandfather's real name. Her whole life, she'd known him by his fake name. He'd moved from North Vietnam to South Vietnam, trying to run from the communists and changed his identity. Ava's mother told her this when she was around 10 years old. I didn't see why it was a secret. I already knew how to keep secrets by then, so I was surprised. I think I thought maybe she didn't think I could lie well enough.

Ava remembers her parents were always talking about moving, leaving Vietnam. I wanted to believe that there was possibly maybe a place in the world where people did say everything that they think and that they weren't running to threats of reality. Maybe there are people who just tell you everything. When she was a teenager, her family got the papers they needed to immigrate to the U.S.,

She remembers saying goodbye to their friends and family. We had put on tennis shoes. I had never worn closed-toe shoes before in my life. We had socks on, and I had a jacket on like I do now, but it was 80, probably 80 to 90 degrees with 90% humidity, and I just remember being hot. They arrived in Seattle in 1992, three days before Halloween. I remember thinking that,

America didn't have any smells. It just smelled like nothing. I didn't smell food. I didn't smell the streets. I didn't smell sweat. And I hadn't ever seen so many yellow leaves. They soon moved to California. Ava was a good student. She went to UCLA for college and wanted to become a psychiatrist. And when she graduated, she stayed in Los Angeles.

And then one day, she visited Las Vegas for a bachelorette party, and a man approached her and her friends. He stole my friend's engagement ring after just what it seemed to be shaking her hand and saying a few sentences with her, and then he gave it back. And I thought this was the most bizarre thing, to give it back. If you could steal something, why would you give it back? I've never met an honest thief, I guess.

I mean, did you immediately, once he gave the engagement ring back, say, how did you do that? I said, why did you give it back? 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? Yes. Okay. She asked me to steal a chocolate covered strawberry for her. Steal it from a VIP table full of people. And he did.

This is now maybe 4 a.m. at an after-hours Las Vegas nightclub, and everything felt a little bit half-tinged with fabrication, you know? He told her his name was Apollo Robbins. I think he said that I'm a theatrical pickpocket, to which I had no idea what that meant. I didn't know what to make around the premise of Stealing for Entertainment.

Apollo had been working as a kind of magician, specializing in theft. He's been called the best pickpocket in the world. After that first night, what was the next thing you two did together? Did you go on a first date, or do you remember the next time you saw each other? Before we saw each other again, because I lived in L.A. at the time and Apollo lived in Las Vegas...

We had phone calls that lasted an average of four hours. It was anywhere between two to nine hours. We had very long conversations about everything, but a lot of it was about psychology. I thought it was a really peculiar thing to be interested in

deception if you didn't have to grow up with it. And I thought that if you grew up in America and the living was easy, then why would you be interested in cons and scams and I suppose heists? But I knew very little at that time. What did Apollo tell you about why he'd become a magician?

He said that his brothers were thieves. He told her he was from Missouri. His father was a minister, and he had two half-brothers. I had idolized them when I was growing up. They were my much older brothers, and they could do—I saw them do stuff like pickpocketing at a zoo and other things.

Apollo says when he was 14, one of them got into trouble. 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. Around that time, he remembers their house flooding.

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. Apollo says that a man at the magic shop sold him a book about coin magic. And he started studying it and practicing tricks. When...

I was like 12 or so. I shoplifted some cigarettes and this 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. They had been underneath my arm and the back of them. And then when he started to check me, I dropped them in his apron. And it got me out of the store. And that's, it's reverse pickpocketing. I was putting something on him.

So when I started magic, I decided, let me see if I can bring some of that putting things on people, taking things off people that I had seen. I had seen it mostly with my brothers. And I didn't have the nervousness. I saw other magicians who tried to do those things. 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.

When he was 22, Apollo left Missouri and moved to Las Vegas. Years later, he got Ava's number at the bachelorette party. And then they started getting to know each other during those long phone calls. 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. The Magic Castle is an invitation-only club for magicians. We actually visited for our episode, The Shell Game. It's in an old mansion in Hollywood.

What stood out to me that evening was Apollo made a point to turn off his cell phone and put it away. And I don't know that I had been on a date. I didn't date a lot, but I hadn't been on a date where someone did that.

Did the fact that Apollo was a professional in this deception and pickpocketing make you nervous when you first started seeing each other? Did you find yourself thinking, well, maybe he's just using me, deceiving me. He's good at this. It definitely made me nervous. It made me nervous thinking about what else does it mean if I continue this relationship long term? We'll be right back.

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Get 25% off your first month for a limited time at ritual.com slash criminal. Start Ritual or add Essential for Women 18 Plus to your subscription today. That's ritual.com slash criminal for 25% off. After their date at the Magic Castle, Ava Doe went back to Las Vegas to visit Apollo Robbins. He asked her if she wanted to go see his friends Penn and Teller. 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? Tyler 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. I said, do you trust me?

And she said yes, so she put it on. I lied. I didn't trust him. But she put it on. They ended up driving up to a mountain cabin he'd rented to surprise her. And the surprises didn't stop. Well, he stole my watch. He stole my jewelry often. So I stopped wearing jewelry just to see what else he would steal.

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. Apollo had read an old book called Whiz Mob, which explains slang used by teams of pickpockets on the street. He read a lot of books about magic and crime.

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? He started thinking about putting his own team together.

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. You know, we started hanging out with all these different people. So some of them were thieves. One was...

was a hacker, one was a cannon, which is the lingo for a thief who can steal all by himself. He doesn't need anyone else on the team. One was a really renowned card hustler. His name was Rod the Hop, and he was very famous for this one move called the hop.

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 is Kevin Mitnick. We had Joe, Ponchop Joe, who was very good at running crooked carnival-type scams. We had Joe Moves, who was one of the last guys who worked with Titanic Thompson, who's 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.

Ava had moved to Las Vegas, and she and Apollo were living together. They called the group their brain trust. They said there wasn't a real structure to their meetings at first. They just wanted to get people talking to each other. They've made observations about people for all of their life and for high consequences. So I'm trying to learn what is it that they're seeing in people, because I'm trying to learn to see the same thing.

Eva says she asked a lot of questions. Because what magic and crime share is the, you, whether it's, whatever the consequences, and the consequence in crime is much more severe than it is in magic. But you are trying to, you

you know, to put it in plain language, get away with something. You know what it's like to try to get away with something. And when you meet each other, when you meet another person who's been trying to do that, you feel it.

The idea for the brain trust was that they would consult for security companies, speak at law enforcement conventions, put on demonstrations and lectures. Everyone leaves it at the door. Where you work, who you steal from, what you steal, we leave it at the door when we talk about skills. But Apollo says that not everyone in the group got along.

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. Do you remember, Ava, a time when you asked another magician or thief or con artist, you know, one of these guys, why they did what they did and what their answer was?

Yes, I remember asking Rod, who was in full transparency a really good friend of ours. I said to him, I said, Rod, you could do anything else you want probably. Why are you cheating slot machines? And he said, he never gave me the answer I wanted, but what he said was, I'm just going to do this until this. And it was always some variation of that.

that he's just going to do this until this time. He did have that kind of perpetual goal of, but if I could just beat the bill validator on the slot machine, because I got that one little thing, I just got to accomplish that before I end. We always talked about how it was like the old grifter movies where they just have to pull this one last con. Abe and Apollo also traveled around the world looking for people for the brain trust. Once, they went to Spain to try to talk to pickpockets.

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 dominoes.

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. 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 used is tugging on the sleeve. And that indicates tug on the sleeve, I need you to meet me back at a spot. 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. So he had a translator who said, "Have him meet me for dinner." When we had dinner with him, it was fascinating because I asked him, "Do you hang out with any pickpockets?"

And he said, "No, I don't know any of them." And his tone was interesting. And I said, "Okay." And he said, "Oh, you think I'm like them?" I said, "No, not at all." He said, "Yeah, I'm not like them. I don't steal from people."

And I said, you don't. And he said, no, people play my game. They will take the money out of their pockets and put it down and play my game. I don't put my hand in their pockets. Apollo and Ava say that the members of the group had an unspoken agreement. While they were involved in the brain trust, they wouldn't break the law. 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. 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.

By then, for Ava, things had changed. When I met Apollo, I was still thinking that I would become a psychiatrist, that I would work in a clinical setting. I didn't think that I would shift gears. But as she was getting to know Apollo, she changed her mind. I've always been a watcher. So I just watch. And then one day...

He was performing something. I walked away because I had a phone call. When I came back, I saw a detail in the way he handled something and I figured out how it worked. She was interested in how people responded to him. There was this vulnerable moment where people are exposed to a shift in what they thought is real. So I wanted to do that. She started off learning how to pickpocket.

But then she got tired of it. It was a gender problem. The performing space that I often performed in was corporate parties, which had many men. And I didn't love the responses I would get when someone realized I had been in their pocket. Instead, Ava became a kind of magician called a mentalist.

All of the routines you would see a mentalist perform are more things that your mind fools you. Not so much in sleight of hand. It uses some sleight of hand, but mostly psychological. Give me an example. I mean, of a simplistic... Someone might pretend to read your mind and...

Someone might pretend to have psychic phenomenon. Someone might move an object with their mind on the table, that kind of thing. She remembers one time when she was working a party. She'd ask someone to think about their mother's maiden name. And the person, the lady that I was performing for, she, when I said her mother's maiden name back in full, she said, okay. And I thought I failed her.

But she was stunned. And I realized then that, I realized at that moment that if I wanted an applause, maybe mentalism isn't always the thing. People don't applaud mentalism. I don't know why exactly. I mean, I have some theories about why they don't applaud, but most people are quietly stunned. When we met Ava in the studio, we asked her to show us one of her tricks.

She told me to pull out my credit card and hold it so only I could read the numbers. And then she recited the number. Before we even started the interview, Ava handed me a piece of paper and asked me to draw something on it and not show her. I put the drawing in my pocket. And then, near the end of the day, we sat down together again. She put my hand on her wrist and asked me to think about the picture. Then she drew almost exactly what I had drawn, a dog.

For a while, Eve and Apollo performed together

But Apollo says Ava liked to make spreadsheets and plan ahead, and he liked to make up a show on the fly. They decided they were better off doing shows alone. Then they got married. Do either of you, I mean, do you ever manage to trick each other? I mean, is it possible? 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. And he's kept it. Yeah.

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. We get this question a lot. Do we still get fooled? I look to get fooled at least once a day. In 2016, Ava and Apollo told their friends and family they were having a baby. They invited everyone over for the baby shower and made another announcement.

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. Then we had one of them draw the name out of the box 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 that all came out that all said Maya. How old are you, Maya? Seven. We'll be right back.

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with Kara Swish, a touch more with Sue Bird and Megan Rapinoe, not just football with Cam Hayward, and more presented by Smartsheet. Hello. The Vox Media podcast stage at South by Southwest is open to all South by Southwest badge holders. We hope to see you at the Austin Convention Center soon.

You can visit voxmedia.com slash S-X-S-W to learn more. That's voxmedia.com slash S-X-S-W. The Republicans have been saying lots of things. Just yesterday, their leader said he wants to own Gaza. The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip.

And we will do a job with it, too. We'll own it. On Monday, the Secretary of State said an entire federal agency was insubordinate. USAID in particular, they refuse to tell us anything. We won't tell you what the money's going to, where the money's for, who has it. Over the weekend, Vice President Elon Musk, the richest man on Earth, tweeted about the same agency that, you know, gives money to the poorest people on Earth. We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.

Could gone to some great parties. Did that instead. But what have the Democrats been saying? People are aroused. I haven't seen people so aroused in a very, very long time. Huh. That's a weird way to put it, Senator. We're going to ask what exactly is the Democrats' strategy to push back on Republicans on Today Explained. Ava Doe and Apollo Robbins' daughter, Maya, joined us in the studio. What grade are you in?

First grade. First grade. And do you like school? Mm-hmm. What's your favorite thing? Mostly math. Do you ever do magic at school for your friends? I do, but they say that's not magic. Eve and Apollo told us every year on Maya's birthday they teach her a new trick, so we asked to see one. Do you have a calculator? On my phone. Okay. Does that work? Yeah. Okay, do you want me to bring it up?

Yeah, but just don't show me. Okay, I won't show you, I promise. Okay, wait a second, I'm going to get it right now. Okay, okay, I'm ready. How is your math? It's not that good. Well, that's okay. Okay. Okay, think of a number between 1 and 10, but don't tell me. Okay. This will be your secret number. Now double it. Okay. Add 14. Got it? Yep. Okay, divide it in half. Okay. Do you remember your secret number? Yes.

Subtract that from the number you have. I did it. Okay, I might need to get a little close. Okay. Hold out your finger like that. The answer is seven. That's right. How did you do that? You know, do you ever think to yourself, well, I'm really good at keeping secrets and I'm good at magic, but because my parents are really good too, I'm not going to get away with it? Not all the time.

Do you sometimes tell mommy to play a game with you but not read your mind? You say, no mind reading. Yes, I do. Ava told us that sometimes Maya asks to learn certain tricks.

There's one they call a cups and balls routine, where the magician places cups over balls and makes them disappear. And she, you know, the trick requires a lot of practice. And she had talked to me earlier that day about how do you practice. So I told her that one of my magic teachers told me that you should practice until you get it right seven times in a row. And

Later that day, she had taken a piece of paper and drawn out a series of rows and columns, and she was marking Xs and check marks in these squares for all of the times that she had gotten the different phases of the cups and balls routine correctly.

I think I was so incredibly surprised at the science, the scientific approach that she was taking. We asked Apollo and Ava if it's important to them that Maya learns magic, like a family business. But they told us it's about something different. 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.

What are some of the ways that we misperceive reality? Because that's what magic is taking advantage of. 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? I mean, do you think in the beginning your relationship changed?

Do you think, Ava, if you had said, you know what, I'm not interested in any of this, I want to be a farmer, you know, or a million other things, that the relationship would have worked as well as it did, as well as it had? I mean, implicit in the workings of your relationship, is it both your interest in this topic, in deception, in

In all the psychology of it, you know, in magic, in tricks. I'm going to honestly answer this question, Apollo. Sure, yeah, yeah. Which is, no, I don't think it would have worked as well. You know, you only know the one door that you open, right?

But I think that if we weren't both aligned in the same interest, I think that we would have been attracted to each other for a while. And I don't know how long that while would have lasted. I just don't think that we would have this connection. I think I'm always kind of amazed by how much we can still talk.

If both of you right now decided that you didn't care about rules or the law and you weren't nervous about it, could you take off with Maya and make yourselves incredibly rich and go off and live a wonderful life on a deserted island? Sure.

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. 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. Yeah, and I think the other dimension to Phoebe is that, you know, we have other choices.

I always wonder what would happen if we have no other choice. I don't know that I could, you know, 100% with certainty definitively say that, no, if I had no other choice, I wouldn't do something that could benefit myself breaking the law because...

I had the skill to do it. Those people that we met, a lot of them didn't have choices. Do you feel like both of you are rather insulated from being conned or pickpocketed? Not at all. I think we know more about the different kinds of things and we might recognize when a game is being run.

But we will have moments in our life where we're vulnerable, when our blind spots will be activated, and when we're not looking for it. And those are good times to be targeted. 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 is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Zajico, Lily Clark, Lena Sillison, and Megan Kinane. Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. And you can sign up for our newsletter at thisiscriminal.com slash newsletter.

If you want to see videos of Ava, Apollo, and Maya showing me and Lauren magic, join Criminal Plus at criminal.com slash plus. If you join, you'll be supporting our work, and you'll be able to listen to Criminal, This Is Love, and Phoebe Reads a Mystery without any ads, plus you'll get bonus episodes. These are special episodes with me and Criminal co-creator Lauren Spohr telling stories from the last 10 years of working together. You can find out more at thisiscriminal.com slash plus.

We're on Facebook and Twitter at Criminal Show and Instagram at criminal underscore podcast. We're also on YouTube at youtube.com slash criminal podcast. Criminal is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.