Apollo Robbins
speaker
34 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Apollo Robbins’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
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?
She asked me to steal a chocolate covered strawberry for her.
I had idolized them when I was growing up through my much older brothers. I saw them do stuff like pickpocketing at a zoo and other things.
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.
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.
When I was like 12 or so, I shoplifted some cigarettes, and a 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. Um, they had been underneath my arm and the back of him. And then when he started to check me, I dropped him 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 the, when I started magic, I decided, let me see if I can bring some of the, that putting things on people, taking things off people that I'd seen. I had seen it mostly with my brothers and, um, 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.
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.
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?
Teller 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. And I said, Do you trust me? And she said yes, so she put it on. I lied.
But she put it on.
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.
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?
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.
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 was 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 was 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.
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.
He did have that kind of perpetual goal of, but if I could just beat the bill validator on the slot machine. He says, I got that one little thing. I just got to accomplish that before I end. We always talked about how that was like the old grifter movies where they just have to pull this one last con.
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 domino. 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.
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