Techniques of the Professional Pickpocket Paperback by Wayne B. Yeager
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Very informative book. I went through it once, got my friends watch (gave back later). The reason this book is worth so much is that unlike other books, it tells you step by step how to pickpocket somebody when you are not trying to perform a magic act. This book gives many practice techniques and acts to get the mark vulnerable. This book gives you the confidence to perform your magic act, in a non-magic-show enviornment.
Very impressive, most books you will find on this sensitive subject are written for the magician, But most of these tricks wont be done on stage. I actually thought I was safe with a chained wallet. This book shows how the criminals REALLY do it. If you were an aspiring magician looking for some new tricks this will benefit you because rather than just giving you some silly gimmicks it shows the very basic tactics, in diversion, team work, and manipulation and allows you to be creative.
This is a very good book. Infact so good I dare call it amazing. It goes far into the details of pickpocketing and all of the finess required. However for almost $300 it is not worth it. At only 70 pages I tore through this book in under an hour. If I dropped that kind of money I would have expected more lasting entertainment. So do as I did and download it online for free and save tons of money.
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 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.
