Grift rap

[Times photo: Brendan Fitterer 2002] James Swain has enough “grift sense” (expertise in scams and cheating) to make a good living at it, but, he says, “I’m not a cheater; I’m a writer.”

By BILL DURYEA, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published April 17, 2003

James Swain uses his mystery novels to expose - and expound on - the evils of gambling.

TAMPA -- With one hand, James Swain holds a deck of cards in the air, divides it in two and splices the halves back together, all the while explaining how casinos in Las Vegas lose $100-million a year to gambling cheaters.

"That they know about," he says, as he begins to extract four aces from the deck by legerdemain too slick to ruin with a leaden explanation. Then he transforms what looks like four aces into a straight flush, ace-of-hearts high.

"That's magic," he says to the small crowd gathered a couple of feet from him at the Barnes & Noble in Northdale.

"This is cheating," he says, launching into a demonstration of how a band of "crossroaders" (cheaters, in gambling parlance) managed to bilk a South African casino out of $30-million by concealing high-value chips inside hollowed-out stacks.

"This went on for more than two years," Swain says of the chip scam. "You know how they finally got caught? They kept a ledger of their take. It's the nature of cheating. They don't trust each other."

Watching Swain, one comes to realize that he has enough "grift sense" (expertise in scams and cheating) to make a good living at it.

"I'm not a cheater," Swain says. "I'm a writer."

One can argue about which vocation, over time, is compensated better, but right now Jim Swain is making a killing as a mystery writer.

Sucker Bet, his third novel featuring ex-cop and freelance scam-buster Tony Valentine, has just been released by Ballantine Books. His fourth, Candy Store, is written and ready for publication next year. In the meantime, there's talk of taking Valentine to the big and little screens.

His latest novel begins with a lesson in cheating.

A blackjack dealer at the Micanopy Indian reservation casino (any resemblance to the Miccosukee tribe is purely coincidental) is purposefully dealing a statistically improbable number of winning hands to a loutish former rock 'n' roll drummer, who is being softened up for an even bigger con.

In fairness, it can't be called a lesson in cheating, because the reader does not learn how the dealer, an experienced card "mechanic," manipulated the cards so successfully. The lesson is delayed, of course, because the dealer is dead within eight pages.

Not long afterward, Tony Valentine's phone is ringing at his home in Palm Harbor. Reluctantly, he agrees to venture into the physical and moral swamp of South Florida.

Like his part of Florida, Valentine is not too flashy. He doesn't smoke or drink. He's older and a little creakier in the joints. What he does have is an uncanny ability to spot a cheater. Loaded dice, marked cards, "dealing the deuces" (the second card from the top), Valentine learned all the tricks when he worked as a detective in Atlantic City.

"Somebody said to me that Tony is a moral compass in a world of slime," Swain, 46, says.

In this regard, he is an extension of his creator's value system, which runs counter to the book's epigram from Canada Bill Jones: "It's morally wrong to allow suckers to keep their money."

In Swain's books, unlike the far darker world of Jim Thompson, author of The Grifters, the house odds favor good over evil. Valentine, as the moral arbiter, came to life at the urging of Swain's wife, Laura. After reading the first chapters of Grift Sense, which initially focused on two cheaters, she told Swain, "They're breaking the law." Point taken; no one will empathize with the criminal. She pointed to the character of the "grifter hunter" who appeared on Page 72, and a protagonist was born.

Swain's familiarity with cheating is purely academic. Since the day in 1987 he saw a crossroader muck his cards at a high-stakes blackjack table, swapping a winning pair for the cards he was dealt, Swain has been as fascinated by the technical skill of cheating as much as the sociopathic dexterity of a grifter to "lie 24 hours a day."

As Valentine unravels the scams within the scams (and it's not all cards; there's game-show fixing and rigged college basketball, too), Swain has a chance to discuss some of his pet peeves, among them the unregulated, and therefore suspect, Indian casinos, of which there are some 300 around the country.

In one particularly righteous moment in Sucker Bet, Valentine explains to the Micanopy's tribal elders how their dealers were cheating the customers and the tribe. It's a lesson in basic blackjack principles with a nifty twist that cognoscenti should even enjoy. But Valentine doesn't leave it at that.

"The fact is, gentlemen, you're running a crooked operation. You need to clean up your act, or risk getting exposed and ruining it for all the other Indian casinos around the country," Valentine says. "'The fact is you're all guilty, either of stupidity or of not having enough common sense to police yourselves more closely."

Despite his close association with casinos and their denizens (they are the source for his material), Swain is not eager to see casino gambling take root in his adopted state.

"Each year, 15 percent of casino employees are fired for reasons related to cheating," he says.

"It's why I'm so against casino gambling in this state. It corrupts everybody."

If there is a weakness in Swain's otherwise brisk plotting, it's a tendency toward the didactic. More than once he stages a conversation for the sole purpose of elucidating another bit of scamming lore.

But even in these moments, the reader is getting something she hasn't read before. And the reader is most often female, Swain says, if the audience at his readings is any indication.

"They like Tony's honesty, and they like the strong women characters that I surround Tony with," he says.

At the reading in Northdale, Swain pulls out the stops for his finale. It's a demonstration of how card players can read body language, known as "tells," to divine what cards their opponent holds.

He asks someone in the audience to memorize a card from the deck. Swain spreads the cards face-up on the table and then asks the person to scan the cards until he has found the one he memorized.

Looking only at the man's eyes, Swain reaches down and plucks out the six of diamonds.

"Do you play cards, Jeff?" he says to the man. "You shouldn't. You flare your nostrils."

Like his books, Swain makes it look easy.

Mystery writer James Swain will demonstrate his card-handling and sign his new book, Sucker Bet, at 7 p.m. April 25 at Borders, 909 N Dale Mabry Highway, Tampa.

© St. Petersburg Times. All rights reserved.