In magic circles, Robbins is regarded as a kind of legend. Psychiatrists, neuroscientists, and the military study his methods for what they reveal about the nature of human attention.
[...]
Josh grew increasingly befuddled, as Robbins continued to make the coin vanish and reappear—on his shoulder, in his pocket, under his watchband. In the middle of this, Robbins started stealing Josh’s stuff. Josh’s watch seemed to melt off his wrist, and Robbins held it up behind his back for everyone to see. Then he took Josh’s wallet, his sunglasses, and his phone. Robbins dances around his victims, gently guiding them into place, floating in and out of their personal space. By the time they comprehend what has happened, Robbins is waiting with a look that says, “I understand what you must be feeling.” Robbins’s simplest improvisations have the dreamlike quality of a casual encounter gone subtly awry. He struck up a conversation with a young man, who told him, “We’re going to Penn and Teller after this.”
[...]
When Robbins hits his stride, it starts to seem as if the only possible explanation is an ability to start and stop time. At the Rio, a man’s cell phone disappeared from his jacket and was replaced by a piece of fried chicken; the cigarettes from a pack in one man’s breast pocket materialized loose in the side pocket of another; a woman’s engagement ring vanished and reappeared attached to a key ring in her husband’s pants; a man’s driver’s license disappeared from his wallet and turned up inside a sealed bag of M&M’s in his wife’s purse.
[...]
By most reckonings, the first performer to make picking pockets the centerpiece of his act was an English magician of French extraction named Fred Brezin, who started performing in London, in 1906, billing himself as “The Original and First Pickpocket.” A Hungarian Jew named Adolph Herczog, who performed as Dr. Giovanni, made a splash in England in the nineteen-twenties by stealing a tiepin from the Prince of Wales, and went on to become a fixture of night clubs in the United States. The heyday of theatrical pickpocketing came after the Second World War. By far the most famous exponent was a bushy-haired Serbian named Borislav Milojkowic, who went by the stage name Borra, King of the Pickpockets, and became a star of night clubs and circuses throughout Europe. He was able to snatch a victim’s eyeglasses from his face without his realizing it. Robbins, who has studied tapes of Borra’s act, recognizes in him a kindred spirit, and has made the eyeglasses steal a regular part of his own act, adding a seemingly impossible twist: sunglasses
[...]
