Jamy on CBS “48 Hours”
Originally published 5.21.2019
In 1993, the Times Square Business Investment District started a campaign to clean the Three-Card Monte operators out of Times Square, and they retained me to serve as Monte demonstrator at the press conference, which in turn was picked up as an AP wire story with my photo accompanying it around the country.
Producers at CBS “48 Hours” were, if I recall, already at work on a story on street scams, because they had some new technology with a tiny camera embedded in a baseball cap, and a very skilled shooter who could use it to get undercover footage of the games that were a commonplace in the city in those days. They saw the story in the New York Times, I believe, and tracked me down. I’ve always liked this story, and my footage was shot at Mostly Magic, the magic club on Carmine Street in Greenwich Village, owned by the magician Imam, where I performed as a regular on Wednesday nights in 1992 when I returned to NYC from Washington DC, and remained until the club closed in ’94 after a 17-year run. (Their closure eventually inspired the creation of Monday Night Magic in 1997.)