We magicians have a tendency to gossip. That is an undisputable fact. Sometimes we hear a rumor, and before we know what has actually happened, ugly factoids about various magicians, manufacturers and dealers have become fact and reputations have been trashed. This is really unfortunate.

Rather than post anything about current "offenses," I will tell you about a situation that I was involved in several years ago. One of my inspirations was a fellow named Cleve Haubold. He was an actor, a playwright and a magician. He performed under the name Van Cleve. One of his signature pieces was a routine called "The Miracle of the Little Orange Mouse," which is found in one of the early balloon sculpting books. Shortly after my wife and I saw him perform this at the TAOM convention, Dr. Ralph Marcom came to Houston to perform at our annual magic club Christmas banquet. Among the items he did was Cleve's routine.

I could not attend the banquet, because I was working, but my wife went. When I got home, she was in a rage. "That Marcom had the audacity to do Cleve's litte orange mouse routine. How DARE he!!!" So I had no compunction in telling people that Ralph Marcom was a knockoff artist. Later, I learned that MarcoM was the co-author of the routine, even though his name was not on it in the book. I also learned that if he had purchased the book, he would have had the right to perform the routine. Ralph and his wife Gloria were amused by the whole thing. They praised my wife's sense of ethics, even though they were a bit misplaced. Ralph is now one of my best friends, and we still chuckle over this. But it could have turned out much different.

And I could have checked with him first.

Recently, a French magician came under attack for using Ted Lesley's marking system without permission. This had resulted from a misunderstanding. The magician showed Ted the way he had adapted Ted's system. Ted said somthing to him that meant he thought it was a nice idea. The fellow somehow got the idea that Ted had approved his use of the system and had given him permission to use it. This was not the case. However, later he paid Ted a fee, and now the deck that he made is perfectly ethical. Unfortunately, Ted did not tell me that he had been paid a fee until I mentioned on the Café that the deck had been produced without Ted's permission. The parties involved e-mailed me and explained the situation. I retracted my accusations. In that case, Ted should have told me about it, because we had discussed it at length during the six weeks we were on the road with his lecture.

The problem with rumors is that people do not check the facts. In both of these cases, people's reputations could have suffered.

How many of you have gotten the e-mail about PBS losing part of its funding? Did you know that this e-mail started in 1996, and is no longer valid. Still people pass it around without questioning it. This e-mail and others that are similar still are passed around the net. When you get one of these, go to Snopes.com and check it out.

The same thing happens on this forum with new tricks. A trick will not even be released, and the "experts" will start tearing it apart. Check out these two links:
Here!
and here!

Note how much of each link was posted before the tricks were in circulation.

So, the next time you hear that "Manufacturer A" has knocked off "Manufacturer B," get the facts from both parties. Sometimes things are not as they seem.

I have recently been called to task by members of this forum and other parts of the internet for hypocrisy and having a set of double standards. Some of this was based on a complete misinterpretation of the previous post about "getting the rest of the story," which they thought referred to a particular incident. It actually referred to something completely different, but I'll let that pass. Actually, it proves my point, in a way.

These people seem to think that because the people they are accusing of various "high crimes and misdemeanors" are friends of mine, that I am ignoring the situation and not taking them to task. This is not the case at all.

Every time I have pointed out an alleged thief or knockoff artist in any of my writings, it has been done after all avenues of restitution have been tried unsuccessfully.

Until the parties in this situation have finished their negotiations, I am going to stay out of it. Once it is over, I will comment. To do so prematurely would not be of any benefit whatsoever to anyone.

The situation that I refer to in the second post of this thread has been brought nearly to a close. The party who had done most of the accusing has determined that he had been misled and has apologized to the other party. Both of these gentlemen have shown admirable behavior, all in all.

This leads to "the rest of the rest of the story." Much of the accusation was done on blogs. The allure of the blog is that it affords relative anonymity. I will admit that I was tempted to enter the blogging arena. But I have decided against that. I will make any and all assertions face to face with the accused.

The main noisemakers in this particular case were pseudonymous bloggers who hide behind fake judicial robes and cutesy names. They are the internet equivalent of eunuchs. They are not man enough to reveal their true identities. I stay away from the blogs. I don't have the time to mess with these pseudonymous playgrounds of the prestidigitatorial pundits.

They seem to think that they can libel people at will, without any fear of repercussion. Most people on the net do not know that there are cybertrails that are just as easy to follow as paper trails if you know how. My brother in law literally wrote the book on network and systems security for IBM. He knows cybertricks that the hackers would love to learn.

The only two bloggers in magic that I have any respect for at all are Glenn Bishop and Steve Pellegrino. I may not agree with what they say, but at least they sign their own names to their blogs.

The ones who don't will sing in the "Boys' Choir of Cyberspace" until they change their ways.

Have things really changed all that much in the last hundred years or so? Sure, we have the internet and search engines, but a hundred years ago, they had newspapers and the telegraph. I know that there wasn't as much information going around then as there is now, but people were much more careful with the media than they are with the internet.

Any fool with an e-mail account can have his own web site. Any fool with $10.00 can have his own domain. And nobody regulates what he puts up on it. So, unless you know your stuff, you really can't trust the information you find on the internet. Not that the newspapers and magazines of 100 years ago were that much better, but at least they had an editorial staff that filtered out a lot of the really off-base material.

So, what does this have to do with this thread?

Well, it concerns people pinching other people's material.

If you have the October 2005 issue of Genii magazine, there is an article in it about the Bangs sisters. These were a pair of fraudulent mediums who specialized in "spirit paintings." They were good at it. They made a bunch of money. It took David P. Abbott several years to figure out how they did it. He casually and innocently revealed the basic secret to an Englishman named William Mariott, who took it back to England and built the apparatus, apparently without Abbott's knowledge or approval, and proceded to tour the country with his demonstration of how the spirit paintings were done.

Mariott even had the gall to license this pirated piece to P.T. Selbit, who presented it in his stage show as the creation of "Dr. Wilmar." (William Mariott) David P. Abbott actually saw one of these performances, and accepted Selbit's explanation of how he got it in a gentlemanly fashion.

So, have we progressed since then? I don't really know. It took Abbott several years before he was certain that his idea had been pinched. And magic was not his sole source of income. So it probably didn't hurt as much as it would had he depended on this for his livelihood. The Bangs sisters certainly didn't appreciate it!

This doesn't mean that magicians did not sue one another back then. There were a series of suits and countersuits between Selbit and Goldin over who owned the rights to the Sawing a Woman in Half. Their methods were radically different. The result of their suits was that neither of them got wealthy.

But their attorneys did.

There has been a lot of fuss kicked up over the recent severing of ties between a well-known magician and a very large discount magic company.

The well-known magician took his position with the VLDMC against the advice of many of his friends who warned him about various and sundry alleged offenses, such as ripoffs, etc. The well-known magician knew pretty much what he was getting into, but he took the position anyway.

Now, he alleges that the VLDMC has violated various agreements they had and is now allegedly manufacturing his props, themselves. His evidence is that the VLDMC lists one or two of his items as current best-sellers, but they haven't ordered any of them from him for sometime. The VLDMC claims that they are not manufacturing the props. They claim, in fact, that they have NEVER manufactured knockoff merchandise, and that he had asked them to engage in price-fixing.

What is the truth?

I don't know.

They both could be telling the truth to a certain degree. Now I'm not a moral relativist. But I do know ways to say things that are not completely truthful without actually lying. For example, if the VLDMC did not actually manufacture ANYTHING, but had someone else manufacture it for them, then they could say that they had not manufactured any of his items.

On the other hand, price-fixing is a different kind of accusation. Many manufacturers sell their props with an agreement that the resellers will charge a certain price for them. This is not the same as price-fixing. Price-fixing is what occurs when a large portion of any industry agrees to charge an artificially high price in order to gouge the buyers -- such as what happens when the members of the diamond cartel decide that they will all charge a high price for diamonds. This is one guy who is asking his resellers to sell things for a certain price. Price-fixing also occurs when a large group of manufacturers decides to charge an artificially low price for a product in order to freeze out the competition, such as we have seen with certain manufacturers of television sets in foreign countries.

Price-fixing would be what you would have if all the manufacturers of TT's decided to charge $10 each for them, or if all of the manufacturers of TT's in, say, Argentina, decided to ruin the Japanese TT manufacturers by agreeing to flood the market with 10 cent TT's.

But price-fixing is a very easy accusation to make, because it is largely misunderstood.

By now, most of us have seen the e-mail that was circulated explaining what went on. I know that the man was thinking of his son's future when he made the decision to work with the VLDMC. He could see how much a college education was going to cost, so he wanted to put money aside for that. At least, that was the story we got back then.

My question is -- why is he surprised?

A Largely Uncredited Magic Teacher -- Piet Forton

This may be the most controversial post I have ever made to this part of my column, but I must get this off my chest. I have sat on this information for almost six months, now. I had to speak to Piet just to make sure that I had the information correct.

Piet is a three-time FISM winner who lives in Basel, Switzerland. One of his former students has written extensively on cards. I won't mention names, but his books are selling like hotcakes in several languages. For whatever reason, he will not credit Piet with any of the material he has learned from him. Instead, he credits it to other people who learned it from Piet. One example is the "Pop-Out Move." Piet invented it. He popularized it. This was in print a good twenty years before the publication in question appeared. However, Piet doesn't release much of his material to the magical public. He seldom allows anything of his to be published, and he publishes very little, himself.

So he leaves himself open to theft by his students and their confidantes.

The one that really has hurt a couple of people is an item that Piet invented about 40 years ago. He saw John Ramsay perform his Cylinder and Coins at a convention in Eastbourne. He learned the routine and realized that the coins in the gimmick could be improved. So he designed a Ramsay stack that used magnets. He had one of these made by a Swiss jeweler. Not long ago, he showed it to a magician who lives in the US, against the advice of one of his friends. This fellow showed it to a machinist, who is now manufacturing the item -- without credit to Piet Forton.

However, Piet did give one machinist permission to manufacture it. This is Auke van Dokkum of the Netherlands. And other people are accusing Auke of manufacturing it without permission from the person who owns the rights.

Auke's product is completely legitimate. I got the word directly from the man who invented the gimmick.

And that, my friends, is the rest of the story.