The Ticket Masters

The black Dodge Ram weaves through traffic at 85 miles an hour like a tailback following a block. Destination: Jacksonville, Florida. The Little General taps his can of Skoal against the steering wheel, a silver Rolex glinting on his wrist. Junior, in faded jeans and mirrored shades, his blond hair cropped with a wave, rides shotgun.

"Hello Moto! Hello Moto!" their phones chirp in unison. The brothers do a double take and burst out laughing. They haven't seen each other in a while and can't believe they've picked the same ring for their brand-spanking-new cells. Which makes it kind of silly, since their $700 Razrs ring practically on the minute.

Crammed in back are three big suitcases, jackets, shirts and two leather shoulder bags with $165,000 in cash and another $70,000 in tickets. No guns. At least none I've been told about.

It's Wednesday afternoon of Super Bowl week. The brothers are ticket brokers, hustlers. This is the first leg of their triple crown--the Super Bowl, followed by college basketball's Final Four and the Masters. You want to be there, they deliver the ticket. Every experience has its price, and the final price of this experience is constantly in flux. Wireless notepad open on his lap, Junior scans ticket prices on TraderDaily.com. Prices seem to be creeping up, but then again he isn't sure the numbers are real--yet. It's a futures exchange. As in the stock market or the Chicago exchange, you can make a killing or get killed. In past years the brothers have made out handsomely on the world's biggest football game. Four out of five Super Bowls, they raked it in. But the older brother, the Little General in this operation, has no idea how this one will turn out. He has plenty of orders for seats priced from $1,800 to $2,300, paid in advance with credit cards and corporate checks by some of his best clients. The $165,000 in cash is to buy the tickets in Jacksonville from fellow brokers and hustlers. "We're in a little trouble on the get-ins," he explained the night before about the lowest-priced seats. "Our cream orders should be fine. Those prices are coming down." It's all a calculated gamble. His main hedge is that he has insisted on late delivery times--mostly Saturday and Sunday--which give him a little more leeway to turn a profit.

There are other risks. As we near Jacksonville, the General takes a call from a broker who sent a runner there to "dig tickets." The runner--and the cash--have gone missing.

"How much cash did he have?" asks the General. "Six figures?"

"Almost."

"Did you check the police and hospitals?"

"Yeah."

"All right. If you need us to do anything, let us know. We'll keep our fingers crossed."

The General hangs up. "I hate bad stories," he says. "That's a bad story."

"That's a very scary story," Junior says. "Maybe he's got a gambling problem."

"Or someone could have rolled him," says the General, spitting into his cup.

The brothers fall silent on that thought. It's too late in the day to squirrel away their $165,000 in a Jacksonville safe-deposit box. And tonight, with hordes of thieves, hookers, gangsters, pickpockets and all manner of con artists descending on this backwater city for our nation's biggest sports extravaganza, we're not exactly staying at Fort Knox. It's February 2, day one of the Super Bowl ticket hustle. The brothers need to buy and deliver about 110 tickets. The countdown begins; kickoff is in just four days.

•

I first meet the Little General in the bedlam of his hometown NBA team's coliseum after a victory at the buzzer. The Little General is not tall. Although he hails from the Midwest, he has a Southern-patrician demeanor about him, and he's square-jawed with bright eyes and a broad grin. Junior is the head turner in the family, with a natural lip snarl and a wicked sense of humor. I know the duo's other brother, a top hedge-fund manager who lives thousands of miles away. At a Christmas party the eldest brother told me about how he'd grown up scalping tickets--and how both his younger brothers followed in his footsteps and never gave up the hustle. And why would they? Brokers at the General's level make $300,000 to $500,000 a year, largely by buying in advance and then reselling blocks of tickets for NBA and college football games. That is their day job, one that leaves ample time for leisure or the vice of their choice. The Super Bowl is where they throw the dice, making or losing as much as $80,000 in a single week.

The Little General is a man who lives by his cell phone, so in the middle of our first few phone conversations he would drop off to do tickets. Once, after an unusually long interruption, he came back on the line. "That was kind of a weird one," he said. He'd just completed the sale of two tickets to Bush's inaugural ball. His attorney friend is buddies with a congressman. Then again, I once called the General on a weekday morning, and he asked me to hold on; I heard muffled voices and then "Get up, get up, get up, get up--get in the hole!" The General's daytime office is his golf club. Except for five madcap days at the Super Bowl and the whirlwind, back-to-back weeks of the Final Four and the Masters, the General mostly works on his swing.

The night of my arrival at the NBA coliseum, we have spoken for just a few minutes when he invites me to join him at his Tuesday-night poker game. On the way out he shares a kiss with the cute waitress. His new Ram is parked out front, a stone's throw from the arena. We cruise a residential neighborhood, and the site of tonight's game might as well have a neon sign on it--two lipstick-red doors with portholes that look as if they were torn from a nightclub. Inside is a felt-covered poker table crowded by eight raucous men. A girl bursting out of her bikini top gives the General his first shot of vodka--with her cleavage. She lowers her breasts to serve up my first refreshment, too.

"I was afraid you might be a bookworm," the Little General says and smiles. "You'll be fine."

The General offers a preview of some of the characters we'll be meeting in the next new days. "Most of the time they won't even know who you are," he says. "I might even say you're the bagman."

The deal

The General is considered a midsize licensed broker. He takes far more risk than smaller brokers who lack the resources or constitution to take dozens or hundreds of advance orders for major events like the Super Bowl. The General's clients are salesmen, businessmen, lawyers and, indirectly, major corporations. His tickets come from some of those same clients, as well as a network of street hustlers and scalpers. In the food chain above the General sit the major national brokers with annual revenue ranging from tens of millions of dollars to $100 million, firms like RazorGator Tickets, Encore Tickets and Ticket City. Recently TicketsNow and StubHub have emerged as big online players.

Some Super Bowl facts: The NFL presold more than 78,000 tickets to the game, though it does not want to say exactly how many or precisely to whom. "It's a private business," says Brian McCarthy of the NFL. "It's not a secretive thing. It's just a business practice."

The NFL sells 13,000 tickets at $600 each and approximately 65,000 at $500, adding up to ticket sales of more than $40 million. If the Super Bowl were a dud, that would be the end of it. But of course it's a massively popular spectacle. Tens of thousands of the some 78,000 tickets are resold through brokers and scalpers to corporations and individuals. The NFL says it "really has no idea" how many tickets are resold, though it eagerly acknowledges that "tickets sold at $500 or $600 are probably woefully underpriced."

Upon winning the AFC Championship in Pittsburgh, the Patriots took possession of 17.5 percent of the Super Bowl tickets, which are held by the NFL in a vault. The math confused me at first. The NFL states that "no tickets are given away. Everyone pays for them." That means owners, players, corporations and fans. So on January 23, or soon after, the Patriots had to pay the NFL for nearly 14,000 tickets--in other words, the team coughed up more than $7 million.

That sounds like a $7 million penalty for making it to the Super Bowl, unless you dig a little deeper. Two thousand tickets would easily take care of each team's players and staff, as well as a number of bigwigs. What do the teams do with their other 12,000 tickets? Neither the Patriots nor the Eagles would comment. Nor would any of the other major entities who pay for NFL ticket allotments--Budweiser, Fox, CBS and Ford. Typical was the response of a Pepsi-Cola spokeswoman, who said, "We don't share information about when we receive tickets and how many we receive."

Despite the official silence, the brokers I interviewed estimate that roughly 25 percent to 30 percent of the allotments--nearly 25,000 tickets--enter what's called the secondary market. The opening market price for those tickets ranged from $1,900 to $6,000. If you take an average final-resale range of $2,500 to $2,600, you come up with a $2,000 average markup. Multiply that by 25,000 tickets and you get $50 million in profit for those who sell and resell those secondary tickets. That's an estimate of how much NFL teams, players, sponsors, brokers, scalpers and fans can make on the difference between a ticket's face value and its street value. In other words, the lucky souls who get NFL allotments--the chance to pay $500 to $600 for strips of cardboard--can easily triple or quadruple their money.

Who gets the tickets depends on who you are. As George Orwell wrote in Animal Farm, "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." When it comes to the Super Bowl, the most equal animals are the owners of the two participating teams, who receive a combined 35 percent. The host city's team gets five percent, and the networks, official (continued on page 176)Ticket Masters(continued from page 86) sponsors and charities combined receive more than 24 percent. The 29 other teams in the league each receive a scant 1.2 percent. Active players--the workhorses--get two tickets each. Super Bowl players get the option to buy another 15 tickets. Fans don't receive a single straight allotment. The 30,000 of them who mailed postcards to the NFL were entered into a drawing for 500 winners (two tickets per winner), a one-in-60 chance to buy. The Eagles and Patriots both say their season-ticket holders were entered in certified drawings to buy some portion of their tickets. Neither would disclose how many tickets fans got the chance to buy. Was it 5,000 or 500? They won't say.

Ticket scalping

The NFL's clandestine method of distributing Super Bowl tickets practically invites team owners, sponsors, advertisers, broadcasters and players to resell their tickets at grossly marked-up prices, an annual reward for being an NFL partner and a kind of insider stock deal. Officially the NFL says it "doesn't have much of a view" on the difference between the tickets' face and street values. Nor does the NFL "give any specific instructions when it delivers the tickets. There wouldn't necessarily need to be." But league policy reminds teams and players that scalping is unethical and, in some states, illegal. "Scalping suggests a desire to profit personally and perhaps illicitly on the coattails of the league's popularity. Such conduct will not be tolerated," states the policy, which adds that scalping "may result in disciplinary action against the violator"--may being the operative word, though Minnesota Vikings head coach Mike Tice was tagged with a $100,000 fine when he admitted to selling some of his 12-ticket allotment for $1,900 apiece.

Any corporation that resells tickets must account for the revenue as income. Legitimate resales--at original pricing--to players, coaches, employees or individuals are fine. Scalping is a gray area. Though legal in many states, it clearly contravenes NFL policy. Unreported cash transactions for any team or corporation that regularly receives NFL ticket allotments would be another matter. The threshold for federal prosecution, says the IRS, is proof that "the suspects did it as a continuing enterprise."

The NFL, the Super Bowl teams and other major corporations know there is a huge resale market for the tickets. If an event has a perceived scarcity of tickets, engineered or not, prices will soar. Antitrust laws were designed to prohibit such anticonsumer activity, which is known as price-fixing. If two or more major players hold products off the market, that is called a conspiracy.

The Hustle

The brothers' Razr phones ring 30 times or more in the half hour after we pick up Junior at the airport. The calls have a wonderful brevity and directness.

"Yeah, how much are they?"

"I'll take the six."

"You think the get-ins are going back up?"

"What's the weather forecast for the game?"

"You're done, Tom. You don't have to call me every day. You're 1,000 percent done."

"Casey wants to know--you want a four-pack for two dimes each?"

"There seems to be a little bit of a spike here."

Gliding on the cacophony of cell phone calls, we sweep in over the gray St. John's River on a wet, miserable afternoon. There's a cruise ship below, and ahead looms Alltel Stadium.

Five minutes later the General pulls up outside NFL headquarters, the Adam's Mark hotel. I clamber after quick-stepping Junior. In the packed bar, he greets John the Mormon. Baby-faced, wearing white Dockers, a banana-color shirt and a brown suede jacket, he looks every bit the high school nerd. The Mormon and Junior start trading tickets and thousands in cash on the table like boys swapping baseball cards, while a couple of large black men at the bar raise their eyes at the spectacle. Trotting back to the car, Junior explains what went down. John the Mormon had a client with a bad pair of seats who wanted the best in the house. Junior knew where he could get his hands on a great pair. So John the Mormon's client said he'd give him $4,000 if he turned his bad ones into great ones. 'John and I sat down and figured that if we lay out $6,500 to buy the two 50-yard-line tickets and our guy gives us $4,000, we're into our two seats for 25," explains Junior, meaning the deal so far has them $2,500 out of pocket. But then he says, "We sold the bad seats for $2,450 each and split the $2,400 profit." That's what they call ticket hustling.

Minutes later the General, who has an internal compass, has found the latest FedEx drop-off. Many deals are contingent on extremely tight deadlines, and the brothers wouldn't trust the U.S. mail in a million years. It's 7:15 P.M., a good 15 minutes before the cutoff, and we're parked in front of the purple-and-orange logo. Junior has half a dozen orders he's readying to go out for morning delivery. He's matching tickets to neatly printed air bills, making sure he has them straight. What's amazing is the faith and nonchalance. If a package is lost or gets sent to the wrong address, $10,000 or more of tickets turns into worthless cardboard. And get this: At 7:27 Junior doesn't even take the air pouches in himself. He talks a street scalper into walking his $40,000 worth of tickets into FedEx.

Hustlers and brokers saunter up to the General and Junior, knocking fists, trashing Jacksonville and asking what the market is doing. A bald guy in a Super Bowl jacket hops in back, just the cash separating us.

"Four guys are missing right now," says the bald guy, "like they got kidnapped or something."

The General tells him he knows about one. "Who else?"

The bald guy mentions a Denver hustler and two others he doesn't know by name.

"Maybe the cops are grabbing people," says Junior.

"How did you hear about the other ones?" asks the General.

"The kid from Denver owes me money," says the bald guy. "He was the first one to go off the board, so I thought maybe he ran off with my money. Then there's another guy. Then they were talking two other guys from Chicago."

And just like that talk turns to where to eat. Fortunately, a call comes in from another broker, a guy I'll call Old Boy, who for the past few weeks has been telling the General he'll need a couple hundred tickets for his major corporate clients but has so far failed to deliver the cash. We're directed to an upscale Italian joint. The fish is light and buttery, the chardonnay smooth as silk, as it should be at $150 a bottle. The owner won't take our money.

A couple of hours later the General is unhappy. A fellow broker sold him a few nights in a Motel 6 that the General figured he'd flip to customers, but one thing led to another, and here we are.

"This is a disaster," says the General. Paint is chipping off the walls; the bed is a sponge. Ten minutes after checking in, I'm rapping on the brothers' door. The General answers in his boxers, $165,000 arrayed on the bed in neat stacks. The brothers are trying to "fix their start," how much they each put into the kitty so that sometime next week they can sort out exactly how much they made or lost. Forget about how easy it would be to break the door or smash the window. They don't seem to have the least concern.

The Little General circles to the bathroom and pops out with a question. "Did you bring any shampoo?"

Junior deadpans, "No, I thought we were staying in a hotel."

Chuckling, the General holds up something only slightly thicker than a credit card. "Look, they gave us a bar of soap," he says.

•

The General has been arrested seven times. He considers it mainly an inconvenience and a relatively infrequent one, considering he's been doing this for more than 15 years. The General can't fathom why ticket scalping--reselling a ticket for substantially more than its list price--is illegal in many states. Here in Florida the charge is a second-degree misdemeanor with a fine of $75 to $200. A ticket friend bails him out, his attorney sends a check to a charity, and he shows up on the court date with his attorney--to make certain the case is thrown out. The General says he's never been convicted.

Compare this with airlines, he says. American, Delta and United airlines charge different prices at different times, as anyone gouged for a flight on short notice knows. Nobody charges American Airlines with scalping billions every year. Corporate insiders, meanwhile, receive stock for a dollar, flipping it out for the public at $20 in a public offering--a 1,900 percent markup. And what is a Wall Street firm but suits scalping billions of dollars in stock? There's the futures exchange, where you can make or lose money betting on everything from pork bellies to the price of oil. Without people willing to bet on fledgling companies and the price of tomorrow's commodities, our modern economy would not exist.

TicketsNow, eBay, StubHub and Razor-Gator think it's perfectly fine to resell tickets through auctions, online aggregations or listings. Online and auction sales are growing by leaps and bounds. Major League Baseball recently acquired Tickets.com, a move that despite official denials appears designed to offer secondary-ticket marketing to the league's 30 teams, including those with antiscalping policies. Business experts have heralded the increasing importance of the experience economy, and few modern experiences are more precious than attending celebrated sporting events like the Super Bowl or the Final Four.

The idea that the price for such events can be set in stone a year or months in advance will soon be considered an anachronism.

Thursday

The Little General and I sit patiently in a downtown bank with $126,000 in cash in his leather shoulder bag. A grandmotherly black woman, first name Emma, brightens when the General hands over his account number, license and black Amex. She pauses, smiling across the desk. "What pretty eyes you have," she says.

"Why, thank you," says the General.

Emma walks us into the vault. The General pulls out box 382, and we walk into one of the private rooms, locking it behind us. He draws out the money from his bag. He counts the $10,000 bricks and the six slim ones and begins squeezing them into the 18-inch-long box. It's tight. Then it's back to the vault to be signed out. "Thanks, Emma."

•

The mood is light; it's been a day of boisterous greetings at the Adam's Mark, the centerpiece Super Bowl hotel, which by virtue of its designation as NFL headquarters has clearly assumed the role of this week's de facto futures exchange. Perched on the bank of the meandering St. John's River, the hotel offers a colorful public stage. Docked across from the red-carpeted lobby entrance is a private yacht and one of the many cruise ships in town to provide 3,000 extra rooms for the more than 100,000 visitors. Palm trees and a generous promenade line the river. The hotel is spacious and convivial, if less than elegant. A row of ferns separates the lobby from the sprawling dining room and adjoining bar, and a bustling souvenir stand butts up against a grand escalator that rises to the second floor, where ESPN broadcasts its radio show. Over the next 100 hours, the wheeling and dealing for Super Bowl tickets will concentrate in three contiguous spots, from a dozen deal-makers' tables in the dining room and bar to the lobby and the palm-lined porte cochere.

As the General passes through the bar, he knocks knuckles with a dude built like a lineman, who says, "Hey, brother, you heard three guys got nabbed? You betta stow that shit."

The Little General doesn't miss a step, motioning to me, the guy in black leather and shades. "I got my muscle."

The General's first full day in Jacksonville begins as a reunion. Over the next increasingly tense four days, the General's club will comprise ticket guys and hustlers hailing from Massachusetts, Illinois, New Jersey, New York, Michigan, Minnesota, Texas, Kentucky, Georgia, North Carolina and Europe. Indeed the hotel has the feel of a hustlers' sales convention. The General's table resembles a men's club; women don't practice this hustle. Salty, affectionate nicknames are part of the culture of hustling, and except where noted, these terms of endearment are genuine. (Because of the controversial legality of ticket hustling, my access was granted on the condition that no real names or home cities be identified.)

The General's mentor is Sunshine, a bittersweet pit bull of a broker from the Midwest with one milky eye, who taught the General and his brothers to scalp in high school. Then there's Dirty, Sunshine's dogged Sancho Panza--a scruffy-looking clean freak--and also an Irishman we'll call Danny Boy, a tall ladies' man with a jaunty step, who, as the General says, "likes a bit of the drink." There's the aforementioned John the Mormon, as well as a sharp-eyed fellow we'll call Tex, who has the expression of a wiseguy holding cards in a Sopranos poker game. Anonymous shall remain the beloved, nattily dressed 60-something Southern gentleman who appears to be a woman. For foreign events like soccer's Euro and World cups, the General often partners with a freewheeling European we'll call Noodle. The General is one of many brokers who work the Super Bowl with a partner for practicality and camaraderie. Though the General confesses he sometimes thinks Junior is a bit too "loosey-goosey," the risks he takes often make them big money. And two heads--and two pairs of arms and legs--can come in handy. The encroaching swirl of buys, sales and deliveries, not to mention bank deposits and withdrawals, will soon demand that brokers be in three places at once.

Soon after the General sits, there's a commotion. Eagles cheerleaders prance down the escalator in their panty-like bottoms and slinky tops. The ticket guys barely glance up.

"What's going on?" says Tex. "How many guys are missing? I heard five."

"I heard one guy's missing with 175 grand," says another hustler.

Sunshine is disgusted. "I grew up with these guys, and I wouldn't give them that kinda money."

"From what I understand," explains another, "this one guy, he had a girl he'd do anything for."

Junior looks up from his laptop and smiles warmly. "Is there a finder's fee?"

One by one, bit players swing by the table with whispered entreaties, hustlers who dig tickets for the General and Junior. There's Tugboat, who tops 450 pounds and swallows Junior up in a bear hug. Pie is a crusty six-foot-three New Englander with flaming hair and teeth like a jack-o'-lantern's; as the General so aptly puts it, he has no checking account, no Social Security number, a tax-free annual income nearing $100,000 and "a net worth of whatever happens to be in his pocket." Caveman has the protruding brow and squat build of our distant ancestors. The General has no illusions about the lowest rung, the scalpers and street hustlers who will soon infest every corner of the lobby. It's all the brothers can do to remember the names of the brokers, often calling them by their home city, "Hey, Miami!" or "Wassup, New York!" Big paydays like the Super Bowl fuel the hustler sins--gambling, drugs, booze and bad fashion. They can be spotted in windbreakers or pleatherette jackets from past championships, caps and sneakers. In the lobby the General points out a couple of Boston hustlers with head twitches, OxyContin addicts, and New Yorkers with hollow cheeks and haunted eyes, cokeheads.

Between greetings, the General mostly says no to offers to buy tickets, rarely acknowledging the hustler at his ear, almost never moving his eyes. He has the look of a man who has said no millions of times. Prices are up slightly this morning, and the General is waiting, a poker player calling the bluff. It's only Thursday; more than half the brokers won't even arrive till tomorrow. The General figures the national brokers who control untold thousands of seats are holding back supply to drive up early prices. "It's just ones and twos out there," he says of the tickets. "It's a Mexican standoff."

Sunshine leans back and offers his lyrical interpretation: "Keyser Söze is just toying with us." In the film The Usual Suspects, Söze is a Merlin among thieves, a legendary, seemingly omnipotent master criminal who manipulates even the most hardened crooks behind the scenes. A few years back, at another Super Bowl, Sunshine stopped the General in the main hotel lobby and said, "There goes the Keyser Söze of the ticket business." The man inspires awe and fear. The ticket guys I meet this week wouldn't dare offer the Keyser's real name for publication. His reach is too far. Sunshine has heard that he controls about 7,000 of the some 25,000 secondary tickets available, and Sunshine knows that in this Darwinian game he is at best a small fish. When and how Söze releases thousands of seats will greatly sway the market.

No blinkers--counterfeits--for the game have been spotted, but Noodle has already been offered a sheet of six tickets to Playboy's party. (Note to counterfeiters: They aren't distributed to guests in sheets.) So far, the cops are a minor distraction. Police posing as fans bust scalpers dumb enough to sell marked-up tickets to straights. Noodle's friend Smiley falls for a chick in the lobby who pays the bloated price of $3,000 for a single. Smiley hands her the ticket and she snaps on the cuffs. In the process, Noodle gets "heated up" by the cops. Before they can question him, the General approaches the other side of the row of greenery that separates the lobby from the dining room. Noodle executes a no-look-behind-the-back pass, tossing the General a fistful of his business cards. "Hold on to these," he whispers, making certain the cops will find no evidence he's a broker.

"There's no reason to sell to a straight," says a bemused General. "Broker to broker, it's very difficult to get arrested." In other words, stay in the club, buy from known hustlers and sell to known clients and you're unlikely to pay an unprofitable visit to a Jacksonville jail.

By evening the General's band sets off for Thursday night's high-stakes poker game--the General at the wheel, Junior at his side, Sunshine, Dirty and the writer in back. Junior's wife phones and asks for help with her son's fourth-grade homework, and the hustlers warm to the task, whipping out calculators and shouting answers.

After stopping to load up on beer and Subway sandwiches, we drive to the dark outskirts of town. I can't say where. Who's there? Nobody. Nobody heats up the writer. Nobody says he's gonna have to look in my little leather notebook. Nobody doesn't like the word I scratched down that I should have just kept in my head. Nobody says he's gonna have to search me for a wire, and Nobody does indeed pat me down. The General and Sunshine stick up for me, and Junior kindly tells a white lie in my defense. Things cool and the game gets rolling. Shortly after midnight Nobody shuffles up to me and says, "Let's go for a walk." We walk the grounds at a leisurely pace, and then I pull up abruptly at the gate to the pool. Nobody laughs. "Hey, relax. I ain't gonna snuff you." But Nobody isn't happy. "I can't figure you," he says. "You're smart. You don't talk. The whole sunglasses tiling. Tell me what your story is gonna be."

"It's Thursday," I say. "The game isn't till Sunday."

Nobody isn't happy. "The best story you could write about the ticket business," he says, "is no story."

•

Ticket hustling is risky business. The General has been threatened more than once by Knockout Pete, a sturdy Italian sort known to slam against walls those hustlers who fail to donate fast enough. In New York the General once bought some prized Final Four tickets off a couple of alumni--netting a quick $24,000 profit he declined to share. Knockout banged on the General's getaway cab, shouting, "I'm gonna fucking kill you if I see you again!"

The General has never been held up with a gun, though he has employed armed off-duty cops to carry the bag at previous Super Bowls. (Many ticket guys carry guns.) Like any veteran broker or hustler, the General confesses to having had tickets robbed "right from my hands."

You want to be a ticket broker? A hustler? Think again. Play at the General's level or above and there are pressures most couldn't stomach. At one Super Bowl the General had dozens of preorders at $2,000. Prices zoomed up to $3,000, and in a few days he lost $80,000 meeting his obligations to deliver his clients' seats.

The Masters is the last and perhaps most prestigious leg on the hustler's triple crown. Like the tournament, Masters hustling is very much an old boys' network. Long ago Augusta assigned lifetime Tournament or Series badges to club members and a select patron list. The annual fee for this privilege is just $175. Patrons caught reselling their badges can lose their annuity, but the profits can be huge. Badge prices have ranged from $3,000 to more than $10,000, making some brokers rich on the upswing and breaking others.

Friday

As the General drives out of the Motel 6 lot at eight A.M. sharp, Dirty announces he has had a dream. Someone broke into his room. "They were trying to get all our money," he says. "I shot him in the leg twice."

The General spits in his plastic cup. "I gotta get money out."

Junior has checked online, and prices are up. So say the other brokers who've already called. "Look how smart that Keyser is," says Sunshine. "He tells the Patriots not to release their seats till Saturday."

The General will require a lot of cash to buy the 100 or so seats he still needs for his clients. The General and I get out at the bank, where we say hello to Emma and withdraw the entire $126,000, to go with the 25 grand he kept, which means the General is now walking the streets of Jacksonville with more than $150,000 in cash.

At breakfast at the Adam's Mark the General proposes a sit-down with another major broker to see if they can buy on credit. He's deployed that strategy before to counter spiraling prices: Buy with the rising market, sell while it's high. Though it's still early--two and a half days till kickoff--there's no doubt about the upswing. The General has surveyed fellow brokers in the lobby, and everybody's buying. Lots of deliveries have to be made in the next few hours. Meanwhile he's been summoned upstairs. A kingpin broker has ordered the General "to bring him every ticket" he's got.

"People are starting to panic," says Junior, shaking his head as his brother walks off. Junior has deliveries that need to be made today. He's got to start buying faster--a pair of lower corners at 26 from Pie, meaning $2,600. That's $600 more each than they would have cost him three days before. "People are gonna lose a lot of money today," Sunshine says. "Keyser's not releasing his tickets."

Fifteen minutes later, the General returns with a fresh dilemma. Old Boy, a notoriously late payer, wants the General to supply him with just under half a million dollars' worth of tickets on credit. Sunshine surveys the General and Junior. "You guys are crazy if you're even considering it," he says.

The General and Junior reach a compromise. They'll buy Old Boy as many seats as he gives them cash for, but they'll buy on credit only if he arranges a sit-down with the major corporations that are his ultimate clients and if they in turn sign a contract. For weeks Old Boy has promised to wire the General a quarter million dollars or more to pay for the seats. Without the cash it's a huge gamble.

The Little General strides through the lobby, which is now packed with hustlers. By the palm tree across from the private yacht, just after a ticket delivery, something good happens. Tugboat is beached on the bench when three Southern boys roll in. The General just knows these guys have extra seats.

"Extras?" he says coolly.

"Yes," one man replies, pointing to his ruddy-faced friend talking on a cell. They stop. The General waits. The man clicks off.

"How many do you have?" asks the General.

"Six," he replies, giving their location.

"How much would you like?" asks the General pleasantly.

"Two," says the man.

"I've got bindles. Is that okay?" says the General, stepping over to open his leather bag on a concrete planter box, 40 feet from the valet. With no time for second thoughts, he counts out $12,000 in exchange for six strips of orange cardboard. He turns and smiles. "I'll cut you in, Tugboat."

As the men walk off, Tugboat shuffles up. "A nickel would be good," he says, and the General hands him $500. As we stroll along the promenade with Danny Boy, Junior and Dirty to grab lunch, the General explains that technically he sliced Tugboat, cut into his turf. Hence the nickel. The General's mood has lifted. Minus Tugboat's $500 commission, he just bought six good tickets he can flip for a quick $6,000 profit. The count has ticked down to 94 seats.

Waiting for a table by the jam-packed ESPN outdoor TV stage, the General and Danny Boy spy a Saint Bernard dragging a man in a black leather jacket by a leash. The man's other hand is wrapped around a Bud.

"Got tickets?" the General asks.

The man's massive head swings like a bobble-head doll. He's dead drunk. Mirror shades make him look like a toy. He wags his enormous butt like his dog. The General motions for Danny Boy to move in for the close. They dance about the price.

"He'll sell," whispers the General. "He's a local."

"How do you know?" I stupidly ask.

"Saint Bernards don't travel well," says the General.

The man hands the leash to a friend and waddles off with Danny Boy. Five minutes later the Irishman saunters back. "Bumped him down from 25 to 23," he says. He hopped out of the chaos into the nearest clothing store. "I slipped the salesgirl a 20," Danny says. "I was in, I was out. Ninety-two hundred for the four."

Danny Boy and the General split the profits. But Junior's gotten a call: two New York hustlers with tickets to sell. Just like that I'm jogging through the crowd to keep up. The General is not entirely cool about the impending purchase. Junior is getting loosey-goosey, and the General has seen these particular New Yorkers pound rival hustlers.

Junior spins in the middle of the traffic-snarled street. The General calmly strides up to the traffic cop, something north of $110,000 draped over his shoulder. "Ma'am, where's North Liberty?"

Junior grabs the bag and trots off down the sidewalk. Ahead, a hustler hangs on to the back door of a white compact and motions Junior in with a leering grin.

"Don't get in the car!" the General cries. "Don't get in the car!" But little brothers never listen. The door closes, and Junior is inside.

The General shakes his head as they drive off. "You don't get in a car with guys like that." We're trotting around the corner after the car, the General on his cell, asking me, "Where did they go?"

•

Minutes later, the General looks up to find Junior on the street, unscathed and still in possession of the bag. After making certain his brother is all right, he takes a breath and says in front of the Adam's Mark, "Let's eat like civilized people."

The General gathers up his band and leads us into the more fashionable restaurant just off the lobby. Warren Moon sits two tables to our right. "If you want, you can put your bag over here," the helpful waitress says to the General, pointing to a chair by the window.

The gang howls. "Why don't you just put it outside, sir," Junior jokes. "Nobody will bother it."

The Little General rescues the befuddled waitress with a kind smile. "I think I'll just keep it right here."

He takes his natural position at the head of the long table. To his left, Danny Boy begins counting 100s. Two seats down, Junior looks as if he's playing solitaire, except the 30 cards are tickets, nearly $90,000 at this hour's prices--80 left to buy.

Sunshine leans in, surveying the seat numbers.

"Let's do some trades," he says.

"Whadda ya need?" says Junior.

The pimply busboy comes by to fill our water glasses and stands gaping. The tickets. The cash. "Could I just stand here?" he says.

Thirty feet away, out in the lobby, undercover cops are working to bust scalpers, yet in this sanctuary the Little General calmly orders the blackened grouper with a sweet tea, Dirty tucks into some bread, and Danny Boy orders pizza.

"Here's your 11 grand," Danny says, handing Junior a stack. "I owe you 100." Upon which Danny turns to the General and in a jovial tone starts talking about the upcoming U2 concert. "You wanna come to Dublin in June?" he asks. "We'll go over, work the show, blast it out."

But there's a dark undertow. Old Boy has crept in like a bad chill and drawn the General off to a nearby table, where they speak in hushed tones. Under the table he hands the General $26,000 in cash and $6,000 in a cashier's check and tells him two $25,000 wire transfers will be hitting his account any minute. The cash and cashier's check mean the General's ticket orders have just climbed back up about 10 tickets--90 to go. Then Old Boy gets up to leave and says in a toneless voice that he'll pick up the tab.

"I don't want your money," says Danny Boy, tossing a bill onto the table, shaking his head at Old Boy and slinging the classic hustler refrain, "Get stuck. Stay stuck." He's twisting the knife in a stuck broker's heart. Danny knows Old Boy needs tickets bad. And that knowledge means the price just went up.

Saturday

Jack Kemp--the former congressman, vice presidential candidate and pro quarterback--calmly reads his paper 20 feet from the boys' table. It's Saturday breakfast at the Adam's Mark, and the pressure is building. Only one of Old Boy's $25,000 wires hit the General's account. Junior has to deliver half his seats today. At current broker prices--about $3,000--they could lose $500 to $800 a ticket, but even so they have to accelerate the buying. By noon they still need 60, and the General is seeking evidence that prices are cooling. Danny Boy just told him he bought a pair at $3,200 each and had to dump them at $3,000 to get out of them--losing money. Says the General, "I take that as a good sign." It looks as though the market may be turning.

Star sightings are on the upswing. A once-celebrated quarterback watches Sunshine count out 30 grand near the hotel's safe-deposit box. "That ain't chump change, Joe," Sunshine snorts at the ex-ballplayer.

Speaking of cash, the General's strapping lawyer buddy is carrying the bag. The Counselor's got the toughness and size of a defensive end. He's here for the action. "I like the spectacle of it," he says, motioning. "Look over there--it's Evander Holyfield." Sure enough, 20 feet away stands the boxer whose ear Mike Tyson chewed. The lawyer takes a strange pleasure in seeing his friends sweat. "Forty-eight weeks of the year these guys play golf and poker," he says, shaking bis head. "I like to see them when they actually have to work.

"The money is insane," he says, the bag slung over his barrel chest. "Cash right out in the open. They don't even appreciate the danger." Just last night, he says, Junior saw someone in the lobby show excessive interest in the bag. "So he calls the General on his cell," says the lawyer. "Suddenly I'm the guy with the bag."

The Counselor says they treat money funny, and I couldn't agree more. Twenty-five feet away, dead center in the lobby, stands Sunshine, engulfed in scalpers and fans, pen tucked behind an ear, cell plastered to the other--tattered black briefcase carrying untold thousands cradled between his legs. Danny Boy rides the escalator above the fray, thumbing through 100s as he rises. Near the valet the General and Junior have turned a table into an impromptu bank, counting out thousands and exchanging tickets next to an oblivious TV camera crew filming fans.

It's carnival and street craps. Minutes later, next to the cream-color Bentley double-parked at the valet, Junior flips a coin with a hustler for the $200 they can't agree to on a pair of get-ins. The coin rolls nearly under the wheel. Heads. "The first flip he's won in two years," laughs the General.

A few minutes later the General is pacing. He's trying to fill the last two tickets of a nine-seat order for Junior. "I'm going to lose six grand on it," he says with a grimace. Two hours later, while washing down spaghetti and clams with the house red at a nearby Italian joint, the General explains, "For each order, there are five brokers bidding. You lose money. Or you bust the order--which I don't do."

This is the nasty downside of the advance order. The General has taken guaranteed contracts at just $2,300 per ticket, but the market Saturday evening has jumped to $3,500 a seat. They still need another 40. The General is losing $1,000 or more for every seat he buys. He's praying the market will fall. Maybe a big broker is holding back tickets and will need to unload them. Maybe he'll get lucky and pick up some packages off straights.

"I'll remember what it feels like in my gut today," promises Sunshine. "That's why I don't give anybody a break. Ninety-five percent of the brokers are getting killed."

Sunday

At 10 A.M. in front of the seemingly deserted Adam's Mark, the General has run out of cash. It doesn't take a CPA to figure that every $3,000 they spend on a ticket now pushes them deeper into the red. A guy with a bowling ball in his shirt and a frog in his throat sidles up.

"You got any money?" asks Junior.

"Yeah."

"What can you give us?"

"Ten dimes."

Junior holds out his hand, and the guy plumbs his pocket and pulls out a wad the size of half a grilled cheese.

Junior doesn't count.

The guy with the belly turns to the General and smiles broadly. "I'm lending this to you, not him."

After days of rain and cold, mother nature conspires to drive up prices. The day breaks warm and clear--perfect Super Bowl weather. Squawking Eagles fans flap their wings through the crowd. A wife carries a sign, Trade husband for tickets, while an expectant mom shows off the bulging-belly ad space she successfully bartered for two seats. But the best hustler I see all week is a steely Army recruiter. "If I give you a card to fill out, would you?" the captain asks a couple of God-fearing youths.

"Would there be a commitment to join?"

"No, no commitment," says the captain, beaming.

Just 25 left. Every ticket is still selling for three dimes or more. The brothers snap out 100s with the cool efficiency of house card dealers. Old Boy desperately needs 150 more, but as the General notes, "he's about half a million dollars short."

A fellow broker offers the General a ticket at 35--$1,500 more than he could have bought it for a week ago. He passes.

Dirty walks up, disgusted. "The fans want $4,000 or $5,000 for their tickets."

"Tell 'em to get the fuck out of here!" snarls Sunshine.

Out front I talk to a bunch of Eagles fans. One got scammed paying $3,800 on eBay for a pair of tickets he never received. At 1:10, the General kneels behind the Bentley's wheel, counting out cash he hands to a hustler for a pair. "It's coming down," he says. "We were being offered 35. Now it's 31. More tickets are coming out." With just five hours till kickoff, prices are finally falling.

Five minutes later the General stands before the lobby's revolving door, hustlers and fans streaming around him, voices roaring. He takes a small rubber band that a couple of hours ago was wrapped around a $10,000 brick and squeezes it around his forehead like a vise. He's already lost $20,000, and he still has to buy 20 more tickets. He feels like puking. Clients are pissed, wondering where their tickets are. He doesn't care what he has to pay. He just wants to be done.

A hustler friend brushes by, adopting the tone of a hotel manager. "Sir, I believe you're wearing a rubber band on your head."

The General wades through the crowd to the red carpet out front. He looks as if he's going to bang his head against a steel post. "Next Super Bowl," he says, "remind me that it will break at 1:15." Finally prices are falling. Too late to do the General or Junior any good.

Time compresses. Lots of deliveries to Patriots and Eagles fans, even several Germans, part of the General's European clientele. The endgame approaches, and I take inventory. Sunshine, like virtually every medium-size broker, lost tens of thousands. Danny Boy, a street hustler, made about $6,000. John the Mormon is one of the few modest-size brokers who made good. He and his three partners made about $30,000 each. "We didn't take any orders; we're just flip-pin'," he says. He respects the General and Junior. "I couldn't do what they do. They're gamblers. Four out of five times it works. When it works, they make a lot of money."

It's 2:02. We're sitting out front on the ledge of a concrete planter. "You hold this. Just stay here," the General says, leaving me the bag. "I'm going to confront Old Boy one last time in the Adam's Mark."

Super Bowl Sunday afternoon, and I'm left holding the bag, surrounded by hundreds of hustlers. After a couple of minutes I begin to relax. Nobody has time to notice me.

The General returns. Old Boy says the wires should be hitting his account. In the meantime he pleads again to buy half a million dollars' worth of tickets on credit. "I gotta find a plug for this," the General says, pointing to his dead cell phone. It's 2:30. Just inside the hotel's side door, fighting the crowd, the General drops to his knees to plug in. There's no reception.

Up the escalator goes the General, and he turns the corner to plug in next to a column. Old Boy paces nearby but can't see us. The General gets a call from a customer three blocks away. "Walk in, go up the escalator, and then turn to the right," he says. "He's in a black hat, black jacket, black glasses. Think man in black."

The General turns to me. "They've got two tickets. I gotta go downstairs and buy 'em. Give me five minutes."

He's reaching into the bag. "Where's that fuckin' rubber band? If I'd left it on my head, I'd have it now." After scrounging, he finds another. "If Junior needs five grand, tell him it's the one with the rubber band around it." And then he's gone.

Three minutes later, two Patriots fans stroll up. They're from Boston originally, and we chat amiably. Three minutes become 10, and finally the General arrives and nonchalantly delivers their tickets.

At 3:15 Old Boy rides up the escalator. The General drags the bag around to the other side of the pillar. Once the coast is clear, he's off to help Junior buy and deliver his last six tickets. I'm holding the bag again. It's been a long week. I find myself dozing off.

My eyes pop open to the sight of Junior.

"Where'd he go?" he asks.

"Down to find you."

"Where's the bag?"

I smile. "I'm sitting on it."

Ten minutes later the brothers are reunited behind the column, considering whether they should buy tickets Old Boy didn't pay for.

"Here's where we can try to take a shot," says Junior. "The question is, do you do it?"

"Would a wire hit on Sunday?" asks the General.

"Do we buy on credit?" asks Junior. "How is Old Boy planning logistically on handing out 120 tickets?"

It's not clear which way they'll go. The promise hangs in the air, and gradually the moment passes.

"How much did we lose?" asks the General, who then begins putting the debacle in a context his brother can appreciate. "You lose $5,000 in Vegas, it's no big deal. Ten thousand and I'm an idiot." The General raps his fingers against his head. "Twenty thousand dollars is an extremely bad weekend."

It will take them days to sort it out. Did the tickets spike because of diehard Philly fans? Was it the late distribution of secondary tickets? They'll never know. After leafing through scribbled names and numbers on hotel notepads, envelopes and ledgers, they close the books on Valentine's Day. They lost more than $64,000.

The brothers are laughing now, sitting by the bag when Junior puts it in perspective, clutching $5,000 in his hand. "Of course we can turn $60,000 of green into $60,000 of cardboard." Which is a marvelously poetic take on what they've been doing the past week--turning green paper into orange cardboard that will be worthless tomorrow.

Sometime after four P.M., barely more than two hours before kickoff, the General says Old Boy tried once more to hook him. On the street, he told the General his attorney would sign a contract saying he'll pay him for half a million dollars in tickets. But the General hopped in the attorney's car and asked the counselor how he knew Old Boy. The General says the man replied, "He's just some guy who's supposed to get me two tickets to the game."

•

Fittingly, as the General's Ram pulls out of the garage, the Stones' "Midnight Rambler" blares on the radio. The time is a little after five P.M. Our last image of the Adam's Mark is of none other than Old Boy pacing on the corner, phone glued to his ear.

Minutes later we're on the freeway, driving past the stadium, Sunshine and Dirty joking about the seats they sold to the game that will finally begin in just over an hour. "Can I have the line and total?" asks the General, putting a dime on the game with his bookie--a first-half parlay, taking Philly with four points and betting that the score at the half will be under 23. Dirty doesn't have a bookie, so the General lets him bet $100 too. Sunshine also calls his bookie and bets a nickel.

The Little General turns to me. "That was the biggest Super Bowl ever. Thirty-five hundred for get-ins." No one talks for a long time. The black Ram is gathering speed now as we motor down the freeway in the fading Florida light. The Little General checks his messages and plays one that just came in. Old Boy. "Please, please, call me. Help me. I'm going to be killed. Help me, help me, help me."

The brothers need to deliver 110 Super Bowl tickets. The countdown begins; kickoff is in four days.

Ticket hustling is risky business. The General has been threatened with violence and had tickets stolen from his hands. He has had to employ armed off-duty cops as guards.

It's carnival and street craps. The General and Junior have turned a restaurant table into an impromptu bank, counting out thousands of dollars and flipping tickets.