On a July episode of the primetime competition show America’s Got Talent, a compact, graying man in ripped jeans and a vest and tie took the stage.

Holding up a pack of cards, he announced: “I’m not real proud of this, but about ten years ago I found this pack of cards in a federal prison.”

He was a con man, he explained to the hosts, “all about fast cars and fancy clothes”—but the love of a good woman transformed him. “I met an amazing girl and I had some amazing friends and I walked into the U.S. Marshals’ office and said ‘I retire.’ I turned myself in,” he said. “You can’t look a woman in the eye, say ‘I love you,’ and lie about who you are.” His five-year incarceration, he told the audience, allowed him to reinvent himself as a legal kind of con man: a stage magician. “The day I got there,” he said, “I picked up a deck of cards, and I picked up a book about how to do card tricks, and I taught myself how to perform, and I’ve been doing magic ever since.”

That’s Aiden Sinclair’s shtick, the con man magician. “Aiden Sinclair is America’s preeminent grifter turned professional magician,” boasts his website. “Rather than face a future as a recidivism statistic, Aiden chose to spend his time adapting the skills that served him so well as a confidence artist to a new calling.” TheAmerica’s Got Talent crowd ate it right up. “You turned your life around, and now you’re here to entertain and put smiles on people’s faces rather than taking things away from people,” competition judge Howie Mandel enthused to Sinclair on the show. Read more….

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/a-con-man-reinvents-himself-as-a-reality-tv-magician