By Scott Dickensheets for Los Angeles Magazine…

I met Rick Lax shortly after the publication of his first book, a law-school memoir; he’d come to Las Vegas to research his second, a treatise on deception, through the lens of Sin City. While he said he eventually planned to return to the Midwest to practice law, he was clearly taking to this city. I edited a local alt-weekly in those days, and I began assigning him stories. Odd, offbeat stories. Gregarious, curious, game for anything, Lax turned out to be a gifted stunt journalist—the kind of writer who observes the human condition by ginning up cray-cray scenarios and seeing what happens: walking around in an old-man mask, attempting to reside in the men’s room of a local mall that was marketed as a “community.” As you can imagine, Vegas offers no shortage of opportunities for that kind of work, as Rick chronicled in his third book.

As it happened, the theme of deception was related to another passion of Rick’s: magic. He’s been performing magic, sometimes professionally, since childhood, and has gone on to craft tricks for companies that retail them to aspiring magicians.

All of that has led him to his current role: co-creator of the TV show Wizard Wars, a Syfy Channel show in which two teams of magicians compete to create magic routines out of randomly selected, and often ludicrous, items. The winners then compete against a team of the show’s more advanced performers, or “wizards.” Each round is judged by magic experts, including Vegas headlienrs Penn & Teller. After its initial six-show run, Syfy has ordered another round of shows. Though it’s shot in LA, Wizard Wars has a heavy Vegas vibe.

– Read the Interview at: http://www.lamag.com/las-vegas/wizard-behind-wizards/#sthash.vSwe8TJK.dpuf