Episode 124 – Richard Turner on Stage Presence, Wonder and Performance Art

Yeah, definitely. I mean, I read somewhere that Muhammad Ali had you kidnapped? What?

I started doing my show, basically. And he said, we'll give you $10,000 a week to come to the Middle East and play cards for oil money. I said, no thanks. And he was irate with me. He said, what? You're turning down $10,000 a week?

I have a very rare visual condition.

It was first documented in 1760 by Charles Bonnet.

It's called Charles Bonnet syndrome.

And it's a condition where a person who has lost their sight and should see black or nothing,

for some unexplainable reason, still sees colors, patterns, shapes, images.

And I'm, as far as anyone knows, the most extreme case on the planet.

And there are other people that are lazy.

I think that's one of the worst disabilities of all is laziness or procrastination.

My wife and I, we are so, we get so irritated when somebody wants to do tomorrow what they can do right now.

We are not procrastinators.

And to me, I'd rather give me, take my vision, cut the eyes out of my head, rather than procrastination any day of the week.

I got to the point, you know, many years later where I could do 500 push-ups in 12 minutes, 9 seconds.

I topped out at 340 on the bench press.

I could do the splits across two chairs, and I could curl more than my body weight.

Very few weight lifters can curl their weight.

They can militate their weight, but it was very few that can curl their own body weight more than their weight.

So in 2015, I get a letter from Ripley's.

They said, oh, you're in the 2015 issue of Ripley's Believe It or Not Book of I-POPPIN Oddities.

And you will receive a certification that you are a certified oddity.

You are a certified oddball.

So I say, you might be an oddball, Xavier, but I'm certified.

I'm certified.

What's up folks, Xavier Katana here.

Here is our interview with Mr. Richard Turner.

Richard has a phenomenal story.

He is a card mechanic, and the major caveat is that he lost his sight at the very young

age of nine.

so it makes his story especially interesting we get into a lot of really amazing stuff and i

i saw his documentary dealt and i was just really moved by richard's story richard won the golden

lion award in magic from siegfried and roy in 1982 he was the 2014 and 2017 recipient of the

Close-Up Magician of the Year Award. It's an amazing story. You guys are going to love this

episode. Here is Mr. Richard Turner. Thank you guys so much for listening.

The human experience is in session. My guest for today is Mr. Richard Turner. Richard,

thank you so much for making the time to do this. Welcome to HXP.

I am honored to be with you today.

So, Richard, you're regarded as one of the best card mechanics in the world.

But to many people, they might not know what that is.

Can you tell us what a card mechanic is, please?

Of course.

And the term card mechanic goes back like 50 years before the invention of the automobile.

If you go back to the hustlers during the 19th century, they were referred to as mechanics or sharpers.

a mechanic is somebody who can fix the outcome of a card game,

which is different than the slights used by magicians to perform card magic.

Those techniques are, I'll just say, they're a lot easier to develop,

and there's thousands of very good card magicians,

but the techniques for the card table are just many, many, many times more difficult to develop,

and there's just a handful of really good world-class card mechanics,

partly because of the amount of hours it takes.

And just for the history, you know, aboard the old river boats and the gamblers back then,

the gamblers, they would spend like half their life developing one or two moves.

And that's what they would become known for.

And I just happened to spend my life learning a whole lot of the moves.

Yeah.

I mean, there's a caveat to this.

And there's a big turn in this story, for lack of a better word.

suffered a retina disease that took your vision. Can you tell us about that?

Well, I was, my sister and I, Lori, we both had scarlet fever, and we're not sure if this is what

caused it, but we both got scarlet fever, and actually our elementary school, we were in

quarantine because of that, and then shortly thereafter, I was sitting in my classroom,

fourth grade, 1963, and the teachers writing stuff on the board. And first it was clear,

and then a moment later, it was all fuzzy. I looked down at my book, my book, the words all

of a sudden went fuzzy. So it was a degeneration, and we're not exactly sure the cause other than

my sister and I both got scarlet fever, and the same thing happened to both of us.

And then it was a degeneration that started with the retina, which is the, I'm sorry,

I started with the macula, which is the center part of the retina, and that was the first to go.

So for quite a number of years of my life, I had only peripheral vision.

It would be like having a hat in front of your face.

And then the peripheral vision was measured at 20 over 400, which is twice as low as what's considered legally blind.

So even the vision that I had out of the size of the eyes was very much distorted.

20-20 is normal vision. 20-50 is what you have to have to drive. And 20 over 400 is like eight times as low as what you're allowed to have. You must have to drive a car. So I've never driven a car, except when a few times when someone wasn't looking.

so it's it's absolutely remarkable i mean i i saw the documentary that you guys did and i was hooked

by it how did you overcome this adversity i mean you're you're not ever really able to look at the

cards so i mean how are you able to mechanic the cards without seeing what the card is

that's a really good question and there's a number of questions in there um first um i i was able to

the cards up until about 25 years ago. I could put the cards within two inches of the corner of my

eye, one eye or the other, and I could make them out. So I was able to play cards up until like

1990, around 1990, 1992. But since everything is done by touch, and my sense of touch

was heightened because of the lack of sight,

kind of the neural networks kind of relocated,

reorganized themselves around my visual cortex,

my sense of touch.

So how I identify cards,

well, let me just put it another way.

What I can do with the cards,

it'd be better to explain it along those lines.

You can take a deck of cards and shuffle them up

and say, I want to play seven cards dead.

I want five players in the game.

I want to sit at the third hand, and I want you to deal me straight.

And I will let you shuffle the cards.

I'll deal them out.

And as I deal, I'll let you take those cards out of my hand as I'm dealing.

Anytime you want, and shuffle them up some more, and remove cards from the deck,

and just hand me a stack of cards each time I go around the table.

And the hand that you selected and the game you selected,

with the number of players you selected will have the winning hand.

So even if you had 20-20 vision or if you had x-ray vision

or if you had a deck that was face-up where you could see every card coming off the deck

or if you had a deck that had giant embossed Ks on the K and Js on the J,

how did that even be conceivable?

Hmm. You know, I find, you know, there's something so amazing about overcoming that level of adversity that you faced. Was there ever a time where you felt like giving up?

Well, I started off as when I was very young, five years old, I got attention from my artistic talent.

I could paint and draw beyond my years.

And I was always the best artist all the way through school, first, second, third, fourth grade.

Then, of course, the vision started going south.

And I was known as the best artist.

And so now, all of a sudden, I couldn't paint and draw anymore.

So what was my identity at that time was kind of stripped from me, and that caused me to rebel.

And like everybody during the 60s and early 70s, not everybody, but in my case, I got involved with the wrong people.

And the kids, the straight kids, they would tease, hey, Magoo, and other things, how many fingers am I holding up and steal your money and things like that.

And so that caused rebellion.

But the ones that didn't do that and didn't judge were the druggies.

And so I got involved for about three years in the drug scene. Not a long time. And that was kind of my rebellion or my escape or my frustration or my way of trying to separate myself from my frustration and from my life, like I said, my loss of my ability to paint and draw.

and I even at one point was so mad at my vision to oneself that I took a magnifying glass

and I went out in the backyard and I stared at the sun through the magnifying glass literally

trying to burn the eyes out of my head oh my yeah and um so anyway but then uh I was

at a park uh wanting to buy some drugs from these people and asked them you know if they had any

time what we were looking for. And they said they had something better. And I said, what's that?

And they said, well, a relationship with the creator of everything you see. And so I said,

I said, mind if I sit down, tell me what you know. And from there, I changed from a life from going

to the drugs to going to church. And that turned my life around. From there, I, within a month

after that, I got involved with the martial arts. I met John Murphy, who was my karate instructor.

I stopped on February 13, 71, is when I met the people in the park.

March, the next month, March 5, 71, is when I started karate.

And he didn't care if you were blind, deaf, or dumb.

He beat everyone equally.

And he's the one that kind of laid the foundation that whatever's in front of you,

you can fight your way through it.

So he's the one that I credit for laying down that initial foundation for me to believe that the situation is not perfect, is not great, but we can fight our way through it.

And then that also, I got from that, you know, came confidence.

I got stronger because my abuse from the years that I was involved with drugs, and I was already a small person, that helped build up my strength.

And he said, you know, when I first started, the women, the kids, the old ladies were beating me up.

And the kids were beating me up.

put some meat on your bone. And so he got me started lifting weights. I got to the point,

you know, many years later where I could do 500 pushups in 12 minutes, nine seconds.

I topped out at 340 on the bench press. I could do the splits across two chairs

and I could curl more than my body weight. Very few weight lifters can curl their weight. They

can militate their weight, but it was very few that can curl their own body weight more than

their weight. Anyway, so he turned me into a pretty darn strong guy. And if you look at some

of the videos or pictures, you'll see that I was pretty strong. In fact, I was actually very strong.

And so that kind of laid the foundation to not look at it as a disability, but as a challenge

to overcome, just like you have a better fighter in front of you, figure out how you can out

like a game of chess, that particular fighter.

And he would tell me, don't advertise your weaknesses.

Don't let the person in front of you know that all you see is a big blurry blob.

Stare them down like he can see them and bulldoze right through them.

How old are you now, just for a sense of context here?

I'm 64.

And you moved into karate when you were how old?

Four months from becoming 17. I was 16 years old.

I haven't stopped working out in 47 years and six months, I believe.

And I could actually put it right down to the day if you wanted me to take the time.

I mean, how much of this is, you know, a mental, I mean, all of this is really just a manipulation of the mind, right?

You're able to feel the cards.

I mean, when you run your fingers down the side of the deck of cards, you're able to feel what the number is, right?

No, not down the sides.

All you're feeling is the edge of the cards.

Sure.

But I can feel the difference in the thicknesses of cards down to a thousandth of an inch.

But that's not quite what you were stating, but that's giving you an idea of the touch that I have.

And I have been a touch analyst for United States Playing Card Company.

the biggest card maker in the country for many years because my fingers are able to tell them

and give them information that even their most precise measuring devices are not. That's kind

of a cool thing. How would you compare your sense of touch now to pre-CBS? Has it changed?

Well, let's just define CBS. I have a very rare visual condition. It was first documented in 1760

Charles Bonnet and it's called Charles Bonnet syndrome and it's a condition

where a person who has lost their sight and should see black or nothing for some

unexplainable reason still sees colors patterns shapes images and I'm as far as

anyone knows the most extreme case on the planet the average person with CVS

will just have periodic splashes of color or a light flashing or you know

So, you know, I see a kaleidoscope of beautiful, vivid colors, patterns, shapes, every subconscious image you can imagine.

And the thing is, I don't see these images in the back of the brain like when you're dreaming or imagining.

I can look at them.

I see them in front of me.

I see them in external space in the same way that you see what's in front of you.

A visually sighted person will see in front of them.

I see in front of me.

So I'm actually seeing things.

They're obviously not really there.

They're obviously projected from my mind.

And I was just recently interviewed for a Harvard study on the brain.

And Dr. Ogis said that what had happened is my touch networks are looping back around to my neural network.

And like when I go into a pool, my eyes will be completely closed.

and as I go underwater, all the colors, I'll see the water go up over my head

and they change hues to a darker hue.

And then when I come back out, it goes down and I'll see the water passing by my face

and the hues change to a lighter shade.

And he said that is because the sense of touch is so refined.

That's not quite the word he used.

it used, that my sense of touch is once again looping back to my neural networks, creating

a sense of vision.

So that's kind of how I see things.

And I love the way I see things.

I live in a very beautiful world.

The thing is, it doesn't matter if it's day or night.

You can lock me in a vault with no light source of any kind, and I still see these

vivid royal blues and royal reds and yellows and greens and whatever shades they happen to be at

the particular time. In the documentary, a deck of cards is by your side pretty much all the time.

I mean, you wake up, grab a deck of cards. I mean, you would think there's a waterproof deck of cards

that you take in the shower with you. I mean, how much is that repetitive sort of conditioning of

your body with the motion of moving the cards and feeling the cards, how much does that connect into

or ability to mechanic them.

Or manipulate them, yes.

Manipulate them.

Yeah.

And very, very crucial.

As we've been sitting here the whole time I've been talking to you,

I've been dealing seconds with a deck of cards.

That's why I deal a second card out instead of the top card.

I put it in the middle of the deck and I deal another one.

In that particular slide, I've done over 100 million times.

But what I do is I take a move.

Like, I'll just use the one I'm talking about right now, the second deal.

I will break it down to its smallest components and figure out what my fingers need to do.

My thumb must apply the precise amount of pressure to push over exactly 22.6 thousandths of an inch.

And with this particular deck, that's the caliper or the thickness of two cards.

And then I will then, my right thumb will sweep across the deck in a 64th of a second.

We'll engage that second card and deal it out.

So I break it down piece by piece in slow motion until every exacting element of the muscle memory is firmly embedded in my brain.

And then I turn it into a subconscious habit.

I'm one of those persons that is constantly moving.

When I was a kid, they called me Gilligan from Gilligan's Island.

They called me a perpetual motion machine because I never stopped moving.

If I was in elementary school today, they would have probably stuffed me full of those drugs that they give some of these poor kids today that I think steals their initiative.

In a lot of ways, I think there's just too much prescribing going on around there, this world.

Anyway, they probably would have done that to me.

And that was actually an asset.

So that's what I will do with the moves.

And so I am constantly honing and practicing the moves.

I put in like an

average of 10 to 20 hours a day. And I sustained that seven days a week for 26 years straight.

And then when my son, Ace of Spades, was born when I was 41, I was responsible for having to feed him part of the time.

And so I'm holding him and I couldn't practice because he would slobber all over my cards.

And so I had to reduce some of the practicing. And then about three years, that was 95.

I got my first talking computer.

My sister, Lori, I call her my genius sister

because she is a genius.

She's brilliant.

And she was way ahead of me in the adaptive technology,

you know, talking computers

and all the wonderful stuff that's out there now.

But when it was first started,

she always had the best and the latest.

And she kept telling me,

you got to get a talking computer.

You got to get JAWS on your computer.

So I finally got one in 1990.

And that, because I had to have my fingers on the keyboard, I couldn't practice.

So my office is set up.

We have two computers in front of me here.

I have my Mac and I have my PC.

And all I do is just spin this chair around and I'm at my poker table.

And that way, so when I'm in between working on some kind of thing, checking emails or whatever,

if someone calls, I can instantly turn around and go back to practicing.

You invented an acronym, DEALT. It's something that you talk about with regards to life and outlook in regards to everyone being dealt a certain hand in life. What is the meaning of DEALT?

well i have a program that i do i i love i love speaking to companies now and uh i actually had

to be drug into it my wife who is a had a degree in speech communication in english literature

would tell me speaking people want to hear what you have to say and i'm sitting there going i can

perform but man speaking in front of people anyway so uh that was one of the things that i

had to get over, and people keep wanting me to talk, and I'm going, why do they even want to

hear me? Why are people wanting to listen to me? But they listen. And so now I do a lot of speaking,

and I have a program I call Winning With the Hand You've Been DELT, D-E-A-L-T, and DELT is an

acronym. D stands for dreams. Our dreams fuel the fire in our belly. E stands for excellence.

What opens doors is becoming an expert at achieving a state of excellence.

A stands for analysis.

We have to analyze our obstacles, analyze our assets.

L stands for loyalty.

We must be loyal to our company, colleagues, customers, values such as honesty and integrity.

And T stands for tenacity.

It's tenacity that breaks down the barriers that stand between us and our dream.

And I kind of give my personal examples in each of those areas relating the tenacity it took to fight 10 men in a row

when I earned my first degree black belt, I'd fight 10 men in a row.

And that took an obsessive amount of tenacity,

as did it to learn and develop all the things that I've done with the cards.

That word, obsession, is that something that you would describe yourself as?

Well, I call myself the poster boy for obsessive, compulsive behavior and out of it.

it's almost over it's a running joke in our family my you know if i want i see a shirt i like

i have to buy a dozen of them if i find whatever you know she says you you are just i'm obsessed

about whatever's going on at the moment uh and i'm enjoying whatever that happens to be and i if i'm

visiting i'm visiting with you i'm talking with you uh whatever's going on at the moment i'm

It's at the top of my list, and I have to say I'm obsessed about it.

And my whole life has been very, very wonderful and full of blessings,

and I have been extremely blessed.

So with a wonderful wife, we've been together 28 years,

and my son, who just graduated from Trinity and has a new job with a very fine company,

and he's been my traveling partner ever since he was born,

life. But there you have it. I'm just astounded by your ability to overcome all the challenges

that you've been dealt by life. And I think we all go through those things, right? We all have

something that is challenging us in our lives, and it's kind of up to us if we overcome them or not.

I say everybody has challenges. Every single person out there has something that they're dealing with. Maybe they were assaulted as a kid. I was doing a program with one of the people that are working with our film. They're using it actually to help change the lives of people.

and we did one recently.

We're getting ready to do another one in New York

where people watch the film.

They'll fill out this card of things

that were they lonely or hurt, injured.

And one of the guys at one of these events,

he was charged with a crime

and sent to prison for years.

And then the DNA proved that he was not

the person that did it.

And so he had a lot of bitterness and anger.

And another lady was talking about

how she was sexually assaulted.

as a kid. And then those are extreme, you know, very tragic cases. And then there are other people

that are lazy. I think that's one of the worst disabilities of all is laziness or procrastination.

My wife and I, we are so, we get so irritated when somebody wants to do tomorrow what they

can do right now. You know, we are not procrastinators. And to me, I'd rather give me,

take my vision, cut the eyes out of my head, rather than procrastination any day of the week.

In regards to dealing with those limitations, you had a mentor that was a big part of your life,

Di Vernon. Can you tell us about him, please?

Oh, Di Vernon was my card mentor. He was born in 1894. So, Jafar, we just celebrated,

It would have been 124 years old.

Anyway, he was born in 1894.

He lived to be over 98 years old.

My wife, Kim, and I threw him his 98th birthday, two months before he passed away.

But for over half a century, for like 60 years, he was recognized and considered as the best card man in the world.

He was known as the man who fooled Houdini, and that took place in the early 1920s.

And so he spent his entire life chasing gamblers around the world, and he would trick them or trade techniques, learning all their different moves.

And he took a liking to me back in 1975.

And at that time, I just turned 21, and I had already been working with cards since I was like seven years old.

So I had developed some pretty difficult moves, except for I have to say they were wretched by my standards today.

But he saw something in me, saw someone that was crazy obsessed like he was.

And my first thing he would say is, I don't care how fine that brief is, I know you're up to something because your actions are suspicious.

And so that was one of the first things he said to me.

And so I took that and I started analyzing it.

how I've changed things. And then he started seeing that I was just putting in all his hours.

Then he started challenging me. And he started describing to me different moves, techniques,

controls. And the thing about what Werner did is he didn't describe them to me in the way that he

could do them or the way any other magician that we've ever heard of could do them because I

couldn't see what he was showing me. He described them to me in a perfect manner, the way he wished

they could be done. Some of these moves he worked on for 70 years and never accomplished.

And so I would literally, you know, I would get really close to him, close to his hands,

out of the corner of my eye, try to get a picture of what he was showing me. And of course, he also

let me check out his hands, feel his hands. He would tell me, yeah, put your fingers on the side.

You want this, you want to be totally natural in your execution. So he would describe these moves

in a way that if you could do it that way,

it'd be much more deceptive,

but it's so much harder

because you don't have the same control over the deck

that you would using the classic grips

that many card mechanics and magicians used over the century.

And so I developed these things,

and then I'd come back and I'd show them,

and they'd go, that's perfect, that's it.

And then they'd call all the other top card guys over,

Larry, Larry, come watch this, Tony, watch this.

And that just encouraged me to keep practicing more and more.

And it wasn't for years later that I finally found out,

he finally admitted to me that the things he told me, he just made up.

He just wanted to see what I'd come up with.

He just wanted to, he kept challenging me.

And so I always say in my thing, you know, take possible out of impossible.

Take possible out of impossible.

What others thought was not possible to be done, I figured out ways to make it happen.

Yeah, I think you're a walking example of the possible inside of impossible.

Yeah, and I'm also a walking oddball.

I'm a certified oddball.

Let me tell you about that.

In 1984, I was on a TV show called Ripley's Believe It or Not. We've all heard of Ripley's Believe It or Not.

Sure.

Ripley started a show back in the 1930s. But anyway, I was on this TV show. I built a castle out of cards that was from all my used cards from a couple decades worth.

My wife said, we have a whole room with nothing but used cards. Can you do something with them?

I can't throw them away. I said, what if they made cards illegal?

house. No, I have too many. I make the card castle. So I glued together over 200,000 cards.

It weighs 825 pounds and it's on display. It's the second largest Ripley's in the country.

My wife was so happy to get it out of the house. Anyway, so in 2015, I get a letter from Ripley's.

They said, oh, you're in the 2015 issue of Ripley's Believe It or Not Book of I-Poppin'

oddities and you will receive a certification that you are a certified oddity you are a certified

oddball so i say you might be an oddball xavier but i'm certified okay um you know you talk about

you talk about all these hours that you put into what you're doing with the manipulation of the

cards how many hours per day of practice are you actually putting in well for years like i said i

hours. 14 was my average day of practice. The only time I was not practicing is when I was training,

working out or training. And even then, I had cards strategically placed, or if I was at a gym,

I would have them right next to whatever I was working on. And I'd grab them, do a few reps,

then do a few deals, or try to hustle someone in a card game at the gym, which I did years back.

so I average 14 hours a day

a low day would be 10 hours

there would be times when I'd get up

at 6 and not go to bed until 3 where I

practice like 20-21

hours in a day that was not

all that common but there were days that I

literally had the cards going 20 hours in a day

now because of

the computer and having to answer emails

and things like that I put

in only I get 3 hours

minimum to

3-10 hours a day is what I'm putting in

Sometimes I get a 12 or 14-hour day when I'm on the road and away from my office.

But I still put in at least three hours.

I love sitting with my wife in the evening.

We'll bring up Netflix and go watch some past series that we will be binge-watching.

And the only reason why I'm doing this is because it's uninterrupted practice time.

I'm going to the movies for the same reason.

What a blind guy going to a movie for.

Well, because it's uninterrupted practice time.

I can visualize in my head.

I can see my mind instantly creates pictures in front of me of what I'm hearing.

So I'll get an idea of what's going on with the film.

But really what I'm doing is getting uninterrupted time with the cards.

Thank you guys so much for listening to this episode.

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A discipline is so important to this whole story.

I mean, your story and excelling at anything.

So, you know, how much would you say is this just downright discipline?

Well, the thing is, I don't have to discipline myself.

It's the other way around.

I can't stop disciplining myself.

I have a strange kind of makeup and where, example, I'm at church.

And someone brings up that I was distracting people by practicing with my cards.

And so one time I thought, okay, I had to put them down during that hour.

And my wife, Kim, says, you're shaking.

Why are you shaking?

Because for the first time I didn't have cards in my hand.

And so then I took the donation envelopes and I put them in my hand, and that works.

But then I solved the whole problem by, as I said, I worked with the United States Playing Card Company as their analyst.

I had them give me some decks that have no printing on either side.

They're just blank pieces of paper.

But they're regular playing cards, but they have nothing on either side.

So I call those my church cards.

and my wife even keeps some in her Bible case that she has her Bible in.

I just pull them out or I have my ones that I take that I have just for that purpose.

And then I have other ones for when I'm in the ocean.

I was out in Costa Rica with my brother Mike and he was a champion surfer

and we were filming some scenes for the Delt movie and me surfing and I'm a lousy surfer.

have spectacular crashes and then when we were done with all the whole thing and all the camera

and everything when we get out of there and all of a sudden my brother sees my you know swimsuit

he goes what's that in your back pocket oh i mean oh those are my waterproof cards

so i mean how many cards how many card decks do you have how many packs do you have back there

I have in the house, well, I have tens of thousands in the house, but in the warehouse with my friend John Walton, we're down to about maybe 100,000 decks.

But I have enough.

Yeah, I made enough to last me for my life and my friends who wanted really good quality cards.

So, yeah, I do have a lot of decks.

I have different kinds.

the best made card is the b92 they started making them in 1892 that's what the 92 stands for and

the most recognized pack of cards is the bicycle rider back they started making those in the 1880s

and that's probably the most recognized label in the world is a bicycle deck but they're all

made by one company u.s playing card company so this is interesting i thought when i read this

You know, as your skills became more widely known, you received some offers from the criminal world.

I mean, but you were wary about being 100% used.

What is this about?

Tell us more about that.

Well, that is true.

I've started in the early 80s.

You know, I was on a TV show called That's Incredible with John Davidson, Fran Tarkerton, and I think it's Kathy Lee Crosby.

So she broke her leg playing football the day before I was in the studio with her.

But she did come up and say, hey, I'm here in a full body cast, but I want to say hi.

Anyway, in that show at that time, there was only three networks, ABC, NBC, CBS.

And so it was seen in the United States by like 60 million people.

And then it went to 125 countries immediately.

So it was seen all over the world.

And from that came the mob.

the first offer

was a guy

I'll just call him R.D.

He saw what I could do

he wanted to play some cards

so we sat down to play

and I showed him

how I could

take his money

he could shuffle and cut me

then he goes

you're holding out on me

I'm not holding out

and that means I'm

palming cards out of the deck

held my hands up

in front of him

said shuffle the cards again

how many players are at the game

how many players this time

where do you want to sit

I dealt out four kings

he goes

after he saw that, he said, I'll give you $1,000 a day to come work for me.

Now, this is 1981.

$1,000 a day back then was good money.

And then he says, I said, no, thanks.

And he goes, $2,000 a day.

And again, I politely refused.

And then he said, how much will it cost to buy you?

Those were his exact words.

How much will it cost to buy you?

And I instantly flashed to the scene in the Godfather movie

where the guy wakes up and his horse's head is in bed with him.

And he made him a deal he couldn't refuse.

He was 100% used.

And so what that means is when they're done with you,

they dispatch you.

They kill you.

And that guy, he followed me for like six years.

And he

would come and see me at the castle, and we'd have dinner probably once a month.

And twice, he and his partner, one of his partner's associates, which is one of the top five crime families in New York, and if I said the name, everybody would know.

I watched them being arrested, hauled off to jail on the news, and I thought, that could have been me.

and one time he invited me to one of his games.

He wanted me to deal with these private games.

And so we're going to it and he said,

now I have to tell you, everybody here own mountains.

And that's a euphemism.

What it means is everybody there were very wealthy.

And the driveway, the place we went to,

the guy literally owned the mountain.

The driveway was probably a mile, mile and a half long,

came to a guardhouse.

It was a two-story guardhouse.

And we passed through that, walked inside,

went into these rooms into this big, empty, not big, empty, big open room,

and there was crap tables, blackjack tables.

There were nude dancing girls.

There was cocaine piled on a table.

There was open bar.

And everybody had, it was all cash.

Minimum bet was $100.

Everybody were walking around with fistfuls of $100 bills playing the different games.

And he wanted me to be one of the dealers because he said,

I can do by myself what it took four of his mechanics to do.

And so I decided to see what the artifice's mechanics were using.

So I'm standing behind this table, and the guy sitting there playing turns around and goes,

Hey, Richard, it's me, Joey.

You've been to my place in La Costa.

And back then, La Costa is a beach town between San Diego and L.A. where the mobsters had their beach homes.

And he had propositioned me sometime within the year before to come work for him.

He goes, yeah, you're not playing here now, are you?

I said, no, no, no, Joey.

I'm just a guest like you are.

He goes, but Richard's playing.

Joey's leaving.

And if I would have been in that game, I don't think he would have been quite so polite if I was the dealer behind that table.

And anyway, so that was one offer.

And then another offer came from the Middle East.

It started off with a phone call.

There was a very strongly accented voice.

Wanted to talk to me about doing business.

And so I said, meet me aboard the place I was performing.

And it was a riverboat.

And I get aboard the boat.

And it was a party of five men.

They were all of Middle Eastern descent.

And only one spoke English.

The interpreter, there were four.

there was the boss who was to my right

and the interpreter was to my left.

When I went up, they threw a stack of bills on my table

and said, let's see what you can do with the cards.

I started doing my show, basically.

And he said, we'll give you $10,000 a week

to come to the Middle East and play cards for oil money.

I said, no, thanks.

And he was, I afraid with me.

He said, what?

You're turning down $10,000 a week?

Yep.

And so then he started arguing with his boss, and it was either probably Farsi or Arabic.

I couldn't tell the difference.

And then he turned back and he said, how about $20,000 a week?

And again, I said, no.

He's arguing with his boss, and his boss is getting mad at him, and he's getting mad at me.

And he kept up in $30,000.

Finally said, how about a million dollars?

Now, he didn't say if that was by the week.

But again, I did say no.

and they were so mad.

They had their dinners were just served to them.

They threw down their napkins, threw down their forks,

threw another stack of bills on my table and got up and left.

And because there were so many bills, I thought they were all like ones or fives.

They were all $100 bills, a big old stack of $100 bills.

I had a good night.

Didn't have to put myself in a position where I'd be 100% used.

If you want to hear more stories, I have more.

and they even get more interesting, more scary.

Yeah, definitely.

I mean, I read somewhere that Muhammad Ali had you kidnapped?

What?

Well, Muhammad Ali was a wonderful, wonderful dear man.

I love the guy.

I was very fortunate to know him.

I was in a competition in Las Vegas hosted by Siegfried and Roy in 1982.

It was a showdown of all the top magicians and card men from around the world.

And I was the winner of that.

And then afterwards, someone tells me somebody would like to meet you who was there and watched the thing.

And I go in there and it turns out it's Muhammad Ali.

And I was always a big fan of his because, you know, at this point I had been in the martial arts for like 11 years, well, 11, 12 years since 71.

So I was a big fan of fighting and I never missed one of his boxing matches.

And, you know, I was a big fan of his and he turned out to be a big fan of mine.

And we started hanging out together, went to shows together.

And I can tell you some fun stories with Ali.

But the kidnapping one was, this is another time, another year.

I'm just in a casino.

And four big African-American men come up to me and go, Richard Turner, you're coming with us.

And I'm sitting there thinking, I don't think so.

And they didn't give me much of a choice.

They were a good head taller than I was.

So there were two in front of me, two in back of me.

They pushed me off the back end of the casino.

They stuffed me into a limo.

The limo zips away, whips around.

I could tell that they were short distances zigzagging in and out of the back sides of the casinos.

They pull up behind another casino in the back.

They open the door, two in front, pull me out, help me out.

And then they, with the two behind me, just tell me where to go.

And they go through the back end of the casino.

And through these hall passageways into a big suite where Ollie comes running up and throws his arms around me and a big bear hug goes, Richard, how you doing? It's so good to see you again.

So he had me snatched because he wanted to visit with me and he heard some new things that I was doing and he wanted me to demonstrate them for him.

So that's how he had someone snatch me and bring me to him.

Interesting.

You talk about these different ways that people want to exploit your skills.

Is there a defense against the skill that you have in casinos?

Well, the casinos, their security is very, very good.

The safest places to gamble are in the casinos.

They have cameras everywhere.

They know everything you're doing, saying when you've been there, when you were there last.

If they have any suspicion on who you are or that you might be able to do something, those cameras are going and the eye on the sky is watching.

And, of course, each time the players come up with a way to try to beat the casino, then the casino changes their procedure to cancel out that new method that the players are trying to use to profit against the casino.

And, of course, the casinos, up until before the 1980s, they were questionable.

You know, they would have what they called bust out men, people that had skills where they could deal seconds or in a peak or whatever it would take to take the money, take the player down.

But when the mob kind of lost control and it was more owned by corporations, you know, they cleaned up their act, I'll just put it like that.

And now instead of cheating the players, they'll just refuse service to somebody they don't like.

think you're skilled instead of bringing in someone like myself or or a guy who's unbelievable

like a man like steve 40 who works within the casino industry um so bringing someone like that

being there to take them down they'll just say xavier i'm sorry to tell you this but you can't

play here anymore goodbye goodbye next door and then you go next door and they've already won

next door so next door says oh i'm sorry go across the street so then you find out they won't give

to get any more cards.

So it's an easier way.

Instead of cheating you,

they just tell you to get lost.

Has there been a time

where you used your skills

for your benefit?

Yeah, it's like fighting.

That's probably,

if I have to say,

where I've slipped and fallen.

I never went back to drugs

or anything like that,

but I've always been a card player.

My sisters,

when we first started playing,

I'm seven years old,

seven, eight, nine, ten.

We'd play for M&Ms.

The red being the most valuable.

We play for massage time.

30-second ante, that 15 to 30 seconds,

and then you'd have to pay up after every hand.

Up to going through high school,

I was always playing cards with people.

I had the first day of ninth grade.

I won a quarter off the guy sitting next to me,

playing a hand with cards,

and I got my cards taken away and sent to the back of the class,

first day of ninth grade.

and so I always

it's like a

karate training

you train, you learn to kick

you learn to punch, but you go

will it really work? What if someone's

punching me back? Will these

moves actually be effective?

and so

and it's the same thing with the card moves

so that's where I would

slip if you would, through the years

I would get in games and I

would have to try out the moves, I'm practicing

I'm sitting there practicing this darn move for 10,000 hours.

Now I want to put it to its actual purpose.

So there were times, and sometimes I'd take the money,

and other times I'd just take the money right back to them.

Other times when people all openly challenged me. Now that's a different story. And I've had people, very, very wealthy people, challenge me to see if I could beat them. One time a guy wanted to just cut high card for the pot. And we kept cutting and cutting and cutting. We cut over a dozen times before he finally surrendered.

And if you know how money works, when you double the double the double the double, and that was fun for me.

Another time, the CEO of not a Fortune 500 company, not a Fortune 50, probably not a Fortune 50.

I won't say the name, but he invited me to Martha's Vineyard, and he said, you can join our game under these conditions.

We know how tricky you are with those little fingers of yours.

so when it's your deal

one of us at the table

we shuffle, the deck is laid on the table

and you have to deal those cards from off the table

and it was he, he was the CEO

and he had a number of his VPs, top VPs in the game

and so I had to deal with it

like I said, cards on the table

and that's one of my favorite methods

because it's so deceptive

and all night long he kept slamming his fist on the table

going, there's no way you can be cheating

And the thing is, when he said, if you can do it, go for it, but I know it can't be done, there was two things there.

First, he challenged me, you know, if you can do it, go for it.

That's challenged me as what I can do and what I'm known for.

And the other is, if I could do it, I had his permission.

But he said, go for it if you can do it.

And so anyway, he kept slamming his face.

There's no way you can be cheating.

And one of the things I do in my show as a demonstration is I let someone shuffle the cards, and then I have them deal out to three or whatever number of players, it doesn't matter, and then deal my cards from anywhere on the deck.

When they come around, deal five cards to us, and then I'll spread it out, and I'll show that when they shuffled, cut, and dealt, I had four of a kind.

I had the winning hand.

And so to have done it under the conditions he set forth was even easier.

But anyway, that's one example.

But there's other times.

And there was one time a guy pulled a gun on me.

He was from Wyoming.

He said, I've heard about you gamers here in Texas.

You're all a bunch of sissies.

I'm from Wyoming.

You and I are going to play a little heads-up poker.

That's exactly how he talked.

And he was a Wyoming cowboy.

And so he was obviously challenging me, obviously knew who I was.

And so we sat down, and we're sitting there playing.

and we got some chips from the casino at this particular place.

It was a faux casino, but they had gambling there.

Anyway, I would borrow the chips, and we were just buying it $300 at a time.

Within five minutes, I had it $300, bought it another $300,

and within five minutes, I had that.

And then finally, he pulled a gun, slapped me across the nose with the barrel twice,

so I knew what was going on.

And then he held it under the table and said, keep dealing.

and at that point I'm going, okay.

And now I went out, and as soon as I said, I got to go,

and he said, don't you move.

And anyway, so then I just made sure everything was clean and pretty,

and the money just pretty much stayed where it was,

because at that point it became pretty much a dead-even game.

And then finally one of the managers of the place who I knew

walked within about four feet of him, and I moved over to him.

I wasn't going to do something when someone's standing there.

a gun anyway security came in took him it's it's unbelievable man i mean i you know before this

interview i talked to some people about who we were going to have on i don't think they had heard

of you before and everyone was so surprised i mean they couldn't believe that you know someone

that had challenges with their vision could could overcome such a massive hurdle and i think that's

what's so inspiring about your story is that, you know, if you can do this, anyone can do anything.

And that's what I take from it. Oh, big time. Exactly. You just got to decide A to C, you know,

don't let anything get in your way. Just go to whatever your objective or A to Z. Don't let the

B, C, D get in your way. Focus on it. Determine what you want. See it. Picture it. Visualize it

And then don't turn left or turn right.

Anyone that says, ah, that you can't do, that can't be done.

Just look at that as one of the fun obstacles to overcome in the process.

I think that's what's so inspiring about what you do is that you're showing people that you can really overcome anything that you put your mind to.

Yeah.

And, of course, even then, you know, my whole life, you know, I've been a performer for over 40 years.

performed all over the world.

I've been seeing on media and different things

in over 200 countries.

And since I did some specials for China,

by over a billion people now.

And the thing is the vision part of it

has only been the past 25 years that I mentioned it.

Before that, I was a professional performer

and I did not tell people about my vision.

And when someone else did,

levity with them because I wanted my work to stand on its own merit. I didn't want people to say,

hey, pretty good for a blind boy or pretty good for a disabled whatever. And so I would,

I kind of, I just had a little chip on my shoulder. And so I would shy away when people

wanted to say, hey, but this makes it more incredible. I go, well, so, okay, so it's more

incredible. In fact, when the dad's last incredible first approached me, they wanted me to walk with a

I said, no, I won't do that.

And so the first time I turned down the highest,

one of the highest rated shows on television,

1981, when they first approached me to be on their show.

Then they said they dropped the white cane part of it.

And then so I just did the show.

And then, but I say that because

I don't consider myself disabled.

I see differently than everybody else.

We all, like I said, have our challenges.

is if it's laziness, if you were assaulted, if you were thrown in prison, or if you had

your eyes gouged out.

We all have something that we have to deal with, and that just makes life more interesting

and more fun.

We can look at it as a downfall or as a tragedy, as something negative, or we can look at it

as part of a challenge.

And I choose to look at anything that's put in front of me as part of a challenge.

other challenges outside of the vision. I mean, all my years in the martial arts,

man, you know, my body's old and the parts are wearing out. So I haven't missed a workout in 47

years. But I've had knee surgery. I've had hernia surgery. I've had three shoulder surgeries.

One particular fight, I won the match, but I lost the work. So it ripped my shoulder apart

and other things. And so, you know, and I just come out of the hospital.

So I get out of the hospital at noon on Friday.

I'd be back in the gym against the doctor's orders.

And, of course, now the doctors can't hear this.

And I'd be back in the gym working out the other day.

I had surgery on my shoulder.

I'd work out the other three quarters of the body.

And I would recover in a fraction of the time.

They would always come totally astounded how fast I would be back behind the deck or back fully working out.

And that's because the same blood that is going through your body.

three quarters of the body where that body was in a cast or injured or taped up or whatever,

they didn't serve the blood.

The blood's still going through that area.

They just somehow accelerate the heaping process.

It flush out the swelling.

One time, I'm getting off on a lot of tangents for you.

Sorry about that.

I've had seven hand surgeries.

My hands are my living.

People say, why are you fighting?

You're hurting your hands.

So I've had seven hand surgeries.

My hand was as big as my foot.

And I went in, my wife, my beautiful wife, Kim and I,

we worked out for 150 minutes without taking a breath.

That's two hours and two and a half hour workout,

two and a half hour workout.

The swelling in my hand went down.

I thought it went down 50% from that one workout.

And I went back to the therapist.

I said, look, and I had just been in there that day.

And they measure your swelling every time.

She goes, it didn't go down 50%.

It went down 60% in a 24 hour period.

doing what the doctors are afraid to have me do because they're afraid of lawyers.

And that's get back in the game.

And I'm not encouraging people to go against their doctors.

I'm stubborn and I did that, but I'm not encouraging others to do that.

Listen to your doctor because I don't want to be sued.

It's been bad advice, but I was not one that listened to doctors.

I'll just say that.

That was me.

Yeah, I mean, it's inspiring.

have to know when to push forward, right? I mean, it's important to understand our limits and then

push a little bit past them. Yes. And then when you start pushing, then accelerate it. And I've

said people say, oh man, I need to lose weight or something. You know, start off easy. I tell people,

okay, just walk three houses down and walk back. Five minutes. Do something that is so easy,

you can't not do it.

You just walk down the

distance of three houses. Then the next day, walk down four houses. Then the next day, jog down the distance of one of the houses, then walk.

And then just slowly – and then what happens is you create a habit, and your body becomes addicted to that habit.

The endorphins and the different things that are in our miraculously made brain, you start excreting, and that creates a desire to do it.

and then eventually it almost becomes

where you, if you can't,

if you're not able to do it,

you're going, I'm going to go nuts

if I don't have a chance to get in that gym and work out.

I'm going to go nuts

if I don't get that deck of cards back in my hand.

Richard, this has been amazing, man.

I really appreciate it.

I know we had been planning this for a couple months now.

Where can people find your work?

Is there a website that they can go to

to order the documentary, to watch the documentary?

Oh, yes.

Delt, D-E-A-L-T as in Delta Hand of Cards.

It's an award-winning documentary.

It's been, it's 95 on Rotten Tomatoes.

It's five stars on iTunes.

And you can get it on any video on-demand platform, iTunes, Amazon Prime, Google Play, Comcast.

It's on Hulu.

And the international distribution, October, is being released internationally around the world.

But you can find it all over.

Just Google DeltMovie.com is one of the websites.

My website for when people want to book for speaking engagements or shows, RichardTurner52.com.

Richard Turner, my name, HummingCardsAndDeck52.com.

And my personal, and then for bookings, Kim at RichardTurner52.com.

I can contact my manager.

But those are the main places.

But you can watch a lot of stuff on YouTube if you just want to see clips from the film

or dozens of other shows and things that I've been on

or everything I've described here,

you can go online and actually watch it done live

in front of people around the world.

Perfect.

Guys, my guest, his name is Richard Turner.

The documentary is called Delt.

Go pick it up.

It's an amazing watch.

We are going to get out of here.

Thank you so much for listening.

You will hear from us next week.