COLUMN ONE : ‘Got This Right Off a Truck’ : In the shadow of the top-dollar deal makers, New York City’s cast-offs and fallen angels are out to compete. Who else could sell a worthless box for $60?

Here they come, making their meager way: the unlucky, the slow, the palsied, the incomplete of limbs, the loosed from jobs and the cast out of homes, the covered with sores, the street dudes, the boozers and dope fiends, the addled by interior voices, the eroded of spirit and the gut-shot by life.

Manhattan may be the nation’s capital of high finance, but what is most conspicuous are the sorry transactions of hand-to-mouth existence. Arms forage through the trash for soda cans worth a nickel. Peddlers set up shop on thin sheets of plastic, their sidewalk inventory accumulated from dumpsters.

Panhandlers beg beside each subway entrance and automatic teller machine, some bold as drill sergeants, others barely able to murmur into the deadened ears of the city. Practitioners of petty con games roam from street to street, criminal mischief leaping off their tongues.

Oh, yes, the con men. Michael Bice has been working the same scam for more than two years now. “Hey man, check this out,” he says. “I got a brand new camcorder. Just the thing for Christmas.”

The box contains only tightly rolled newspaper, but it looks real enough under his arm. The shape is good, the heft right. An ad for a Sony Handicam is glued on the side. The package is wrapped in bubble plastic. Stickers are affixed: “Factory Sealed” and “Packing List Enclosed.”

Bice is rambling through the evening rush hour traffic. Vehicles are jammed up, waiting to get into the Holland Tunnel. He has started with a delivery truck, but then strolls back to a white Camaro with New Jersey plates.

Two guys are inside. Appearances are important. The con man makes a quick read: 25 years old, not cops, suburbs, pricey tennis shoes.

Bice himself has obvious and important qualities. His eyes flutter, his body stinks. He looks like a crack addict, desperate for cash.

The driver eyes him thoroughly, and the con man lets him talk first. “What do you want for it?” he asks after smirking at his friend. Bice lifts the box from its “skirt,” a Macy’s shopping bag. The price on the ad reads $999.

“I just got this off a Fed Ex truck, and I need to lay it down quick,” the con man says. He jerks his head nervously. “I want 90 bucks.”

At this point, the “vic,” or victim, often demands to see the camcorder. If so, Bice parries or bluffs. But these vics don’t ask. Instead they start to bargain. “I only got $30 here,” says the driver, peeping into his billfold.

The light changes. Horns start to honk. The car edges a few inches forward. This is the vic’s own bargaining tactic: take it or leave it.

Bice needs to decide. A $30 hit is really “punk licks.” Usually, he gets $50 or more. But this would be his first sale of the day, and he needs to add some heat to his blood. He hasn’t had any drugs since his methadone at noon.

He tells the driver to peel off another $5 and he’ll hand over the box. Then he “caps” the deal. “I got no peddler’s license, and you got no receipt,” he says. “Police can confiscate this. So hide it right away.”

That’s to keep the vics from tearing into the box for a peek. Bice turns and slowly walks away. Rule No. 1: Never run until you are out of sight. Rule 2: When you start to run, go at least a block and a half.

His getaway ends at a liquor store, where he buys some peach wine. “The guys had nice sneakers, and I should have got more,” he says regretfully.

But then he grins. He imagines their faces as they open the purchase. He can hear them cursing, their voices in his head like a catchy tune.

Who knows what comes up these streets, East Side, West Side, all around the town? So many are on the scrounge. New York has an estimated 70,000 to 90,000 homeless people. They know the city from the bottom up, stalagmites in a great cave of stalactites. Their real estate is doorways, alleys, tunnels.

Bice wakes up at the Bowery subway station, where he and a few others keep mattresses at the end of the platform. He uses a wool blanket with roses in the design. The wall is white tile, yellowed like bad teeth. Nearby is a wicker rocking chair, its seat punched out.

The M and J trains hurtle by in a rush of color and sound. The tracks smell like an outhouse. Fluorescent lights hang overhead, also serving as discreet shelf space for drugs. Empty crack vials and discarded needles litter the damp cement floor. Scraps of paper and tape are everywhere.

This corner of the station is a makeshift assembly plant for the “flying game.” Two dozen guys traipse in and out all day, making up the camcorder boxes. They are “flyers” as opposed to “slummers,” the con men who peddle brass necklaces with “14-karat gold” stamped in the metal.

“You got a lot of slummers switching over to the flying game because of the good money,” Bice says. “It’s bad. They don’t respect the game. They’ll step in on you with another box just when you’ve got a vic.”

Street money is hard money. “I’m out there everyday, in play,” says Bice, a well-muscled 30-year-old whose gift of salesmanship has stayed with him even as everything else flew apart. He is a former immigration officer who dealt a little coke on the side. Then life tricked him. He became his own best customer.

The flying game is his new life. His hours are spent scavenging supplies, building boxes, pursuing sales, smoking up the profits. He tries to do three boxes a day, but, with the drugs and all, the rhythm occasionally slows.

Sometimes, his eyeballs roll up into his forehead. Memory goes adrift. Time is swallowed in clumps. He misplaces his purposes.

“The down side of my life is you live from day to day,” he says. “You’re not taking care of your hygiene the way you’re supposed to. If you were ever a lady’s man, and I was, your potential is way down.

“The up side is I really enjoy whipping people. I like the fast turnover, the making of the money. You’re going right up against someone, your mind against theirs.”

There is a pecking order at the Bowery stop. Panhandlers curl up on the stairs. Window wipers, who do windshields for spare change, sleep back in the honeycombed tunnels. The flyers have the most status, lying on the platform.

The station is rarely busy. It is a high-crime area. Robbers often lurk, and commuters know enough to wait upstairs until they hear the train. The transit police are more concerned with the robbers than the guys building boxes.

From time to time, the flyers will tell the cops where a thug has fled. A good robber can disappear into the darkness of the subway, from Bowery to Grand, never going upstairs. The flyers are glad to cooperate.

They have a peculiar sense of ethics, which spares them the harassments of conscience. Panhandling is too undignified a business and robbery too risky a crime. In the penal code, their scam is called “fraudulent accosting,” a misdemeanor, usually punishable with 45 days in the lockup, tops.

“You’re making just as much as you would dealing drugs, and it’s no felony,” Bice says. “Don’t get me wrong. If I saw a camcorder in somebody’s car, and the vibes were good, I might take a shot.

“But to steal one from a store, that’s not a necessity. You can’t get much more for a real camcorder than you can for the box.

“Besides, think how God looks at this. He may not want me to beat people out of their money, but he takes it into consideration that I’m not beating an honest man. No one buys hot unless they’ve got larceny in their heart.”

To be considered a true flyer, to “have wings,” there are three rites of passage. First is a $100 score. Second is a rip-down, where the cops tear up your box. Third is a comeback vic--an angry customer who finds you.

A tough guy once came back on Bice and left some nasty bumps. “It’s the punk licks you’ve got to watch, the cheap people,” he says. “The rich ones who pay you a lot, they get a kick out of it. It’s nothing to them.”

Flyers try to be disciplined. It can take an hour or two to make a convincing box, starting with any carton, then encasing it in plastic, adding the camera ads and a phony shipping bill, sealing it with bubble plastic and clear tape.

The subway platform is such odd territory, a subterranean kindergarten 10 feet wide, all these derelicts pasting and taping and passing the scissors. They scramble when the whoosh of the subway blows away their loose paper.

Bice clips his camcorder ads from video magazines. If he can, he buys brochures--five for $2--at the camera store. The cutouts go in a three-ring binder, with separations for each brand: JVC, Ricoh, Olympus, Sony, Magnavox.

He stows his gear in two dirty valises, which he keeps beside the tracks. No flyer is supposed to steal from another, though this custom often goes up in the urgent smoke of the crack pipes.

“Very few you can call friends in this game,” Bice says. “You can call them close associates, but that’s about all.”

Usually, he works alone. But lately he has been running with an addict named Goldie, whose wife had convinced him to enter drug rehab. There was a long waiting list, so Goldie came to the Bowery instead.

Bice pays him 10% as “hold me down money” to watch for any cops on the street. Goldie is dependably loyal, though his skill as a lookout is hampered by his inability to smoke crack and pay attention at the same time.

“You’re no good to me if you just been smoking,” Bice says.

“Did you see me smoking?” Goldie answers in a lame denial.

“I know you been smoking.”

The two men come up to the street. Bice uses a car window as a mirror to see what his reflection has to say. He then psyches up before starting the game. He fingers a white crucifix that he wears around his neck. He says two prayers, one to God, the other to his favorite actor, Humphrey Bogart.

Then he and Goldie walk over to Broadway and Canal, at the edge of Chinatown. The sidewalk traffic is bustling and there are plenty of cars too. Bice quickly gets into play. He is more theatrical than most flyers.

“You got to act like you just stole it, half hiding it, half selling it,” he says. “Some vics really dig the action. They say: ‘Yeah, I seen it when you took it.’ I once had two guys arguing over me: ‘Hey, I seen him first.’

“We beat a lot of tourists with the game, but you’d be surprised, mostly it’s New Yorkers. That’s the difference between a vic and a mark. A mark actually comes looking for a hot machine. The mark, that’s your New Yorker.”

What’s a New Yorker to do? Temptation is around each corner, temptation to buy, to flee, to pity, to embrace, to despair. There is a sliding succession of grief-tracked faces, stratum upon stratum of underground economy. Who among them are the fallen angels? Who are the creeps? And who is merely in-between?

Panhandlers work nearly every subway train. Some whimper, some bring their children, some do comedy routines. The guy wearing antennas for ears has a cat on his shoulder and plays the saxophone badly until people pay him to stop.

The beggar with the seeing-eye dog is Frank Perino, 48. He walks from car to car, singing an aria from “Carmen.” “I can also do John Denver, Neil Diamond and Kenny Rogers, but the people like the opera best,” he says.

But is he really blind? (Yes, he is.)

The man in tattered clothes, limping with a metal cane is John Carrubba, 38. “I make people think I’m new, just on the street, make them think: There but for the grace of God go I,” he says. “The yuppies like that.”

Does he really need a cane? (No. And pressed clothes are in his knapsack.)

Crack addicts Russell Ingram, 36, and Charles Johnson, 44, are too proud to “wiggle a cup.” Instead they fish the day’s discarded newspapers out of the garbage and resell them at impromptu locations.

“The money’s good, but you’ve got to screen your product,” Ingram says. “You can’t have your customers opening them up and saying yech.”

Estes Frazier, 31, pushes a shopping cart through Midtown, collecting metal and wire from dumpsters and construction sites. Legitimate scrap yards pay 70 cents a pound for copper, 25 cents a pound for aluminum.

“Then there are the 24-hour scrap places, bootleggers we call them,” he says. “They stay open for the crackheads. It’s good ‘cause they take anything, even a fire hydrant. But they only pay 10 cents on the dollar.”

John Lewis, 41, is a sidewalk peddler. The trash provides him a haphazard supply of goods--a pair of blue silk pajamas, a partial tube of Vaseline, the summer, 1962, issue of Daedalus. His 45 r.p.m. records include “Kung Fu Man” by Ultrafunk and “I’m in the Mood for Love” by Rosemary Clooney.

“It’s just a matter of survival,” he says. “I worked construction for 15 years, but things went sour. You know what sour is? Your work, your wife, your life, your kids--they’re all gone. Now I hunt through the garbage.”

Bice does not like peddlers. A lot of them are “jappers.” When you have your back to them, they shake their head “no” at your vic.

“The street is tough,” he says. “You got to learn: live and let live.”

Bice was right about Goldie. He is high as a steeple, and while Broadway is thick with cops, the lookout cannot even find the con man among the crowds. Bice is in the street, dodging cars, yanking the box in and out of its skirt.

A red light stops the traffic. Three semitrailers wait in a row. The con man jumps on the first one’s running board. The driver asks right off: “Is it hot?” This is a clue to Bice. A nervous vic needs reassurance.

“No problem, man,” he says. “I got this on the street three hours ago, not anywhere around here. For 90 bucks, you take it home.”

The vic starts talking to the other two drivers on his citizens band radio. He sends Bice scurrying back and forth between the trucks. The con man sizes up the situation: These guys are tweeners, not top dollar.

He lowers his price to $60. He shows the second driver the Federal Express receipt on the box’s side. “I got this right off a truck, man,” he says.

The light changes. Traffic pulls around the three waiting semis. The second driver rotates the box, studying the photo under the clear tape, then taking a closer look at Bice. “What are you, some kind of dope addict?” he asks.

The con man smiles as if to say: you betcha. And that extra bit of salesmanship cinches it. Money is exchanged. The two even shake hands.

In the deepest part of himself, the part that can still taste success, Bice lights with a flame of satisfaction. He stuffs the cash in his pants.

“Sixty bucks,” he says, easing away. “Now that’s proper licks.”