Ticket Tricks : Illegal Scalpers Say They’re Just Making a Living While Making Customers Happy

No way he’s selling crack cocaine--not any more, says Cory Robinson. Yet here he is, in a ragtag cluster of men on a noisy Los Angeles street corner, watching the cars for action and worrying about another police bust.

“We’re not selling no drugs, we’re not committing no robberies,” Robinson says defiantly, a diamond stud in each ear, his eyes sharp under a low-slung cap. “We ain’t doing no wrong. We’re just giving the people what they want.”

What they want, this night, is a ticket or two to the Dodgers game. Robinson is a scalper, a nomadic wheeler-dealer in the illegal ticket trade. At 21, he says, he has spent four years taking tax-free profits at sporting events all over the map. He’s done hockey in Toronto, football in Oklahoma, and college basketball’s Final Four in North Carolina. That blue cap he’s wearing is a memento of the Super Bowl in Atlanta, where he picked up $1,000 for a day’s work in January.

Dodger Stadium is his favorite Los Angeles venue, as it is for more than 50 independent, unlicensed entrepreneurs who unlawfully work the winding roads outside the ballpark, all but in the shadow of the Los Angeles Police Department’s training academy.

The scalpers run a season-long cat-and-mouse game with LAPD vice officers, winning just often enough to survive--though not in great numbers, or in lavish style. Most are poor street hustlers, moonlighting from blue-collar jobs or using scalping as a sole source of income.

“A lot of guys say if they wasn’t dealing tickets, they’d be dealing hub caps,” says Danny, 35, a veteran of 15 seasons who, like most scalpers, refuses to divulge his full name. Danny is the prototypical scalper: Wearing his Dodgers cap, he shows up three hours before game time, working the cars on strategic points along Stadium Way, Elysian Park Avenue and Academy Road.

Virtually every scalper carries the same hand-printed cardboard sign: “I need tickets.”

The sign is a bit of a ruse. It advertises that the scalper is ready to deal without touting the unlawful side of his trade--the fact that, when not buying tickets, he is busily hawking them for sometimes double or triple the face value.

The tickets come from anywhere--box offices, licensed brokers or, often, season-ticket holders who choose not to attend a given game. The brokers and season-seat holders know the scalpers are out there, ready to pay cash for good locations. They drive up and unload their unwanted tickets in hasty, through-the-car-window deals.

Scalpers then await their buyers, who are expected to see through the counter-logic of the “I need tickets” signs. “They will see you’re dealing in tickets and they’ll ask (if we also sell),” says Rick, 55, who dangles a cigarette from his fingers while advertising on steeply sloping Elysian Park Avenue, north of Sunset Boulevard.

On a good night, the scalpers at Dodger Stadium say, each can haul down $150, even $200.

But there are risks. They can be stuck with unwanted tickets, a chronic occupational hazard. LaMont, 24, who scored a $1,700 windfall at last year’s USC-UCLA college football game, remembers getting burned not long ago at a hockey game in Anaheim: He invested heavily in tickets to the Mighty Ducks’ final home game of the season, only to have the team fall out of the playoff race.

It cost him $200.

“The bottom fell out,” he says.

And then there are the police, often in plain clothes, posing as buyers just as they would during a drug bust. The police confiscate their tickets and issue citations, scalpers say. Fines run about $200.

Even if police don’t catch them in the act, passing patrol officers shoo them along. Scalping is neither a high-priority crime nor a significant problem, except at sold-out games or rock concerts, police say. But the practice of snapping up tickets and boosting prices cheats customers of a chance to buy those tickets at a fair value, said Detective Kurt Joachimstaler of the LAPD’s administrative-vice gambling section.

Under state scalping laws, tickets cannot be resold, even at face value, on the premises of an arena. City ordinances also make it a misdemeanor to resell tickets off-site without a license, such as those held by ticket agencies.

Scalpers resent the regulations and the busts. They say their main problem--maybe their only real problem--is the police.

“It’s rough, man . . . the cops harass us,” complains Michael Williams, 22, who says he has been cited perhaps 10 times in five years. The cops got him just the other day, he adds. “They could be out there doing their jobs, chasing the big-time thieves and dope dealers. We’re not bothering nobody. We’re just doing our jobs, like they are.”

Strolling the shoulder of Stadium Way, Williams holds his sign in one hand and a brown bag in the other. A Budweiser cap pokes up like a budding flower. He talks of his trade as nothing short of a public service, saying fans rely on him. “They don’t have to wait in line,” he says. “Sold-out games, we give them the tickets they want.”

Williams says he works nearly every Dodgers home game, spending $1.10 to take the bus downtown from South-Central Los Angeles. In between games, Williams runs a forklift at a warehouse, he says. He supports five children and step-children, plus a cat and a dog, he says.

“This is just enough to make ends meet,” he says. “This is work. It’s a grind.”

LaMont is one of the lucky ones. He owns a car, an old beige Oldsmobile. Robinson used to have a car--an ’80 Buick Regal--but it broke down at a Pink Floyd concert in Oakland. He sold it there for $900, enough for plane fare to Las Vegas to roll the dice, as it were, on the recent Julio Cesar Chavez fight.

Now he gets to Dodger Stadium by bus from Hawthorne, dreaming of the day when he will buy his own minivan.

On this night, the Cubs are in town. Up on Academy Road, where LaMont is one of several scalpers working a busy stretch of asphalt, a deal is going down. Brian Schroeder of Farley, Iowa, has rolled into town in his “Cubs Mobile,” a blue ’71 Volkswagen convertible with “Cubs” and “Holy Cow!” splashed in red across its flank.

Schroeder has come a few thousand miles and wants a seat right behind the Cubs’ dugout.

One scalper has it--a seat four rows back. The face value is $11, but the scalper wants $40. They haggle good-naturedly until Schroeder agrees to pay $30 and pulls out his wallet.

“We said $35?” the scalper asks.

“No, $30.”

The deal is made and the scalper walks away, chuckling.

Schroeder is grinning, too--another satisfied customer. “He’s laughing at me because no one’s going to pay that for the Cubs’ side (of the field),” he says of the scalper. “But I’m going to enjoy the game, right? That’s baseball.”