The Grafter and the Picker

"The Grafter and the Picker" is a study of two rogues from two very different bunco traditions who one day find themselves working the same street corner in lower Manhattan's Union Square area. One of these rogues is the late Joe Ades, a bearded, bellowing sidewalk pitchman from Manchester, England, by way of Australia, known for his line of potato peelers and his fancy style of dress. He was always spiffed out in a nice suit and tie and some little extra finishing touch; cuff links, say, or a pocket square, which bulged on his breast like the fat roll of bills he flashed to the crowd when naming his price. He was also an assiduous bon vivant who every night after work dined with his wife at one of their spots: Elio's, Centolire, Jean Georges, La Ripaille. The two lived comfortably on staid Park Avenue, in a sumptuous, meandering eight-room apartment. As Joe liked to say of his $5 peelers, "Never underestimate a small amount of money."
In England, where Joe was born in the thirties, he was part of a straggling fraternity of peddlers who worked various hustles in markets and fairgrounds and occasionally in the public thoroughfares as well. These roving traders called themselves grafters (a group that should not be confused with grifters). Grafters referred to their goods as "tools," a blanket term for everything from ladies' hankies, perfume, and purses to ironing board covers and razor blades, carpet cleaners and screwdriver sets. There were honest grafters with honest ("straight") tools, and dishonest grafters with dishonest ("crooked") tools. But honesty is a slippery fellow, and the same man working a straight tool one week was often working a crooked one the next. By Joe's lights, he was the only true grafter working in New York--until he met Ricki, the pull-up merchant of Union Square South. The story of these two successful scamps is the off-beat subject of "The Grafter and the Picker."