Chapter Five

The first documented fraud of his life involved forty-two rabbit scalps and the Glen Innes Municipal Council.

The council paid a bounty. Twenty cents a scalp. Jamie and the two Rennie twins went out with a .22 and a spotlight and made about four dollars a night, which in 1988 was money for a fourteen-year-old, and then Jamie noticed something.

The clerk who paid the bounty did not count.

The clerk weighed.

It took him four days to work out the rest. Rabbit scalps, soaked, take on water. Rabbit scalps with a little river sand worked down into the fur take on considerably more. And rabbit scalps divided along the line of the skull with a razor blade present, in a wet hessian bag on a set of council scales, as approximately one and three-quarter rabbits.

He ran it eleven weeks. He cleared just under two hundred dollars. He gave the Rennie twins forty each and told them the council had cut the rate.

He was never caught, because the clerk had no reason to check, and because a fourteen-year-old in a flannelette shirt with dirt under his fingernails was the last person in Glen Innes in 1988 that anybody was going to suspect of a systematic weights-and-measures fraud.

And he learned the thing that underwrote everything he ever did afterwards, and he learned it at fourteen:

People do not verify. People check the presentation and skip the substance. The gap between the presentation and the substance is where the money lives, and the gap can be made as wide as you have the nerve to make it.

He told that story from stage many times over the following thirty years. He always ended it the same way — "and that, folks, is when I first learned about leverage" — and it always got applause.

And nobody in any of those rooms ever worked out that they were the rabbits.