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Lost Magic Decoded Premieres Tonight: Meet the Millionaires’ Magician Steve Cohen

Cultural Immersion, Culture, Pop Culture Travel, Travel News — on October 18, 2012 10:44 am
Lost Magic Decoded Premieres Tonight: Meet the Millionaires’ Magician Steve Cohen

Tonight, Lost Magic: Decoded, premieres on the History Channel at 9 pm. Peter was honored to co-executive produce the show. Before the premiere, find out a bit more about Cohen and how he came to be known as the Millionaires’ Magician.

Steven Knight: How did you first get into magic?

Steve Cohen: I’ve been doing magic since I was 6 years old. I learned magic first from my uncle who was a very talented amateur magician and used to show magic to all the children in my family at family parties, and I was really the only one that paid attention, I was really eager to learn how he did these tricks. So he would take me off to a corner and he would not only show me the tricks but he’d give me the props, he’d give me the cards and a little box that has a hidden device in it. He would pass on his tricks to me because I was really interested in it.

When I was 10 years old, I gathered up enough courage and tricks to perform at a children’s birthday party. I got paid $25 to perform to a room of 4-year-olds, and entertain them with magic tricks. It was nerve-wracking, but that was my entry into show business. Then all through junior high-school, high school, and college, I was doing magic at various events and parties. When I went to Cornell I was doing performances for the university, for the dean and the board of trustees. I also got a chance to perform for Carl Sagan, doing a show for his group at the science center at Cornell.

It started off as a birthday party thing and I ended up performing for some of the smartest people in the world.

SK: What were you studying at Cornell?

SC: My major was psychology. I was most interested in combining my study of magic with my study psychology, seeing how people think and tying the psychological secrets I was learning to my magic.

SK: Did you have magic in mind as a career and profession for life?

SC: I’ve always wanted to do magic, even while I was in college. The joke is with a name like Steve Cohen I should be a physician not a magician. But my parents are very proud. Of course my parents wanted me to have a regular job, so I appeased them by getting a somewhat regular job, working as a translator. I speak Japanese, and I was working as an interpreter/translator for several years, but it was very boring and I always had my eye on magic.

Even when I was a translator I would do performances for people like David Rockefeller, and a lot of wealthy folks in New York and in Tokyo. Along the way I became known as “The Millionaires’ Magician.” I eventually ended up performing for Warren Buffet and a hundred different billionaires around the world, including the royal family of Saudi Arabia and the Queen of Morocco.

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  • Usmc

    Bullet catch hoax…. At least have the bullet u caught in ur mouth to have rifling grooves on it….. So whack!!

  • jeff

    bullet catch LOL yes a bullet went into magazine but was not chambered, he never pulled the slide to load, so either there was a blank and something broke glass or was a real bullet but not the one signed and was aimed to miss you. rest of show was good but anyone that has used a gun will see right through that one.

  • Yawn

    Ugh the setups for these tricks are so over the top… I was hoping this show was something it isn’t… Surely not “decoded” more like hammed up to the extreme… Such filler… They could have fit more tricks in if it weren’t for the lengthy filler… Lets write on a blackboard all the people that failed at the magic bullet trick… I’d advise you not to do this its too dangerous! Please…..
    Fake audiences watching basic sleight of hand oohing and aching like they’ve never seen it before…. And yes I’m always the guy that says “this is what he did” and yes people hate that lol =)
    My cross to bear.

  • Usmc1

    u can see him holding the bullet in his lower left lip… Lol dudes a joke

  • magic billy

    the most convincing bullet catch’s are done with a black powder rifle or revolver, not a Glock 19. anyone who has ever operated a firearm know that round must be chambered before it can be fired. bullets are “Swaged” down the barrel anything drawn the bullet with a sharpie is going to turn into a messy black smudge if anything. swaging describes the process of the bullet entering the barrel and being squeezed to conform to the rifling. Most firearm bullets are made slightly larger than the inside diameter of the barrel, so that they are swaged to engage the rifling and form a tight seal upon firing.

  • http://www.facebook.com/jay.mort.94 Jay Mort

    Catch a bullet is just to easy to bunk. It involved: misdirection (M), sleight of hand (SoH), suspense (S), and smoke and mirrors (S&M).
    1. S: Magician psychs up crowd pointing out EMTs, talking about danger, and acting nervous (an NYC crowd who probably couldn’t tell a glock from a flintlock anyways). This makes the crowd anxious and frightened making it more likely they will not think clearly or be as attentive.
    2. S/S&M: The shooter shows off the power of the glock, insinuating it has 1 round in the gun (a lie, there is actually 2, a live round and either a dud or more likely a less than leathal rubber bullet), by firing the pistol at a vase. Neatly destroying it. (observant onlookers would see the glock’s slide not locking back in the open position which indicates an empty magazine, which means there was another round in the mag: the dud/rubber bullet). This action further psychs the crowd with the visceral display of destruction, the loud noise, overpreasure of the expanding gas in an enclosed area (likely the reason for an indoor trick), and the brass clinking on the ground.
    3. S&M: Magician has a dummy round initialed by an audience member.
    4. SoH: Magician palms the initialed round after showing it to the camera and ‘confirming’ it is the real one. Magician replaces it with a pre-marked dummy round (the audience and those at home can’t tell it isn’t the real one as from even a small distance marks encircling a cylindrical object become almost impossible to identify, and the magician does not detail the round afterwards.
    5. S&M/M: Magician hands ‘fake’ dummy round to shooter who places it into ‘empty’ mag he removed from the gun.(further insiuating he previously had only one bullet in the gun, again a lie – the blank/rubber bullet is still in the gun’s chamber) While everyone is watching the shooter loading the ‘fake’ bullet into the magazine and insert it into the gun the magician removes the initialed bullet from the palmed cartridge, repalming the bullet and now empty case. (observant viewers like Jeannie will notice the shooter never racks the pistols slide, without racking the slide the single bullet he just put in the magazine would never make it into the barrel of the gun and thus could not be fired, doubly obvious as the camera doesn’t leave the gun until it is fired again)
    6 S/S&M/SoH/M: Magician walks towards center stage. Taking time to look nervous and inspect glass pane (more to get people to not pay attention to the shooter not chambering the ‘fake’ round). He gets into position, reaches in his pocket to remove a hankerchief (and at the same time deposit the palmed cartridge case). Suspense builds as people are afraid for him.
    7. S&M: Hankerchief dropped, the shooter fires. The rubber bullet flies through the glass and strikes the magician in the side chest (where the shooter was aiming instead of his mouth).
    8. S&M/SoH/S: Magician takes the hit (which hits like a paintball) turns his back to all the viewers, while back is turned puts the palmed initialed bullet into his mouth.
    9. S&M/S/M: While writhing around spits out bullet. People are too worried and/or stunned to pay any attention to the shooter (who still has the ‘fake’ bullet in the gun, who likely puts the gun away for “safety reasons”). Magician is taken away to the hospital obviously (though not really) injured, making people overly worried about him to cloud their judgement and leaves them to be amazed by the initialed bullet they saw him spit out.
    10 S&M: Magician shows TV viewers images of what he claims is from a glass shard popping a few blood vessels. Unfortunately no lacerations are visible, nor are there any stitches from the operation he would have to go through to remove the glass from his body. Instead what we see is a bruise from blunt force trauma (this is why it is likely he used a rubber bullet) very similar to the injuries one would see from a game of paintball. (A glass shard would cause a laceration on the skin where it entered and likely only cause small amounts of internal bleeding in its local area, blunt force trauma creates multiple internal hemerages over the impact area without any skin lacerations, which bleed significantly into the surrounding tissue i.e. a bruise.)
    So there you have it, how this guy did the bullet catch trick.