On March 9, 2004, Louisiana State Police pulled back two pieces of carpet behind the counter of a Bourbon Street souvenir shop and found more than 350 pills, hydrocodone, stuffed into bottles with the labels torn off.
The shop sold T-shirts and hot sauce up front. In the back room, it ran one of the oldest cons in the business, dressed up fresh for a new century of tourists.
Bourbon Street runs twelve blocks, jazz trumpets and hurricane cups spilling out of every doorway, and it has swallowed grifters like this one for two hundred years.
Carnival men used to call the game Razzle Dazzle: a rigged betting contest with an unwinnable jackpot, worked by a barker who never lets the mark walk away ahead. Bet a little, the barker says, and you’re one roll from the big prize. The version running out of Happy Days, at 335 Bourbon Street, pulled in m…
