The Way of the Scalper

Risk and reward inside South Philly's stealth economy.

by E. James Beale

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Published: Sep 30, 2008

Need tickets?"

Every morning, Lee Roberts settles his debts from the night before, makes a series of calls and e-mails to find out who's buying and selling that night, and heads off to a stadium, arena or venue. Today, like many days, he's at Citizens Bank Park.

"Need tickets?"

He is used to rejection. A middle-aged couple wearing Phillies shirts and matching red caps passes by, brushing him off. Roberts casually tells them to enjoy the game as his eyes dart back and forth, looking for a new buyer. Ten thousand people may pass him before one stops.

"Need tickets?"

As he walks up Pattison Avenue from Eagles'-tailgating-friendly "K Lot" toward Broad, Roberts will pass about 40 other men, all looking to buy and sell tickets. They remain seemingly invisible to the fans, who mostly brush aside their advances, and to the cops, who technically should be shooing them. But they keep asking the same question.

"Need tickets?"

"Um, actually yeah," replies a twentysomething brunette with her friend, stopping Roberts across from the old Spectrum.

"Well," he says, "do you want really good seats or just aight ones?" The girls don't know. At about 5-foot-9 with short, dark, spiked hair, a day-old beard and light blue eyes, he comes off as non-threatening, but he still consciously slows down potential buyers, trying to make them feel comfortable. "Well," says Roberts, "what are you trying to spend?" He pulls out tickets ranging from the upper deck to eight rows above the dugout. "My brother was going to come, and he wanted really good tickets, but I think we just want OK ones," one of the girls asks more than tells him. "How about this?" Roberts takes two tickets from his bunch. "These are $44 tickets, they're on the first base side, 12 rows up. Why don't you give me $60 for the pair?" The girls seem interested but start to talk quietly to each other. "Look," says Roberts, sensing the deal, "I'm not here to rob you, I'm out here every day, I'm saving you $30. You're not going to find better seats than that, you're just not." The girls look at each other, agree, and buy the tickets.

This year, on deals like this one, Roberts will make roughly $60,000.

Scalpers don't specialize. There aren't sports scalpers and music scalpers. In Philly, nearly all events — be it your Flyers game, your Jonas Brothers concert or your Disney on Ice — are worked by the same group of guys. If there is a crowd, they will be there. (Naturally, bigger events draw more scalpers — the 40 at the Phillies turned into maybe 80 when the Steelers were in town against the Eagles, and the Olympics will draw scalpers from all over the world.) While the group is based in Philadelphia, if the local teams travel, the scalpers will, as well. During one recent weekend, with the Eagles and Phillies both out of town, several scalpers headed to Ohio to work the 1 p.m. Bengals game in Cincinnati, then over to Cleveland for the Browns game that night. Another few made the trip down to D.C. for the Redskins, and a third up to Syracuse for a Penn State game. This week, Roberts and his partner, Greg, will either be in Texas for the Austin Music Festival or in Talledega, Ala., working a weekend of races at the SuperSpeedway. The guy selling you a ticket in the parking lot is less like a fan with an extra seat, and more like Ticketmaster. Greg has made a living re-selling tickets for the past 37 years. The South Philly Sports Complex is a work site, and scalping is a career.

Why scalping? Well, you're your own boss, and set your own schedule. You have the freedom to travel the country, the ability to gain access to nearly any major event, and you get to be a part of some stories — scalpers talk proudly of providing tickets for clients from Frank Sinatra to Fat Joe, and often pass time reminiscing about such experiences. There's a certain allure. And, of course, there's money. A scalper's income is hard to nail down precisely — the cash they make per game fluctuates — but on an average day, at a baseball game, a decent scalper will make between $100 and $300, and no scalper I spoke to found the idea of a one-day, several-thousand-dollar haul ludicrous. "We've all had days like that," a thin scalper with light skin, a white T-shirt and tight braids said as a dozen others nodded knowingly. Nearly two dozen regular scalpers were willing to ballpark their tax-free annual salary at between $35,000 and $70,000. This past Monday, a man wearing a Phillies jersey, skirt, wig and women's glasses pulled up to the stadium, walked to the ticket office to pick up two tickets, stopped and chatted with two of the scalpers and sped off in a new Mercedes. "He just retired," explains Franky (except for Roberts and Greg, all scalpers' names have been changed), "bought the car and the dress and called it a career."

Still, there are drawbacks to working in an unregulated secondary economy. The work can be demeaning, and is filled with constant pressure. Since most scalpers can't work on consignment, there are days when they walk home in the red. And the legality is, at best, questionable: Technically, anyone is allowed to re-sell a ticket for any price up to its face value, but the Phillies, SEPTA and the city all officially prohibit vending without a license. While police and security often turn a blind eye, the occasional night in jail is nearly inevitable. "If I have to tip someone to work, I will," Roberts says. And if the cops aren't arresting you, they (and security) can chase you away from your familiar perches. During a recent series against the Brewers, two SEPTA cops started to shoo away a small herd of scalpers. As both sides began to argue — "Why today when it's fine every other day?" asked the scalpers; "You're ruining the family atmosphere!" — the cops started to yell loudly that the scalpers were carrying fake tickets. The scalpers weren't, but that didn't matter. The threat alone scared every potential customer in sight.

All of which is to say, scalping isn't for everyone. A successful scalper must be charming, extroverted, confident and unafraid of rejection. He can't come off as threatening, must be able to solve problems quickly, and it doesn't hurt to be white. (Time and time again, white fans come off the subway, walk past a group of black men with tickets and buy off a white scalper 15 feet behind. "Yup, they're racist," says one white salesman.) What's more, he needs to know the business. If you have good seats without any understanding of what they're going for, you won't make money. Roberts tells the story of a kid who started working near the stadium, selling water and pretzels to fans as they came in. "He came up to me and said, 'I got a customer who's willing to pay $100 a ticket, I'll give you $60 each.' So he gives me the money, he goes back, and the guy has flaked on him.

Now he's stuck with tickets he can't resell because he took a risk without knowing the market."

The best way to know the market is to know your fellow scalpers. In many ways, scalping is a team sport. Good scalpers know not only what they think they can get for their tickets, but also what tickets the scalpers around him are carrying. For instance, "Junior," who works right off the subway and often brings his young son to games with him, will initiate contact with a couple of guys who want better seats than what he's selling. Instead of passing on the sale, he'll arrange the money for location, then grab a few seats from another scalper a few feet away and split the profits.

As a result, disliked scalpers struggle.

"If you're out here and don't know what you're doing, you're not going to last long," Roberts explains. "There are so many people who demand that you either know someone who vouches for you or you get grandfathered in." In the afternoon, before the crowds come, the scalpers often mill around the ticket windows. It's less a social pow-wow than a pre-game team meeting.

Scalpers are often perceived as sketchy characters, and while you won't often get sold fake tickets (at least at a Phillies game), there's some truth to the stereotype. Underground economies do attract people who prefer to work underground: The combination of decent money and few hard-line responsibilities invites those with vices (in a refrain I hear several times, every scalper has a vice).

Roberts has used scalping to get his life back together — he's a recovering addict and appreciates the everyday work of scalping — but many use it to indulge their problems. While some parlay their success into a new dress and a shiny Mercedes, one old vet stares at me through yellow eyes and demands I pay him if I want an interview, perhaps forgetting that he gave me one the day before. Twice I sit with hustlers as they run down their co-workers' various issues. "George does dust, Johnny is on dope, Junior loves to party, Franky gambles, Stewie is on the pills — right now even, take a look." Marlon stops his rapid-fire dissection to point to a loopy scalper with his head tilted left, wandering away from a potential sale. But the scalpers' negative image isn't wholly deserved. Scalpers often partner up, and a sober guy will rarely partner with a high one — if you're high, you're a liability. The group seems to self-regulate in positive ways, and to promote the scalpers who run their businesses right.

And yet all the charm, confidence and team spirit in the world isn't enough to make a successful scalper. A scalper is nothing without his tickets.

Before a season starts, the Philadelphia Phillies have roughly 3.7 million regular-season tickets to sell. This year, they'll sell about 3.4 million. Out of those, about 1.6 million will go to season-ticket holders, and the rest will be sold off either as group seats, multiple game packages, or individually by phone, online or at the stadium. Most will go to fans who use the seats themselves, but a certain percentage will go to ticket brokers — sellers, like Ticketmaster, who will turn around and sell the tickets again. There are more than 50 such brokers in the Philadelphia area alone.

While some of the tickets that end up in scalpers' hands are the product of hand-to-hand deals — you have an extra ticket, you sell it to a scalper for, say, $15, and he moves it to the next guy for $25 — the overwhelming majority of scalped tickets come from these brokers.

Some broker-to-scalper arrangements are formal, and based on consignment — "I have relationships with two brokers in Philly, one in Delaware and two more in Jersey," Roberts explains — but most are not. Before games, brokers will pull up beside a group of scalpers and sell off their extra tickets in bulk, often for well below face value. "Some days I'll know I only need to get back 10 [dollars for a $44] a ticket," Roberts says.

At Phillies games, this is a common refrain. One old vet says he very rarely sells for face value or higher. "I can charge under face and I'll make a killing." Some even suggest the Phillies' prices are comparatively unreasonable. "We're more fair about prices than those guys," barks George, pointing to the Phillies' ticket offices. "That's the biggest fucking scalper right there. I stand by scalping."

If a fan is paying $35 for a $44 ticket, with a scalper taking a profit in between, who's losing money? The answer, it seems, is the ticket brokers. Because they buy in bulk, the brokers receive slight discounts on their tickets, but no more than the average fan, and certainly not enough to justify getting only $10 back from someone like Roberts. But they can more than make back the money they lose on, say, an early summer series with the Astros on bigger games. Last weekend, when the Phillies battled the Nationals with a playoff trip possibly at stake, the crowds were huge and, thanks to a law Gov. Ed Rendell signed into place last year removing the cap on prices that brokers can charge (previously, it was either 25 percent or $5 over face value), ticket prices soared. The brokers' prices reflected that hike, as they were able to charge three times face value for lower-level seats. For the current playoff series against the Brewers, Roberts estimates, $30 tickets will go for $500 or more. If the team advances to the World Series? "You're looking at $1,000 or more for a lower-level ticket, and probably three or four hundred just to get in the door." The money they lose when Cincinnati visits in June, they'll make back double for big games. In and of itself, this isn't a problem for the Phillies. "The goal of the Phillies ticket offices is to get as many people into the seats as possible. The reason a secondary market exists is because people have a market for it. I don't see it as a problem," says John Weber, vice president of ticket sales and operations, which has an official partnership with StubHub, a ticket auction site. He acknowledges that, hey, if he can get other people to sell his tickets without charging him, he wins.

Scalpers do draw away some of the foot-traffic fans who would otherwise purchase tickets at the gate, but they're often selling tickets that wouldn't be sold without them. What's more, if there were no scalpers, brokers wouldn't be able to function, and without brokers, the Phillies lose much of their ticket base. Which isn't to say the Phillies are condoning scalping. Weber speaks happily about the new influx of auction-based ticket sites like StubHub, but seems lost when the topic of Roberts and his 40 colleagues comes up. "Scalpers?" he asks incredulously, as if I'd asked about the pitchers' palmballs. "There is very little of that that goes on around here."

Like many businesses, scalping is being threatened by new technologies. Especially with the cap on brokers' prices lifted, individuals now have the ability to provide what scalpers have for years — and they're doing so over the Internet. Many buyers will go to the Web ahead of time rather than trying their luck down at the stadium on game day. Some scalpers are adapting, using StubHub and Craigslist. But it's not the same job.

"I like being out, around people and out in the air," Johnny tells me, sucking down a Newport 100. "This is what I do."

Scalpers say scalping is a job like any other, but most of them have never had that other job, and many of the skills they've developed, like walking up to strangers, persuading them to do business, and negotiating, won't translate well on a résumé. These guys don't scalp, they're scalpers, no matter how the law changes or how good technology gets.

"If a broker offered me a job at $75,000 a year — clear, with benefits — I'd take it," says Roberts. Then he pauses, thinking it over. "But if I was working in an office, I'd make them unlimited amounts of money." Upset that this hypothetical brokerage is getting rich off his hypothetical sales, he changes the subject. Seventy-five is probably better money than he'll make this year, but he can't chase that big payday — and the thrill that comes with it — from the Austin Music Festival, sitting at a desk. Roberts has a line he's sold more than a couple of tickets with: He'll tell a customer, "Money is replaceable, but experience and memory? That lasts a lifetime." He says it with a twinkle in his eye, and the customer always knows it's a line. Still, more often than not, it works. If that desk job offer comes, it may well work on him, too.

E. James Beale blogs at The Sports Complex: citypaper.net/sports.

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