Street Scalpers vs. StubHub

by Reeves Wiedeman, Art by Ryan Catbird

The Green Day concert at Madison Square Garden on July 27, a Monday night, was not sold out. There were packs of teenagers, many with parents in tow, piling out of New York’s Penn Station and into the Garden, but most wore shirts with the words “American Idiot”—the band’s 2004 atomic bomb on the pop culture landscape—and not “21st Century Breakdown,” the 2009 follow-up that landed more like a surgical strike. Five years ago, this was a hot ticket. In a recession, it was just a hard sell.

“Tickets are still available at the box office,” said an MSG security guard through a bullhorn, sounding rather resigned. “All tickets purchased on the street will not be honored inside the arena.”

The latter clause was a veiled threat aimed at two groups: the teenagers with 25 bucks in their pockets, and the hundred or so middle-aged men prowling the plaza, whispering “Tickets…tickets…I got floor seats…tickets.”

I noticed one of these ticket whisperers in action. A six-foot, burly man with a shaved head, he’d squeezed himself into a circle of Italians. They spoke enough English to know why he was there, and lucky for him, they were looking for tickets. Three, to be exact. The scalper pulled a handful of 8 1/2 × 11 sheets of paper —the computer printout, this century’s paperboard stub—out of his cargo shorts. He was wearing a loose-fitting baby-blue tank top and looked the part of a charming vagrant with his unkempt Van Dyke beard and sporadic teeth. The Italians were in pressed shirts. After a moment of haggling, they walked off without any tickets and he turned away with a look of frustration.

Scalping has been a fact of life for both the ticketed and the ticketless at any event worth attending since Romans ponied up extra denarii for seats at the Colosseum. Scalpers serve an economic purpose, as middlemen. They’re also hustlers and, occasionally, scam artists. Some have gotten desperate kids in to see a Yankees-Red Sox at the last minute, at face value; others have made desperate parents pay three times the going rate for a Jonas Brothers concert. It’s a checkered history for a profession that’s become a victim of its own success, of the success of the internet, and of course, a victim of the lack of success in any sector of the economy over the last two years. I approached the bearded scalper.

“Hi…are you selling?” “What are ya looking for?” “Actually,” I said,. “I’m writing a story about scalpers in New York and I was wonderi—” “Business is shit,” he said. “What the hell else do you wanna know?”

There are three types of scalpers outside the Garden—and for that matter, outside Gate 4 at Yankee Stadium, along 57th street in front of Carnegie Hall, and in the Meadowlands parking lot. There are the counterfeiters: the punks with an HP printer, some software, and enough smarts to fake it. Then there are the young kids, down to make a few bucks with a few friends. And then there are the Scalpers: the ones who see honor in their profession, and remember selling Led Zeppelin tickets for 20 bucks, taking half the profits around the corner to the Blarney Stone and the rest home to the wife and kids.

Scott, the bearded scalper, told me he’s one of the latter. He’d been a short order cook and longshoreman, which helped pay his bills with disability checks. Nothing stuck, or was as lucrative as scalping. But two great bubbles crashed the scalping business.

First, more people started doing it. In the ’80s, Scott would have been one of 25 or so scalpers at the Garden. Today, he’s one of 125. “One kid would come down and bring seven of his friends and they’d all start selling. The place got overrun,” said Scott, “We had rules. You didn’t do that.”

The other bubble, which poured a seemingly unlimited supply of unclaimed tickets into the market, was the internet. Now, anyone willing to pay a premium can get tickets at home, online. Good days have become fewer and fewer, and Scott has resorted to traveling. In the South and Midwest, NASCAR, with 200,000 tickets at some races, provides good opportunities. He went to New Jersey the day before the Green Day concert for the Gold Cup soccer final, between the U.S. and Mexico.

“I made 1,100 bucks in one night,” Scott said. “Every Mexican in the Northeast wanted to go to that game.”

“Oh, so it’s my fault, it’s my fucking fault,” yelled Officer Tizzo, loud enough for everyone in the 8th Avenue plaza outside the Garden to hear. He was slapping black handcuffs on Jack, a scalper Scott knows. Jack had been selling six of Scott’s tickets, with half of each sale kicking back to Scott. The officer pulled out four tickets from Jack’s pocket. (He’d only been able to sell two.)

“I’m just going to the concert,” said Jack, a white-haired man dressed in black, save for a giant silver bracelet on one wrist and an even larger silver watch on the other. He was more Neil Armstrong’s generation than Billie Joe’s.

“Oh yeah, you’re going in with four fucking tickets,” said Officer Tizzo, laughing, as he pulled out black gloves to handle the evidence.

“Yeah, I got ‘em off StubHub,” said Jack.

Scott said he’s been arrested “hundreds of times.” It’s just part of doing business. For higher profile events, like a Paul McCartney concert, half a dozen guys could end up in handcuffs. If you’re arrested at the Garden, like Jack, the officer will call in your ID and, if you’re clean, offer a mere warning. If you have a previous infraction, then you’re likely headed to the Midtown

South Precinct headquarters on West 35th Street. Because you’ve probably been arrested after hours, there won’t be a judge present, so you’re spending the night in jail. It’s even worse in New Jersey, where you end up in county prison, not jail, and the fine can reach into the hundreds of dollars. That’s one reason Scott said many non-natives rarely even bother with the Meadowlands. (The other reason is the handful of teenagers whom, he claimed, the Giants and Jets employ to scout out scalpers, hiding up in the stadium with binoculars and walkie-talkies to alert security to deals in progress.)

It didn’t escape Scott that the world’s biggest scalpers make huge profits with no risk – yet – of getting arrested. StubHub and Ticketmaster’s extortion-wing, TicketsNow, makes millions on the lawless internet. In most states, scalping is completely legal —as long as you’re selling tickets somewhere other than at the event (say, on the internet). It’s a curious double standard that exists simply because no one’s quite figured out how to regulate the Web. Scott, as he sees it, is just another victim of the information age.

The World Series between New York and Philadelphia last October was the 40th such appearance for the Yankees, but the first in the team’s new palace. Game One, with a pregame Jay-Z concert (later rescheduled), was a hot ticket. A Phillies fan had offered sex, via Craigslist, in exchange for a seat. In the Bronx, I found two cops patrolling the streets for every scalper trying to hide from them. One scalper led customers into a McDonald’s bathroom across the street to complete transactions.

Scott used to scalp at the Stadium almost exclusively, but he said the cops started cracking down too hard to make it worthwhile. As he tells it, he had 400 tickets a night and would supply other scalpers as his grunts. I told him I scalped a ticket in the grandstand for 30 bucks during the regular season. He told me I did well. I asked if I could have haggled for less.

“See, you kids, you come in and say, ‘I want a seat and I’ll give you 10 bucks for it,’ and I just wanna crack you in the fucking head,” Scott said. “Do you go to your job and work for free? Show some respect.”

Scott’s no longer a ticket kingpin. He gets his tickets from one of the bigger brokers in town, and often won’t know how many tickets he has to sell, or if there are any at all, until hours before an event. The company tries to sell as many as possible online before releasing them to the human scalpers. He lives on Staten Island with a wife and five kids, he said, and it costs 25 bucks for him to travel into the city, with food and tolls and gas. He would only barely make his money back tonight.

“It’s all a hustle. Some people sell drugs; some people sell guns; I sell tickets,” he said, opening a can of Sprite. “I like to think it’s the lesser evil.”

The concert was starting, and he had given up unloading the last few tickets he had. Sometimes he goes into the concert if he can’t sell the tickets – he was hoping to have a few extra for his kids when he scalps a Coheed and Cambria concert later in the summer – but not tonight. I asked if he can support his family on this lifestyle.

“I used to. Now I gotta do whatever I can on the side. I gotta hustle.”

“Hustle what?” I ask.

“That don’t matter,” he said. He turned away and, spotting a young couple sheepishly approaching the arena, made one last attempt at a sale.