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my own superiors or a local police department on the value of our services. But I have to admit that to a certain extent, it’s the same talent that con men and criminal predators use to get by.
    By the way, my fictitious campers did end up escaping with their lives, which was far from a foregone conclusion since my real love was animals. So, in preparation for becom ing a vet, I spent three summers on dairy farms in upstate New York in the Cornell Farm Cadet Program sponsored by the university’s veterinary school. This was a great opportunity for city kids to get out and live with nature, and in exchange for this privilege, I worked seventy to eighty hours a week at $15 per, while my school friends back home were sunning themselves at Jones Beach. If I never milk another cow, I won’t feel a huge void in my life.
    All of this physical labor did get me in good shape for sports, which was the other consuming passion of my life. At Hempstead High School, I pitched for the baseball team and played defensive tackle in football. And as I look back on it, this was probably the first real surfacing of my interest in personality profiling.
    On the mound, it rather quickly dawned on me that throwing hard and accurate pitches was only half the battle. I had a solid fastball and a pretty decent slider, but a lot of high school pitchers had that, or equivalent stuff. The key was to be able to psych out the batter, and I realized that that had mainly to do with establishing an air of confidence for yourself and making the guy standing at the plate as insecure as possible. This came into play in a remarkably analogous way years later when I began developing my interrogation techniques.
    In high school, I was already six foot two, which I used to my advantage. Talent-wise, we were a so-so team in a good league, and I knew it was up to the pitcher to try to be a field leader and set a winning tone. I had pretty good control for a high schooler, but I decided not to let the opposing batters know this. I wanted to appear reckless, not quite pre dictable, so the batters wouldn’t dig in at the plate. I wanted them to think that if they did, they risked being brushed back or even worse by this wild man sixty feet away.
    Hempstead did have a good football team, for which I was a 188-pound defensive line man. Again, I realized the psychological aspect of the game was what could give us an edge. I figured I could take on the bigger guys if I grunted and groaned and generally acted like a nut. It didn’t take long before I got the rest of the linemen to behave the same way. Later, when I regularly worked on murder trials in which insani ty was used as a defense, I already knew from my own experience that the mere fact that someone acts like a maniac does not necessarily mean he doesn’t know exactly what he’s doing.
    In 1962, we were playing Wantagh High for the Thorpe Award, the trophy for the best high school football team on Long Island. They outweighed us by about forty pounds a man, and we knew chances were good we were going to get the crap knocked out of us before a full house. So before the game, we worked out a set of warm-up drills whose sole objective was to psych out and intimidate our opponents. We formed up in two lines with the first man in one line tackling—practically decking—the first man in the other line. This was accompanied by all the appropriate grunts and groans and shrieks of pain. We could see from the faces of the Wantagh players that we were having the intended effect. They must have been figuring, "If these jokers are stupid enough to do that to each other, God knows what they’ll do to us."
    In fact, the entire episode was carefully choreographed. We prac ticed wres tling throws so we could appear to hit the ground hard, but without getting hurt. And when we got into the actual game, we kept up the general level of craziness to make it appear we’d only been let out of the asylum for this one afternoon and