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were going straight back as soon as the game was over. The contest was close all the way, but when the dust finally settled, we had won, 14-13, and captured the Thorpe Award for 1962.
    My first brush with "law enforcement," in fact, my first "real" experience with profiling, came at age eighteen, when I got a job as a bouncer in a bar and club in Hempstead called the Gaslight East. I was so good at it that later I was given the same position at the Surf Club in Long Beach. At both places, my two main responsibilities were to keep out those below legal drinking age—in other words, anyone younger than me—and to short-circuit or break up the inevitable fights that crop up in places where alcohol is consumed.
    Standing at the door, I would request an ID from anyone whose age was questionable, then ask the person for his or her date of birth to see if it matched up. This is pretty standard procedure and it’s what everyone expects, so they’re all prepared for it. Seldom will a kid who’s gone to the trouble of coming up with a fake ID be so careless as to fail to memorize the birth date on it. Looking straight into their eyes as I ques tioned them was an effective technique with some people, particularly girls, who generally have a more developed social conscience at that age. But those who want to get in can still get past most scrutiny if they just concentrate on their acting for a few moments.
    What I was actually doing while I quizzed each group of kids as they got to the front of the line was discreetly scrutinizing the people about three or four rows back—watching them as they prepared to be questioned, observing their body language, noticing if they looked at all nervous or tentative.
    Breaking up fights was more of a challenge, and for that I fell back on my athletic experience. If they see a look in your eyes that tells them you’re not quite predictable and you act just a little overtly screwy, then sometimes even the big guys will think twice about tangling with you. If they think you’re just off enough not to be worried about your own safety, then you become a far more dangerous opponent. Almost twenty years later, for example, when we were conducting the prison interviews for the major serial-killer study, we learned that the typical assassin personality is far more danger ous in certain crucial ways than the typical serial-killer personality. Because unlike the serial killer, who will only choose a victim he thinks he can handle and then will go to elaborate lengths to avoid capture, the assassin is obsessively concerned with his "mis sion" and is generally willing to die to achieve it.
    The other consideration in making people have a particular opinion of you—such as that you’re irrational and crazy enough to do something unpredictable—is that you have to maintain that persona all the time on the job, not just when you think people are looking at you. When I interviewed Gary Trapnell, a notorious armed robber and airplane hijacker, at the federal prison in Marion, Illinois, he claimed that he could fool any prison psychiatrist into believing he had any mental illness I cared to specify. The key to pulling it off, he informed me, was to behave that way all the time, even alone in your cell, so that when they interviewed you, you wouldn’t have to "think" your way through it, which was what gave you away. So, long before I had the benefit of this type of "expert" advice, I seemed to have some instinct for thinking like a criminal.
    When I couldn’t manage to scare people out of a fight at the bar, I tried to use my amateur profiling techniques to do the next best thing and head it off before it got serious. I found that with a little experience, by closely observing behavior and body lan guage, I was able to correlate this with the sort of action that ended up breaking out into fights so I could anticipate if an individual was about to start something. In that case, or when in doubt, I always