An NYPD officer patrolling the neighborhood saw a large group of foreign tourists clustered on the corner of 125th Street and Lenox Avenue, apparently participating in the card game, which has long been used by street-smart operators to fool gullible visitors to the city.
“I heard somebody saying ‘where’d it go, where’d it go, find the ace, find the ace’ in kind of a Southern accent, and I thought, hey, that guy sounds really familiar,” the officer said. “I looked over and sure enough it was President Clinton.”
The former president, wearing dark sunglasses and a purple velvet hat with a yellow feather in it, went completely unrecognized by the group of tourists.
“He just said his name was ‘Arkansas Willie,’” said one of the tourists, a visitor from Nepal.
New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said late today that he would direct the appropriate officials to investigate whether Clinton had broken city ordinances prohibiting illegal card games. “We’re taking this very, very seriously,” Giuliani said.
Clinton indicated that he would return all of the money to the tourists who participated in his three-card monte game. He also said that he would soon be writing a piece for The New York Times op-ed page explaining his actions and putting them in the context of the activities of past presidents. George Washington and John Adams, the former president asserts, ran a riverboat casino on the Mississippi River once their terms in office were over.
Clinton went on to say that he would no longer operate any card games in the neighborhood but would instead focus on selling Rolex watches and Gucci bags that are, in his words, “100 percent real.”
