Devin,

I'd like to know more about your relationship with Al Mann. You've certainly put your own work into some of his routines. Al is one of the people that some people have only heard about, with his material being unavailable for quite awhile. Any personal insight you have, I'm sure we would love to hear about.

Sam,
Rather than repeat myself, I will be sharing quite a bit of information about Al when I write a short bio on my background. That will answer many of your questions. I will try to write it this afternoon or if not, Sunday for sure. I have a show tonight so my time is limited today.

Devin

I decided to share some information about Al Mann here, as it will be easier to find under this topic.

Al Mann was one of the greatest mental minds who ever lived and in my opinion one of the most underrated. I met Al in 1986 after my headline prediction about the Newfoundland Plane crash made international news. Al contacted me as he was totally baffled as to how I could have a state senator read and sign notarized predictions, that later came true, and then have the senator state he remembered reading the predictions. Such a feat seemed so impossible there appeared no way it could be a trick. Al wanted to meet me . I did meet with him and explained the secret, but swore him to remain silent on the method.

At that time Al realized that my Ultimate Prediction was very similar to his (at that time)TOP SECRET Glass Box. Al shared the method with me and a few months later combining my ideas with his, I developed the super improved version of the original glass box. This was kept under wraps until just a few years ago, when it was finally revealed and released as the Glass Box. Last year I revealed all the private techniques as to how to create a false memory with the VIP and this was explained in my Glass Box Revisited.

The Glass Box was the start of long and endearing friendship with Al. I visited him many times and we spoke on the phone almost every week about ideas. It has been said that while Al was living you could count his close friends on one hand. I consider myself very fortunate to have been one of those.

Over the time I was friends with Al, I was able to master and perform everything he released and he had over 114 booklets on the market. Most of these were very limited and ran off on a memo-graph machine. When Al got an order, he would print the book and then spiral-bind it and send it to the customer. Due to people copying his work, Robert Nelson (not the mentalist)but the magic dealer from Winston-Salem suggested that Al release his manuscripts on RED PAPER so they couldn't be copied. For a while Al did this, but red paper is more expensive, and Al trying to make more money went back to using white paper. I followed suit with the release of the Glass Box printing the directions on Red Paper to prevent copying.

Al use to tell people that I did everything that he released. As far as we both knew I was the only person to successfully pull off his feat of being in two places at the same time, this was described in his INVISIBLE MEN. I got publicity for performing in both Japan and Los Angeles at the same time. I asked Al if he ever thought someone would do that. He said he wrote it knowing someday somebody would and I was that person.

Al was a genius but his works were not complete. He gave basic clever ideas but didn't always expand on them. Over the years I took most of his basic ideas and revamped them and improved the methods. Many which were later released by me after his death with my improvements.

Al had a think-tank which consisted of 13 people, whom he called the mystic 13. The membership changed over the years as people died. At one point in the mid eighties Al told me I was now part of the Mystic 13, and I remained one until his death.

Al was great to invent ingenious methods, but he was not big on performing them. Most of my time with him was showing him improvements on his methods or performing for him the effects he had invented. He could invent the methods but he was NOT very proficient at showing them. He would often try to show me a move, mess it up and get angry about it.

Larry Becker shared with me the time he had a session with Al Mann and some other people. It turns out that Larry did most of the performing and Al never did anything! In fact Al asked Larry to show the other people some of his moves or effects, because Larry did the moves better than Al.

My best times with Al is when he was advising me when I was playing the role of a real psychic. We would get together and discuss things I could do the fool the researchers. Al had no problem with me claiming to be real. In fact he got a big kick out me using some of his material to fool the skeptics and researchers. He was quick to brag about his in some of his future publications. He really was thrilled and would laugh about how I was able to fool skeptic researchers with his material. Yes, Al's methods were good enough to fool the researchers (until they got hold of his books and found out how they were fooled.)

Al continued to write books as he got older, but the quality of the material started to diminish. Still good ideas for those who could see how to improve them. Many of his latter books were not as favorably received as his earlier releases and rightly so. Al' earliest writings were his best work. As he got older, he needed money and his shows were limited in the West Virginia area he was living in. To make money he had to write more books. In the end he was charging $35 to $40 for 8 to 10 pages of mediocre ideas. At that point a lot of mentalists said Al was releasing JUNK and refused to buy the items.

I was one of the few people who virtually bought and have everything that Al wrote and released including notes on unreleased items. Even some of his weaker ideas have potential for those who can see beyond the basic idea.

Unfortunately, Al is slowly being forgotten. Most of his booklets only sold 20 to 30 copies. Lybrary has the remaining copies and when those are gone they are gone. At the present, there are no plans to reprint as his son will not give the rights to anyone. I'm the closest thing to keeping his legend alive as I was his protege. Al spoke highly of me to anyone who would listen and my exploits were mentioned in several of his books, including the Fabulous Feats of Jason Michaels. I have the complete collection including unpublished ideas. I have virtually improved almost everything he invented and revised the effects so much they are not even recogonizable. Over the coming years, I will be releasing some of my revamps and revisions of Mann's ideas. His books will not be republished, but the things I will be offering go far beyond what Al first envisioned. Hopefully, my releases will keep his memory alive.

Devin