A Connoisseur of the Con

By Michael Walsh

Bopping down Wilshire Boulevard in his Reebok tennis shoes, black Lycra biking shorts, a clean T shirt, red wristbands, sunglasses and a Panama hat, big Tim Brown doesn't look like a typical Santa Monica, Calif., beggar. And he's not: at 6 ft. 3 in., the former Golden Gloves boxer and current alcoholic is an intimidating presence as he accosts pedestrians and dashes into traffic to knock on car windows. "You have to make them scared enough so they'll give you what they have in their pockets," says Brown, explaining the activist panhandling philosophy that he says can bring him $20 to $30 a day.

On this fine Saturday afternoon, no one is safe from Brown's rap: shoppers, teenagers at a bus stop, liquor-store merchants, are all peppered with requests for money, cigarettes and food. "Spare some change?" Brown cries to a man carrying groceries, who lowers his head and scuttles away. "Excuse me!" he shouts to a man in a gray Jaguar, who flashes a frozen smile but keeps his window up and roars away the minute the light turns green. "What's up, pop?" he calls to an elderly couple, who hurriedly push past him. "Just keep asking, keep asking," says Brown after a particularly rude turndown. "Oh, this is fun!"

Or perhaps more like sport. "The Bible says, 'Ask and you shall receive,' " notes Brown, 35, and he has taken the injunction to heart, especially when fortified with a few shots of cheap vodka and beer ("When I'm sober, I have my pride"). He cannily tailors his pitch to his victims. "I can tell right off if they'll give me money," he says. "If they look like they might halfway give me something, then I run a sympathy line on them. If they look like they won't, then I give them a worse sympathy line."

A connoisseur of the con, Brown has wrapped his knee with a bandage and hobbled with a cane, which brought him $200 in one week. After a brief hospitalization for pancreatitis, he wore his infirmary bracelets like a badge and pulled in $100. Although he professes faith in God, Brown will even cheat the churches: not long ago, he and a buddy collected nearly $75 when they made the rounds of local houses of worship with a former employer's business card and a tale of a job waiting if they could only get bus fare.

Unlike many of his fellow street people, Brown is not completely indigent. He gets $637 a month disability from the government for problems arising from his alcoholism, washes up every night at a Santa Monica church (where he sleeps on the doorstep), and keeps his possessions -- photo albums, letters and graduation certificates -- neatly tucked away inside a black vinyl tote bag. The adopted son of a well-off Washington family, Brown says he attended a military academy in Virginia, spent a semester in college and then joined the Navy and later became a signalman. But when the family finances collapsed through mismanagement, he took to the streets.

It looks as if the streets are where he will stay. "The scary part is that I'm starting to enjoy this," says Brown. "I don't want to be out here when I'm 50 or 60. But as far as I see myself, I'm always going to be on the streets. I can't see myself going nowhere from here."

With reporting by Scott Brown/Los Angeles