Albert Stroller
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| Albert Stroller | |
|---|---|
| First appearance | The Con is On |
| Portrayed by | Robert Vaughn |
| In-universe information | |
| Gender | Male |
| Occupation | Grifter |
Albert Stroller (affectionately known as Albie) is a character in the BBC TV series Hustle. He is played by Robert Vaughn.
Albert is a member of a crew of grifters. He is the group roper; his role is to identify people as targets ("marks") and lead them to the inside-man. His sharp, distinctive style gives him the air of a CEO, which allows him to prey on marks in upper tax brackets. He exudes the kind of dignified professionalism that wealthy, unsuspecting marks trust implicitly and he uses that to rope them in for the serious score. As a result, he is a member of numerous types of establishments where the very wealthy can be found – private gentlemen's clubs, casinos, top hotels and restaurants are regular haunts for Albert and his targets. He is friends with many wealthy people under numerous aliases.
He is a master of cold reading - a technique often used by mentalists, fortune tellers, psychics, and mediums to determine details about another person in order to convince them that the reader knows much more about a subject than he or she actually does. Even without prior knowledge of a person, a practiced cold reader can still quickly obtain a great deal of information about the subject by carefully analyzing the person's body language, clothing or fashion, hairstyle, gender, sexual orientation, religion, race or ethnicity, level of education, manner of speech, place of origin, etc. This ability of his helps him to get close to the mark.
He was stationed in North London during World War II, where he fell madly in love with a local girl, Lily Cooper. A few weeks later, he had to evacuate the base and didn't have the time to get word to Lily. He wrote her a letter later and posted it as soon as he could, but received no reply. After the war, he came back to London to look for her, only to see her at the church as she was getting married.
He fled from the United States in the 1970s. Originally he was a shoe salesman in the midwest until the work-force was laid off. To secure a decent redundancy package, Albert conned the company out of $60,000 and shared it amongst his former co-workers. Reputedly he enjoyed the experience so much that he became a grifter and moved to Las Vegas to work the marks there. He went there because as he puts it "There are more marks per square mile in Las Vegas than anywhere else in the world". He would work the marks during the day and then he would work the casinos at night. However, soon all the casinos became wise to the grifters in town and banned them from even entering the casino. Every time he tried entering a casino, the security threw him out so he left for the UK shortly afterwards. One of his partners-in-crime in Las Vegas was Joey Pepper, and together they would work the Shoe-switch scam. However, Joey was once caught doing the switch and was almost killed by the Casino security.
He was "out-grifted" once by Victor Maher, before joining with Mickey Bricks and the rest of the crew, although he had spoken about Maher to Mickey before Maher turns up in Season 1 Episode 4 trying to out-grift Mickey.
He cannot go to Indonesia as he sold the air force some fighter jets in the '70s, and they still haven't arrived.
Stroller is an habitual gambler; he is also an habitual card cheat. These two habits combined have proven to be a weakness, and during the first season he was hospitalized after receiving a severe beating after being caught cheating by a casino owner. During the second season, he briefly dealt with a bout of depression after the death of a close friend caused him to question his own lifestyle. In the fifth season premiere, it was revealed that Albert was serving two years in prison for cheating in a casino, but he stated that he was actually enjoying the rest, and set Mickey and Ash up with new team members Emma and Sean Kennedy (Albeit by setting them up so that each duo thought they were conning the other as a mark), subsequently being released several months early on parole for good behaviour after the team manipulated a judge into thinking Albert knew the location of a lost treasure, while Albert himself conned an unsympathetic member of the parole board into releasing him. His birthdate is 3 June 1933.