Despite what his show, “Hoodwinked,” might imply, Bob Arno doesn’t have a shady past.

In fact, it’s important to him that he and his colleagues, a group masquerading as con men, cheats and swindlers, be every bit as educational as they are entertaining.

“The purpose of the show is not to teach young people how to emulate our work,” said Arno, one of the five performers in “Hoodwinked,” set for 7:30 p.m. Thursday at Proctors. “The important thing is to reveal how it’s done, and that way innocent people won’t be suckers. They’ll know what to watch out for.”

Arno, a native of Stockholm, Sweden, and a resident of Las Vegas for nearly three decades, has been demonstrating his skills as a pickpocket since he was 16 years old. He says he has never used his skills for any ill-gotten gains, and he hopes the same can be said of any would-be pupils.

“I get e-mails from kids around the world who say how they would like to do what I’m doing,” said Arno. “Then, they add at the bottom that they will always give things back. There’s always that caveat at the end of the e-mail. There’s just something about this skill that has universal appeal around the world.”

Vietnam experience

Arno might have ended up as a simple sleight-of-hand artist without the educational component in his show if not for his experience working as a freelance photographer during the Vietnam War. He was one of five photojournalists on hand when Thich Quang Duc, a Buddhist monk, set himself on fire in the middle of a busy intersection in downtown Saigon.

“I was privileged, if that’s the right word, to get a tip and be in the right place at the right time,” said Arno. “I sold that photo, and others, and that was how I was able to pay for my time in Vietnam. I had an adventure streak in me, and I’d go places and shoot photographs for a month and then entertain the troops by putting on shows for a month. I’d go back and forth between the two.

Watching the real thing

“But that’s where my interest in criminology began,” continued Arno. “I was 23 and living in these small guest houses in Saigon, and the place was infested with drug dealers and con men looking to make a quick killing. You had to be ready for anything, and that’s where I acquired my taste for taking on these guys. Watching them, I realized that what appears to be is not always true.”

After leaving Vietnam in 1965, Arno came to the U.S. and performed at the Latin Quarter, a night club in New York City. Slowly, his show started becoming more and more an educational endeavor as opposed to strictly an entertainment one.

“The transition wasn’t exactly planned,” said Arno, “and at first I wouldn’t have dreamed of going in this direction. “But in the early ’80s I started filming thieves at work, and I would use that to embellish and enrich the show. It actually made the show a lot better. I would have an actual thief doing something for a minute, and then I would re-enact it to explain how they did it.”

Police training

Eventually, Arno got requests from law enforcement agencies to help train their officers.

“It started out small, and then I suddenly started getting requests from FBI and police academies across the country to do lectures,” said Arno. “I thought to myself, ‘Why not?’ That got me interested and I started divesting about 30 percent of my energy and time into the legal domain, and started learning more about criminal behavior.”

Arno would often do a show in a city and at the same time make a presentation at a corporate security conference.

“I’d have a Friday night show somewhere, but then I’d get more people at my Monday morning lecture,” said Arno. “I started doing more for the private sector and lecturing to them now is where I make most of my money. It baffled me at first, but that’s the way it’s been the past few years.”

Part of Arno’s work has been keeping himself educated about pickpockets, keeping tabs on how and where they work.

“There’s the gypsy king of pickpockets who sits in Romania and never goes anywhere,” explained Arno. “He teaches people, and that horde goes out and does its thing and then pays him a commission. There was also a school in Colombia where people went and learned, but that turned out to be a myth. Pickpocketing is organized, but you’re only going to find it in certain parts of the world. You’re not going to see one in suburban Helsinki or in the American Midwest. You’re going to see it in big cities.”

Arno quickly adds, however, that people everywhere should be on guard.

“Sometimes, you might get a slick group of pickpockets from New Orleans that will descend on a small-town city in the Midwest for about 10 days,” said Arno. “Until the reports start coming in, the police don’t even know what’s happening, and then by the time they have the manpower to look into it, the thieves are already out of town. Usually, though, it’s a big city. Places like Rome and Barcelona will have 200 reports of pickpockets a day.”

Joining Arno on stage in “Hoodwinked,” will be Richard Turner, a “card mechanic”; Todd Robbins, “the king of con men” according to The New York Times; and Banachek, an expert at psychological manipulation.

Experienced team

“We just got it going in July, but it’s been in the planning stages for a while now,” said Arno. “These are people who spent a lifetime acquiring information, and now they’ve had to burn some bridges. I’ve only become friendly with them lately because I didn’t know them. We sort of work in different genres, but the show is a lot of fun, and there are times when we’ll work the audience together. People have really been enjoying it.”

Arno said there are people following in his footsteps, but unfortunately not many of them are doing it as performers.

“I don’t see a lot of people coming up behind me and doing this sort of thing,” he said. “They don’t have the learning grounds that I had. There were more nightclubs and variety shows when I was getting into it. Now, there aren’t that many places where you can hone your act. Pickpocketing isn’t a dying art, but people who want to do what I’ve done, well, they’re hard to find.”