Toronto magician was North America’s skeptic-in-chief
Escapologist spent years debunking fraudsters he considered predators
James Randi, a Toronto-born magician who later challenged spoon benders, mind readers and faith healers with such voracity that he became regarded as the country’s foremost skeptic, has died, his foundation announced. He was 92.
The James Randi Educational Foundation confirmed the death, saying simply that its Canadian-born founder succumbed to “age-related causes” on Tuesday.
Born Randall James Hamilton Zwinge in Leaside on Aug. 7, 1928, Randi — known simply by that surname — had a nagging desire to question from a young age. Academically, he said he was bored in school and teachers acknowledged he was a prodigy far ahead of his peers. At Oakwood Collegiate, he completed everything but the final exams — “I didn’t like one of the questions,” he said later, “so I decided I wouldn’t do it.” (He never got a high school diploma but in 1986 was awarded a prestigious MacArthur fellowship, often known simply as a “genius grant.”)
He became fascinated with magic before he’d reached his teens, after seeing several shows by the great Harry Blackstone, Sr., at the long-gone Casino Theatre on Queen Street. He dropped out of high school to join the carnival and soon, as the Amazing Randi, he was seen on an early Canadian broadcast where he was suspended, upside down in a straitjacket, high over Niagara Falls.
He told the Star in 2016 that he didn’t recall the year of that show, but says it was a lucrative gig. “I remember thinking how handsomely I was being paid while I was hanging upside down,” he says.
Entertainer, genius, debunker, atheist: Randi was them all. Magical as his feats — like escaping from a locked coffin submerged in water — seemed, Randi concluded his shows around the globe with a simple statement, insisting no otherworldly powers were at play.
“Everything you have seen here is tricks,” he would say. “There is nothing supernatural involved.”
The magician’s transparency gave a glimpse of what would become his longest-running act, as North America’s skepticin-chief. In that role, his first widely seen exploit was also his most enduring.
On a 1972 episode of “The Tonight Show,” he helped Johnny
Carson set up Uri Geller, the Israeli performer who claimed to bend spoons with his mind. Randi ensured the spoons and other props were kept from Geller’s hands until showtime to prevent any tampering.
The result was an agonizing 22 minutes in which Geller was unable to perform any tricks.
Randi had bushy white eyebrows and beard, a bald head, and gold-rimmed glasses, and bounced his five-foot-six frame energetically, even in his final years. He sought to disprove not just those who read palms and minds, but chiropractors, homeopaths and others he saw as predators seeking innocent people’s money.
Randi targeted those he saw as frauds with a tenacity and dedication he admitted was an obsession. His efforts were reminiscent of those of his great predecessor Harry Houdini, who devoted large portions of his time to debunking spiritualists and their seances.
“I see people being swindled every day by medical quackery, frauds of every sort, psychics and their hotlines, people who claim to be able to find lost children or to help them invest their money,” Randi told The Associated Press in 1998. “I know they are being swindled because I know the methods being used.”
Once, awaiting the chance to sift through the trash of a faith healer, Randi spent days in his car, eating Twinkies and drinking Pepsi.
“I suffer from this obsession that I have something important to do,” he explained in a 2007 interview.
There were other coups for Randi: He once showed the messages television faith healer Peter Popoff claimed to be getting from God about his audience were actually coming from his wife through an earpiece. But the vast majority of those he aimed to show were frauds were lesser known, lured to prove their abilities by the
James Randi Educational Foundation.
Through that organization, Randi was guardian of a $1-million prize he promised to give anyone who could prove either their own supernatural powers or the presence of a supernatural being.
His loudest detractors said they didn’t believe the money even existed, but Randi had the bank documentation. No one ever came close to collecting.
Randi gave up the day-to-day operation of his foundation in 2009 and retired in 2015.
In 2010, he announced he was gay. In 2013, he married his longtime partner, Deyvi Pena, at a ceremony in Washington, D.C. He was the subject of a 2014 documentary, “An Honest Liar.”
He spoke with certainty. While he said he never really questioned his beliefs, he acknowledged there was always a chance he was wrong.
“I am probably right. But I’m always only probably right,” he said. “Absolutes are very hard to find.”