Gerry McCambridge, "The Mentalist," offers his audiences a $25,000 check if they can prove any of his audience members are planted or paid off in advance to cooperate in his mind-reading routines. Photo by Ralph Fountain.

Gerry McCambridge, aka "The Mentalist," tells his audience at the Stardust he is "a student of human nature" who likes to sit at a shopping mall for hours at a time studying people and their behavior.

As it turns out, this is true.

Catching up to McCambridge the next day at the Fashion Show mall, one finds he was just vague about the details. He is in fact studying the ticket booth in the mall's food court, trying to fathom the nature of what makes people buy tickets to Las Vegas shows.

"This is show business. It's two words. I've got the show down pat," McCambridge says of an act he has been doing for almost 30 years. But most of his dates have been for corporations or private parties. "This is all new to me," he says of his self-promoted Stardust enterprise and the business of selling tickets through commissioned agents.

McCambridge has been trying to figure out the secret to Las Vegas success since July of last year, when he started scouting the market while performing at the suburban Rampart Casino. Locals told their friends about his mind-reading act, a specific niche of show business that stands apart from the usual stage magic performed here.

Positive word of mouth kept McCambridge at the Rampart for 47 weeks, when he wasn't off doing those corporate events that paid the bulk of his living.

In June, McCambridge -- with support from Excalibur hypnotist Anthony Cools -- moved into a former restaurant at the Stardust. The clock is ticking toward the casino's closure in the fall, but the move already yielded a modest payoff.

When a topless revue folded in the main showroom, McCambridge took over the 9 p.m. time slot. Even though his audiences there have numbered in the low hundreds, he gains big-room credibility and some prominent billboards on Interstate 15.

"The biggest problem with me is getting the people in. Bring the people in, and I can entertain them," says the guy who had singled out a stranger in the audience, figured out the name of her first childhood crush, then produced that person's name ("Jason") from a sealed envelope in his jacket.

McCambridge's act manages to be genuinely puzzling to a majority of audiences, even in the era of wireless Internet access and TV specials that reveal traditional magic tricks.

But he has a hard time explaining that he's neither a conventional magician nor a psychic who claims to contact the spirit world. He likes to say his act "rides the line between illusion and intuition. ... I'm admitting to you there's both going on here."

"You're either going to leave saying, 'It's all tricks. But it's good tricks.' Or you're going to leave going, 'The guy can really do it. I don't know how the hell he's doing it.' I win either way."

Case in point: For his opening stunt, McCambridge has an audience member randomly select a phone number from the white pages. Amazingly, the seven digits of that number are assembled from the manila envelopes handed out to seven other audience members invited to the stage.

Common sense suggests the numbers had to be in the envelope to begin with. This is supported by the fact that if you were to go home and check the selected page -- the third column of Page 72 in the Las Vegas phone book -- it doesn't turn up the phone number in question. But how did he get the woman to say it?

McCambridge wasn't always "The Mentalist." The native New Yorker says he spent much of his childhood learning other genres of traditional magic -- from escape artist to dove act -- and "had a whole illusion show at the age of 15." But recurring motion sickness that came from driving all over the country motivated him to sell all his large illusions and focus on the part of the act that would fit in a suitcase for a plane flight.

His biggest break to date came after Jeff Zucker, former president of entertainment for NBC, invited him to perform at four private parties. That led to an NBC special in 2004 that McCambridge developed as executive producer.

But he recognizes the obstacles that remain in the path to Las Vegas fame. "I have the least visual act on the Strip," he says. Or, as he tells audiences, "There's nothing to see. The whole show happens in your mind."

And there's the lack of a reference point. Danny Gans also struck gold on the corporate circuit by updating Rich Little's act for younger people who no longer appreciated impressions of Kirk Douglas or Burt Lancaster. McCambridge's most famous forbearer is the Amazing Kreskin. But he finds it's no longer useful to name-check the 71-year-old performer with a 20-something ticket agent, much less use it as shorthand for what he does.

"I used to see Kreskin as a kid (on TV talk shows)," he says. "The ending to the routine is amazing, but the five-minute process to get there is boring as hell."

"I thought, 'There has to be a way to get from the beginning to the end and entertain them.' So I started to study stand-up comedy. Kreskin became my 'what not to do.' ''

If you could turn the tables and read McCambridge's mind, you would discover he wishes a fancy hotel such as Bellagio would build him a 350-seat theater, where he could be "that less-expensive alternative" to a pricey epic such as "O."

If not, he says he will enjoy using Las Vegas as a home base to be with three of his six children (three from a previous marriage live out-of-state) between corporate gigs.

Says this mentalist, "I'm just a guy looking to make a living and find my next property."