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Click here for feature story on Candini in the San Antonio Express News! Click Here! For San Antonio Express Interview Video Mind Reading Part of his Mystique By Brian Chasnoff - Express-News 10/30/2008 12:00 CDT Don't be frightened of Candin. For one, he's a police officer — a missing persons detective, serving and protecting the Alamo City for 12 years. Soon he'll start investigating crime scenes. He has other interests, sure. And yes, they include deep space, Armageddon and mentalism. He performs the latter — a form of mind reading, a more rarified sort of magic — when he's not helping solve mysteries in the streets. But really, don't be spooked by Candin. Even on Halloween. “We have to remind people that he's not the Antichrist,” says Steve Schmidt, owner of Enchanted Springs Ranch in Boerne. “He's not the dark side.” Visitors to the ranch eat barbecue and ride in carriages past faux-Western backdrops. Sometimes they watch the mentalist perform. He'll bend a spoon before your eyes. Pick a word from a 300-plus-page novel, but don't tell it to Candin. He'll tellyou what word you chose. “It's sleight of mind,” the mentalist explains, cryptically. “You have to persuade somebody to go a certain direction.” He started in 2003 with magic shows for kids, calling himself Candini and pulling rabbits from hats. Soon he drifted toward the more mystifying feats of mentalism. He ditched the bunny and dropped the “i”. Now he'll guess your mother's name if you tell him your birthday. Candin spikes his shows with off-kilter humor, conflating ESP with ESPN, for example, and he's peculiar in conversation too, sputtering digressions about dinosaurs and meteorites. Did you know about the meteorites? He collects them in an aquarium in his laundry room. He's spent thousands of dollars on them, misshapen chunks of debris from outer space. One, he says, contains amino acids not found on Earth. “There's your extraterrestrials,” he says. “That's my passion.” He points out stones that fell in Russia and China, New Orleans and Africa. “This thing came down like a bus in Peru,” he says. “It's fascinating to me because this is from somewhere else. It's like, how close can you get to God? With a meteorite.” Candin's a man of faith. It happened in 1993, after his mother died. He was born again. He volunteered as a chaplain at Bexar County Jail, preaching sermons and showing inmates the light. The book of Revelation intrigues Candin. He reads the Bible literally. God created the Earth. Humans walked with dinosaurs. The sun will darken. The stars will fall. A beast will rise from the sea. “It could start today,” Candin says, standing in the kitchen of his home in the Hill Country that he shares with his wife and two daughters. “I think the Rapture could happen anytime.” Don't panic. Candin says he is only an entertainer. He steers clear of witchcraft. He won't touch Ouija boards. “Contacting the dead is an abomination,” he says. “It's in Deuteronomy. You shouldn't do it.” But mentalism is different. Candin says it's an art form that encompasses suggestion and psychology. Skeptics say it's trickery, that the novel the mentalist hands you is a fake. Candin says he uses techniques, but he's no skeptic. His performances can startle even him. “God is supernatural,” he says. “He's paranormal, and I think he shows us things.” Other times, Candin takes more of the credit. “I mess with people's minds,” he says. Don't be afraid of Candin. Don't, because Candin is afraid of this story. He contacted the San Antonio Express-News with the idea. Then he nearly killed it with paranoia. “I have been almost physically sick worrying about this, and of course you know why,” the mentalist wrote in a recent 12:40 a.m. e-mail. “Waiting (for the story) would probably be my death from a heart attack.” Candin used to be in the Air Force. He's afraid of breaking rules. He's skittish about connecting mentalism to police work. “I get hunches, but I think every police officer has that ability,” he says. And: “I think it makes me a better detective because you're acting as a prophet. No, I don't want to say that.” And: “If it does subconsciously help me with police work, so be it.” And: “I know you're saying this guy's a psychotic policeman.” He's not. People who know him love him. They say he's unusual, yes, but also funny and kindhearted. And he became a cop for the right reasons. “He has very high ambitions,” says an officer who's known Candin for more than two decades and requested anonymity because he wasn't authorized to talk to a reporter. “He always aspired to be a good person.” So don't be frightened of Candin. But be afraid of his coin trick. You'll be in the midst of admiring his meteorites, and Candin will tell you to look at a coin he acquired in an exotic land. Don't look. A fireball will explode in your face. Candin will smile, and you'll smell the butane as you wait for your heart to stop pounding.