Seer Profit

As you walk around Manhattan, Brooklyn, wherever, you can't miss them-the storefront psychics tucked away on nearly every block. Even as the neighborhoods around them change and the high-end chain stores move in, they stay put, offering $5 palm and tarot readings, crystal-ball gazing, spiritual guidance, advice on your love life and lottery numbers. The likes of Sister Isadore and Mother Maxine know all, tell all.

The question has always been, how do they stay in business, as everything around them is forced out by absurdly skyrocketing rents? The answer, according to last Sunday's Post, seems to lie with people like the 28-year-old Queens woman who handed over a reported $11,000 to one such storefront soothsayer, proving once again that a century's worth of debunking hasbeen totally lost on some people.

The fortune teller, 22-year-old Angelina Williams, allegedly told the poor sap that the spirits had identified an "evil energy" in her stomach, and that if she gave Williams $11,000, the money would absorb the evil and send it packing. Hey, makes sense to us.

Only after handing over her life savings did the victim consider maybe she'd been had. Shortly after that brilliant deduction, she went to the cops. Williams, who hadn't used her powers to see this one coming, was arrested at her Astoria parlor on Thursday (the day after the Ides of March, no less).

Among other things, she's being charged with grand larceny and with operating a confidence game, and her husband didn't help things later when he offered police $600 to let her out of jail. Fortune telling is technically illegal in New York when the would-be seer takes money for "claimed use of occult powers to exorcise, influence, or affect evil spirits or curses." We wonder why some preachers aren't being arrested on similar charges.