Can psychics see their own futures? If so, Sylvia Mitchell, 36, peering into her crystal ball on a busy corner of Greenwich Village, might have caught a glimpse of her driver’s license photo, blown up and attached to an unpleasant poster saying “Wanted” and “Grand Larceny” and “$28,000.” And so she apparently took off.

This city is up to its third eye in psychics and palm readers, and yet little is known about them. Called gypsies by the police, they are as structured as the Mafia, with a council of elders to solve their disputes over turf. The families are not named Luchese, Gambino or Genovese, but the relatively anonymous Eli, Evans, Miller and Johns.

“The scam is tremendous,” said Lt. Manny Hernandez, of the detective squad at the Sixth Precinct, in Manhattan. Adam Brown, a lawyer suing Ms. Mitchell, called the business “organized psychic crime.”

Grand larceny is historically a clear-cut crime, like stealing a purse in a bar. Some psychic cases would seem harder to prosecute: The squad is also looking for a psychic named Angela from a West 18th Street parlor who detectives say persuaded a client to give her $9,000 for some magic coins that the two, in a cleansing ritual, later threw into an upstate lake.