The crowd outside the sleek Dream Downtown Hotel in Chelsea is large on Saturday nights, young men and women waiting to get into hot spots like the hotel’s PH-D, “a glittering room,” a reviewer wrote, “of celebrities, beautiful women and cresting credit-card bills.”

It was there, shortly after midnight on a recent Sunday, that a relic of old New York arrived. His name, according to the police, was Andrew Jones, 57, and he had turned up in many of New York City’s neighborhoods to perform his trade over the past 35 years. He carried his usual tools: three playing cards and a cardboard box.

By the time a police officer saw him at 1:15 a.m., he had drawn an audience: “At least nine people crowded around the cardboard box,” the officer wrote in a criminal complaint, “causing at least 20 people to have to walk off the sidewalk and onto the street to get past.”

Later, after Mr. Jones was arrested, his court-appointed lawyer, who was half his age, said she had never come across the particular crime he was accused of. But the officer knew right away what was happening on the sidewalk that night. “‘Three-card monte,’” she wrote.