LAS VEGAS — Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, for a surprising performance by Criss Angel, master illusionist, creator of Mindfreak on A&E, and star of Criss Angel Believe, the highly anticipated live show with Cirque du Soleil, due to open some time this fall at the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas. This week, it was announced that the $100-million (U.S.) show will be delayed – not for the first time – due to “technical difficulties,” causing onlookers to wonder if Cirque du Soleil, a proven money-maker with five ongoing productions in Vegas, made a wise decision to partner with the man some are calling “the new Houdini.”

The show, which now promises to open in October – even though tickets had been sold for a September debut – marks the first time the Montreal-based entertainment troupe has created a production with a celebrity headliner. The collaboration has not been easy. “There have been pitfalls along the way,” Felix Rappaport, president of the Luxor, told me last month.

But gossip is also mounting about recent erratic behaviour on the part of Angel. In April, at the Miss USA pageant in Vegas, he created a scene when his then-girlfriend, Veronica Grabowski, Miss Nevada, didn't make the finals. He threatened a local gossip columnist, Norm Clarke, who had alleged that Angel had put pressure on one of the judges: He said Clarke would need another eye patch by the time Angel finished with him. (Clarke already had one.) When a TV crew turned their camera on Angel in the audience, he responded by giving them the finger. Despite criticism in blogs and the local press, Angel has refused to apologize. The performance you are about to witness took place over the course of a two-day interview. What is the trick Angel will do?

He will disappear behind a series of masks. The master illusionist, in the city of all things fake, is trying to maintain control of what you see. After all, Angel told me, his work as an artist is to “blur the boundary between reality and illusion.”

After a long wait, Angel emerges from the bedroom of his penthouse at the apex of the pyramid-shaped Luxor on the Vegas Strip. A heavy, unkempt beard masks his face. From under a baseball cap, worn backward, his streaked hair juts out at odd angles and down the back of his neck. In heavy boots, with lifts in the soles that make him appear taller than his height of about 5-foot-8, he moves into the main sitting area, walking with an assured, nonchalant air, and takes a seat on a sofa, placing his hands on the tops of his knees. He wears sunglasses.

His brother, Costa Sarantakos, makes way for him, and gestures to what has caused a stir in the room: bling worth over a million. “A lot of his stuff has symbolism,” Sarantakos says in a conspiratorial whisper. Angel's other brother, J.D., the eldest of the three boys, and his mother, Dimitra, a small, slim, dark-haired 73-year-old, also stand back with knowing smiles.

Angel, the youngest child in the family, is dripping in custom-made silver and diamond jewellery. Like the grill of a car, big, chunky rings on every finger (except for one) confront his small audience. Around his neck, he wears multiple long necklaces, some of which have crosses or skulls, handcuffs, his Criss Angel logo, initials and words. There are earrings, too, and a stack of individual bracelets, on each arm, at least five inches deep.

“I don't like to talk about it,” he says sharply, when asked about the symbolism of each piece. “Except for this,” he says on second thought, holding up one of his necklaces with a large cross. “Dad's initials and the word ‘believe' are in there,” he explains, his voice softening as he turns the piece over in his hands. His father died in 1998 of stomach cancer. Three years before, doctors had given him three weeks to live. A former bodybuilder who kept himself in top form, he was determined to prove the doctors wrong. “He lives in me every day,” Angel says.

“Believe,” which appears in much of Angel's work and merchandise, is a reference to Houdini. It was the word he told his wife he would use if any spiritual medium reached him in the afterlife. Ten years after his death, Houdini's widow revealed the code word because no one had succeeded in contacting him.

Angel, whose real name is Christopher Sarantakos, sits still and upright, like a Mafia don or a king, having already been ushered into the palace of fame by Larry King interviews and Oprah appearances. He is basking in this big, new moment of his career, one he has fought to achieve since he was a boy.

It all began when his Aunt Stella showed six-year-old Christopher a magic trick. Soon, he was performing tricks at birthday parties. A close-knit Greek family, his older brothers and parents would pile into the van and take him to talent shows. At 14, he got a gig doing magic on Friday nights at a local restaurant. By that time, he had figured out how to make his mom float in the family den.

“Since I was a kid, I used to practise signing my name ‘cause I always thought I was going to be famous,” explains Angel, in an accent that still speaks of his blue-collar Long Island, N.Y., roots. “At 12, I was coming up with different stage names.” He eventually settled on Angel, a moniker he was already contemplating, after James Randi, a famous stage magician, commented, “You look nothing like an angel,” when Randi was invited by the young illusionist to appear on a local cable show he had at the age of 18. Angel added Criss when he came across the name of Peter Criss, a band member of the rock group Kiss.

There was no trick to the rapid ascendancy that brought him here – seven years ago, he was broke and unknown – to the top of a fake pyramid, to his own Peter Pan haven, with a pinball machine, electronic games, a foosball table, large train set and personal security guards who carry tasers and mutter “No comment” when asked if they pack heat.

His only secret is hard work, a trait that can make Angel highly egotistical and controlling. Hours earlier, as I entered his penthouse, he was on the phone loudly explaining to someone what he expected to be done. A public-relations assistant micromanages every interview opportunity. There is a sense that his brothers, both of whom are in his employ, tiptoe around his volatile personality.

Angel is arrogantly dismissive of what some people think of his image, which is part goth, part rock ‘n' roll and part satanic, even though it has caused him to receive death threats. “It's all about perceptions, and I just put the images out there, and I'm not doing it to be perceived as evil. I get Christians that think I'm wonderful, and I get Christians that think I'm the devil. And the fact of the matter is, it doesn't matter except for me and the man upstairs,” he says, pointing one finger skyward.

But the mask of the swollen-headed celebrity drops when he speaks about his father, or any member of his family. Suddenly he becomes the devoted son, the former choirboy who sounds like a Hallmark card on the subject of how “love lives forever,” a favourite phrase also immortalized in major bling.

He carries a picture of his dad with him everywhere. It was his death – “Feb. 12 at 4:32 p.m., and I said to him, ‘Go' and he died in my arms,” Angel recalls – that gave him renewed drive to reach for his dreams. “My father, with his condition, with his crazy death sentence, lived life each day. He always believed that your body was a slave to your mind, and that when your mind, body, spirit worked together, you could do anything in life.”

In 2001, frustrated by producers who promised him deals and never followed through – “They wanted to give me 30 grand and own me for life,” he scoffs – Angel asked his mother to mortgage her house for $360,000. He wanted to mount his own off-Broadway show. It was just after Sept. 11. People discouraged him and his family. But his mother, ever his champion, agreed. He called it Criss Angel Mindfreak. “I told her I would go back to doing children's parties and pay every cent back if it didn't work,” says Angel.

The vision was to create a new kind of magic. “Outside of what Houdini did, it was behind the times. It was kind of cheesy. … I always loved Dali and Fellini and music. … I loved the art of magic. I just wasn't a big fan of what magicians were doing.”

Originally scheduled to run 12 weeks, the New York show lasted for 600 performances over the course of a year. That success led to some TV specials, but it wasn't until 2004, when Angel met his manager, Dave Baram, president of the Firm in Hollywood, that he began to achieve the mega-success he craved. Baram convinced Angel to tone down his extreme goth look – long hair and dramatic white face makeup – as they embarked on the Mindfreak television series, now entering Season 4. Angel was so sure of his connection to Baram that when they sealed their agent-client agreement, he insisted they cut their hands to become blood brothers.

Angel keeps a close-knit group around him. He first met his makeup artist in New York 15 years ago. For years, believing he would be famous one day, she worked for him for free. “I told her I would look after her when I made it. She is like family to me,” he told me the day before, during a lunch break while shooting a segment for Mindfreak at a local FAO Schwarz toy store. Two of his cameramen have been with him for 13 years.

His mother, who lives on Long Island, in the same house where she raised her sons, visits him in Vegas often. During the two days I spent with him, she was there, as were his brothers, at every point of his day, hanging out on set and in his penthouse. “We try to remind him of what got him here, “ says Costa, a soft-spoken man with a significant mullet. During lunch on the set, Angel sat with his family, and when he got up to return to work, he leaned down to kiss the top of his mother's head.

“We are worried about him sometimes,” confesses J.D., who has often assisted on camera with his brother's stunts, as has Costa. “There have been a few close calls,” he adds, including one last season when Angel, who is 40, almost drowned.

In his popular Mindfreak TV series, Angel has pulled off memorable stunts and illusions, which have allowed him to eclipse other contemporary illusionists, including David Blaine and David Copperfield. He has walked down the sides of buildings; walked on water; lit himself on fire; encased himself in concrete; submerged himself in water; and flown across the Nevada desert, suspended from a helicopter with wire and four giant fishhooks pierced through the skin on his back. He has scars to show for some of his death-defying feats.

In the first two weeks of its debut in July, 2005, the show attracted 1.7 million viewers alone. The premier of Season 3, in which he levitated in the light at the top of the Luxor Hotel, drew 2.7 million viewers, becoming the series' most-watched episode.

Angel likes to point out that he has created more hours of television magic tricks than any illusionist, but he is not one to rest on his bed of nails. “I have to ramp up what I do artistically,” he told me while travelling in his custom RV to FAO Schwarz. “If I don't have anything creatively to say on TV or in a live show, I won't do it.”

In Season 4, which debuts on A&E July 23, he will attempt to walk on Lake Mead, outside of Las Vegas. The last time he performed a walking-on-water illusion, he gingerly moved across the surface of the pool at the Aladdin Hotel in Vegas, while people swam beside and beneath him. Later in the month, he will do a dice-with-death stunt – or “mind, body, spirit demonstration” as he prefers to call such things – entitled Implosion, in which he will be locked inside a building that is about to be blown up.

Angel often adopts the demeanour of an entrepreneurial guru, speaking of his plans for himself and his brand with stunning confidence. If he believes strongly in anything, it is in himself and his artistic vision. Included in his list of objectives is acting in Hollywood. He has appeared on CSI:NY and recently signed for a part in the film version of Mandrake the Magician, a comic strip from the 1930s.

At the Luxor, where his production office is, and many of the Mindfreak episodes are filmed, he has a store of merchandise – clothes, jewellery and other paraphernalia – and big plans for “brand” expansion, including a Criss Angel bar and “a sanctuary where you can hang out with things from the show.” His vision will redefine Vegas, he says. “I want to create a destination interactive experience that people will come to from early morning until late at night.”

The live show at the Luxor will take a narrative format. “It's a trip through the baroque theatre of Criss's brain,” explains Serge Denoncourt, co-writer and director of the Cirque show. Angel has pursued a collaboration with Cirque for a long time. He first discovered the troupe on a TV special when he was a teenager. “They created a brand new interpretation of the circus that was more sophisticated, and without question, more poetic, artistic and had an emotional connection. I always strived to do that in my art.”

Now, with his wish coming true, the pressure is intense, which may account for some of his recent behaviour. Vegas runs on a capitalist imperative, and Rappaport and MGM-Mirage, the owner of the Luxor, have high hopes the show will “break through the fierce competition on the Strip, because Criss appeals to a very hip, young crowd.” For his part, Angel says that his live show, two years in development, will be completely unprecedented. “I wanted to create an experience that wasn't following any path,” he says, “but one that others would follow.” The contract is for 10 years. By the time it comes to an end, he will have completed 4,600 performances.

To prepare for his work both on his TV series and for his new live show, he works out every day for two hours and closely watches his diet. His straggly beard, the subject of much Internet discussion, is simply a function of working too hard. “I don't want to take the time to shave,” he says. He sleeps only three hours a night. “I am a workaholic. Even when I go on vacation, it's never a vacation. I'm always working in my mind. It drives me crazy.”

Despite his coterie of trusted advisers, he rarely delegates. He signs all the cheques and pores over every detail of his marketing, his illusions, the camera angles, the final product. He works with other magicians who consult with him about how to pull off an illusion, but “the ideas are all mine,” he says, adding that he keeps notepads in his house and cars to record his thoughts.

Angel is polite and diplomatic in many of his responses, as if trying to shape the opinion that an interviewer might form. “She wasn't willing to do the work,” is all he will say about Britney Spears, whose MTV comeback he was supposed to work on until she decided to plan it without his input. Of the many celebrities to whom he has been romantically linked, including Cameron Diaz, Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan and Pamela Anderson, he says simply that they are “wonderful human beings” and that it is the tabloids that create something out of nothing. Still, Angel has been accused of being a publicity hound, showing up for photo-ops with Vegas-visiting starlets.

He can swing between personae – the crazed seeker of high-octane celebrity life and the down-to-earth son who only values hard work – as if it's part of a show to confound his onlooker as to who he really is.

Angel has all the toys of fame. He owns nearly 50 custom-made motorcycles and hot rods, and a fleet of 15 luxury cars – among them, a Lamborghini, a Rolls-Royce, a Bentley, a Porsche, a Corvette and a Viper. Recently, he ordered a Hummer that has multiple digital screens, a special sound system, flames that come out the back, and the ability to deal a deck of cards out the front. It took nearly eight months to build. The custom features alone cost $350,000. Many of his cars and motorcycles are on prominent display at the Luxor.

He is looking to buy 100 acres in the desert, where he will build houses for his mother and brothers; a warehouse for his merchandise, cars and sets; a track for racing his bikes; and a mansion for himself. “I want to take a helicopter to work every day,” he says casually. The complex will take three years to complete.

In the same breath, however, he tells me that success has made his life more difficult.

“Truthfully, it's nice to have these things,” he says from behind his beard, his bling and his sunglasses, sitting in his penthouse. “But they are just things, like cars and motorcycles and pinball machines and computers. … Materialistic things mean nothing.” He was happier when he was trying to make it. “I used to think when I had money I would have freedom. It is the complete opposite. I have more responsibility, more stress.” He tells me that the only thing he really cares about is his charitable work, all of which involves children.

He displays equally contradictory behaviour about his ex-wife, JoAnn Winkhart, from whom he split last year. His marriage broke down because he worked too hard, he explains. “She served me with divorce papers,” he says, before going off on a tangent about how she and her lawyer are trying to “extort” money from him.

Moments later, during a discussion about the importance of treating people with respect – another lesson from his father – he insists that he still loves Winkhart, and that he sent her flowers on her birthday. “I think JoAnn is a wonderful, beautiful human being,” he says, repeating his standard line about the women in his life. “I still love and care about her. … She's just been misguided [by her divorce lawyer] and I forgive her for that.” (At press time, a settlement still had not been finalized.) Angel ducks behind various guises, so that few can pinpoint him. For all the effort to make it, to be someone, he has become many people, a series of caricatures for the consumption of others. Fame, after all, is the ultimate funhouse of mirrors. It's all about image, what you allow the onlooker to see that may or may not be real.