Booked Full of Mooks

A place is booked full of mooks when a character orchestrates to have a public venue — such as a restaurant, town square, theater, or museum — filled with actors, agents, or acolytes who give the appearance of normal bystanders. This is often done with the intent of fooling an opponent into thinking that there's nothing amiss, when in fact they're hopelessly outnumbered. For extra dramatic effect, the orchestrator may deliberately reveal this by having all the "bystanders" react at once, cueing an Oh, Crap! moment from the opponent.

This is a good shorthand to demonstrate not only the orchestrator's wealth and power but also the lengths they'll go to in order to be totally in control of the situation. They're able to hire dozens, if not hundreds of people, book out an entire venue, and dedicate them to posing as normal citizens for hours, just to remove any unexpected variables. It's also a good dose of paranoia for their opponents — if the orchestrator can completely infiltrate and control a whole area, can they ever be safe out in public?

If the orchestrator has villainous intent, this is often done to lure the other character into a trap. They may have been hesitant to meet with the orchestrator in private; when the mooks are revealed, they realize to their horror there are no bystanders to help them and they're Alone with the Psycho. Or it turns out that all the mooks are armed and try to kill the other character, forcing them to flee or fight for their life.

For less sinister (but still deceptive) motives, this may be used in espionage; to protect the secrecy of a conversation in an Overt Rendezvous, everyone around them is a fellow agent to stop interlopers from eavesdropping. It could also be a form of Benevolent Conspiracy, with everyone there simply being there for the orchestrator and/or the unaware character's safety and protection. In crime stories, it may be a sting and all the bystanders are undercover police. Or, it could be part of an attempt to impress someone (as a Grand Romantic Gesture, Engineered Heroics, or otherwise), and filling the place with actors means there's no chance of people acting unexpectedly.

Subtrope of The Reveal. A subversion of Overt Rendezvous, Nonviolent Initial Confrontation, and Safety in Muggles. Compare Sinister Surveillance, We Are Everywhere, and Locked Out of the Loop. Compare and contrast The Mole, about a single infiltrator in a group. May overlap with Everyone Is Armed, You and What Army? and Flock of Wolves. For examples that take place on a society-wide scale, see Masquerade and "Truman Show" Plot. Do note that it requires the entirety of the group to be in on it, not simply a few "plants" in an otherwise unaware crowd.

As this is a Plot Twist trope, unmarked spoilers abound. Beware.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Durarara!!: Mikado agrees to meet Namie in a public and rather crowded street while she is trying to get her hands on Mika Harima. She pretends to go alone but mixes a couple of her men into the crowd. When she confronts Mikado he sends a group message, revealing everyone else in the crowd to be a member of the Dollars and that he is their leader. The crowd becomes too thick for Namie's men to get to her.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Crusaders: When the Joestar Group encounters Daniel D. D'Arby in Giza, it's at an outdoor cafe filled with other patrons. However, completely unbeknownst to the protagonists is the fact that, as part of his scheme to steal their souls, D'Arby made sure everyone in the cafe and within sight of it, including a seemingly-innocent street boy that is actually an expert card-dealer, was somebody that worked for him to ensure no matter what, such as if the group tried to bring in someone else to deal the cards in their game of poker, he would have the advantage in defeating them with his deceitful cheating tactics.
• In episode 7 of Lupin III: Part 5, Lupin meets up with the head of the DGSE in the middle of a café. However, the head intends to double-cross Lupin and filled said café with DGSE agents.
• Project A-Ko: Played with in the second film. All of the guests at the "hotel" built from the wrecked spaceship turn out to be members of one foreign intelligence agency or another, all intending to get their hands on C-ko and force the Leptons to hand over the secrets of their technology. Fortunately for A-ko, B-ko, and C-ko, it becomes a case of We ARE Struggling Together, as each agency wants to be the one to take the girl, and they're not willing to share.
• Spy X Family: During the Cruise Ship-Arc, Yor tells Loid and Anya that as part of her duties as a City Hall clerk, she'll be going on a business trip with her boss aboard a cruise ship. In reality, she has been assigned to protect a woman and her surviving family who have become the target of an enemy crime syndicate, and a significant number of the ship's manifest consist of a Carnival of Killers, which Yor, as the Thorn Princess, has to keep away from her client, all the while keeping everything secret from the other passengers as well as Loid and Anya who tagged along when the latter won tickets to go on the cruise.

Films — Animated

• The Venture Bros: Radiant is the Blood of the Baboon Heart: When the Monarch and 21 first meet Mantilla in a subway station, all the other passersby briefly vanish from sight before revealing themselves to be her ARCH minions in disguise.

Films — Live-Action

• Bullet Train: Past a particular station, all of the remaining passengers on the train except the main characters are revealed to be thugs working for the White Death. Every normal passenger had already disembarked. This frees the main characters to fight out in the open without fear of looking suspicious to civilians or hurting them.
• Contagion: After peddling his fake miracle "cure" Forsythia, Alan meets up with a confidant in a public park to make excuses for himself. He figures out too late that said confidant is working with the police, and that all the city workers and park visitors around him are undercover cops, who promptly arrest him for fraud.
• John Wick: Chapter 2: When John Wick is about to go on the run from The Syndicate, he meets Winston at the Bethesda Terrace and Fountain in New York's Central Park. On Winston's cue, everyone in the busy public thoroughfare stops, turns towards them, and continues on, before Winston grants John a Mercy Lead.
• The Man from U.N.C.L.E.: Napoleon and Ilya meet at a West Berlin café with their CIA and KGB handlers to discuss teaming up to steal dangerous nuclear secrets from an Italian terrorist group. When the handlers leave, all the other patrons at the café leave too—they're all agents who took up the other tables to make sure the conversation remained confidential.
• Men in Black II: Agent J finds the now-retired and neuralyzed Agent K working as a small town postmaster. In order to convince him that the Men in Black do exist, J reveals that every other worker in K's post office is an alien in disguise.
• Mission Impossible: After the disastrous opening mission, IMF agent Ethan Hunt has an Overt Rendezvous with his superior Kittridge in an upscale restaurant. Ethan realizes something's up when he recognizes the other restaurant patrons as people he's run into earlier. Kittridge suspects Ethan of being The Mole, so all of the staff and guests in the café are fellow IMF agents preparing to apprehend him.
• In Monster X Strikes Back: Attack the G8 Summit (the sequel to The X From Outer Space), the Japanese Prime Minister reveals that he is actually the Dear Leader of North Korea^note a No Celebrities Were Harmed version of Kim Jong-Il in disguise. All the staffers and interpreters at the summit are North Korean spies as well, and they take the other world leaders hostage.
• In Ong-Bak, after Ting takes down an obnoxious and viciously aggressive Australian fighter in the underground fight club, he tries to leave, only to find himself surrounded by the audience. When he tries to push through the crowd, members of the audience intentionally close ranks and pack themselves close together to prevent him from leaving. When he tries to push through another part of the circle, one of the men draws a gun on him. It turns out that much of the crowd work for the crime boss who runs the place, and the boss is angry with Ting for costing him money and disrupting the event.
• This also happens in a meeting between Yakuza and The Mafia in The Punisher — everyone else in the restaurant turns out to be a hired gun working for the Yakuza.
• Raiders of the Lost Ark: In Cairo, Indiana Jones is told that someone in a local bar wishes to speak with him. Indy walks inside and finds his arch-rival Rene Belloq. They spar verbally for a bit until Indy gets pissed enough to pull out his gun and threaten Belloq — at which point every Arab in the bar draws their own gun and takes aim at Indy. Indy only escapes getting gunned down right there because Sallah sends his own children in to retrieve their "Uncle Indy".
• Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows: Irene Adler chooses to meet with Professor Moriarity for tea at her favorite restaurant, expecting he'd kill her for outliving her usefulness if they met in private. However, he reveals that he bribed everyone in the restaurant to leave at once, giving him the privacy needed to poison her.
• Sonic the Hedgehog 2: Sonic escapes from the avalanche in Siberia by teleporting to Rachel's wedding in Hawaii, at which point the groom, Randall, tasers Sonic and takes him into custody, revealing himself as an undercover GUN agent. Randall's helped by his groomsmen, his "family," all the guests he invited, and the staff at the wedding venue, all of whom are undercover GUN agents, too. Even the priest officiating the ceremony has a taser hidden in his Bible. Poor Rachel and her family were the only ones unaware that the wedding was just a ploy to capture Sonic.
• The Sting: Master con man Henry Gondorff engineers a plan to fleece thuggish racketeer Doyle Lonnegan in revenge for the slaying of Luther Coleman. The con involves an underground betting parlor where the race results are held up while the odds are shifted. The whole place is staffed with almost every grifter in the midwest, essential to control all of Lonnegan's perceptions. Even the federal marshals that arrive to shut down Gondorff's parlor are actually fellow con men armed with blanks.
• Van Helsing: Van Helsing and Carl plan to rescue Anna from Dracula as the latter attends a Budapest masquerade ball. As Dracula dances with the captive Anna, however, he takes her to a big mirror that shows she's the only one with a reflection, meaning everyone else in the room is a vampire.

Literature

• Artemis Fowl: The Eternity Code: At the beginning of the book, Artemis meets up with Jon Spiro in a restaurant to show off some tech that will completely destroy Spiro's business, with an offer to keep it off the market for a year in exchange for a metric tonne of gold. Artemis is confident that Spiro won't try anything in public, but then it turns out that all of the patrons (even an 80-year-old lady!) and staff are armed thugs working for Spiro, who walks off with the tech and leaves the thugs to kill Artemis.
• In the Aubrey-Maturin novel The Reverse of the Medal, Captain Jack Aubrey is framed for stock-market fraud and sentenced to an hour in the public stocks. Unknown to him, though, all his numerous Navy subordinates and old friends have cleared the square of gawkers, disgruntled investors, and rock-bearing hired thugs. When Jack is finally locked into the stocks and looks up, the crowd is wholly composed of sailors who commence to cheer for him.
• The Continental Op: "The Big Knockover" provides a rare third-party perspective on this maneuver. In the aftermath of a massive bank robbery, the Continental Op tails the gangster Red O'Leary, suspected to be close to the ringleaders of the operation. O'Leary goes into a nightclub with his girlfriend, and the Op follows. As the club fills up with other customers at an unusually early hour, the Op notices how few women there are, how the other tables are occupied by "rat-faced men, hatched-faced men, square-jawed men"—who are all keeping an eye on O'Leary. The Op realizes that these are all the lower-rung gangsters who participated in the robbery and got screwed out of their share of the cash, and now they suspect O'Leary knows where the money is. Red O'Leary also realizes exactly what's happening—and sticks around anyway because he's headstrong and foolish enough to think he can take them all on. Sure enough, the leader of the angry gangsters, Bluepoint Vance, is the last to arrive, and when the discussion between him and O'Leary breaks down, all the others attack. The Op intervenes to get O'Leary out alive, cursing his foolishness every step of the way.
• In the short story "Murder! At the Ruptured Troll" by Ken St. Andre, Murk the Mighty is called to the Ruptured Troll tavern to act as a detective and determine which of the 15 non-elven customers present killed the elf Phanomii. After Murk identifies the wizard Sven Stormsender as the murderer, Sven orders the other 14 customers to attack Murk, revealing that all of them had been hired by Sven in advance and planted in the tavern to fight for him.
• Pale: Avery and Clem have a meeting with Samaniego, leader of the Lighthouse Witch Hunters, at a restaurant. Samaniego calls Avery complacent and shows his control over the situation by moving his chair, revealing that every guest in the restaurant except for Avery and Clem are actually his fellow Witch Hunters. Avery's bracelet that tracks connections (specifically, people watching her) doesn't activate until the reveal, showing the folly of her overreliance on it.
• A Series of Unfortunate Events: In The Penultimate Peril, the Hotel Denouement is filled with VFD volunteers posing as hotel guests and employees, and the main conflict is based around figuring out which side of the organization any one person is on and who the main characters can trust. Expanded in the television adaptation, when it's blatantly shown that any large crowd in or around the city potentially has a number of VFD (from either side) in the mix.
• The Witches: While staying at a hotel with his grandmother, the protagonist stumbles upon a convention for the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. He realizes after becoming trapped in the convention hall that the RSPCC is a cover story for the witches of England, who are having their yearly meeting hosted by the Grand High Witch.

Live-Action TV

• Boardwalk Empire: When Chalky is stuck in a crowded jail cell, a fellow inmate named Purnsley keeps getting on his case, psyching himself up for a fight. Chalky eventually decides he's had enough, and he turns and addresses all the other inmates by name, revealing he's either employed or done favors for all of them. Purnsley has just enough time to realize his mistake before they beat the hell out of him.
• Charmed (1998): In "The Day Magic Died", Paige and Phoebe meet up with a warlock in a bar to try and figure out why magic is down everywhere. After a while, the witches note the bar has gone very quiet, then realize all the patrons are demons. How did they get the bar full of demons without magic? They simply paid the human patrons to leave.
• Daredevil: In "In the Blood", Wilson Fisk takes Vanessa Marianna out to a restaurant full of couples eating and chatting. Near the end of dinner, Anatoly Ranskahov shows up seeking to talk business with him. Almost immediately, all of the men seated at the other tables stand up and move in on Anatoly to prevent him from reaching Fisk. Fisk booked the entire restaurant for the evening and made sure that the only patrons present were his men and their wives and girlfriends.
• In Dark Angel the protagonist goes to confront a high ranking officer who is trying to sell one of her fellow experimentees to the Chinese. They confront him in a bustling mess hall. In this case, it is clear that all the other attendees are soldiers from the same base, but all their loud conversations turn out to be a front for ambushing the heroes.
• The Defenders: Danny Rand enters Midland Circle, a financial organization being used as a cover business by the Hand, in order to confront their leadership; not warrior-to-warrior, but businessman-to-businessman. After crashing what appears to be a stockholder meeting, he's caught off-guard and nearly captured when it turns out the suits are all henchmen wielding collapsible batons and tranquilizer guns. He only gets out of the mess thanks to Luke rescuing him.
• Doctor Who: As Cybermen march out of St. Paul's at the start of "Death in Heaven", a crowd surrounds them and starts taking selfies with them. On cue, all these admirers draw guns and reveal themselves as undercover UNIT operatives.
• Fargo: In season 3, Nikki meets with V.M.Varga in a public place, positive that he can't do anything as "you're a pretty distinctive guy." Varga just smirks. "Am I? Look around." Nikki does...and sees that just in this lobby, Varga has least six henchmen who are dressed almost exactly the way he is.
• The Golden Girls: In "Bang the Drum, Stanley," Sophia gets hit on the head with a baseball and, at her ex-son-in-law Stan's urging, fakes being paralyzed to file a Frivolous Lawsuit against the stadium. When she goes in for a physical examination, the lobby is full of other people on crutches and using wheelchairs, and when a sick little boy arrives, Sophia's conscience catches up with her and she comes clean. At that moment, all of the patients stand up and remove their casts and braces, revealing that they're perfectly healthy—they're actually a troupe of actors that Dorothy hired to expose the scam.
• Gotham: The season 3 episode "Look into My Eyes," Aubrey James and Penguin pull this trope on each other as they meet in an Italian restaurant. First, James reveals the entire staff of the restaurant are actually his hired mooks, and seemingly has Penguin at his mercy, but finds himself Out-Gambitted when the Penguin reveals that all the customers in the restaurant are his hired mooks.
• It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia: In "The Gang Broke Dee," Sweet Dee goes through a Heroic BSoD and stops responding to the rest of the Gang's usual antics. She then has a surprising turn of luck with her stand-up comedy, gradually packing houses and becoming a minor celebrity. She books a television appearance and seems to be on top of the world...only to go on stage and discover that she's not only still in Philly, but the bar is full of people there to tell her how awful she is. It turns out that the hundreds of audience members who seemingly loved her routine were actually paid off by Frank, who, along with Charlie and Mac, engineered the entire thing. Why? Because they were sick of her whining and wanted to show her that her situation could be worse.
• Secret Invasion (2023): Varik and Talos meet in a crowded cafe for a parley. When Gravik tells Talos that he's lucky not to have had G'iah (Talos' daughter) sent back to him in a body bag, Talos furiously lunges at him, at which point every other person in the room drops what they're doing and assumes Gravik's appearance, revealing that they're all Skrulls allied with him. Talos swiftly backs down. But not for long.
• Superman & Lois: After learning that the restaurant where his daughter is meeting her boyfriend's parents is owned by Intergang leader Bruno Mannheim and was the same one where Bruno regularly met with John Henry's Dead Alternate Counterpart, John Henry goes to intervene, where he learns that Bruno is indeed the boyfriend's dad. Unfortunately, it seems Bruno doesn't like having family dinner disrupted, as he took the precaution of ensuring that everyone else in the restaurant — staff and diners alike — were his mooks, several of them armed. John Henry promptly finds himself surrounded, and with an extremely angry Bruno intent on breaking every bone in his body.
• Ted Lasso: When Ghanaian multibillionaire Edwin Akufo tries to convince Sam Obisanya to leave AFC Richmond and sign on with his team, he takes Sam to an art museum to have a chat. Midway through, Edwin reveals that he rented out the whole museum for the day and everyone else there (even a man Edwin claimed was the real Banksy) is an actor.
• Vengeance Unlimited: In one episode, Mr Chapel called in a dozen favors to set up a restaurant where everyone but the baddie is paying in monopoly money, and the staff accepts it. This was part of a plan to Gaslight the baddie who got away with parricide.
• The West Wing: In "Election Night," Josh goes to vote in the presidential election. As he's exiting his polling station, various people come up to him and happily talk about their own votes...all of which are inaccurate for various reasons (one guy voted for President Bartlett in multiple parties, one woman thinks that she only has to fill in the top box to have her vote count for that entire party, and so on). Josh gets increasingly frustrated until the final woman says she has a message from Toby Ziegler. It turns out the seemingly-ignorant passersby are actually a troupe of actors that Toby hired to prank Josh.

Tabletop Games

• Shadowrun: In the campaign Harlequin's Back, there's the adventure "Walk in the Park". The shadowrunners are hired to pick up a woman in a park. When they try to do so, they discover that everyone else in the park is part of a security team that will try to capture or kill them.

Video Games

• Set-up and ultimately subverted in Evil Genius 2. In the line of plots dealing with Atomic Olga, the Genius pays Olga's brother, a professional figure skater, to put on a performance for an audience full of minions. Nothing happens to him, but Atomic Olga still reacts with outrage towards the Genius simply due to what could've happened.
• Genshin Impact: In Diluc's Story Quest, Huffman has been tasked by Kaeya to keep an eye on Diluc as he works his night shift at the Angel's Share tavern, under the suspicion that Diluc is the mysterious Darknight Hero. Much to Diluc's dismay, he has to fight off an Abyss Order attack on Mondstadt during his shift, and asks the Traveler to distract Huffman elsewhere so he can sneak out and defeat the attack. After returning, Huffman becomes suspicious that Diluc left the tavern behind his back, so he asks the customers to testify. To his surprise, every single customer says that Diluc was at the tavern the whole time, and Huffman leaves, his only lead on the Darknight Hero having turned cold. Turns out Diluc had anticipated such a problem and had the entire tavern booked out by his associates at the Dawn Winery in order to lie for him and create an alibi. However, Kaeya himself had been secretly spying on Diluc from an out-of-sight table and applauds him for going this far to hide his identity. He ultimately chooses not to report Diluc to the Knights of Favonius, since he finds the whole ordeal amusing and he has a vow to not divulge other people's secrets.
• No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle: The hotel in which Travis is sent to fight Nathan Copeland has been completely booked by members of his cult, as is everyone just standing around in the lobbies and hallways. Travis doesn't realize this until they all suddenly start running at him, trying to attack him. This leads to Travis having to fight off wave after wave of Nathan's followers before he can even reach the suite where they're supposed to duel. The reason for Nathan's approach is because Travis had recently come out of retirement, and he wanted to see if Travis is as good at battling as the legends say he is.

Western Animation

• Batman: The Animated Series: "Almost Got 'Im" takes place in a Bad Guy Bar full of lowlifes, where the Joker, the Penguin, Killer Croc, Two-Face, and Poison Ivy get together to play poker and tell stories about which of them has come the closest to defeating Batman. The Joker goes last and brags that he's going for a proxy revenge by killing Catwoman, who saved the Dark Knight the previous evening and has gone missing. That's when "Killer Croc" reveals that he's actually Batman in disguise, having set the whole thing up to learn Catwoman's location. The villains think they have him outmatched until Batman snaps his fingers—at which point every other bar patron pulls out their weapons, revealing that they're all Gotham police officers helping Batman with the sting.
• Codename: Kids Next Door: In the episode, "M.O.V.I.E.", Numbah 4 disguises himself as an adult to sneak into an R-rated movie, but when he gets into the theater, he finds that all the adults are villains in disguise and the R-rated movie was just a cover for their meeting.
• Samurai Jack: Late in Season 5 Jack and Ashi travel on a tram and soon become suspicious of the other passengers riding with them, who are all Tiger Men. It soon becomes clear that they're all bounty hunters out to kill or capture them, with the cherry on top being their shirts spelling out their intentions and later their reactions to Jack's and Ashi's counterattacks.
• Xiaolin Showdown: During the 2nd episode, "Like a Rock", Jack Spicer and Wuya are in Paris, France talking about their partnership in finding Shen Gong Wu while the former is using the Third-Arm Sash to drink some tea, when a mime named Le Mime walks up, causing Jack to call in his Jack Bots to attack him. Thankfully, Wuya tells Jack to just hire him instead of hurting him, since he could be useful in finding the Fist of Tebigong and getting the Monks and Dojo off their backs.

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