The Greatness of Grifters Getting Gotten
Does it get much better than watching bullshit artists having to pay out in prison time? No. No, it does not.
“You know when it stopped being a ‘criminal’ act?”
He was, like the best bunco artists, completely, and seemingly justifiably, aggrieved. At? At the turn of events that saw him being dragged into court for some “straight up bullshit.” And now? Now he was working to convince me, and some imaginary court of public opinion, how not wrong he was.
“It stopped being a criminal act when he handed me his car keys!” He had offered to have a friend’s truck fixed, but then turned around and sold it. Keeping the cash, ducking the now-truckless friend. Moreover, he had convinced the buyer to forge the seller’s signature on the transfer slip. So that when the now-truckless friend finally reported the truck stolen, the purchaser was also fucked.
How fucked?
Arrested for grand theft auto fucked. Which caused him to track down this impresario of car fuckery, catch him mid-test drive of someone else’s Mercedes Benz, smash into him and ignite a fist fight…in front of a police station…that had gotten them both arrested. The call I was getting was one that I was getting to urge me to somehow silence either/both the buyer or the seller to “help out” the impresario. And because he wanted to make sure that I understood that I also had some skin in the game this…
“Jake [the buyer] is telling the cops ALL about you!”
“About what?”
“About the gun you sold him.”
[T]he impresario himself earn[ed] some headline ink for international drug trafficking. A crime that he had somehow blamed on his having to care for his elderly mother.
“I never sold Jake any gun,” I said, truthfully. “I sold it to YOU.” I had once had a Federal Firearms License that allowed me to legally purchase and sell guns. I was unsure that he ever understood this. That is, the whole “legally” part.
In any case his story metastasized into the seller dying, the buyer assaulting a cop by driving off with him on the hood of said truck during a traffic stop of a still-listed-as-stolen vehicle, and the impresario himself earning some major headline ink for international drug trafficking. A crime that he had somehow blamed on his having to care for his elderly mother. It was a symphony of fuck-up-ery that in the end showed the viral impact of chaos causing grift.
And all of which came back to mind this week when watching CEO, Grifter and Bunco Artist Sam Bankman-Fried get convicted of a multitude of financial crimes that have him staring down a possible sentence of over 100 years in the stony lonesome. Bankman-Fried tried his best to continue the big bamboozle, testifying in his own defense, playing the “I don’t recall” card, all standard Michael Corleone-fare, but in the end, emails, texts, and direct testimony scuttled his ducking and dodging. Now all that’s left is how many years he’ll get to play chess and learn how to make license plates.
What’s especially wonderful to watch though is what Bobby Womack once alluded to when he sang “you won’t know what you do when you’re put under pressure”: grifters never say die. Elizabeth Holmes’s shock at having to actually start serving her sentence was palpable. The confusion. The freshly fired sense of…well…injustice, at a billionaire being treated like a commoner. It was fine for her Svengali, Sunny Balwani, to go to prison. He was, after all, not like her. But her, a mom?
This shock is also present and palpable in the still continuing case of media mugger Carlos Watson. Watson’s grift was audacious and involved voice changing devices, impersonations, celebrity cons, Alex Rodriguez, falsified documents and concluded with his arrest at a tony midtown Manhattan hotel.
Watson’s response? Just as audacious: it’s not just that he did things that were illegal. It was more that everyone else did the same illegal things and he is just being punished for it because…wait for it…HE is Black and the system is biased against bold Black businessmen like him. Who steal like everyone else. But are unfairly singled out for stealing. Because they are Black stealers.
“He’s FULL OF SHIT.” Roland Martin, host and managing editor of the Roland Martin Show, has been hammering Watson’s blackface act since the onset of Watson’s legal troubles. Dismayed by the Watson-esque chutzpah at dismissing the $83 mil he did get away with, along with the fantasy $600 mil valuation he had claimed, and the $40 mil he tried to gank from Goldman Sachs as being the products of anti-Black racism.
[M]ight it be that the same judicial reckoning that caught them…is signaling an end to a judicial system that just punishes the least of us while the most, and sometimes worst, of us skate on by their depredations just because they went to good schools?
“I had to light his ass up,” Martin said via email. Because the list of “Black” celebrities who weren’t Black, without quotes, until they got in trouble, never sat well with Martin who on his show claimed that being Black was not a cloak that could be thrown on when it’s convenient. So Martin called bullshit on Watson’s claim. In glorious public fashion.
And still…despite emails, texts, letters, and direct testimony of co-defendants that have already pled out, Watson continues the hustle because: why would he stop now?
I can think of 11 reasons to stop now: Allen Stanford, Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev, Raj Rajaratnam, Joaquín Guzmán Loera (aka El Chapo), John Kapoor, Thomas Kwok, Michael Milken, Jay Y. Lee, S. Curtis Johnson, and the baffled Elizabeth Holmes. From sentences of 110 years to three months these names all belong to billionaires, some even white, who had to face the music.
And not just them…might it be that the same judicial reckoning that caught them, and Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, Danny Masterson, and soon, very possibly, former President Donald Trump is signaling an end to a judicial system that just punishes the least of us while the most, and sometimes worst, of us, skate on by their depredations just because they went to good schools?
I would hope so.
But then someone like Watson breathlessly intones their unequivocal innocence and I find myself chuckling, grabbing a tub of popcorn (insert popcorn eating meme here) and settling in for the bullshit show to end all bullshit shows.
“While it’s horrifying to think that white prosecutors would target me,” said Watson, emphasis mine. “Every person of color knows that it happens.”
Especially when you grift away $83 mil, along with the fantasy $600 mil valuation, and the $40 mil he tried to gank from Goldman Sachs. And did I mention, total disclosure style, the $7 mil in PPP money he got for COVID shut down to not lay off staff or cut salaries, while he cut my salary 19 percent for the duration of my last few years there at his company?
But yeah, I guess he’s right. Every person of color knows that it happens. And in the face of that I’ll be glad to bring him some Chipotle after he’s locked up. Because I understand. I really do.
“You know when it stopped being a ‘criminal’ act?”
Never?
Have you bought my memoir A Walk Across Dirty Water and Straight Into Murderer's Row, from Amazon? Or the Bookshop.Org dealie, here…you should. It came out and a week later my father died. THAT is how good it is!
What? Too soon?
Apropos of very little, how about the IRS tax cheats? Y'know, the ones who skate on billions in taxes while small biz, like mine, gets fined $400 for being 1 day late in filing?? Yup, the accountant, a family friend, was TWENTY-FOUR hours late in filing our online return. Bingo, $200 per partner. *eyeroll* Wonder how much Donnie got fined for the supposed late returns we've heard about in the past? I'm firing up the popcorn machine and settling in for more incredible testimony in NY this coming week!