Poop Shute

Won't You Be My Neighbor?

We used to have a neighbor that lived directly below us on the ground floor. His name was Ross. I would guess he was about sixty-ish years old. Ross was a really friendly neighbor, often insisting we stop and chat with him. He loved the theatre and the arts and even insisted that when the Mesa Arts Center's season opened that he would take the three of us to go see a show.

Nice guy.

Often when we were coming or going from our our apartment he would be outside in a lawn chair smoking, or chatting with other neighbors, or even playing a little tennis. Well, for the past few weeks we haven't seen him at all. And then a lockbox showed up on his doorknob one day. The lockbox isn't one of those Century 21 ones where the key is inside so the realtor can show the house. No, this is one of those that covers the entire knob so nobody can get in without the key to the box and the door. We assmued the worst. He was either evicted or he had passed away. Both were plausible, because once I saw workers going in and out and through the doorway I could see that Ross's furniture was still inside.

Finally, a couple nights ago another neighbor, Mike, was outside smoking. Mike had spent a lot of time hanging out with Ross, so I asked if he knew what had happened to him. Sure he enough, he did. Ross was alive and well, but no longer a legal resident of The Cimmaron Apartments.

Apparently Ross was a Con Man, a huckster, a grifter, a scam artist. The scam he was running here, I guess somehow involved Qwest. It was clear to me that Mike hadn't gotten all the details about the scam and that he didn't really understand it, because I couldn't really understand it from his description. It was something like Ross claimed he worked for Qwest and that he could lower people's bills, but instead he just jacked up their bill. I don't know how that works, and I'm not sure where he gets paid in there, but I'm guessing he asks for a bribe to lower the bill or something like that. I dunno.

So, until recently I lived upstairs from a con man. A bad one too by the sound of his scam. I just read the autobiography from one of the most succesful CON MEN of all time and the most important principle I learned from that book was simple: don't sh*t where you eat. Meaning, have a safe sanctuary, and earn a good rep there. Ross took in his own neighbors who knew where he lived for Christ's sake. If he were smart he would've been fleecing people in Scottsdale, or Tempe and never let them know where he lived.

Still, though, it's kind of cool to know that I was that close to that kind of action. I finished reading that autobiography the day before we found out, so my mind was flying through all the scams that the author mentioned to try to piece these Qwest details together to see where it fit. All in all, it didn't seem to.

The only thing that did fit the mold was the fact that the scam centered around the idea that the "mark" was trying to get something for nothing. The con man's greatest tool resides within the mark himself. More often than not a con man convinces the mark that they are going to make a killing at someone else's expense. In Ross's case, the idea was that he and the nieghbor were essentially going to steal from Qwest. Then the mark is left holding the bag, or in this case the bill.