Tag: crime

The 5 Families of Feces

Former drivers remain furious over years of abuse. “Who does this fuckin’ scumbag think he is? He looks like he crawled out of a dumpster.” And now the drivers are an existential threat to the business. In June 2015, more of them sued, seeking more unpaid overtime. But this suit has class-action status; more than 1300 pump-truck drivers are currently represented. Charlie has always settled, but not now. “This is the case where I have had it, and I want to fight back to the end. And now the drivers have to, you know, pay.” If Charlie goes to trial and loses, the damages could be in the 10s of millions of $. Call-a-Head would be finished. Charlie has new competition, too: Private equity is making a porta-potty play. In July 2017, Platinum Equity, a Beverly Hills–based investment firm, bought United Site Services, the nation’s largest portable-toilet conglomerate. Charlie frequently fields calls encouraging him to sell. His payday would be enormous, perhaps as much as $40M. He always refuses. And then, in December, Gary Weiner dropped a bombshell. He had just sold himself to United Site Services. Mr. John was throwing in the towel. Within days, the toilet giant was calling Call-a-Head’s clients, offering a 30% discount on rentals. (Weiner disputes this.) A battle with Wall Street and “a lot of college-educated people from Harvard” loomed, but Charlie saw only “bean counters” who didn’t understand the industry. “This is my life. I love it. I’ll always be doin’ it.”

Darknet Evolution

To prevent the problems of customer binding, and losing business when darknet markets go down, merchants have begun to leave the specialized and centralized platforms and instead ventured to use widely accessible technology to build their own communications and operational back-ends.

Instead of using websites on the darknet, merchants are now operating invite-only channels on widely available mobile messaging systems like Telegram. This allows the merchant to control the reach of their communication better and be less vulnerable to system take-downs. To further stabilize the connection between merchant and customer, repeat customers are given unique messaging contacts that are independent of shared channels and thus even less likely to be found and taken down. Channels are often operated by automated bots that allow customers to inquire about offers and initiate the purchase, often even allowing a fully bot-driven experience without human intervention on the merchant’s side.

The other major change is the use of “dead drops” instead of the postal system which has proven vulnerable to tracking and interception. Now, goods are hidden in publicly accessible places like parks and the location is given to the customer on purchase. The customer then goes to the location and picks up the goods. This means that delivery becomes asynchronous for the merchant, he can hide a lot of product in different locations for future, not yet known, purchases. For the client the time to delivery is significantly shorter than waiting for a letter or parcel shipped by traditional means – he has the product in his hands in a matter of hours instead of days. Furthermore this method does not require for the customer to give any personally identifiable information to the merchant, which in turn doesn’t have to safeguard it anymore. Less data means less risk for everyone.

Art Thief

The skilled climber and thief Vjeran Tomic, whom the French press referred to as Spider-Man, has described robbery as an act of imagination. Tomic’s confidence as a burglar grew to the point that he felt “indestructible and invulnerable.” Once, while fleeing the police across the rooftops of Paris, he took refuge in an empty apartment in a fashionable building. He decided to take whatever jewelry he could find; suddenly, the owner came home. “I saw that he was an old man with a very sexy girl”. He hid in a closet in the bathroom adjoining the man’s bedroom. “I couldn’t get out of it without crossing the room,” he recalled. “The couple . . . began making love, and that went on all night!” He waited until they finally fell asleep, then made his escape. “I have taken many risks like this one, and sometimes much worse ones. But I always perform well when faced with these sorts of obstacles.” Tomic kept moving through the galleries, taking down “Pigeon with Peas,” by Picasso, and “Olive Tree Near l’Estaque,” by Braque. He almost stole a 6th: Modigliani’s “Woman with Blue Eyes.” “When I went to get it off the wall, it told me, ‘If you take me, you will regret it the rest of your life.’ I will never forget what this ‘Woman with Blue Eyes’ did to me. When I touched it, to take it out of its frame . . . the feeling started instantly—a fear that came over me like an iceberg, a freezing fear that made me run away.” It took 2 trips for Tomic to carry the canvases out of the museum. He had parked his Renault a few minutes away, along the Avenue de New York. He sat in the driver’s seat for 5 minutes. As a professional thief, Tomic knew that it was reckless to linger at a crime scene, but he continued to equivocate about the Modigliani that he hadn’t taken. Tomic headed back, but within 1 minute reality set in: the streets of Paris were deserted, and he was quite possibly the only person within blocks of a recently burglarized museum. He fled the scene again, though his regret lingered. “When I drove, the blue-eyed lady was in my head”.

Amazon Marketplace Fraud

Fascinating article about the many ways Amazon Marketplace sellers sabotage each other and defraud customers.

Defacement: Sellers armed with the accounts of Amazon distributors (sometimes legitimately, sometimes through the black market) can make all manner of changes to a rival’s listings, from changing images to altering text to reclassifying a product into an irrelevant category, like “sex toys.”

Phony fires: Sellers will buy their rival’s product, light it on fire, and post a picture to the reviews, claiming it exploded. Amazon is quick to suspend sellers for safety claims.

Food vendor cap

The city’s government isn’t interested in helping more workers become vendors. The city capped food-vendor permits in the early 1980s; there are currently just over 4000 available, often only on the black market, where they might cost $25K (the city, by comparison, charges $200 for 2-year permits, which can be renewed indefinitely). And yet a 2015 report found that New York’s vendors contributed an estimated $293M to the city’s economy and $71M in taxes. “Street vending is an inherently New York City thing. I don’t know why there needs to be a cap on permits.”

you can only get a nyc food vendor license if you sell burnt pretzels. it’s the law. see also how the mob controls these licenses.

Mars Crime

Consider the basic science of crime-scene analysis. In the dry, freezer-like air and extreme solar exposure of Mars, DNA will age differently than it does on Earth. Blood from blunt-trauma and stab wounds will produce dramatically new spatter patterns in the planet’s low gravity. Electrostatic charge will give a new kind of evidentiary value to dust found clinging to the exteriors of space suits and nearby surfaces. Even radiocarbon dating will be different on Mars due to the planet’s atmospheric chemistry, making it difficult to date older crime scenes.

Vacant Property Theory

Broken-windows theory always worked better as an idea than as a description of the real world. The problems with the theory, which include the fact that perceptions of disorder generally have more to do with the racial composition of a neighborhood than with the number of broken windows or amount of graffiti in the area, are numerous and well documented. But more interesting than the theory’s flaws is the way that it was framed and interpreted. Consider the authors’ famous evocation of how disorder begins: A piece of property is abandoned, weeds grow up, a window is smashed. Adults stop scolding rowdy children; the children, emboldened, become more rowdy. Families move out, unattached adults move in. Teenagers gather in front of the corner store. The merchant asks them to move; they refuse. Fights occur. Litter accumulates. People start drinking in front of the grocery; in time, an inebriate slumps to the sidewalk and is allowed to sleep it off. Pedestrians are approached by panhandlers. Things get worse from there. But what’s curious is how the first 2 steps of this cycle—“A piece of property is abandoned, weeds grow up”—have disappeared in the public imagination. The 3rd step—“a window is smashed”—inspired the article’s catchy title and took center stage. Debates about the theory ignored the 2 problems at the root of its story, jumping straight to the criminal behavior. We got “broken windows,” not “abandoned property,” and a very different policy response ensued. But what if the authors—and the policymakers who heeded them—had taken another tack? What if vacant property had received the attention that, for 30 years, was instead showered on petty criminals?

Stoner Arms Dealers

the incredible true story behind the movie War Dogs.

The e-mail confirmed it: everything was finally back on schedule after weeks of maddening, inexplicable delay. A 747 cargo plane had just lifted off from an airport in Hungary and was banking over the Black Sea toward Kyrgyzstan. After stopping to refuel there, the flight would carry on to Kabul. Aboard the plane were 80 pallets loaded with 5M rounds of ammunition for AK-47s, the Soviet-era assault rifle favored by the Afghan National Army. Reading the e-mail back in Miami Beach, David Packouz breathed a sigh of relief. The shipment was part of a $30M contract that Packouz and his partner, Efraim Diveroli, had won from the Pentagon to arm America’s allies in Afghanistan. It was May 2007, and the war was going badly. After 6 years of fighting, Al Qaeda remained a menace, the Taliban were resurgent, and NATO casualties were rising sharply. For the Bush administration, the ammunition was part of a desperate, last-ditch push to turn the war around before the US presidential election the following year. To Packouz and Diveroli, the shipment was part of a major arms deal that promised to make them seriously rich.