Is it possible for those to get tracked back to him? Even if he didn’t attach any names (or fake names) to them, it seems that someone could pull the camera footage and see him buying, with his own money, a few dozen phones every night and tossing them in his trunk.
In fact, one thing about it that bothered me was that if anyone looked at the journal receipt (the one that stays inside the register so people can look back), they’d see all the sames happened one after another. A wiser move, at least going forward, would be to space them out over the course of the day.
Sure they were. I installed a camera system in my own store before that. I got it at Sams Club. The quality would have been more than adequate to see him doing that. No, you’re not going to be able to read the license plate on car 100 feet away and through a window, but you could certainly recognize your own employee walking out with all those phones or spending 20 minutes standing at the register ringing up fake sales.
And, don’t forget, this is a cell phone store, they absolutely would have had cameras. I can recall some of the stores that sold pagers having bars on the windows.
What a fascinating episode. I loved the effort that Mike put into keeping the location of the superlab anonymous. I agree that it seems like a bit of overkill just to have a room that no one knows about, but then, I’m not a criminal mastermind like Gus.
I’m leaning more towards Kim’s crisis just being “doesn’t want to spend her whole life dealing with bank finances” as opposed to something more specific.
Very curious to see what happens next with Jimmy. But I certainly didn’t predict that after all the painting last episode, he’d end up wiping it right back off. So…
How the heck are they keeping the workers silent about it? Even if they don’t know what they are building, how do you keep word from leaking out through general gossip that there’s a construction project going on, and some inspector decides to visit?
Perhaps, but on the other hand, we now know where we can find a tunnel under the boarder, but neither of these guys could give up the location if they wanted to*.
*Maybe, the second guy mentioned that he heard a town nearby and Vince made a point of showing us that he could see the ground as we was walking. It’s possible that that these are clues for something.
You can fanwank this one though. Mike doesn’t know as much as he claims to about storage / distribution, but because of his demeanor, it makes the employee doubt his own knowledge.
(I doubt this is what they were actually going for though)
The laundry workers don’t show up until after the excavation and construction is over. All they know is a couple of white guys show up most mornings and enter a secret room through a staircase under an industrial washing machine. The question remains how they are kept silent about the secret entrance. But they don’t see any construction.
And how are the Los Pollos Hermanos workers kept silent? Mike saw a black SUV enter the parking lot long enough to drop something (presumably drug money) off, and then leave in a hurry. If that happens with any regularity it isn’t going unnoticed by the employees.
There is the time Hector commandeered the chicken restaurant. We saw Gus in fine form, telling a personal and believable story to his workers and giving them a big bonus for their silence. I wonder if we’re supposed to believe this is how he keeps all of his “civilian” workers quiet. He pays and treats them well, giving them believable stories when necessary? We certainly know his leadership skills are top notch. He inspires respect and loyalty. And, when the situation calls for it, fear and strict obedience.
Maybe, it just bugged me because Vince and the writers and the technical staff have made such a huge effort to keep everything as believable as possible. As soon as I saw that all I could think was 'wait, no, you can still stack boxes that say that".
OTOH, maybe you’re right, maybe it’s that little stuff, on top of last week that has the workers calling in complaints about him. Especially now if they can add to their complaints that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
It would be awesome if Mike was playing a double game… he knew the truth, but made a spurious complaint to see how the guy would respond.
Sadly, I doubt that. Even Vince and co. do make mistakes.
The German guy clearly understood that the construction was illegal and needed to be unnoticed. So presumably part of the construction challenge is finding discrete workers who will keep their mouths shut with a combination of carrot and stick, along with ways to keep it from being super obvious that dozens of guys descend on this laundromat every evening, etc.
Doesn’t seem any more difficult than any of the rest of the construction project. And that kind of stuff is what Gus (and Mike) excel at.
I don’t know what you mean by tracked back to him - I’m sure someone can find that the cameras were sold from the store where he worked, and maybe they could find that he bought and resold burner phones on his own time. But none of that is illegal or even typically a firing offense, so I don’t see what would drive an investigation back to him, or why it would be a big worry if it did. Side note: the ‘every night’ is incorrect, he just did it the one night this time.
As far as pulling footage goes, how long did people retain camera footage in 2003? IIRC camera systems then tended to only keep video for something between a day and a week before overwriting, it’s only more recently that they usually keep 30-90 days of footage. Typically the only reason to save footage is if someone suspects some kind of theft in the store, but nothing illegal happens at the store.
If you mean laundry workers, I think the laundry facility is shut down and isn’t going to open until the lab is built (or at least the major construction is done). If you mean workers, paying workers well enough that they don’t ask questions and possibly don’t know where they’re working is part of the big expense. I suspect they’ll show some of the security precautions they take once construction actually starts.
Don’t black SUVs often enter and leave the parking lot of a fast food restaurant? Expecting fast food employees to take note of a fairly common type of car that does a pretty common thing during a busy time of day and then report it to the police and for the police to take notice seems to be in the same category as expecting police to respond to be able to have an officer on site less than five minutes after an incident starts in a bad part of town. (Also I suspect the black SUV specifically is one thing that is going to change as Mike starts running more of Gus’s operation.)
Kim is screwing up but she is doing so intentionally. She is trying to piss off Mesa Verde, I just don’t know why yet. She’s too smart to accidentally forget or make an error; this is all planned.
There are quite a few jurisdictions in the US which use satellite photos to enforce building codes and permitting. Those violations generally feed into expensive fines and increased property taxes, so it’s a very lucrative investment for the State/County/etc.
They’ve got to keep the overhead clean as well as avoid affecting any by traffic. If they inconvenience anyone at all there will be complaints.
You’re ordering a lot of concrete which comes from a concrete plant, of which you will have damn few to choose from. It’s not just a matter of keeping them quiet, it’s a matter of keeping any inspectors who happen by quiet. Same for dumping all that dirt. It has to go somewhere, and the people receiving it have to know where it’s coming from so they know it’s not contaminated soil which can get them fined. And again, what about inspectors? There’s a lot more here than ‘get Julio. He can use a trowel, and as he’s here illegally he won’t ask questions.’
Buying and reselling phones might not be illegal, but he’s selling them under the premise that they can be used for illegal things. What happens when phones, that come back to him in one way or another, are found in a few of the local jails or the feds tap a phone and the person is talking to someone on a burner that he sold, personally.
Well, yeah, it’s been one night…so far. I don’t think this was a one and done kinda thing. I was implying future nights as well.
They retain footage for as long as you want them to. I believe when I set up my first system I was keeping a few weeks of them before overwriting the oldest tape.
They use time lapse VCRs, a regular 2 hour VHS can hold, more or less, as much as you want it to. It wasn’t uncommon to have 20 or 30 of them laying around, each with about 24 hours on it. Again, you can have as many as you want and set the time lapse however you’d like.
This is unlike a DVR where you’re limited to hard drive space. Once it fills up, it starts overwriting. You still have some control, but it’s not quite like a VHS.
Also, with both the DVR and VHS, you can set them to motion/alarm. In those cases, if there’s nothing moving, they don’t record. As soon as the cameras sense movement, they start. You can pack a lot more on to a tape (or have better quality) when you’re not taping most of the night.
I find it hard to believe Gus would be paying huge sums to workers of any sort - construction, laundry, or restaurant workers - to keep silent, to pay them off for their silence. Paying them well, maybe. But word will always leak out whether they each get a $1k a week. How would word of their big salaries not get out, anyway, and attract the attention of the authorities, somehow? Wouldn’t hearing that Juan, a 40 year old Spanish speaking illegal (or even legal) is netting a big paycheck every week for working in a laundromat be suspicious? (even if he was being paid in cash, off the books?) . I don’t know too much about this kind of thing, though. (and really, do drugs make that much money for the bosses? Is all of Albuquerque hooked on drugs and each of them are spending thousands upon thousands every week for drugs??)
You seriously think there are roving inspectors randomly going around to out of the way buildings where, as far as they know, construction isn’t happening to inspect the non-construction? If inspectors know about the secret lab’s construction, then the secret part has failed. There simply aren’t going to be inspectors. And I’m not sure why you think buying a small building’s worth of concrete or ditching a small building’s volume of dirt is some super-difficult task that is going to require elaborate explanation. In a story about a drug kingpin who’s routinely moving large volumes of illegal drugs across the border and plotting multi-year revenge against a ruthless cartel, I just don’t think that getting ahold of concrete or finding someone to take some dirt (or just dumping it in the desert) is the part that strains suspension of disbelief.
People in this thread seem to have a lot of interesting ideas on how law enforcement and code enforcement work. Sub-five-minute police response in a bad part of town and mysterious code inspectors who turn up to inspect construction they never heard of are interesting ideas are certainly less likely than finding someone crooked in the construction industry who will get rid of a few tons of dirt for cash with no questions asked.
Mike is being an asshole. Purposefully so he is memorable. So if/when an audit of any description occurs, his fees don’t get flagged as suspicious. The point is not that he knows much about loading; he does not, last season he told Lydia as much when she tried to have him hired as a logistics consultant, that he knew little about logistics.
He is a Cop and knows what are the weak points, where stories break. By acting officious and insistent on extreme adherence to the rules, he is playing the stereotype of the security consultant, and he can justify his fees when the time comes.
As I said, satellite images are used to identify unpermitted construction zones. Given that they are near the border, photos are being taken of their town at least monthly and compared to earlier ones for changes in traffic and infrastructure.
But yes, concrete can be mixed on site. It won’t be fun, but it can be done. T’were it me, I’d probably suggested a fully permitted project be established right next door. Maybe even openly use the warehouse as a staging area for materials. That would cover the trucks going to and fro and the workers on site.
I’m guessing the actual lab will be built by expert tunnelers sent in from Mexico.