Yeah, this was always my assumption. He bought a franchise through a shell company, as a fall back plan. We know he had plans for disappearing, what with the money in the ceiling, the box hidden in the wall, and the contact details of the extractor in his wallet, so why wouldn’t he have a place to go that he knew he’d be accepted without a lot of scrutiny?
And if he didn’t have such a plan, then his line about being a manager in a Cinnabon is not just a joke, it a freaking prophesy, because how else would he know where he’d randomly end up?
I figured that wasn’t his sole criminal enterprise, that he mostly does forged documents and quick getaways. The $250,000 new life package is a thing he can do, but mostly he forges IDs for illegal immigrants and gets people out of town or back to Mexico if things get hot for them. Also, while ABQ is 500,000 the whol metro area is more like 900,000 people and is the largest city in New Mexico, so he’s probably got the whole 2 million or so people in the state as his customer base.
Did they actually need very large houses for their setup? I don’t remember how much equipment they were using. I just assumed that most of the houses would be normal sized and that they were showing huge houses because they’re easier to film on TV. Like the way Seinfeld and Friends have gigantic apartments, and sitcom families have these giant dining rooms with the chairs on one side of the table.
I found this statement incredible so I did some Googling. Actually, that normally only is done if a pre-sale inspection for termites has discovered an infestation. And it happens at the end of escrow, after the seller has vacated the house. The houses that Walt was using were still occupied (at least the ones that were shown).
In any case, New Mexico’s sites on termite control say they can be a problem, but don’t even mention tenting as a treatment option. Instead the normal treatments are soil treatment and baiting. Tenting may be done for bedbugs, carpet beetles, and moths too but again I think less expensive and extreme control methods are the norm.
Cooking in a tented house might work a few times, but finding enough houses to do it in on a weekly basis in a city the size of Albuquerque is unlikely.
Even the mobile lab took up as much space as a normal kitchen. How many houses do you know that have that much open floor space without moving all the furniture out? Expensive houses might have that much floor space in a few rooms, but middle class ones won’t. And I wouldn’t expect expensive houses to have as big a termite problem as less expensive ones.
This clip from Gliding Over All, starting at about 3:30, includes a flyover showing 11 tented houses that were supposedly cooked in. Obviously it’s a bit of cinematic license, since that would be an incredible density of houses with a termite problem, but all of the houses seem pretty large to me.
I bet that’s it. Ive lived literally from east coast to west coast, but never deep southwest, and have never seen a house tented during a sale. It’s got to be regional.
I have no idea about ABQ. Out here it’s typical for a house that hasn’t been sold in a while to need tenting and the seller pays for it. After escrow makes sense instread of during it.
Maybe so, but as I said in this case the house would presumably be vacant (which is when you would want to do tenting anyway). The ones Walt used were clearly still inhabited, and Vamonos Pest made a practice of burglarizing or stealing the security codes of the houses they tented, which also presumes they wouldn’t have been vacated.
I guess I could fanwank and say that Vamanos offers free inspections and tells the owner that they need a renting right away or the house will collapse and by the way here is a great special deal.
If you’re already in the cooking meth business, it wouldn’t add too much to your burden of sins to just drive around dropping off termites in the middle of the night to develop some prospects.
Although I guess then you’d have to actually fog the houses if you don’t want to draw attention.
Heh. “A high school teacher having cancer and then taking up cooking meth and then hiring me??? And me being an attorney to all sorts of drug cartel people??? CUUURAAZZYYYY!!!”
(Can you imagine what would happen to Vince Gilligan’s career if he did try some “Owl Creek” or “Newhart” or “Dallas” or “St. Elsewhere” twist? Yikes!)
Yeah, I’ve lived on the east coast and think I’ve actually seen a house tented once or twice in my entire life. I always thought of it as something that is done rarely IRL but often on TV, so I’m used to thinking of pest control as one of those things like always finding a parking place or avoiding pleasantries on the phone that is just for convenience on shows. If it’s a real thing that it’s common to tent houses in the southwest, that’s another interesting fact I learned from this show.
I’d say that in my experience most non-hoarder houses do have that much space, just not all in one room. I’m presuming house sizes are similar to where I live (metro area of about 650k) and not somewhere like LA/SF/NYC where space is at an extreme premium. You wouldn’t be able to set up the lab as a cool looking ‘console’ like the picture where the stations are all right next to each other and it’s going to be cramped, and you might need to shift some couches or beds to the wall or lay a dining table on the side, but that’s not as time consuming or noticeable as moving the furniture out. The 1200-1500 square foot ‘normal size’ houses that I’m used to usually have a dining room that’s mostly empty other than a table, living room with a TV on one wall and a lot of open space around a couch, maybe one other room that’s a ‘family room’ with a second TV or space for kids to play, and 2-3 bedrooms that aren’t entirely filled by a bed.
But you can’t reduce the footprint of the lab, or set it up in a different configuration. The entire thing is set up inside an air-tight plastic tent, in order to prevent odors from being absorbed by the furniture/walls.
Not all rooms are going to be available. Obviously you will be limited to the ground floor, since it would be impractical to carry that heavy equipment up stairs. Most of the houses shown are two story, which eliminates most bedrooms, which will be upstairs. You can’t use any room with wood floors or wall-to-wall carpeting, because of scratches and/or odor issues.
In practical terms, you’re probably limited to the kitchen, since you need a water hook-up for the condensers. I suppose you could run a hose to another room but you risk water damage.
In any case, the need for a comparatively large amount of open space further limits the number of houses available for a cook. It would be a cool strategy for a few cooks, but as a sustainable method for cooking huge amounts it wouldn’t be feasible.
Obviously the capacity of the mobile lab is only a fraction of the Superlab. As I mentioned up thread, I did some calculations based on the stated capacity of the Superlab and the mobile lab, the price meth was selling at, and the huge pile of money Walt had ($80 million, after using the system for 8 months, without accounting for the shares for expenses and his partners), and it didn’t add up.
Oh, yeah if it actually has to be together then it’s not going to fit. I didn’t remember the sealed tent part of it - for some reason I thought the odors were getting dealt with by the fumigation chemicals.
