Willie Sutton in his autobiography said that he never felt as alive as when he was going in to take a bank. He basically acknowledged that he was addicted to the thrill, continuing to plan and execute scores even when he didn’t need the money.
It was “work” for him, but time flies when you’re having fun.
I’d turn that around: Non-hardworkers make their own lack of luck.
I know a few folks who have 10-50M fortunes. And more with 5-10M. The difference between that and went broke along the way to the first $1M is often luck.
For damn sure getting to the first 1M (or first 10M) takes a lot of work. It is totally a necessary condition. It is far from a sufficient condition. Too many people don’t seem to understand (or choose to refuse to understand) that essential difference.
I just watched a documentary about a high school rowing team from inner city Chicago. The kids on the team were pretty much all destined to become gang-bangers, but being on the team diverted them.
The kids (who are now grown men) emphasized how joining a gang was a general expectation if you lived in their neighborhood. Not joining a gang was setting yourself for victimization. Gang membership provided a sense of security. Doesn’t matter that gang life is crazy dangerous too. At least you’d feel safe.
So imagine you’re a 14-year-old kid who joins a gang to avoid the danger of not being in one. It won’t take long for you to adopt the same mentality that any entry-level hiree takes on. You’ll go all in on the gang thing in hopes that you’ll be able to rise up in the organization. And it will be easy for you to hope, since you know the guys who boss you around were once in your shoes. And you also know that there’s high turn-over in the hiearchy–with guys constantly getting killed or imprisoned.
I wonder if criminal life appears to be more meritocratic than the “law and order” world to the average criminal. In the “law and order” world, people talk a good game about talent and work ethic, and yet the power players tend to be people who aren’t necessarily the smartest or hardest working. The average criminal will probably feel like they don’t have much of a shot under a system that values credential-flashing and pedigree. But they will be optimistic about their chances in a system based solely on results.
I agree with this; people who work as janitors or dig ditches do a lot of hard work and I’d certainly rather do the work of being a CEO than hard physical labor. I think a lot of people, especially those who joined a gang early, have a criminal record, or just aren’t that smart, see ‘focusing on legitimate work’ as more likely to lead to them being a ditch digger rather than a rich exec who gets a golden parachute even if he sends the company into bankruptcy. It’s certainly not the case that everyone who works hard at legitimate work gets rich!
The OP referenced El Chapo, and he fits the bill here - he grew up poor, his father took up the drug trade and got him into it at a young age, and by the time he was around 20, with little formal schooling or legitimate work experience, he started mapping routes with a rising drug lord. With that background, what legitimate work was he going to do where he’d make millions of dollars? He lived the exciting life of a rich drug lord until his arrest in 2014 at age 57, did a few escapes and is now likely to live out life in prison. Compare that to toiling away as a poor farmer or what other career paths were open to him - a lot of people are going to rank decades of being a rich, powerful man who ends up in prison over decades of drudgery where you might not even live as long as his pre-prison time.
From the wikipedia page on El Chapo:
I beg to differ. I don’t think it’s luck. If you measure quantity and severity of difficulties between the two groups (very unscientific I know), I think the ones who made went through at least as much baloney. Luck is something the ones who made it use when exercising false modesty. Maybe I’m wrong, who knows.
One guy opens his diner in fall 2018 and gets well established with some retained earnings and loyal clientele increasing over time. Another guy opens his diner in fall 2019 to similar results. Then COVID hits in Feb 2020. The first guy survives on the strength of 18 months of operations a nd the other fails on the basis of just 6 months worth. Otherwise identical guys with identical capitalization, etc.
Bad luck can blow anyone out of the water. It can hand you a problem neither you nor any of your competitors could have solved if placed in the same spot. To be sure, there are lesser challenges that a more or less skillful owner can evade or crash over.
In another vein: Right now various big businesses up to Fortune 100 scale with professional managers and lots of smart analysts are making predictions about the future trajectory of the economy. Some are predicting rapid recovery, others are predicting slow recovery from teh COVID shock. Each is placing their bets, positioning their business to perform well under the future they expect. As a matter of inevitable fact, some of those folks will make predictions that later come true and others will not. It’s a lot more like weather forecasting than it is like doing algebra. The ones for whom the future unfolds according to their plans will do better than those whose “forecast doesn’t verify” as the weathermen say. And that is in addition to, or despite, any attempt they make to adapt to circumstances as they evolve in real time.
We are all riding the bucking bronco of “outrageous fortune” every day. Some folks are perceptive enough to see the bouncing as an obstacle to be overcome. Others insist there is no bouncing at all.
That would be news to billionaire Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou, who has been fighting extradition from Canada to the US for nearly two years, despite the existence of a bilateral extradition treaty. She is currently under monitored house arrest, and the extradition battle may go on for years yet.
It would also be news to Edward Snowden, currently in Russia, and to Julian Assange, currently incarcerated in the UK and facing extradition which may or may not be granted.
None of these take away from my point.
I’m starting to get the smallest inkling you are not genuinely open to revising your opinions.
I’m open. You just haven’t provided anything that warrants revising.
wolfpup put it well, but I seem to recall that there are also some financial swindlers who have been at large for some time. If you have enough money you can get away with most things. like the Red Bull guy. And some countries such as Brazil make it difficult to impossible to extradite someone if you are married to a local.
As Henry Hill told Nicholas Pileggi in Wiseguy (and as reported in the film, Goodfellas), a lot of the crew got a thrill out of stealing that they didn’t get from “honest work” He reported that for his boss, Paul Verio (Cicero in the film), the biggest thrill of an evening out was paying for everything with a stolen credit card. He loved the idea that he was putting something over on someone, even at the risk of getting caught (or, more likely, because of it). He always said that “Liquor tastes better on a Muldoon (stolen credit card)”
I suspect there’s an awful lot of truth in that. But I also suspect that the return on investment for the work they put into their heists was an awful lot better than get from my honest job. Certainly my wife doesn’t indicate how much money she needs for something by holding her thumb and forefinger apart to show the size of the stack of hundred dollar bills she needs.
I feel like I can comment on this. When I was in high school in the late 80s I started dealing pot, acid, mushrooms, and speed. I only did it for ~2 years, but when I stopped I was making about $40k/year. This was more than my parents (an accountant and a RN) individually made; I think they were both making ~$30-35k/year. Google tells me that in current dollars, this is about $75k per year; a pretty good take for a 17 year old without a high school degree.
Most of my money was made selling acid which I could get in hundred lots for ~ $0.70 per hit and easily sell for $5. I would sell 100-200 hits a week without breaking a sweat going to concerts in Denver and cruising Colfax or going to the hogback (if there are any Colorado natives on, they should know about this). I would buy pot for ~$250 / 1/4 lb and sell it in quarter ounce quantities at a 100% markup in a week. I would also sell mushrooms and speed (like the really crappy stuff), but this was really not my thing. I made $3500-4000 a month easily; I was raking it in.
Of course it was awful, damaging in more ways than I can enumerate. Took me years and lots of therapy to get over it an become a normal person. I stopped because I got caught by the police twice in a month at my high school with pot on me. They were totally on to me and were focused on shutting me down. The first time I got caught, the officer (Polka was his name, though I don’t know how it was spelled) took the quarter or half ounce I had with me an threw it in the river (he caught me in a park). He lectured me and scared the shit out of me and told me to straighten up. The second time, about a month later, they took me down to the jail in downtown Denver (at 13th and Cherokee) and booked me. My parents refused to bail me out for ~16 hours or so and left me there until morning. I don’t remember all the details, but I made a deal that if I did not get in trouble for 5(?) years it would be expunged from my record. I assume it was.
I went straight after this event, graduated, went to college, worked, then grad school, eventually got married and had kids, and now work as a scientist at a local state university. Still in Colorado. In adjusted dollars, I make about double now in my 50s what I made then at 16/17 years old.
The crimes I committed were damaging to me. Psychologically. Socially. Maybe financially; hard to be sure about this. I regret it and am ashamed of it still, even though I came out pretty much unscathed. That said, I still understand the why of it. I was well off. I felt independent from my parents. More successful than my peers. I bought a car, moved out and got an apartment, and basically became an adult years before anybody else I knew my age. It was terrible, but also awesome.
By the way, I am still paying for college loans. They are at ridiculously low rates (1%? 0.75%?), so I have not rushed to pay them off, but the costs of “focusing on legitimate endeavors” are actually pretty high in both time and money. I don’t think I matched my teenage earnings until I was in my 30s. I would guess that when I was finally making more than what I made at 17 years old, 10 years had passed and I was ~$60k in debt. Just food for thought.
But Goodfellas also pointed out the downsides of making crime your career. One of which was a lack of opportunity for advancement. Henry Hill said how neither Jimmy Conway or himself would ever be full members of the Mafia because they weren’t Sicilian; they could never aspire to a higher place than working for the Mafia and being subordinate to anyone who was in the Mafia.
The retirement plan sucks too.
I grew up in SoCal flying light airplanes. Some of my airport pals began to earn side money running drugs, mostly marijuana, up from Mexico. It paid pretty good and there appeared to be negligible ability back then for the US authorities to detect or stop you. It seemed pretty much “clean hands” work by the flaky morals of a 17-22 yo. Far from the addicts and the grubby cash, and besides - “It’s just pot”.
Then one of my pals was “shot while escaping” from the Federales when the pickup airstrip down in Mexico was raided. Couple rounds of .30-06 from an M-1 Garand in the back at close range. His parents were understandably heartbroken.
I wasn’t tempted before and definitely wasn’t interested after. Most of the other guys in my circle quit immediately. To be replaced soon enough by others I never knew. The cycle continues.
True. But most young criminals starting out will ignore the odds and tell themselves that they won’t be one of the many failures. They believe they’ll be one of the rare successes. They’ll be the one who knocks.
But Hill knew right from the start that he would never be a Sicilian. And he knew what that meant; he would always be stuck working for other people.
The Billy Batts plotline showed the consequences of that. In the movie, they emphasized how Batts insulted Tommy DeVito. But in real life, it was more about business. The real life Billy Batts had been in prison for six years. During that time Jimmy Burke (Conway) and Tommy DeSimone (DeVito) had run a loanshark business that had previously been Batts’. When Batts was released he told Burke and DeSimone to give him back the business. Burke and DeSimone knew that because Batts was a member of the Mafia and they were not, they would be ordered to give back the business. They killed Batts to avoid this. And they had to hide the fact that they had killed Batts because the Mafia would kill them for doing so.
That’s the reality of life for people like Hill or Conway. They worked for the Mafia. But they were aware that at any time, some Mafia member might take whatever they had from them. Being successful just made this more likely. That’s the reality of working with criminals. If you fail at crime, you’re a failure. If you succeed at crime, you now have something the other criminals want to take from you. There’s no way you can win.
Interesting discussion, especially the first & second person accounts.
I don’t think the sucky retirement plan is all that relevant to the discussion, though. Young people of any persuasion are not looking for / after retirement plans. It’s just too distant. Cash in hand is a huge enticer, OTOH.
Well, “retirement plan” in this case is a bit of a euphemism for your career coming to an early, unwelcome, and violent end. Whether from the cops, a rival gang, or pissing off your psycho boss.
It’s precisely that substantially nobody lives anywhere close to collecting an actual factual pension that makes the “plan” so bad.
Makes me think of Stringer Bell.