I was coming to mention that. Barring trucking import/export, waste management has got to be the easiest job you can pretend someone has - whenever a work inspector shows up, you can just say, “oh, he’s in a truck somewhere in town, sorry, you just missed him”.
Also, garbage routes provide a nice and discreet way to distribute drugs and/or show up at people’s places to collect protection money, since the trucks canvass the entire city.
Jukeboxes (at least until very recently) are a cash only business, which makes it very easy to launder money with. Whose to say if a jukebox in a popular spot doesn’t actually take in $3,000 a week in quarters?
Raymond Patriarca ran the New England mob for years out of the Coin-O-Matic on Atwells Avenue in Providence. The scam worked three ways.
1: Local businessmen would be “encouraged” to rent Coin-O-Matics vending machines for their customer’s enjoyment. And for the businessman’s continued use of his knees.
2: The cash only nature of business allowed Ray to hide other income streams.
3: A big portion of the business were cigarette machines. Customers paid for the packs of cigarettes at an rate that included the tax, but Ray wasn’t so big on giving the government the full tax payment.
Reminds me of Woody Allen’s quip, “Organized crime made an estimated $5 billion last year, which is especially impressive when you consider that hoods spend very little on office supplies.”
As opposed to just driving a car? Using garbage trucks to do the job seems like a pointless elaboration.
How do no-show jobs work? They’re jobs where you’re still getting paid even if no one shows up or no work is done, which I get is lucrative…but how does it work out that people make money off it? I never really understood that on Sopranos.
I don’t think the idea is to make money with no-show jobs; it’s a way of hiding the fact that you’ve got a squad of thuggish goons on the payroll. Putting “Thuggish Goon” on a payroll form is a dead giveaway. So you “hire” them as garbagemen, but they really spend all their time gooning for you, thuggishly. Thus they have a “legitimate” job to explain where they get their money.
I used to live in Tbilisi. I’d be surprised if there were any significant businesses in the city that were not corrupt to the core. At the time Georgia was the 5th most corrupt country in the world according to Transparency International.
Ah, okay. Are no show jobs just a way of explaining why no one’s shown up?
I also remember scenes on the Sopranos where the mafia guys would just be sitting around construction sites, not working. Was that similar, or am I thinking of something totally different?
Yup, that would be it exactly. A no-show construction job in the NYC metro area will cover a lot of otherwise earned income, especially once you include overtime. And if you are living in a $800,000 house in New Jersey, you need to have some kind of legitimate income source.
I also seem to recall at least once on the Sopranos there being a mention of one of Tony’s guys being covered by the union insurance plan.