My grammar and syntax is far from great but it’s good enough. I hope you enjoy.
It is easy to think that it takes a bad guy to be a criminal. Most crimes are done for lack of resources or for the fun of it. I don’t know exactly what made me want to do it but I definitely could rest easy knowing I would eventually have more than what I had at the time.
I lived at home. In my mid to late twenties. Annoyed and frustrated at being stuck at home. I would like to think it was not my own laziness or procrastination. I had a degree but I no longer had the passion for to pursue my once dream career like I once did. To many reasons I don’t care to justify. Uber was a temporary means to an end. It is a job with many freedoms and little pay. The idea to pick my own hours and work 40 hours one week and twelve the next sounded perfect. So there I was. Stuck with the choice of freedom to work how I wanted and when I wanted. Paid enough to fuel myself and my car. The excess I tried to save managed to get spent in two weekends out with friends.
This continued for a while.
Then I heard of Bitcoin. To me it was easy money babble that convinced the gullible into throwing money into what could have been and probably was, an elaborate pyramid scheme. Being a cynic and with the track record the world economy had… there was little else of a conclusion I could have. Simple as that. The first time I heard of bitcoin was from an idiot roommate I once had. He and his half minded squad were going on and on about Beetcoin. “Brahhhh na brahhh doood, it’s a dollar… that shit is gonna be worth thousands one day eeeezy”. “brahhh I knoe braahhh I gots 100 already brahhh”. Fucking idiots are going to lose their money. The idea made me smile. Now I cringe knowing they probably sold it at a hundred and made lots of money… sold it in intervals and made more… or worst of all… they have it all, Hodling the living hell out of it or they forgot all about the digital stash of money they had. Either way, it bothered me that they turned out to be smarter investors than I gave em credit. Fuck.
Anyways. That’s not how I was convinced. A friend I consider smart enough to listen to nudged me in the right direction. “I will have my first million when I am thirty”. He managed to say at some moment or another. I had not seen him in years and in thirty minutes he had said it. Him, being an investor of sorts, made me think he should know more than most.
“Nice nice… that’s great… oh me oh you know idk… I want enough money to get buy… What do I do?... you know Uber and stuff… what? No don’t want to do that anymore it’s not for me… mhmm…mhmm… Ok so you get it. “We hung out for a few days and the seed was planted.
Then another friend tells me about it and enumerates reasons that resonate with my ideals. “It is decentralized… currency of the future… peer to peer”. You know, the usual reasons anyone goes into cryptocurrencies. Oh and yea… you might get rich doing it. You never know you know?
Fuck it. Uber is ok and all but I don’t want to rely on it. So I google, YouTube, and so on and down the beginning levels of the rabbit hole I go. I started on a September and by November I was hooked. I was researching researchers who posted their knowledge on YouTube. I followed the Ideas that I thought where worth it and gambled on the high volatility of alt coins with a mid level ranking on market cap value. Buy low sell high and hold on to your nuts. It was easier than I thought. I managed to double my Initial investment In weeks in terms of BTC value which In USD was priced all over the place. I was seeing green on the screen and it was all too good. Then a massive spike in late December and early January kind of rocked me. I never imagined a digital coin, store of value, whatever, could be worth as much as my car and then some. Not in a few months. What the hell have I gotten myself into to? So I sit tight on my BTC and wait to see what happens. A dip happens. That shit up and decided to dive down to the price level at which I started to trade. I had comfort in knowing that I managed to increase my btc value but this was not enough. Damn what the hell?! I had three to four times my initial investment at one point or another and now I might as well have Ubered a few extra days and made the same. I wanted that Bitcoin. One coin. One or two or three. But I was tired of having a fraction of a coin. Hahaha this is nuts.
So back to Uber and trading. At least I can drive knowing I am investing some of my earnings. Having this in my back pocket definitely made things easier for me. But I was far from satisfied. How in the hell can I get that full coin. Now. Right the fuck now. Hmm hmm hmmm hmmm hmmm yea trading might do it eventually but I didn’t see that happening overnight. Then I got the idea. How many times did I park and wait for my phone to ping me a new passenger. How many times did I wait around looking at empty parking lots in the middle of the night with parked cars waiting to be ransacked? The idea might have been drawn out of self-preservation. Me being somewhat exposed in my car might have made me project my fear and turn it into my benefit. But I was not going to steal from anyone. That’s not right.
Who are the assholes that deserve it? What methods can I get away with? How can I justify it? Who are the worst passengers I get?? Those fuckers from the strip clubs.
I don’t know what it is. Unreleased testosterone, boredom, general sense of being better than most… these guys where the worst. Usually. To their credit I did have some of my best riders picking up people from a strip club. Great tippers. But the bad ones…. Damn. From snorting coke or doing drugs without a care to the consequences to the driver by attracting a potentially attentive cop, to making me wait for forty minutes outside a taco cabana because they promise to tip me to wait - I got a taco for fucks sake – they really made my nights amusing. That was as bad as it got but not too bad. But if anyone deserved it… it was them. Married men away from their wives… That was the target. They had the means to recover quickly and the idea of parking in a strip club might elicit a more negative emotion from then on.
The fucker had to be rich but not too rich. It had to be on the right time and on the right place. Little to no lighting would be best to better avoid the overpaid off duty cop roaming the blacktop. The car… how the fuck was I going to steal a car. That’s too much… and easy to track. Stereo and tires where the way to go. But I didn’t want to sound an alarm and I had little to no knowledge on with electrical equipment. I would probably end up underselling a broken stereo and that shit was not easy to remove now a days. I knew enough about rims and tires to know the good ones had wheel locks but that was manageable with the right tools. So me at home, I practiced.
I would wait for my mom to leave for work and I would go on about my business. Four hydraulic pumps, four wheel locks of varying sizes, twenty lug nuts, multiple lug wrenches and some gloves. The hydraulic pumps where expensive and the rest of the tools combined dented my savings a bit but the risk reward ratio justified the cost.
The hydraulic pumps where easy but time consuming… the tires where heavy and removing them took some time. I bought extra jacks in case I needed to make a run for it. The idea was to leave jacks and take the pumps. So I doubled the amount of stability and reduced the getaway time. All in all I managed to do it all in around twenty minutes with practice. I was impressed with myself but not satisfied. I cut the time down again and again until fifteen minutes was my worst time.
I felt as ready as I was going to get. But still, the chances I would find a dark enough parking lot with little to no pedestrians loitering or any traffic going about was very low. So I staked all the strip clubs I knew of and waited. I borrowed a BB gun and shot a street lamp on each one and observed the response time to fix it. I got lucky. There was this strip joint with a dimly lit parking lot adjacent to the actual club. It had driveway access to and from and it was hidden from sight. It was also the club with the slowest response time, it took them weeks to fix the light. This was as good as it was going to get.
I waited and waited for someone to park on that spot. Most people avoided it since it was not protected but on nights that where packed left many with no other choice. It took a while but I did get my chance. The driver pulled up and parked there. It was packed enough and the R8 was right there. Right fucking there. I couldn’t believe my chances. I thought maybe a BMW or Mercedes or something. Not an R8. Now way! They guy had chains… sagging pants… the swagger of a drunk rich fuck… probably married but by now who gives a shit. I got it. Damn no way. Ok focus. Focus. Slow down. Can I do this?? I shook off my doubts as much as I could and then proceeded to take the wheels.
The plan was simple. Park next to the car to obstruct the view from the club. Place cones at the entrances of the parking lot to avoid anyone else entering. Lift the fucker and take the tires.
I made sure to start as soon as the man entered the club. Time seemed to slow down. My knees felt rough on the asphalt and every noise and slammed car door made me jump. The pumps went up quick and the jacks where snug. The wheel locks matched on the first try. Fuck. I took that as a good sign. This was all going really smoothly. At one point a jack moved and I thought the car would tip over. I cursed my stupidity for not having a lookout but I am not the type to trust someone else with this sort of thing. Besides I had a camera on my dash and an app on my phone. I can do this. This had to work. I had invested a good amount of money into this and I now needed it to work. I knew worst case scenario I could leave the tools and drive away. Try again another day. But I checked my phone often enough and no one seemed to notice. It was working. I removed the last tire and left the car dangling on four cheap jacks. I patted the hood and thanked the car for its contribution and drove my noticeably heavier car away. Definitely the best four riders I have ever had. And I had more after that.
Inspired by wishful thinking.