Toodeloo, crew.
— The Shayist
I ran another valet scheme in November 2022 near the Pacific Bitcoin Conference, in Los Angeles.
I paired up with a group called SHE. I figured it was some sort of feminist thing. I found them online.
How the hell was I supposed to know the Sovereign Hell's Enforcers were a motorcycle gang? I thought it'd be a bunch of bitchy chicks.
The internet is stupid. Never believe anything you read.
I'm not a feminist anyway. I'm a Shayist. Shay first. Shady always.
My valet guys were parking the cars at a church parking lot, and it would have been fine, but one of the bikers started mouthing off to a priest, and... OK, he was beating the holy hell out of a monsignor.
I had a police scanner. I bailed when I heard a swarm of officers was being sent my way.
Actually, I may have called them. Hey, I don't believe in God, but bad karma's bad karma.
Toodeloo, crew.
I still managed to get twenty sets of keys.
Two months later, I returned to L.A. to finish the job. First task? Finding lifters to search the marks' homes. I decided that two would be plenty. For muscle, I hooked up with a crew out of east L.A.
One of my lifters was a street rat named Otto. He didn't have a clue about Bitcoin, but it didn't matter. "A bunch of words, probably written in a column? And you're sayin' it's not a password? Bitch, I don't care. Pay me cash. I'll find it."
I almost fired him for calling me a bitch, but then I remembered, I am a bitch. He got the job done, even without understanding what he was looking for, though he did sometimes come back with pictures of... other things.
He said, "When blackmail knocks, opportunity answers."
"Whoa. Otto. Is that a...?"
"Is it somebody's dick? In a freezer? Yeah."
"Is it... real?"
"You want me to go back and thaw it?"
I did not.
When I needed a mark to talk, I had the muscle go in hard. OK, poor word choice there. But I gotta admit, if I was ever feeling ballsy, blackmail could offer... y'know what? let's just say, I hung on to the pics. "Cuz yoo nevah know," right?
My other lifter was a black guy named Ty. Tall, stringy. Oddly shy. He didn't talk much, but he had talent. I'm not easily impressed, but my jaw dropped when he found Bitcoin seed words stamped into the base of a table.
"How the fuck did you figure that out?"
"Stripped screws," he said. "Who takes apart a dining room table?"
Smart.
I had twenty sets of keys. My guys hit eighteen homes. Everything was going great until number nineteen. Otto got spotted flipping window locks so he could get back in later to rob the place. But Foke's muscle had eyes on him. He never made it back to the house or anywhere else. Rules are rules. Ty got wind of it and split.
I only had one more mark to hit, so I did it myself.
I shouldn't have.