oddball double meaning. Like Johnny Ben Wa Balls must feel every day.
If you Google harder, eventually you’ll find your way to a little website called www.radarenterprizes.com. There you will be persuaded that yours most humbly truly is the proud proprietor of a company selling embossed items for promotional use. Need a pen with your company’s name? I’m your guy. Giveaway cameras for your wedding? No problem. “Compliments of” calendars or mouse pads? Just click to order. No job too small. Now this, I’m sure you’ll agree, is a boring-ass business, but it provides cover, something I can file taxes on. A shell of a shill, then, my flag planted in cyberspace to provide evidence—well, fabricat evidence—that little Radar is legit. If you click on Contact us, you can send a message to [email protected], a mailbox I check only infrequently because the bulk of what I receive is bulk nonsense—come-ons for Vilagra or Vinagra, and You’ve received an e-card from a friend!—and nothing annoys a scammer more than someone else’s lame attempts at spivery. But I do check it. You never know what will wash up on your beach, and fulfilling a legitimate order takes no more effort on my part than forwarding it to my liaison at a certain factory in Shenzhen. I never leave money lying on the table. That’s just not good practice. So I periodically sift through the spam; anyway, it tickles me to see what the lesser minds of the snuke cook up.
The morning of November 1 found me sitting out on the tiny deck of my duplex, feet up on an empty crate of military-surplus gas masks (yard-sale score—can’t resist a dumb bargain), poaching wireless on my laptop. The view from up there was spectacular: a steep drop down to Silver Lake Boulevard; lush, overwatered hills on the far side, reeking with bougainvillea and overpriced homes; and the downtown skyline in the distance, a towering picket fence of glass, corruption, and chrome. I’m not much for aesthetics, but on certain of these clear L.A. days, when the wind blows warm off the desert and sends all the smog to Catalina, you can almost pretend the place is pretty.
Usually to get online I just piggyback the wireless router of Rita and Cecilia, the pair-bonded ovarians who live in the downstairs half of my duplex. Today for some reason it wasn’t kicking a strong signal, so instead I jumped the WiFi from Java Man, the coffee joint at the base of the hill below. Good ol’ Java Man. You like to see a coffee chain giving Starbucks a run for their money.
Checking a week’s worth of e-mail, I found the predictable ballyhoo of online casinos, penny stocks, and university degrees. Amid the spasm of spams, there was one I actually liked, from an outfit calling itself Charity Clearinghouse. They proposed to have you donate, through them, to charities of your choice—which donations are, of course, fully tax deductible. Now here came the pitch, a tangy twofer of money laundering and tax fraud. For every dollar you donate, they promise, you get half a buck back, deposited into an offshore online bank, whence you can online-shop or ATM back to cash or whatever, with ol’ Uncle Sammy ever none the wiser. Of course there’s no such thing as a free lunch, so Charity Clearinghouse admits to holding back a certain percentage of your donation for administrative services. But you’re okay with that; considering your prospective tax break, you still come out way ahead, as does your charity, with the IRS footing the bill, and when you think about it, isn’t that what damn big government should really be doing with your money anyhow? Hell, yeah!
So, it’s the Haiphong phone book all over again, right? Unless you’re dumb enough not to realize that you’ll never see a buck back to your offshore online bank. And, depending on how you make your contribution (credit card is easiest, you are informed), your financials will be thoroughly harvested after the fact. But I liked this scam. I did. It preyed on cupidity, stupidity, munificence, and our national passion for screwing the IRS. In my neck of the weeds, that’s a perfect storm.
I was thinking I might even arrogate the structure of the yak for myself, maybe dress it up in Santa clothes for Christmas. Did I feel guilty about stealing the intellectual property of some fellow artiste trompeur? Come on. There’s nothing new under the sun. You think Patrick Noochi invented the