Biz and Lucci’s scheme struck me as something so revolutionary and dangerous, so potentially lucrative, I knew we needed to jump on it as quickly as possible. But we couldn’t be foolhardy.
I needed to track down the nephew. Our positions had been swapped.
I dialed Osvald’s cell. He picked up on the first ring.
“Osvald!” I said, slightly more excited than usual. “Dile a tu sobrino que me vea por allá por tu lado a las dos. Es importante.”
“Dale, yo me encargo,” he replied. “Él va a estar aquí.”
I got to Prime Cuts a little early so I could stop in and catch up with Osvald for a minute or two.
The nephew showed up right on time.
“Let’s grab a drink down the block,” I suggested.
“Let’s do it!” the nephew replied.
We headed out.
“Let’s get a table,” I said once we were inside the bar. “We need a little discretion.”
“What you got?” the nephew asked once we were settled.
I’d known the nephew for over ten years- since he was a kid, really, and he’d never once come to me with any of his schemes and I’d never approached him with any business proposition. But we both knew that the time had come.
“Have you ever heard of skimming?” I asked.
The nephew leaned forward before he said anything.
“Yeah, of course. But it’s kinda technical and you need to trust a lot of people.”
“Have you ever personally dealt with it?” I asked. “Is it viable or is it oversaturated?”
“Nah, not yet,” he replied. “It’s too complicated for most heads to wanna bother fucking around with it. It’s not something I do myself, but I have access.”
A waitress stopped by to take our order.
“Get whatever you want,” I told the nephew. I looked up at the waitress. “I’m not hungry, but I’ll have a Brugal Añejo, neat with a twist of lime, please.”
We continued our conversation once she left.
“I have these two kids who work for me,” I began. “My main guy brought them to me. He keeps saying they’re hacking geniuses, whatever that means.”
“Yes, hackers,” I agreed. “Anyway, they came to me yesterday with this ‘skim and dip’ scheme. And I have to say, it made sense to me. But they’re too young to handle it. Put them out on the streets and they’d be done in a week. Let them run it on their own, without supervision, and they’d be robbed blind and run out of town in a month.”
“Tell me what you need,” the nephew said, leaning forward again.
“To start out with,” I explained, “this is how green these kids are.”
Then I explained how Biz and Lucci thought they could just take their little EBT list around Brownsville and East New York and pitch a skim and dip to bodega owners who knew them only as kids who’d formerly hustled a low-level EBT scheme. How Lucci assumed he would be the one installing skimmers and cameras at each location. How neither of them had any idea of how daily collections would go. And so on.
“So basically, you need me to handle all of the set-up and then keep handling the day-to-day shit,” the nephew replied.
“Correct,” I confirmed. “I need those two sitting in their bedrooms, going through camera footage and cross-checking PIN numbers. Cloning debit cards. Waiting for money to be dropped off to them. I need them off the streets, period.”
“But what you’re asking of me, that’s like a full-time job,” Osvald’s nephew said, dubiously. “I may as well get an office gig down on Wall Street for alla dat.”
“This job would pay you far better than any office job you could ever land,” I said. A bit harsh, but honest. “And don’t you want to pay down your debt? This’ll help you get that deed fairly quickly. I know you’ve been working on it, but the number is still rather high.”
Between winter 2000 and spring 2001, the nephew had paid down an additional twenty thousand dollars. His balance currently stood at $90,000.
“True,” the nephew admitted.
“If you agree to it, I’ll introduce you to the kids,” I said. “I’m going to make sure you’re on as a consultant. You’ll run your own show and you’ll get paid a set amount each week. Cash on the barrel, no percentages. That’ll help you regulate any liquidity problems keeping you from paying me back.”
“Hmmmmm,” the nephew ruminated on this for a moment. I knew he knew it was a good opportunity. “Like a regular payday, each week.”
“Yes, a regular payday, each week,” I confirmed. “And you can name your rate.”
He threw out a number that I knew was too low for the workload he was signing up for.
I told him he needed to set his price fifty percent higher and said I’d make sure he got that amount.
“And I don’t want to tell you how to spend your money,” I said with a small smile, “but with that much coming in each week, you should be able to pay down $10k a month, minimum.”
