Tricky Business Read Online Free PDF Page B

Estelle.

Two

    THE EXTRAVAGANZA OF THE SEAS WAS A 198-foot, 5,000-ton cash machine, an ugly, top-heavy tub with 205 slot machines and 29 gaming tables in two big rooms glowing with cheesy neon, reeking of stale smoke and beer-breath curses. The ship’s sole function was to carry gamblers three miles from the Florida coast each night, take as much of their money as possible, then return them to land four hours later, so they could go find more money.
    Gambling cruises are a big business, especially in South Florida, where more than two dozen ships take roughly 8,000 customers out nightly. Nobody really knows how much money these ships make; it’s a cash business, which means it’s easy to prevent nosy outfits such as the United States government from finding out where it all comes from, and where it all goes.
    There are many mysteries in the gambling-cruise business, besides the profits. The identities of the real owners of the ships are often hidden via dummy corporations and silent partnerships. And since the gambling takes place unregulated, in international waters, nobody has any idea how honest the games are. If you were a gambler, you might suspect that the roulette wheel was rigged, or the blackjack deck was stacked, or your chances of hitting a jackpot on the slot machine were about as good as if you’d been throwing your coins directly overboard. But who are you going to complain to? Seagulls? There’s no state gambling commission out there in the Gulf Stream.
    Of course, none of this keeps the gamblers from coming. Gamblers need action, even when the odds suck. And so they return to the ships, night after night—the slot-machine ladies, clutching their plastic cups of quarters; the shouting, hard-drinking craps-table crowd; the roulette addicts, who truly believe, all evidence to the contrary, that there is something lucky about their birthdates; the blackjack loners, with their foolproof systems that don’t work—all of them eager to resume the inexorable process of transferring their cash to whoever owns the ship.
    In the case of the Extravaganza of the Seas, the owner of record was a man named Bobby Kemp, who was usually described in the newspaper as a millionaire entrepreneur. Kemp liked the look of that, entrepreneur, although he personally could not pronounce it.
    Pretty much the entire reason that he wound up as the owner of the Extravaganza of the Seas was that he’d wanted to impress a date who had big tits. This happened after he’d made his fortune. He was a rags-to-riches story, the son of a white-trash welfare mother and a disappeared alcoholic father, a high-school dropout who’d been scraping by in the field of freelance auto-body repair and insurance fraud when he got his first big entrepreneurial break. This was the federal law requiring all new cars to be equipped, at considerable expense, with air bags, to protect motorists who were too stupid, lazy, or drunk to go to the trouble of buckling their seat belts.
    This meant that whenever a car hit something hard enough that its air bags deployed, those bags had to be replaced. A new bag from the factory could cost $1,000 or more. But Bobby Kemp had realized that he did not need to pay the factory: He could get air bags for free! All he had to do was remove them from unattended cars. This enabled him to sell them to customers for as little as $500, and still make an excellent profit.
    In short order, Kemp was the unofficial air-bag king of Miami-Dade County. Demand was so great for his bargain air bags that he could no longer steal them fast enough. And so, again using his entrepreneurial brain, he came up with the idea of replacing deployed air bags with . . . pretend air bags. He simply repacked the customer’s old air-bag canister with whatever random trash he had around the shop—wadded-up newspaper, McDonald’s bags, whatever—sealed the canister back up, and reinstalled it in the car, as