thewestside wrote:crm wrote:The gambling thing makes sense...but wouldnt it work the same way with extortion and loansharking? They dont threaten the gambler because they might run to the police, but wouldnt that same person run to the police if they were being extorted?
With loansharking the difference is the mob has already loaned out the money. They can't exactly give a guy money and then not collect. Because then they will just be seen as easy marks anyone can take advantage of. Often times if the guy can't make the vig payemnts the mob will look for other ways to collect. That's how the become your "partners" in whatever business you might have. With extortion, there is also the risk of somebody running to the cops. But they know that there will be five guys coming right behind the guy who gets picked up for the shakedown. They often figure it's better to pay the money than get their business burned down or get a beating.
The guy at the beginning did this with Paulie in Goodfellas, only he was asking for protection. The mob was borrowing credit from the bank on the resturaunt's bill, and in the end when they couldn't borrow any more money from the bank, the guy signed the insurance thing and they burned the place down, still collecting a buck.
I thought you were talking about gamblers, not business owners.
With gamblers, if they have gambling debts to the mob and can't pay the vig in cash...what I've seen go down in Macedonia and I assume it's the same elsewhere is that they send a couple of those muscular enforcer guys to the guy's house and take anything that's worth the vig or even a fraction of it.
It goes from simple shit such as jewelry to bigger things like expensive electronics(this being plasma tv's or tv's in general, computers, laptops, hell even fridges, dryers and washing machines) to cars and beyond.
Then if the guy owes alot of money, they can take your house.
Some guys will typically look for expensive things to collect but they won't take everything they can, they'll just keep coming in rates collecting stuff, this way they can take it as interest and keep it and you still have to pay the original vig.
Others whom are more honorable types, that don't exploit to the fullest, that have a little decency and know what addiction and poverty means, they take, keep and consider it paid off, they don't continue to demand.
Now there were some powerful businessmen in Macedonia who were the best guys to shake down...if you had the patiance and time to wait a couple of years. One was the richest man in Macedonia during the 1990's. He was a multimillionaire, but he was a chronic alcoholic and gambler. He would call his pilots in the middle of the night and make them come to the jets(the same types that are used for arrigation..or spraying against mosqitos and flies) and have a Gypsy trumpet drums type of band play music in the plane. He did alot of stupid crap...
He won a nice resturaunt in Shtip in a poker game. That resturaunt would be worth at least 5 million dollars on the American market, but that time it cost 400,000 Euros, or more like 800,000 German marks, by the local standards. That's alot of money for the local standards considering a major Socialist corperation cost 14 million German marks, or 6 million Euros, that's 9 million American dollars, that had 4800 factory workers in it's peak and produced millions of articles of clothing and shoes that were shipped off around the world and it even made clothing for the West German military and the foreign commands there, which some bosses were pissed off about because instead of saying Made in Yugoslavia, the Germans labelled it Made in West Germany and shipped it off to the PRC.
The stupid fucker got into debts and gambled away his entire multimillion dollar fortune and in the end, he was forced to sell his resturaunt for 50,000 Euros, or 80,000 American dollars.