Their asses were on the street, where they now lived in a series of roach motels when they weren’t living in their car. Oh, and the mother was killed last year by a drunk driver.
It couldn’t possibly get any worse, right? Just watch Channel 12: The father sold his car to afford a “desperate” program of treatment for his son. The program was designed to help people precisely in his situation. If the family qualified, the father would pay what he could—a tiny fraction of the cost—and a network of foundations would pick up the rest of the tab. He found the program on the Internet.
The son never got treatment. The program was all a scam, devised to prey on the parents of terminally ill children.
The TV station had never seen such an extreme combination of sympathetic victims, hateful villains and great video. It was the perfect storm of tragedy for Feel Good Orlando!
By the end of the show, the station’s switchboard lit up until it crashed. The community was coming through. They wanted to do whatever they could for the family—and kill the people behind the scam.
A bank account was set up in their name. Donations flooded in.
So did ratings. The show’s producers had the family back the second day, when the interviewer got their names wrong. “Paul, I mean Phil. Sorry . . . So, Paul, how has the generosity of our station changed your life, because we’re here when you don’t know where else to turn!”
The father dabbed his eyes. “I can’t thank you enough . . .”
A week passed. The station’s editors held a meeting to determine upcoming programming. One item was a no-brainer: Get that father and son back again. Their previous two segments had garnered the largest viewerships in months. And get some more footage from that depressing motel to juice the ratings. A TV van was sent out. It had a giant eyeball on the side.
The crew arrived at the dump. A hooker propositioned the cameraman as he strapped on the battery packs, but he said he was working. The reporter slipped into a bright blue jacket and grabbed a microphone.
“How do I look?”
The cameraman gave a thumbs-up.
“Good morning, Orlando. This is where the desperate father and terminally ill son have been forced to live . . .”
They went to the door and knocked.
And knocked. And knocked.
It finally opened. The father looked like he’d been dead asleep. Except not. The cameraman caught a startling glimpse and forced the door open. The video was beyond the wildest dreams of the Feel Good executives: openly scattered bottles of booze, drug paraphernalia and cash. The cancer-stricken child covered his face from the camera lights. He was wearing a bra.
What the hell?
The initial shock wore off quickly as reality quickly revealed itself: The boy was actually a petite twenty-six-year-old woman who had shaved her head. It was all a sickening, elaborate scam. The community had been ripped off for thousands of dollars. One of the saddest plights on earth exploited by sociopathic crooks and non-verifying journalists.
The TV reporter was giddy with elation. He had an excellent scandal to report, and he hammered away with hardball questions as the couple scrambled to gather up cocaine and cash.
“Are you the worst people to ever live? . . .”
The TV people ran outside as the grifters jumped into a red Camaro.
“Do you think you’ll burn in hell? . . .”
Six hours later, on the station’s main anchor set:
“Good evening, our top story tonight: a shocking scandal that is still unfolding in an exclusive report that you will only see on Live Action Orlando Eyewitness News 12. An unidentified couple has perpetrated one of the most heinous scams . . .”
The broadcast highlighted footage of earlier interviews and repeatedly expressed outrage that its viewers had been duped out of large sums of money because the TV station hadn’t checked any facts. Except they left out that fact.
What the station did learn was that the bank account had been systematically emptied in $9,500 increments—deliberately under the $10,000 trip wire for IRS reporting—until there was nothing left.
The switchboard lit up again. Where had these assholes fled? Would they be arrested? How were the viewers going to get their money back?
One group of viewers intently watched the report on a flat-screen TV in a luxury high-rise hotel overlooking the Intracoastal Waterway. The report ended, and the celebration began. A cork flew from a bottle of bubbly. South Philly Sal raised a glass to toast the newest members of their team.
“To Omar and Piper, who brought in one of our biggest hauls ever.”
Indeed, $36,000. And as they said in Goodfellas, they did the right thing. They shared it with Sal, because he had recruited them and concocted the scheme down to the last detail, including monitoring local TV coverage for the station with the least accurate reporting.
They partied into the evening. Except for Sal, who had stopped drinking after his first, nominal glass of champagne. He sat alone on the far end of the suite, writing at a desk. Addresses, names, known routines of targets broken down into twenty-minute blocks. Sheets of paper were folded and slipped into separate envelopes. Each of the party’s guests would be given their next assignment upon departure. Fun was fun, but there was more work to do.
ORANGE BLOSSOM TRAIL
A black ’78 Firebird peeled away from another budget motel and raced south. The trailing remnants of a metropolis gave way to open pastures, which in turn became bulldozed acres of upstart suburbia. Then more fields and an expressway overpass.
Serge hit a blinker for the left lane. “You know the difference between Floridians and everyone else in the world?”
“We drive around all day and get totally baked?”
“Alligators,” said Serge. “We’re so used to them we don’t even notice anymore. And TV drops our guard even further. Local news can’t grasp economic stories any more complex than the price of gas, and an ‘in-depth’ investigative report means chasing the owner of a pet-grooming salon across a strip-mall parking lot, demanding to know why all the poodles went bald. So in Florida we’re left with perpetual loops of the same cheap video: aerial footage of anything on fire, legs of surfers with shark-teeth marks, ground-level footage of anything on fire, anything weird that beaches itself, a retiree with a jumbo American flag fighting the homeowners’ association . . .”
“And alligators?” asked Coleman.
“Any alligator not in a swamp, because all of this was their swamp, and now they’re living alongside us, using our swimming pools and golf courses and shopping-mall fountains until both sides have grown accustomed to the arrangement.”
“You mentioned the rest of the world?”
“At the mere sight of these modern dinosaurs, foreign tourists spaz out with disposable cameras. Especially the British. I love watching the British go gaga over gators. Last year, I was driving across the glades on the Tamiami Trail and saw all these cars pulled over and people gaping at the roadside canal, and I thought that maybe another sightseeing van had rolled into the water. So I stopped and noticed a single gator had crawled up on the opposite bank, and dozens of people in shorts and dark socks were snapping a million pictures. Their reaction was priceless, like a small boy finding his penis for the first time.”
“Ahhhhhhhh!”