Arrest-Proof Yourself by Dale C. Carson, Wes Denham Page B

again. Bad guys regard working hour after hour for a paycheck with horror. Only squares could be so dumb.
    An undercover narc was telling my coauthor just the other day that two marijuana plants, lovingly watered, fertilized, and stimulated with growth hormones and grow lights, will yield $60,000 or more per year—all in the comfort of the home. That’s real Miracle Grow. Of course crooks have to do business with other crooks, who will cheat and sometimes kill them, but nobody’s got it perfect.
    Crooks are innovative. A client told me a story that demonstrates this perfectly. One of his buddies bought a brand-new Chevy Corvette. This guy drives it directly from the showroom to a party in Manhattan. He’s not a complete idiot, so once he parks, he gets friends to move their cars and squeeze his car in by touching their bumpers to his. The ’Vette is jammed in tight, and the guy figures he’s safe. Wrong. Hours later he finds the Corvette is gone— poof . All that’s left are two streaks of heavy lubricant. The thieves jacked up his hot rod and slid it out on planks. Smart, huh? “Greased skids” is not just a figure of speech.
    Invent computers, and bad guys invent computer crime. Make credit cards universal and voilà, credit card fraud. Cheap 800 lines make possible the phone scams for which South Florida is famous. The Emerald Mine Shares and First Mortgage Certificate scams were works of genius. Con artists love South Florida because it’s only 20 minutes by air and a few hours by fast boat from the Bahamas and all those banks whose last name is Suisse . They appreciate the skilled services of Miami’s identity forgers and the attorneys who know how to make money vanish into a labyrinth of phony corporations. The sun and the nightlife aren’t bad either.
    Great crime often has a breathtaking simplicity. Years ago, before the coastal setback laws made filling wetlands and waterways illegal, a developer was permitted to create an artificial island in Miami’s Biscayne Bay. Similar artificial islands had become some of the most valuable real estate on planet Earth. So this developer borrows $100 million to get started and bangs down a row of pilings to impress visiting loan officers. Once they approve the loan, he just wires the money offshore and vanishes over the Atlantic in his jet. He has never been found. Adios , 100 megabucks.
    Crooks think they’re smarter than ordinary people, and some of them are. Some of the serial killers I arrested while I was in the FBI had studied police procedures and crime-scene investigative techniques. They devoured instructional manuals dense with mathematics, microscopy, and chemistry. These were smart guys who trained to make crime a career.
    Unfortunately, pain and misery are not inherent in the life of crime. They have to be applied externally by the criminal justice system. If criminals were victims, society wouldn’t need police, just social workers to give solace to crooks weeping in the streets. Fat chance! The bad guys are sassy and full of themselves. They have to be hunted, jailed, and processed by the justice machine.
    It’s amazing to see the change that comes over bad guys when they do get caught. The swagger is replaced by cowering. The strut becomes a slouch. The mean stare turns into a shifty flickering of the eyes. Jail, for most crooks, is hell. Even if they escape being raped or beaten, the subjection to strict rules is almost unbearable.
    For the worst criminals, crime pays off emotionally even while they’re in custody. They get fan mail, love letters from women, and flattering media attention. The notorious serial killer Ted Bundy, who was pursued by local police and the FBI in Tallahassee, received fan mail from other serial killers who sought advice on how to avoid being caught. He was the big man in prison until the State of Florida fried his brains in the electric chair.
    Wayne Williams, who killed dozens of young boys around Atlanta, had the