Honor Among Thieves?

Here is another story from my son. He wrote about it in a letter when he was still in prison and I just never got around to posting it.
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I was eating lunch the other day with my friend in the prison cafeteria when another guy came and sat with us. This guy said he was going to start a class after the 1st of the year on how to invest. We listened and said we would like to take the class.

Then he asked about some details like if we ever owned houses. My friend said he still owned a house in the city.The guy told us how in his class he was going to teach people how to turn $10,000 into $1.2 million tax free in 7 years!

He told my friend that if he wanted to they could meet at the library Sunday and show him how he could take a mortgage out on his house and use the money to do this while he is in prison. My friend said he would meet him Sunday and talk about this.

We all left. My friend and I walked and talked for a while before going back to our housing units. We both said we were going to check this guy out because this sounds like a giant hustle!

I've got some people that check people out all the time so I went to them and asked about the guy. They knew him and told me "yes he ran a class on investing before. He went to the hole (solitary confinement) for stealing all his students' Social Security numbers so he could steal money with them. Also he was a Rat that told on everyone on his case."

The next day I saw my friend in the cafeteria again. He talked to his bunky. His bunky was one of the students the guy tried to scam out of his Social Security number. So we got a good laugh out of it and said we would figure out what to do about it later after we had a few ideas.

Well the next day I was with another friend and my bunky at the cafeteria. The tables have 4 stools each. All of a sudden the con artist comes and sits on the empty stool next to me.

I say Hi and then just sit and wait for my friend's unit to come in. They were the next unit.

In less than a minute my friend walks in. He goes through the line, gets his food, and my bunky gets up to let him sit down.

My friend asks me if I said anything. I said no but as you can see I've got my glasses on so I can see a con artist from a mile away and looked at the guy.

I told the guy we checked him out and we know... HE'S NO GOOD!!

I said I know he was trying to con my friend out of his money. I know he tried to steal other people's Social Security numbers in his classes before and went to the hole for it. And I know he told on everyone in his case. I told him that if he tries to con any of my friends again I was going to hurt him real bad.

Then with that out of the way I said I don't care if you hustle these rats like yourself or these cho-mo's (child molesters) but you need to learn what all good con men know... who you can hustle and who you can't.

With all that out of the way I said now that we are at an understanding I still want to take his class. It never hurts to learn a good hustle.

We got up and left him looking like he was going to cry.

My other friend said you could have at least let me know what was going on. I said sometimes you just have to go with the moment.

We all had a real good laugh.