Karma And My Bad Boss

Years ago I worked at a rib joint where the owner also dealt illegal pharmaceuticals out of the back room. He had a friend in Mexico who would drive to the border and toss bags over the fence and my boss would pick them up. He had several customers in our city who would come buy and buy an ounce of weed at a time and then sell that to their friends. My boss probably made five grand a week doing this. Well I'm a live-and-let-live kind of guy and I figure if that's how my boss can keep his restaurant going who am I to judge. But then one week I worked 60 hours and was owed all that and the overtime pay and he told me that he had never authorized for me to work that much when in fact he had. He refused to pay anything more than the 40 he claimed I was scheduled to work. He owed me over $100 and in those days that's a lot. So when I got upset and insisted he paid me he took the check he was in the middle of writing and tore it up and told me I was fired.

I don't know if they still do it but at that time the local sheriff's office offered big rewards for anyone who gave them a tip involving the sort of crimes my boss was into that led to a conviction. The size of the reward depended on the size of the deal they intercepted. Since I had overheard my boss discuss details I knew when and where he was going to make his buy and I knew many of his customers. I decided that depriving his customers of their merchandise was more than enough punishment but as for the controlled substance dealing restaurant owning rip off artist formerly known to me as "Boss." he was going down. I provided details of the buy, the date and time and where at the border it was supposed to be. The feds got involved since it involved other states and the border.

What I did not know was that my former boss was about to make the deal of a lifetime. He had been buying about 100 lbs of weed at a time but this time he'd made deals with a couple of local dealers who wanted to expand their operations and to do that meant getting a bigger shipment from his friend in Mexico. He had also decided to expand into cocaine at the same time. So the feds and local sheriffs and our sheriff and that state's state police all were lying in wait. They even had the Mexican authorities in on it. There were helicopters waiting to go nearby.

My former boss's friend in Mexico had hired a bucket truck which they loaded up and then hung over the fence to drop bags over the U.S. side. The operation was halted when they got about half way through the smuggle. At that point three tons of the stuff had been dropped across our border out in the desert. Then the Mexican federal police and our federal agents and everyone else all converged on the half dozen or so smugglers including my former boss.

The sheriff's office later told me that the street value of all that pot was over $5 million dollars and they had recovered over a million in cash at the scene. I had no idea my boss's operation had grown to the point where he could get his hands on that much cash. The sheriff's reward for me was not as high as it would have been had the entire operation been confined to our county but I did get more than enough to cover my loss of pay. After taxes I ended up with $13,000. That at a time when my pay was $5 an hour and minimum wag was around $3.50. So basically the reward was more than a year's pay for me. I was told I could file a claim for my paycheck but I didn't bother. I was happy with the result.

Some years later my old boss got out of prison, I think he did 12 years total, he was in the paper again. He was killed in a deal gone bad in Mexico. Some people just don't learn.