#criming

[lets-steal-an-archive]

[isaacsapphire]

fiends stole the copper trim off of my church.

I really appreciate how you found a term that applies to both demons and methheads to describe copper thieves.

[reiki-tsubetai]

[rp cont]

Great! Let's get criming then!

[Hunter charges up a fireball to set the place on fire, but looks around and stops]

Hey, weren't there only one dead waiter in a pool of blood? Why are there three guys dead now?

Idk, I'm too drunk. *stands up, slightly out of balance* After you.

[isaacsapphire]

The poisoned Skittle problem, from the perspective of a non poison Skittle

The metaphor of the bowl of Skittles, some percentage of which are poison, and how many of those Skittles you want to eat, has been used by feminists about men, and republicans about immigrants. I'm increasingly devoid of shits to give about what kind of vile things I'm going to be called, so what the heck, I'll use it too for this.

With class and housing in the US, there is a poisoned Skittle problem; the lower income you go, the higher the percentage of assaults George type people are in the mix. (Please note now that I am Not claiming that the elite are not prone to being assaults Georg, or that there's no assaults Georg in higher income brackets) For added fun, the poorer you are, the more you have to be in physical proximity to others who live in your area, while walking to the store or taking public transportation, increasing your vulnerability to being assaulted, etc. In the suburbs, a lot of the time, the guy who lives three houses down from yours and you have literally never seen each other, so it doesn't matter if he would immediately grab your crotch if he was in crotch-grabbing range, because the two of you have never been that close together. If you live in a more dense environment and travel by foot, your chances of being in crotch-grabbing range are much higher, so a crotch-grabber, etc. in your area is a more concerning problem for you.

Most people very reasonably prefer to live somewhere further away from assaults Georg. The thing is, other people also prefer to live further for assaults Georg, and if you were just living next to assaults Georg, you are a Skittle of indeterminate poison. So when a nice redlined Blue suburb with a great school district is considering if they're going to permit some affordable housing, they are going to look at the income bracket that will be living there and say, "There's too high a percentage of poison Skittles in that income bracket. We don't want to live in a community with assaults Georg, or invite assaults Georg Jr into our nice school, so we don't want affordable housing here."

So now you, as an innocent non poison Skittle are left trying to figure out how you are going to communicate your non poison status so you can get the heck away from the poison Skittles. The current way this information is conveyed is by convincing a higher paid job to hire you, making more money, and buying your way into a better neighborhood. This is a rather lossy way to sort, and shit like constantly disrupted sleep at the weekly hotel from all the shitty people who live there with you doesn't help with better job thing. There's plenty of non poisoned Skittles in that bowl, but how to extract them safely?

The obvious next question is why we as a society don't seem to have any solution to the problem of getting assaulted by assaults Georg other than to individually just try to scramble away from where such folks are statistically and to price the entire category of people who are statistically more likely to be assaults Georg out of certain areas. And now it's a criminal justice system problem and I'll leave that for another day, but overall, the criminal justice system seems a lot more interested in hassling people based on statistical similarities to assaults Georg than doing fuck all about stopping assaults Georg.

[lets-steal-an-archive]

We've mentioned before, but every con we do could in theory be used to pull apart the real-world equivalent of the mark. This is one of the reason we have consultants like Apollo Robbins, or sometimes talk to high-level campaign finance experts or US Attorneys. Fiction, where you can bend and twist the rules, is made enormously easier when you force yourself to play by the rules as you break the story. This is a personal issue I have with some con and heist shows. Two lifts and a fake name don't make a con show, they make a particularly aggressive Rockford Files. Of course, this is probably more about my obsession with systems than it is about the bare minimum requirement for audience entertainment.

There was one truly odd moment, after three days of trying to break this thing, where I said: "Jesus, we've pulled corrupt money-laundering apart, international cyber-cons, kleptocratic hustles -- and we cannot break this fucking cheerleading scam. The real version of it is just too ironclad."

Downey: "This web of companies looks like a mob breakdown on The Sopranos."

Me: "Okay, so how do you bring down the mob?"

Downey (who, you will remember, is a former white collar defense attorney): "RICO Act. It's ridiculously broad."

That's how a cut-down version of the RICO Act wound up on the writer's room wall. The key, of course, being that you need to commit TWO acts of racketeering activity. So while half the room banged various combos of offenses off the walls ("Kidnapping and criminal copyright infringement?"), we tackled the other big problem --

-- we can't write a cheerleading episode.

By which I mean, it obeys none of the structural parameters which allow us to make Leverage on a weekly basis. There aren't really enough "hats" for the characters in cheerleading. Coach, cheerleader, maybe judge ... there's no inherent threat of violence or prosecution or meddling law enforcement. What's the real-time (used to be fourth) fifth Act sequence as we tempo up heading into the back of the show?

Again, back to the research. Jeremy had talked to several groups who were trying to change the cheerleading rules, primarily by trying to get it declared as a sport, where Title IX safety rules would kick in. These groups' primary frustration was in the politics of the situation -- which for once fell on both sides of the aisle. Generalizing roughly, Conservatives didn't want to establish that sort of excess regulation, Liberals didn't want Title IX money being diverted to cheerleading from other women's sports. Few friends on either side.

Well, there you go. Despite assumptions by some of our viewers, we try to stay very even-handed on the political spectrum on the few times we venture into politics. My policy is alway that the primary split in politics is along the money/power axis, and there are plenty of R's and D's chasing both. We'd never done a Congressional episode, and Congress is a lovely, complicated, antiquated ramshackle system all based in a one big, swinging doors-French farce worthy building. Aces. We came up with some prototypical Congresspeople, assigned unlikely humans to deal with them, and turned loose the Fun Train.

LEVERAGE #505 "The 'Gimme a K' Street Job" Post-Game

[lets-steal-an-archive]

the co-creator of leverage everybody

[lets-steal-an-archive]

Although we contact a lot of people for research, this was the first time one of our writers said "I'll call the FBI Agent I did counter-terrorism consulting with."

That quote "He doesn't need a lab. He needs pigs," came directly from a dude with some dead scary security clearance.

— John Rogers, Leverage #509 "The Rundown Job" Post-Game