Have a seat episode 2

Just 14??? Geeze, she's just a little squirt.

Too easy. Sorry about that.  I'll just let myself out and the thread can carry on from here.

I feel like this episode lacked some humor like all the other classic Chris Hansen lines. Even the previous "Have a Seat" had "now you're telling me a *whopper* of a story". I feel Chris realized this, but just couldn't come up with a punch line. He asked what color paint, and I feel this was the setup, and the predator said "graphite grey", which Chris couldn't think of anything for.

Man, this guy was dull and dim witted.

Agreed


That pretty much explains it. The saddest factor in this video is that we don't get to see them walk in all confident thinking that all the pieces have fallen into place, eager to indulge in the golden opportunity that they never thought would come

OK. I'll bite.  

Human trafficking is a whole lot more than a "a continuation of a Qanon theory gone awry".  Its a real problem that was a problem Way Way Way before Q-LARPing bullshit ever became any kind of problem to anyone, and it'll still be a problem long after all the QTards have gone the way of the Dodo.  I'm no fan of the Sheriff, and I'm not picking political "sides" here because I prefer my TCAPism apolitical, but just stating a fact.  Human Trafficking is a very real problem.

Hahahahhahahahahahahahhahahahaha, fuck.

He would have outrun them anyway. Those powder blue socks and brown open toe sandals were made for incredible speed.

I’ve lived in the Houston, TX area for most of my life, have been on this earth since the Carter Admin, and it’s ALWAYS been a problem here. Much of the time it’s Coyotes exploiting the people that they’ve brought across the border. They’ll find girls, (sometimes 13, 14, 15, whatever), in the interior of Mexico and tell them and their folks all sorts of tales about the US and how if they’ll agree to pay for their passage after they arrive, that the Coyote will get them a taqueria waitress job or maid/babysitting job or something like that after they arrive. Once they get here, though, they get turned out as whores, and told that if they don’t go along with it that their family members back in Mexico will be killed. It’s a very real thing.

Yeah, it’s really horrible. It’s a big problem down here and there’s really nothing that can be done to stop it. You can have stings like this and bust some perverts and that’s great but to really make some progress you’d want to bust the coyotes or better yet the Cartel members running those coyotes and that’s just never going to happen on a large scale. Bust one, and 10 take their place.

I drove a cab years back, worked nights exclusively, all along Houston’s Ship Channel area and industrial 3rd of the City and County. I worked the Port of Houston and the surrounding areas. I’ve seen some really depressing and sad shit, seen victims of exactly what I’m talking about here, talked to them, so I KNOW it’s a real thing.

It had its moments, for sure. The cab industry in Houston is dead now, Uber/Lyft/etc killed off all the big independent companies and what little is left is all owned by “Greater Houston Transportation” and mostly dedicated to Airport/Medicaid transportation. Back in the day, though, Houston was 2nd only to NYC in total numbers of licensed cabs/drivers, probably 75% of those drivers worked the airports/hotels exclusively and the rest of us ran everywhere else but most worked days and most wouldn’t work the Ship Channel, the PoH, 2nd, 3rd, and 5th Wards plus Sunnyside, Acres Homes, Cloverleaf, or the industrial 3rd of the City/County. I was willing to do it, though, I’d go anywhere, anytime, and I made a pretty good living for a few years doing so until I finally had enough and got out.

Well, cab driving in general has ALWAYS been a way to dodge taxes, at least as far back as the mid 2Ks when I was driving. Drivers were “independent contractors” and it’s up to them to file taxes since they’re “self-employed”. Now, this is tricky because although the cab company DID have a record of every credit card transaction a driver made, (because those transactions were made through the company and the drivers were charged processing fees for those charges and for having the office “cash them out” and DID have a record of every Medicaid/Medicare trip a driver ran because the company “cashed those out” for drivers too, as far as cash fares there’s no way to prove that a driver made anything at all on their shift over and above the lease on the cab for that shift. A driver could turn in $67 in credit card receipts, (enough to cover the cab lease), and if anyone asked, (and no one would), the driver could just say he’d had no luck that night and made no profit. Without a camera in the car, (didn’t exist back then), or going back through dispatch records and trying to locate and contact passengers to question there’s be no way to prove otherwise.

With that being said I DID see a driver prosecuted and imprisoned for tax evasion. She did 3 years in Fed Prison for it IIRC. She was the crookedest driver at our company. By the time she was finally investigated, I had moved from driving a cab to dispatching them so I was in the office when the Feds showed up with their warrant to search the records. She had married a merchant seaman right before his death a decade or two back and collected his pension benefits and listed them as her only income, yet she decided to buy a house, opened a bank account, and started dumping her daily haul in it every day. She ran mostly Medicaid/Medicare trips and trips for our accounts with Marine Companies which were all on-paper and cashed out by the office for her once a day with records retained and well as her “personals” which paid mostly by credit card which, again, the office maintained records of. She’d been doing it for 20 years but after 9/11 tightened up the banking laws and after she opened that account and started filling it with more than her listed income, they finally caught on and busted her. She absolutely hated me for competing with her as a driver and then refusing to participate in her scheme to pay dispatchers for preferential treatment. She tried to get me fired on a daily basis and because of the amount of money she brought in for the company she would have been successful if she had been able to find a single mistake I’d made but she never did. Anyway, I was glad to hear they’d finally convicted and imprisoned her but by then I’d moved on to bigger and better things

BTW, if anyone doubts what a horrible person she was, she got her son a job driving a cab as well, her son was accused by multiple female fares of having acted inappropriately with them and one lady accused him of attempted rape. He was investigated and there wasn’t enough evidence to prosecute him because as soon as he went to climb into the back seat, the lady jumped out of the car because, thank God he hadn’t thought to lock the doors, but the owner of the cab company wouldn’t let him drive after that because the owner liked to maintain a tight relationship with the cops and they thought he did it but just couldn’t get enough evidence for the DA to prosecute. Anyway. this lady tried everything she could to get him back on the job, throwing her weight around and threatening to take whatever business she could to one of our competitor companies. The owner called her bluff and she backed down when she realized that it would cost her more to run with any other company and no matter what she did, her son wasn’t getting hired back on, but she tried.