394: Bait and Switch

Ira Glass

Back when Cliff worked as a room service waiter at Holiday Inn, so many guests ordered in pizza delivery to avoid the lousy room service. But sometimes the food and beverage manager, who was this tightly-wound guy and immigrant from Algeria, would stake out the lobby and try to catch the pizza delivery guys and kick them out before they made it to the elevators. Then one day this food and beverage manager came up with a better plan-- to trick the guests.

The hotel got some cardboard pizza boxes and takeout menus that looked like they could've come from any delivery places you've ever seen. Each of them had a cartoon of an Italian chef with a moustache and a big hat. He was holding his fingers to his lips in the classic kind of "Mama mia, that's delicious" sort of pose.

This pizza place had a name-- Giorgio's-- but the menus didn't list any address. They did list a phone number. And the phone number was not an extension in the hotel phone system. It wasn't a room service number. It rang at this red telephone, an outside line that they installed on the basement wall right near the big institutional hotel switchboard that the room service operators normally use to take orders.

Ira Glass

This is Cliff. So we were supposed to fill one of those out and tape it onto the box for just that finishing touch of verisimilitude.

Ira Glass

A room service waiter named Kevin had a character named Luigi that he would play on the one. The captain of the room service waiters, Brandon, been a loyal company man until all this absurdity began.

Ira Glass

There were two flaws in the deceit, and they were pretty big flaws, Cliff says. One was the pizzas themselves. They were frozen, and they were the size of room service pizzas, not real pizzas from a pizzeria. Smallest just nine inches. A large was the size of an old vinyl LP.

The other flaw was the delivery outfit. Conceivably, the room service waiters could have just changed out of their polyester tux jackets and bow ties back into street clothes and then pretended to be pizza delivery guys. Or they could have stayed in uniform and told the guests that they had intercepted the pizza on the way up.

Instead of either of those options, though, the food and beverage manager chose--

Ira Glass

No matter if it was done badly. It was done just well enough, with just enough of the details right, the menus, the outside phone line, that it made lots of money, right from the start.

Ira Glass

From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our show, bait and switch. We have four stories. In some of these stories are people running the scam running the bait and switch, are unrepentant. In some they feel guilty, they feel contrite. But in all of theses scams, once you know it's a scam, you can't believe people try to pull it off with a straight face.

Our four acts involve a car, a fake valentine, a fake girlfriend, and treating people for the Lord Almighty. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One Neighborhood Watch.

We begin in Austin, Texas, with some people who want nothing more than the best for all concerned. Michael May tells what happened.

Mark Douglas Ledford is 39 years old and plays in several punk rock bands. But don't let that give you the wrong impression. He's a Good Samaritan kind of guy. A tattoo across his chest reads, "To whom much is given, much is required." He owns his own home and has a day job. November 29, 2007 started off like any other work day.

Michael May

Something was off. Mark lives a few miles north of downtown in a ranch home that sits on a corner of a quiet street with only one house nearby. The only people who park on this stretch are Mark's bandmates when they come over to practice.

Michael May

This is Mark's girlfriend at the time, Asia Ward. She's younger than Mark, 21. A cute gothy girl with a thing for zombie movies. Likes to read books about serial killers. They both started to imagine all sorts of sinister scenarios.

Michael May

By the next day, Friday, neighbors are trying to worry, too, about the car. Sarah, the woman who lives across the street, even calls the cops again and sends Mark a text to let him know she's on the case.

That night, Mark goes to play a gig in San Antonio. And when he and Asia roll back home around midnight, there's the car, still just sitting there with the keys dangling from the ignition.

Michael May

Suddenly they were surrounded by cop cars.

Michael May

Mark and Asia are handcuffed and put into separate cop cars, still with no idea what's going on, and told to wait for a detective to show up and interview them. Finally, he arrives. Detective John Spillers.

Michael May

In case you didn't catch that, Detective Spillers is calling them suspects and talking about interviewing witnesses. He says a neighbor reported them breaking into the car.

Michael May

Finally, after a few hours of talking with Mark and Asia, who explain everything, including the calls to 911, and after talking with Sarah across the street, the cops leave without arresting anyone. Asia said they even shook hands.

Michael May

But there's one thing the cops didn't tell them-- a crucial detail that made the whole thing make sense. The police had put the car there themselves. There were no witnesses, no neighbors who saw them break into the car, and for that matter, no victims.

The car is what's known as the bait vehicle, and it was out with surveillance cameras and microphones assigned to lure and catch car thieves. The gear was in the truck, which is why Mark couldn't get in it with the key.

Police departments across the country use bait cars. It's even funded by major insurance companies. And that's because it's effective. The police can sit back and wait for someone to take the car. Then the suspect comes in for booking, complete with their crime preserved on videotape.

If this sounds like a setup, legally, bait cars are not considered entrapment. Just like it's not entrapment for an undercover cop to stand on a street corner dressed as a hooker. For it to be entrapment, the cop would have to egg you on, would have to suggest that you pay for sex or steal the car, and that's not what they're doing here.

The Austin Police made 70 arrests last year using bait cars, and Mark and Asia were about to become another statistic. Around two weeks later, on December 17, Asia's birthday, the couple is woken up at 6 AM. There are flashlights being beamed into Mark's bedroom window.

Michael May

The officers show them arrest warrants for burglary of a vehicle, a charge that could land them in jail for up to a year. They're confused, arrested for something they didn't do, and they still don't know it's a bait car.

In the waiting room at the jail, Mark whispers "happy birthday" across the room to Asia. It's against the rules, and he gets thrown in solitary confinement. He's in there half the day, and he doesn't exactly handle it like a hardened criminal.

Michael May

To be fair, Mark and Asia's case is very unusual. Bait cars are usually played in high crime areas to trap people who already have criminal records. In this case, it was part on a quiet street in a nice neighborhood, just blocks from a high school, right where dozens of kids walk by each day. The police were less likely to catch a hardened car thief and more likely to snare someone drunk or high or broke or bored who'd walk by and see the car just sitting there with the keys in it.

Case in point. Turns out Mark and Asia weren't the only ones on their block snared by the bait car. The boyfriend of their neighbor Sarah, who had no criminal record, drove the car on Friday night around one in the morning. He drove down the block, turned it around, and parked it in the exact same spot. He was caught on video, laughing hysterically as he rolls down the block, with Willie Nelson's "On the Road Again" cranked up on the stereo. He was charged with a felony.

After spending the day in jail, Mark and Asia are released, and right away they get a lawyer and start trying to get to the bottom of this whole mess. That's when they finally learn it's a bait car. That meant that when Mark called 911, the officer who answered the call went so far as to deceive him at his own home. He was furious.

Michael May

I repeatedly asked the police and prosecutors to explain their actions, but they refused to go on record. But Travis County attorney David Escamilla told a newspaper that nobody thinks Mark wanted to steal the car, but quote, "It's not appropriate to go out and jimmy the lock on the trunk of a car that doesn't belong to you."

Detective Spiller's affidavit also focuses on the fact that Mark tried to break into the trunk with a screwdriver, and even wore gloves like a real criminal. And there are couple important details Detective Spillers has left out of the affidavit. He doesn't mention that the car was parked in front of Mark's home, nor that Mark had called 911 as soon as he saw the car, or that Sarah had also called, or that there is surveillance video of Mark milling around, looking through papers in the glove compartment for 20 minutes.

No. Instead, Detective Spillers concludes that he, quote, "believes this section constitutes more than mere curiosity or trying to locate the owner's information."

The prosecutors were put in a tough spot with this one, given all the evidence of the couple's innocence. They almost immediately offered a deal. If Mark and Asia stayed out of trouble for a year, the prosecutors would completely drop the charges.

Michael May

So instead, Mark and Asia demand a jury trial. But like everything leading up to this point, it's not so simple. For more than a year and a half, they regularly show up for court ready for the trial, and for one reason or another, are repeatedly told it's being postponed. Finally, out of desperation, they decide to talk to the media-- me.

I wrote a story for the daily paper, the Austin American-Statesman, and the next week, prosecutors call with a much better offer. Asia's case would be dismissed outright, since she never technically entered the vehicle. Mark could plead no contest to criminal mischief, a class C misdemeanor, same as a traffic ticket. And if he stayed out of trouble for a month, the charge would be dismissed. He takes the deal.

Michael May

Mark and Asia paid a pretty high price. Asia wants to work with kids, and for the past two years, she couldn't even get a volunteer position because of the burglary charge on her record. It's cost them $3,000 for lawyers and to get their records expunged.

But there are less tangible effects, as well. Asia works at a toy store, and a few months ago, someone left a cell phone on the floor. At first, Asia didn't touch it, just let it sit there, ringing and ringing and ringing. She was thinking, it's not mine. Could be a trap. Is it worth the risk? Eventually, she picked up the phone.

Ira Glass

Michael May. When he's not chasing parked cars, he is books and culture editor at the Texas Observer.

Coming up-- a message from Madonna on your home answering machine, and other really scary bait and switch techniques from people who feel they have no choice in a minute from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International when our program continues.

Ira Glass

This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our show we choose a theme, bring you different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show-- Bait and Switch.

There was a flyer taped to the wall by the water fountain in the English department at Penn State this week. It says, "Raw," and then underneath it in bigger letters it says, "Sex," then underneath that, "Everything you need to know." And then under that, a website, rawsex.psu.org, and then under that, an address and time for a meeting of some sort. And then under that, at the very bottom, in teenie-weenie little type, you have to look very closely, it says, "Hosted by Orthodox Christian Fellowship, a ministry of Holy Trinity Orthodox Church."

This flyer, yes, is a not-very-disguised bait and switch for Jesus. Which means us to the next act of our show, Act Two, Raw Sex, in which there will be no sex, but there will be a bunch of Jesus. One of our contributors, Dave Dickerson, was raised as an evangelical, and he says baiting and switching was just taken as a given. After all, being an evangelical comes with a huge responsibility to bring nonbelievers to God.

Ira Glass

There's a big debate among evangelicals about how to better reach out to non-believers. You'll find shelves of books on this at Christian bookstores. One of the evangelicals who's trying to change some of the old tactics is a guy named Jim Henderson. And he's tried all kinds of things to reach non-believers.

When a guy named Hement Mehta offered his own soul for sale on eBay to the highest bidder, it was Jim Henderson who won the auction with a $504 bid, which is, you know, cheap for a soul. And what he we did with that money was he simply asked Mehta to attend a few churches with him and tell them what was persuasive and what put him off. This project led to a book.

Henderson has another book called Evangelism Without Additives. He says in his decades as a pastor trying to convert people, he noticed that sinners like Jesus, but they don't like Jesus's people. Which led Henderson to completely rethink how he was approaching non-believers.

Ira Glass

Jim Henderson. He records his thoughts in books and at two websites, offthemap.com and doableevangelism.com.

Dave Dickerson, who we heard before him, has a book of his own called House of Cards: Love, Faith, and Other Social Expressions.

Ira Glass

Act Three. Friends With Economic Benefits.

People enter friendships with all kinds of agendas because, as Jim Henderson puts it, when people like each other, the rules change. Anna Boiko-Weyrauch has this story from the city of Accra in Ghana. She's changed the name of the woman that she interviews in this story.

Anna Boiko-weyrauch

It was Saturday night, and I was walking around alone in the city, and I stopped at the shop to get some water. People were hanging out on benches in front, eating dinner, playing with a little girl. A woman in a yellow dress called out to me, "Hey Obruni," white lady, "what do you want?"

That's how I met Marion. I liked her right away. She seemed genuine, direct. We ended up spending the rest of the evening sitting on the wooden bench together, eating beans and rice and talking. Her husband was in Italy, and my boyfriend was in the U.S., so we bonded over that. She said she would be my friend, and I really needed one. And she warned me. She told me I should be more careful around Ghanaians, that they would try to cheat me.

Now, this isn't the first time I'd heard about Ghanaians scamming foreigners. Who doesn't get those fake e-mails from West Africa? But here in Ghana, they call it "sakawa," which some say comes from a word in the Hausa language that means to put something into something else. Like, I put the stolen credit card number into the order form. Or more metaphorically, I scammed those people so well, I've got them in my pocket.

A lot of sakawa scams start on internet dating sites. The scammers are usually young men. They're known as sakawa boys. They pretend to be women online, and start chatting with guys overseas, hoping to hook one of them in a relationship. Marion told me her friends and cousins do this all the time.

When we were talking on the bench, she leaned in closer, and she told me in a low voice that she was right in the middle of a sakawa scam. She was the bait.

Her friends and cousins, sakawa boys, had asked her to talk to a foreigner they were scamming. They wanted her to talk to him on the phone and pretend to be the girl he'd been chatting with online. I asked if I could interview her about it, so later we sat down and talked.

Anna Boiko-weyrauch

Marion played an important role in the scam, but according to her, she wasn't on the inside. She was the bait, not an official partner. So not entitled to a cut of the money. Instead, it was more like she was helping her cousin out so he would be more inclined to return the favor later, and give her money when she asked him for it. But only however much he chose to give her.

Anna Boiko-weyrauch

Marion's cousins recruited her to talk to a man she called Mr. Johnson from New York.

Anna Boiko-weyrauch

Marion says that after two conversations with Mr. Johnson, she couldn't stand the deception anymore, and she told him the truth-- that he was being conned. She said she told him not to send any more money. She says that he thanked her, and that her cousins don't know she's the one who busted up their scam.

But I couldn't verify anything she was telling me. I asked her for Mr. Johnson's phone number, but she didn't get it from her cousin's phone for me, even though she swore she would. And I couldn't talk to her cousins without getting her in trouble.

And somehow, during the interview, the more we talked about the scam, the more confused I got. The details kept getting murkier. First she said she only helped scam Mr. Johnson, then she mentioned others. And the timeline of what happened with Mr. Johnson became less and less clear. At one point, she said she hadn't talked to Mr. Johnson or seen any of her sakawa friends since she got married.

I said that because when we first met, she said she was talking to Mr. Johnson then. That was only a few months ago. When I reminded her, Marion said--

Anna Boiko-weyrauch

And then the interview took a different turn. She hinted I should give her money. She needed a job, she said, and she had a lot of stories to tell. She told me she was broke, which I wasn't sure I believed. There are a lot of poor people in Ghana, but Marion doesn't seem to be one of them. Her mom owns a hair salon and a grocery store. Her husband has a new TV and kitchen appliances. But she said her mom is sick of giving her money on the time, and her husband ran into immigration problems in Italy.

We went back and forth a while, and it kept coming down to the same thing. She said she wants foreigners to give her money like they give the sakawa boys, but she doesn't want to defraud anyone.

Anna Boiko-weyrauch

Sakawa is about setting up a basic transaction. You find what the other person wants, like a girlfriend, a radio story, and you use it as bait. I believe Marion did see me as a friend, but also as an opportunity. Frankly, that's how I saw her too.

We hung out a couple of times as friends beside the interview. We ate lunch-- some spicy Ghanaian food-- and played with her cute little baby. A few days later, I called her to press for Mr. Johnson's phone number, but as soon as we decided talking, she yelled that I was only interested in her as a story. I wasn't interested in being a real friend. Then she hung up on me. In her version of the story, I'm the opportunist.

Ira Glass

Anna Boiko-Weyrauch reports for Voice of America and other radio programs from Ghana.

Ira Glass

Act Four. Cherry and Me.

Before we get to the bait and switches that have entered the life of Bill Cotter, some background. He used to do a nice businesses restoring very old books-- usually over 300 years old-- and decided a few years back to start dealing rare books as well. To finance this business, as he's written, he accepted a few of the roughly 500,000 low-interest credit card offers that come in the mail every day. Which worked, for a while. His business grew until a book deal that he had went very, very bad. Cost him $15,000. And all his credit cards, one by one, slipped into delinquency.

He felt terrible, naturally. Guilty, ashamed. And this is where we'll pick up our story.

Bill Cotter

February 14, 2008. Annie, my girlfriend of ten years, comes in the house and says in a tone not entirely free of suspicion, "Look who got a valentine." She holds a pink, squarish envelope hand-addressed to me just out of my reach. "I see your secret admirer was too modest include a return address," Annie says. My secret admirer was also too modest to use a stamp. The envelope had been posted by bulk rate meter. "So what's her name?" Annie says. I open it. "Friendly Card Services," I say.

"Dear Mr. Cotter, Your account is currently four months past due. Please pay $19,243.53 immediately, or we will be forced to deliver your account to a third party for more aggressive collection efforts. Sincerely, Friendly Customer Appreciation Department."

I have long since stopped entering calls from the many, many collectors coming after my many, many wholly unmeetable obligations. These calls, which routinely number 200 every day, start exactly at eight in the morning, and they end exactly at nine o'clock at night.

In the beginning, identifying a collector was easy. The area codes were almost always something numerologically unclean combination of sixes and eights. Then one day I get a call from my own area code. I listen to the message.

"Yo, hey, Bill. This is Cherry. What's up? I haven't heard from you for ages."

Whoa. Do I know a Cherry? I Google the number. My old friend Cherry apparently lives at the I Love America Financial Recovery Resolution and Outstanding Account Consolidation and Settlementations Response Center, LLC, with offices in Los Angeles and Guckeen, Minnesota.

Variants on this gambit abound. Citibank sometimes sends their threats express mail. Such letters usually start, "Dear debtor, you're probably wondering why we just paid to overnight you just one sheet of paper." I always do wonder, but they never explain. They simply go on to itemize the ways in which you've disappointed them, and conclude with a demand for payment in full, just like their not overnighted letters. Other lenders disguise their collection notices inside and out as surprisingly convincing U.S. treasury checks. Discover's method is to simply send one letter a day.

April 25, 2008. My bankruptcy attorney, Mr. H., during our first meeting, charges me with many tasks, the most demanding and subjective of which is evaluating my assets. For most objects, there are guidelines. Clothes-- 10% of retail. Cars-- Blue Book value. Buffalo nickel collection-- whatever you can get on eBay.

But occasionally an object occurs whose worth is subjective. We acquired our housecat in the fall of '04. In all respects, he underperforms as a pet. He won't pounce or chase a laser dot. On every page of his vet file are big fluorescent stickers that say, "Will Bite." He's taught himself to frown. So under "Animals" on page 14 of the Bankruptcy Questionnaire, I generously evaluate him at $0.50.

"What's a Vinnie?" asks Mr. H. "A cat," I say. "That cat?" "Yes, sir," I say. "$10," he says, and then wipes out my figure and enters his own.

This is frustrating, because the job of a bankruptcy attorney is to assign as small a value as possible to each of my objects. "How about $3?" I suggest. "Why don't you just give the beast away, then?" he asks. "Just drop it off behind a chicken restaurant." I look at him, trying to decide what to say. If you can't bare a shameful truth to your attorney, then to whom?

"Well," I admit, "I like him."

"$10, then. Next item."

September 28, 2008. Bait and switching now starts in earnest. A neighbor leaves a Post-it note on my door saying she's just gotten a call from someone trying to find me, that the caller said it was an emergency, and to have me call this 866 number immediately. My parents, sisters, and former employees call me. "Billy, some angry dude who will not identify himself or his business is looking for you."

The subterfuge isn't just from collectors. Envelopes arrive with absolutely no markings at all, demanding to be opened. These contain letters from law firms offering to defend me. Similar envelopes arrive from debt consolidation companies posing as law firms offering to defend me.

Somehow mailed threats aren't that worrisome. Not like calls. Like a voicemail I received dialed from a spooky telephone number made of nothing but zeros, and consisting only of the Madonna song "Open Your Heart" played in its entirety. Among the lyrics is this provocative passage.

[MUSIC - "OPEN YOUR HEART" BY MADONNA]

I follow you around but you can't see/ You're too wrapped up in yourself to notice/ So you choose to look the other way/ Well, I've got something to say/ Don't try to run, I can keep up with you...

[MUSIC FADES]

October 10, 2008. By now, I've learned not only to never answer the telephone, but also to ignore knocks at the door. But one afternoon, I'm expecting an interesting rare book restoration job to be delivered by UPS. I checked the tracking number, which indicated that my package was On Vehicle For Delivery. Hark! The downshift of a grumpy diesel engine. I peek out the blinds. There, parked under a beautiful, spreading pecan tree, my beautiful, brown delivery truck. Hark again! A firm, authority-backed rap.

I answer. Standing before me is a diminutive woman wearing not a penny-brown UPS uniform, but a tan polo shirt and khakis. Just as I was about say, "Hey, what's with the merry new uniform?" and "Where's my parcel?" I see the UPS truck driving away. I notice a pistol at her waste.

She announces that she's from the Travis County Constable's Office, precinct five, and that she's here to deliver a citation initiated by Citibank South Dakota N.A. She hands me a sheaf of papers. I have been officially sued.

Annie, my girlfriend, in her customarily disarming fashion, invites the deputy inside for a cup of coffee. Annie asks the deputy if she would like cream and sugar. The deputy begins to cry.

Annie sits her down on the couch. We listen as Dana Perry, the deputy, confesses how much she hates her hypocritical job. She's in some pretty bad debt herself. And how all she really wants to do is go back to school and play with her baby and start an organic lavender farm. Annie gives her to-go coffee and some rubber tawdries left over from a cashed pinata to give to the baby. And, just in case, Mr. H.'s business card.

October 22, 2009. Finally, case number 091263-CAG, my bankruptcy, is officially filed. My creditors will get $4,911 worth of rare book inventory, $750 worth of archival letter and paper, and $40.45 in cash. I don't have enough rare book inventory left to start fresh as a bookseller, but luckily, I do still have restoration tools and materials, so bookbinding is the direction I'll go.

I hope I'll never have to go through other bankruptcy, though that's about as meaningless as someone recovering from a car wreck saying they don't plan to ever crash again. Still, it's unlikely, as one must be in debt to go bankrupt. As it stands now, I will not qualify for any kind of meaningful credit for seven years. I won't qualify for almost any home, school, or car loans, nor for many jobs. And I won't be able to rent anywhere that has an application process, which leaves those cash-only motel-like tenements out by the airport. With such options, I'm hardly in danger of crashing. I'd never be able to build up enough speed. And that, I suppose, is the point.

Ira Glass

Bill Cotter. He's the author of the novel Fever Chart. His story about bankruptcy first appeared on the McSweeney's site at mcsweeneys.net.

Our program is produced today by Lisa Pollak and our senior producer, Julie Snyder, with Alex Blumberg, Jane Feltes, Sarah Koenig, Robyn Semien, Alissa Shipp, and Nancy Updike. Production help from Aaron Scott. Seth Lind is our production manager, Emily Condon our office manager. Our music consultant is Jessica Hopper.

[ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS]

This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ manager and oversight for our program by our boss, Mr. Torey Malatia. You know, people always ask me, what did he sound like before he got on the radio? I have a recording.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week for more stories of This American Life.