After that, the crew was hooked. They soon built a reputation among disadvantaged people as a gang that could right the wrongs of the world. I was simultaneously proud of her and worried. One day, Elle was going to take a big fall. But right now, she was having a blast, still running strong. She often sent me encrypted messages detailing their scams.
“Robin Hood, huh? I like that. And from the sounds of it, someone needs to swoop down and save your poor ass. I’m coming there—don’t try to stop me. Besides, I owe you big time for all the things you did for me when we were kids.”
She was right about that: I had been watching over her all those years ago. When I was fifteen and she was twelve, she messed up a job we were pulling. It was a real-estate scam, where Uncle Carl pretended to be a crooked government employee who could manipulate deeds. He promised each mark that for a mere hundred thousand dollars, property worth millions could be theirs. We even had a convincer to make the mark happy: Bea. Using a classic “In-and-In” scheme, where you convince the mark to go in by having someone else also go in, Bea pretended to be another investor who would also contribute a hundred grand.
But Uncle Carl, known to the mark as the crooked government employee who was selling cheap property, didn’t want to deal with a bunch of investors. He insisted that only one person bring the money for all of them. Bea then gave a big speech about how honest the mark was and how much she trusted him. To prove her trust, she offered to hand over her hundred thousand dollars and let him be the one to buy the deeds. She had brought her money in a special case that locked to her wrist, so she insisted that the mark use it, for added security. The trick was that the case also had a trap door on the side that would let us remove the money without him knowing.
They met in a secluded nook of a hotel bar where Bea handed over her hundred grand. Right after they combined their money and sent the mark off to see Carl, the rest of us were supposed to take it back. Hale and I would create a distraction, a loud and disruptive argument, during which Elle would sneak up to open the trap door and remove the cash. Hale and I did our part, getting into a huge fight in the hotel lobby. We crashed into everything and everyone, surrounding the mark with a noisy ruckus. He stood there and watched us, exactly as planned.