Town of 20k people, we had a wool shop… just sold wool only. Always thought it was a front, years later found out they won the lotto(2mil) blew it all keeping the wool shop open almost 10 years with zero customers lol
Hell yeah, now that’s how you make good use of an unexpected influx of cash
You do have to admire that sort of commitment though.
tl;dr I was wrong.
I used to go to a restaurant that I was sure was a front.
Years ago I was walking home from the gym and I got peckish. I was in one of the less fancy areas of Manhattan so I didn’t think twice about just walking into the first place I saw.
The second I walked in I decided it was a big mistake. This place looked fancy. Nice place settings, real wood furniture, etc. I was dressed like a bum and probably smelled bad.
But the head waiter came out and treated me like royalty. Fresh baked bread, a sauteed flounder that he filleted right at the table and all around baller service at a very reasonable price. I was the only person there but it was early so I didn’t think much of it. I figured that if their food and service was this good when they thought I was a bum this is the place for me. I dropped a 100% tip and decided I’d go once a week and if I ever found a date I’d impress the hell out of her when we roll into a nice restaurant and the head waiter greets me by my first name and treats me like a big shot (aside: the first and only girl I brought there didn’t like their vegetarian options but ended up marrying me anyway).
Ever time we went the place was practically empty. This was one of the less fancy areas of Manhattan but they were still paying Manhattan rent. The food was always top notch and did I mention how awesome the service was? Mooci, the waiter once came back from vacation and insisted that I try some of the moonshine from his Sicilian Mother. Constant freebies too.
We decided there’s no way they could be turning a profit and assumed it was a mob front. Some older NYers may remember when the story broke that SPQR was a mob front, so it seemed pretty likely.
Well a few years ago we went back after moving out of state. The restaurant was under new management and everything sucked. Crappy place settings, shitty generic food and I didn’t recognize anyone there. It turns out they weren’t a mob front. They were just great cooks that sucked at running a business and ran out of money :(
I mean, Sicilian and living in NY, I would suspect it was a front too.
Oh yeah, I wandered in. I was with a group of people that didn’t really know each other. We were supposed to see a niche movie at the movie theater. It was a one time showing special event. It was a group of people that my wife met online that is into this franchise. Anyway, the company that made the movie forgot to send the movie to the movie theater. Or rather, they sent it to the wrong movie theater. They were going to show the movie the next day instead, and gave us all refunds and free movie vouchers. But the group was already all there, so we decided to walk to a local coffee shop nearby. It wasn’t a coffee shop. It was a casino. Casinos are not legal where I live. We walked in, awkwardly looked around and walked out and went to Starbucks.
Unrelated, but their toilet was on the patio outside. Very weird experience all around.
But wait, can you start at the beginning? How did you meet your wife?
In the casino’s patio bathroom.
Oh theres a bunch of those around here. Its not really a casino per say, but they have a ton of state sanctioned lottery games that look like video slot machines.
Have lots of those in Oregon. They are required to sell some food so they aren’t just straight up gaming establishments, but is a semi government-sanctioned way to bend gambling laws. “Lotto Delis” they’re sometimes called.
Yeah, that’s where I’m from. They all got that keno.
Mattress stores that stay open 24/7, pretty sure you send them a mattress full of cash and they deliver you a mattress full of coke
There are mattress places in my town in locations that have to cost a significant sum to rent that are “by appointment only.”
I never see anyone go in or out, and I’ve not known a single person who would schedule an appointment just to buy a forking mattress.
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Chicago has a weirdly high number of mattress chain stores. There’s a stretch near me that has 3 of them in the span of 4 blocks. They’ve all been there for awhile and there’s rarely ever anyone in them. No way these are legit businesses considering how often people buy mattresses.
Mattress stores have a way of popping up next to each other. If you see a mattress store, there’s almost always another one across the street.
There are none that I know with 100% certainty, but there are a few types of businesses that are generally known to be fronts where I come from (and I suspect in many cities), and there are a few specific ones I’m confident are fronts.
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Massage parlors are commonly fronts for prostitution all over the world, or offer “extra” services. This is so common that many of them have prominent signs explicitly saying they do NOT.
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I swear, there must be more video stores than there are working VCRs in my city. And they seem to have kept mostly the same stock of VHS tapes for the past 30 years. They are rumored to be fronts for, again, prostitution.
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I have strong suspicions about psychic readers. There are a ton of them, and many are open at odd hours of the night in places that are not busy enough to get any legitimate foot traffic.
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Gyms are all fronts for…gyms. I mean, the gym business is corrupt enough that I feel like that counts.
If you are in NYC, usually, from my understanding they are fronta for multi-family kinda squat houses. That’s why the curtains are so close to the front door and you almost never see anyone in there…actually, in all my time I’ve never seen anyone in one of those places. But they’re all set up the same. Pull back those curtains and it’s like a huge illegal house
You’re talking about psychic readers in NYC? I’ve definitely seen some foot traffic in the places downtown.
Helsinki is, for some reason, full of massage parlours.
There’s a neighbourhood called Kallio that was formerly rather cheap but has become much more expensive and gentrified, and the massage parlours remain. I have no idea how they can afford their rent, as I’ve never seen anyone going into or coming out of one of those venues.
Obviously they provide “extra services”, but I don’t think that can be enough to sustain them. I suspect money laundering from drug sales etc.
Please reassure me Roskapankki is still operating.
Some friends of mine saw them carry a dead rat out the back room and throw it out onto the street while they were waiting for me there.
Yeah, it’s still there, but I’ve not been in for ten years.
I see things haven’t changed ;)
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I’m not saying all cash-only bars are laundering money, but I am saying that the owner is probably at the very least not declaring all of their profits.
It’s usually just not declaring profits in my experience, it’s brutally addictive to slap 30% ish profit on top of everything.
My boss at a pizza place had 2 registers he would use for various reasons but it all boiled down to one being reported to the IRS and the other not.
I know a liqour store that has a small bar inside thats cash only, I got friendly enough with a manger that basically admitted the locals that hung out there were mostly blue collar and came in after work where they got payed cash. Meanwhile the retail liqour customers largely were card users. So the owner made the bar cash so he could report less. Makes sense why its the cheapest bar around by a large margin.
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Not declaring all your profit is actually the opposite of laundering money, so it’s going to be one or the other, never both
Galaxy brain: Opening a front to launder your main business’s undeclared profits.
Circle back to: the reason you launder money in the first place
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There is a wool shop that never has any customers, in the center of town, so not cheap real estate, and I saw someone go in there after looking in the windows, and got yelled at to get out.
It’s in Switzerland, so shady financial stuff isn’t exactly rare.
Not defending this particular wool shop but often those sorts of specialty shops also have an online side. Weird that they would throw customers out though
Eh, it also depends on where you live. I don’t know what it’s like over there, but we have an addiction crisis where I live. People steal many odd things, sometimes because they like them, sometimes to sell them, and other times because they hatch a crazy plan that they give up on halfway through.
We definitely have certain people that are regularly kicked out of stores due to prior misbehaviour. (Assult, theft, biohazard stuff, etc.) Sometimes there’s only so much that you can deal with from the same person, you know? It can get to the point where you just ban someone.
Which canton of Switzerland?
Basel Stadt.
Oh, yup, makes sense and sounds reasonably suspicious haha
We have a fireworks shop. They just sell fireworks, and are open all year round. In the UK we have like 4 days a year when it’s acceptable to set them off.
They even have a number in the window for you to ring outside of regular opening hours.
It might as well just be called Mike’s Heroin and Weed Shop.
There’s a few in Bradford, but then again we’re pretty much guaranteed a display at around 11pm every night.
A lot of car washes popping up near me with a monthly fee unlimited washes program that I’m positive is just a better version of what Walter did in Breaking Bad. Scan your app’s QR code and away you go, meanwhile someone behind the scenes rings it up as a cash sale and throws $15 into the till.
Rome, Italy. rent for a small store is 800/mo where this store is, and an average salary is about 1200/mo. This antique/junk store sells like 2 things a day(with average price being 5€) always takes unfavorable exchanges and generally isn’t great business-wise, yet it’s been here for 15 years, in a district where most - more reasonable - businesses fail within 2 years.
It doesn’t take credits cards, only cash. There’s a flight simulator controller from the 80s that didn’t sell for a decade.
Maybe I’m just paranoid.
Edit: i still love that store, I’m addicted to collecting old junk (self promotion time: I founded a coin collecting community over at lemmy.ml,its called numismatics) and I go to that store every month or so, it helped me to get rid of some old vynil records from my grandfather in exchange for some cash (obv without receipt) but still, I think it either evades taxes (taking that from granted) or it’s something bigger, like a front for a mafia or something else.
Had a similar one as well in a former neighbourhood I used to live. Turns out the guy is one of the biggest online sellers and keeps the shop for some legal reasons/for customers to come and see an object in real life/to keep him entertained while in reality he had tremendous trade volumes online.
The fact is that the store owner is a massive boomer, I need to write him via sms because he doesn’t have WhatsApp (ubiquitous in Italy and all of Europe) and only owns a dumb phone, as an online seller myself, I think a smartphone is a must these days. He doesn’t have a site, he thinks eBay is the devil (and as an ebay seller, that’s true, but for other reasons) so I don’t think he’s an online seller, he’s just not the type
Yeah, in that case he is very likely just living off inheritance or something. I know exactly what you mean, though - initially I thought the guy I described above is “your” type of guy. I know more than enough of these idiots but most now have a smartphone to read telegram channels it seems.
And the guy I mean still is a huge boomer and asshole, nevertheless. Both online and offline reviews are horrible.
BTW: Salutami il mio amore segreto, l’Italia. Ancora poche settimane e finalmente potrò tornare a trovarvi.
Beh, se passi a Roma non passare da “la lucerna” o passaci, se è il tuo tipo di negozio
(è il negozio di cui parlo nel post, se non si fosse capito) buona fortuna nella tua visita!
It’s possible the store owner also owns the store location maybe. Massively reduces throughput necessary. Could also be a fence?
It’s possible, there are 2 possibilities.
Either he only operates the store for fun, and barely breaks even. (and may be possible, he seems really interested in what he does)
But even then, he may operate the store for fun and launder money for some mafia
Or it’s shady stuff period.
In the end, innocent until guilty.
Edit2: and maybe he’s just rich from his family and just does what he likes.
Interesting person to meet, probably risky
There is a pizza place. We once went in to order food. There was no food, no menu, no drinks. We stood there and asked for a menu. They looked at us like we were nuts. We turned around and left.
To be fair, after COVID some of the diners started to only do delivery. So maybe it was that (most likely not, though)
Nice try FBI.
There’s a cafe near me that’s open 24/7. I’ve been in there a couple of times and the coffee is horrible, the last time I visited the guy behind the counter didn’t know how to turn on the espresso machine and had to call his boss.
But I’m 100% certain all those people turning up at 1am are just getting a caffeine hit before heading to the clubs
I have 2 places like that near me. Both aren’t 24/7 but no one knows anything about how the stores are run. One is a cafe and the other is a gelato shop.
You would think the gelato shop would be busy during the summer but there are always 3-4 guys chain smoking in front of the shop. It is so bad they had to put a walled off section in front of the shop to keep the smoke from going to the neighboring stores. So pretty sure it is a front for something
There’s a HSBC branch, does that count?
There was (maybe still is) a cake shop in Southgate, North London. About a minute from my old flat.
The cakes in the window display rarely changed, if ever.
The guy running it looked like if you imagine the toughest prisoner at a prison, only wearing an apron.
About 50/50 whether the glass would be smashed whenever you walked past.
It was often “open” and had people coming in and out of it at 2-3am when I came back from nights out.
And there was a drive-by shooting right in that area while I lived there, that I always assumed was related. 😅
I feel like half of London could be listed here. Everyone knows about the American candy shops around Oxford St. I live in South London and every other shop is a vape shop or mobile phone accessory/repair shop. Not saying they are all fronts but they feel like it.
The fact that vape and phone accessory shops are often combined into one is particularly fishy…
Lately I’ve been seeing CBD and vape products get added to the shelves of small local businesses that are otherwise unrelated. Like a small consignment store that specializes in kids clothing (i love that place because I can replace my kids entire wardrobe when they hit a growth spurt for about $100)
That’s a movie idea right there, starring Vinnie Jones and Matt Berry
