Re: Chicago Wins Again! - Literal Highway Robbery

On 2025-04-09 3:37 PM, BTR1701 wrote:

In Chicago, men of a certain unsurprising demographic dressed as parking
attendants are surrounding cars before they even exit the freeway and
demanding money to park at Comiskey Park.
 In a (not-so) shocking twist, if you don’t give them the $40 they’re
demanding, they become violent.
  https://video.twimg.com/amplify_video/1908162578641027072/vid/avc1/650x480/wAy_4va6RimmcLHu.mp4?tag=16
 Well done, Chicago. Even in L.A. you don't get held up on the freeway by
masked bandits like it's an 1820s stagecoach robbery or something.
 

My friends and I were actually victims of something similar at a car race around 45 years ago. We were at Mosport, which is a couple of hours north-east of Toronto, camping for the weekend while we took in some motor racing. Mosport had provided a huge pile of "firewood" - actually, they were chairs like the ones we'd had in our high school cafeteria - and as we approached in a car, a guy came over and told us it would be $5 for a trunk full. We were a little surprised but Mosport had obviously spent some money getting that wood so we coughed up the $5, took a trunkful of wood, and went our way. It was only later that we heard that the people collecting the money had nothing to do with Mosport, who had provided the wood for free.
I had wondered why the guy who approached us spoke so quietly and realized after the fact that he must have been trying to be discrete so that no one else nearby could tell us the wood was free. I seem to recall other guys also approaching people that were coming for wood so I'm not clear if it was an organized scam or if other people just spontaneously started imitating the first guy when they saw his scam was working. (There were several big piles of wood around the park but I have no idea if the same scam was used at the other piles.)
I also remember a bit of an epilogue to the whole thing later on that long weekend: the wood piles (or at least the one we had gone to) were set on fire and all the remaining wood burnt. I suspect that was a bit of protest from people who'd been ripped off by the scam.
I should also point out that no one was threatened or abused if they chose not to give these guys $5 for firewood. I'm sure we were free to drive away and look elsewhere if we liked. But it probably would have cost us more than that to drive to some other supplier of firewood and it might have taken a while given that Mosport isn't in any town. I didn't see anyone tell these guys to fuck off and then helped themselves to the wood for free so I don't know what would have happened; I *suspect* they would have simply got their wood for free without any kind of altercation.
I would think the baseball team could arrange to get a couple of cops (on- or off-duty) to hang out at the offramp to discourage these scammers (and chase them if they try to leave on their scooters); it would go a long way to rehabilitating the image of the team and the city for tolerating that nonsense. (I saw the bit where the police car tried to stop them but the scammers just scattered on their scooters. The cops should have been on comparable vehicles that could give chase.)
--
Rhino