And I tell him all the time I tell him: you wanna know why Reagan didn’t die when Hinckley tried to kill him? Because the whole thing was a setup. Make the cocaine pay the taxes, I’m just a patsy, here. It’s beyond an expense, it’s a fucking employee. Somehow the drug that keeps me up all night, afraid of my friends and family, desperately attempting to tie every comment and event in the media to some kind of systemic oppression (and also taking breaks to talk to old friends on the phone about how good the Sopranos is) – that’s not a business expense? Hell, the cocaine does more work than I do. I ran in there and ordered a shitty cheeseburger and I hated myself so much for not only eating shitty food but eating shitty expensive food at a shitty restaurant for tourist assholes that I decided the government should pay for it instead of myself. I was stuck in Midtown and I wanted a cheeseburger and I panicked because I as overwhelmed with options. You think that trip to the Hard Rock Café was actually a “writer’s meeting?” Fuck no it wasn’t. The cocaine is more of a business expense than half the shit I put on there anyway. It’s called being a patriot.īut what I don’t understand is this: if the government can collect on illegal income, why can’t I write off illegal spending? Why the fuck can I go to jail for not paying taxes on cocaine sales, but I can’t include the price of an eight ball on my Schedule A? I know I’m lying, the IRS knows I’m lying, but we have to lie to each other because that’s how taxes work. And then I have to make up a bunch of shit that I consider business expenses so I can get my money back. And then the government takes all my money because I forget to save my receipts. They’re small business owners and creative freelancers. The people that get fucked over by the IRS aren’t murderous criminals, but instead, chumps that made the mistake of going to college. It was also a time when alcohol was illegal, and drug use and users connoted the same type of fear and stigma in the common consciousness that are today held only by DARE officers and the extreme elderly. He didn’t pay his taxes, and they locked him up.īut that was the 1930s, a time when paying your taxes still something everybody had to do instead of just the middle class. Because Capone hadn’t laundered his money properly and had neglected to pay taxes on the massive amounts of illegal gambling and bootlegging money he had raked in, he was sent away for the most white collar crime of all. In Capone’s case, the federal government argued that all income, regardless of the legality of its source, is subject to federal taxes. That was until one clever prosecutor thought of a solution. Even though Al Capone was publically known as a criminal, it was almost impossible to convict him of anything. If a grunt in the family carried out an execution on Capone’s orders, Capone couldn’t be charged with any crime. Part of the Mafia’s (and by extension Capone’s) success stemmed from an inability on the part of government agents to nail higher ups with crimes that had been committed by those lower in the organization. Although the history of the Mafia and its most prominent members is not only well documented, but also thoroughly canonized in popular culture and imagination, there’s one figure that stands out above the rest. Prior to the 1970s, before the passage of the RICO laws that enabled federal prosecutors to crack down on organized crime, the Mafia flourished.
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