When I was in the military we sometimes had to work with the US. CIA, navy, that sort of stuff. When it comes to crime, they are very organized. Especially war crimes are their specialty.

Once in Somalia a US sailing yacht was captured by pirates. A US destroyer intercepted and opened fire without warning. The yacht was completely perforated, covered in blood. The US crew, of which they knew they were alive, well and on board, and the Somali pirates were splashed open by .50 cal fire. And because they killed the US crew on the boat, they bombed a village as retaliation, claiming they were pirates while there was clear evidence there were only fishermen.

This is just an example of the many war crimes I’ve seen them do.

Alright, I’ll bite. I got a favor from the mafia once. I had bought a motorcycle and the seller gave me an unsigned title, un-notarized. There was a Curio shop on our street - these ancient men ran it, but never sold a Curio, they did sell cigarettes and ran card games in the back of the shop. I told one what happened and he says "ah, don’t worry baby, Sam is a notary! SAM! This young lady needs something notarized. " So they signed the guys name and notarized it.
“What do I owe you?” “Nothing, honey, we do this as a favor for you, yes?”

I’m sure they are long dead now, and the curio shop some hipster bar or something . In their heyday they ran numbers and took protection money but had settled down, but it was funny, their job was sort of - if they could do it for you, and you could pay for it in some way, they would. So of course Sam was their crooked notary. And technically I owe the Mafia a small favor still.

Studied abroad, made some friends. One asked me to ride along to his work. His work wasn’t ahhh, ‘above board’ and he had pissed off his boss, so he took me along as insurance that he wouldn’t be treated badly as their govt would be very pissed to have a foreigner disappear as well. Holy smokes, that was an intensive language immersion experience.

I pay them monthly bills

I lived in a “bad” neighborhood and the family nextstore was the core of the local gang. Every so often a towncar type car would come by in the alley and talk with them from a window. I lived in another “nicer” neighborhood and it had this place called the saint josephs club that always had its blinds drawn. I used to joke that it was the legitamate bussinessmans club.

Pick your battles, know who you’re up against, respond accordingly. I’ve never been in a “gang” but I have been in a crew that tried to keep our community and our peers safe. Our local ethnocentric gangs are Bosnians and Russians. They kinda do their own thing and mostly run gambling houses and sex trafficking, and while I don’t abide the latter, I also know enough to not push it. South Siders, our local HA sub-chapter, and the various white nationalists are a different story. We’ve fought those fuckers in alleys, kicked ass and had my ass kicked. We ran the Hammerskins out of town and I’ll always be proud of that fight. But, no ego, all these people are dangerous. I’ve had friends die over these battles. One had his head stomped into an unrecognizable goo by some South Siders over a drug deal, another was trafficked by bikers from the time she was 12, and another had a biker dad that used him to move product in his teens and ended up in prison because he was the fall guy. There’s some smart, terrible, morally bankrupt folks out there.

I’ve dealt with a number of these who were coming from north African countries. Their hash was good, reasonably priced, and they were friendly. What can I say 🤷

Nonexistant

Fairly pleasant, TBH.

I worked for a summer camp specifically for kids from some particularly dicey neighborhoods. Every so often I had to go set up shop in those neighborhoods to meet with parents and whatnot. Some guys in a local gang came to talk to me, learned I was there to offer something helpful to their kids, and from then out made sure I and my car were safe whenever I had to be in the area.

Nice guys, at least in the capacity I knew them.

I grew up in a town where it was general knowledge that retired Italian mobsters retired to.

They made sure that town was clean, safe, and with very little crime. Chased out encroaching gangs and were generally an overall positive for the community.

Since they stopped retiring there a few years ago, the town has gone to shit.

I went on a ‘Business Enterprise’ programme back in the UK in the very early ‘90s. Basically it was how to run a business 101. Six sessions on different things: accounting, HR, etc. etc.

One of the other guys on the course turned out to be the son of the biggest coke dealer in the city.

He was a nice kid. By the end of the course a bunch of us had bonded and someone invited us all to a house party.

The son of the coke dealer turned up with a briefcase literally full of cocaine. That was a fucking awesome party, let me tell you.

I would say ‘Nice try FBI’, but this was back when I was a child, so fuckit, here goes…

Back when I was only 7 years old (1989), living on a ~40 acre horse ranch/junkyard, my dad and his friend decided to teach me to drive a stick shift truck. Plenty of open space ya know, so yeah…

Anyways, dad’s friend literally told me to drive through the pond in the back end of the property. It was only a couple feet deep anyways, so it shouldn’t have been any big deal right?

Well, we did exactly that, drove through the pond, only for the truck tires to end up completely shredded. So like what the actual fuck?

Apparently I ran over a bucket to a bulldozer buried in the pond.

Well, as we came to find out later as time went on, the previous owner of the property had been stealing bulldozers and other county equipment, grinding off the serial numbers, repainting them, and selling them back to the county.

Yeah that caught up with him, I never actually met the previous property owner, but that motherfucker also had people removed from the gene pool if they reported him…

Very pleasant for me, my girlfriend in the late 90s and early 2000s was a mildly upmarket dealer, and I got work through her contacts which was usually safe. I ended up doing a lot of work through her dealer, who was the big fish in a town of about 300K people.

I got nice presents, got paid to chaperone his daughter and her friends for a week (free holiday!), got better work contacts for myself, very cheap electrical goods, free drugs, and had a favour I never got around to calling in.

I did spend a day digging up his garden looking for a nine bar of resin that he’d buried while high, which was hard work (we didn’t find it), and there was a time I was interviewed by police while I was hiding enough speed in my house that it’s sale could have bought said house, but it was otherwise just an informal business relationship with occasional blowjobs.

10/10 would do again.

I had a friend who lived deep in the ghetto. So deep she was swarned by cops on multiple occasions while going home because “the only reason a white person would be in this area is to buy drugs.”

Her next door neighbor was the largest xanax dealer in the city, and there were a few sell houses on the street.

Everyone there was amazing. They were all super friendly and we got invited to parties and BBQs constantly.

I was driving on I-70 and saw a member of an MC execute someone.

One of my dad’s friends is in a local chapter of the same MC.