He Makes His Living Secretly Tailing Cigarette Thiefs

People continue to fascinate me, as I meet them on my travels and while going about our town spreading the word about the new Deerfield Attractions website. I met a man the other day over a beer who told me was in the security business.

“What kind of security,” I asked, sipping a Steel Rail? “Tobacco and alcohol,” he said seriously. He had a shaved head and muscular arms. He told me about a whole world I’d never thought of before. “You know when you see those delivery trucks, bringing cigarettes to stores? Some times the driver will say he’s missing bundles, these are packs of a few hundred cartons. They’re worth $1500 apiece. If they go missing, we follow the driver over the next few weeks and surveil him. If a storeowner says our load is light, or that we’re missing some of the order, we follow it up.

“You would not believe how many times we find someone stealing. If you think about it, those trucks are like Brink’s trucks…between $250 and 300,000 bucks worth of smokes aboard.

He sets up stings to catch dishonest drivers and conniving clerks who try to report ciggies as missing when they’re not. I thought about what it would be like to spend all of your days secretly tailing cigarette thiefs, and lying clerks. Must make it hard to trust your best friend or your wife after a while.