I grew up in a town called Charlottesville Va (C’ville). It is where the University of Virginia (UVA) is located. C’Ville was a straight up college town back then.

I attended the public school and one of my best friends attended a small Private school.

So my friend and I got hired by a guy to do odd jobs for him. Move that to there, take this stuff to one of his rental apartments. Just sort of random handyman stuff. We really loved it as it wasn’t a lot of hours but it was enough to get us pocket change, that we mainly used to buy pot.

The guy had a number of apartments in C’Ville, a pretty good sized farm that my buddy and I and other kids, the guy hired, would do the odd jobs at. He had at least three crews who did stuff like this.

The guy had arrange a number of scholarships to prestigious universities for kids at that private school. My friend’s brother had a full ride to Carnegie Melon that this guy had arranged.

The guy let a lot of the kids from the private school hang around his house. Which when I got to be an adult I realized how strange and wrong that was. Back then that was no big deal.

For all the bullshit lamenting that you see online about how kids in the 80s would leave at sunrise and not come home until sunset, what they are glossing over is just how many doors that opens for predators and bad actors to connect with kids. Because that is exactly what happened.

In the 80s when I was in high school it was completely normal for us to be at some adults house smoking dope, drinking their beers etc. Also it was totally normal for the adults to fuck the kids. It happened all the time. Healthy adults do not spend time with teenagers.

So how the job worked we would show up at his house and he would give us our daily assignment. We would go off and do whatever it was and at the end of the day he paid us in cash.

So one day we showed up and all the other kids he had hired were also at the house, which was strange because we rarely all saw each other.

He was no where to be found and his house was wide open. There were a few legal looking documents on his kitchen table. He had been arrested by the C’vill PD for embezzling money from UVA.

As we learned later from the newspaper later he had embezzled a lot of money from UVA. The scholarships he was “funding” was from money he was embezzling. The scholarship my friend’s brother had from this guy, was done. He had to leave Carnegie Mellon and went to a shitty school that his folks cold afford.

The whole thing was really weird. Why did he hire all these kids? Why was he funnelling money to these scholarships. I get the motivations for stealing money. That is easy to understand, but why do all the other shit? It had to be some sort of self image thing.