They sell “gift baskets” and the website still says “order now to get your basket in time for the 2021 holiday season”.
They’ve got a big banner out front that says “RUG DEALER”.
Dude, that’s just hair club for men.
I used to live round the corner from a strange little place that sold cassette tapes (what we used for music and sometimes even data before CDs, for those too young to know). Everyone was convinced it was a front but it turned out it was a world famous tape supplier. Just happened to be based in my quiet little back street.
The newsagents next door to my last place have to have been a front though. Shelves were half bare, only ever stocked with stuff that doesn’t go off. Always two or three guys hanging out in the back room, looking slightly surprised if you wanted to buy something. Cash only, no cards (not that unusual round here but they usually have a minimum purchase rather than just no card machine at all these days).
They were absolute sweethearts. Took loads of deliveries for us, always really nice about it. And that’s more evidence that it’s a front. Proper criminals are the best neighbours anyone could ask for because the last thing they want is complaints bringing the police to their door.
I used to get my hair cut buy these two dudes that owned a little barber shop and every once in a while some shady looking guy would come in and they’d stop mid haircut and go into the back for however long they were gone for. Eventually, the random dude would leave and I’d get my haircut finished. I was working as a cook so I’d show up on line a Tuesday at 11am. Place would be dead otherwise. I grew up around there and I’d been going for a long time so they weren’t worried about me.
One thing that was crazy about this place is the only magazines were like guns and ammo type magazines. In Canada. Highly unusual. This was back when a barber shop was still likely to have a few “gentlemen’s magazines” lying around. Not them, just guns. :)
Super sus, but you make it sound like such a cool place. What happened to it? Vice squad raid? :(
Mattress stores that stay open 24/7, pretty sure you send them a mattress full of cash and they deliver you a mattress full of coke
There are mattress places in my town in locations that have to cost a significant sum to rent that are “by appointment only.”
I never see anyone go in or out, and I’ve not known a single person who would schedule an appointment just to buy a forking mattress.
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Chicago has a weirdly high number of mattress chain stores. There’s a stretch near me that has 3 of them in the span of 4 blocks. They’ve all been there for awhile and there’s rarely ever anyone in them. No way these are legit businesses considering how often people buy mattresses.
tl;dr I was wrong.
I used to go to a restaurant that I was sure was a front.
Years ago I was walking home from the gym and I got peckish. I was in one of the less fancy areas of Manhattan so I didn’t think twice about just walking into the first place I saw.
The second I walked in I decided it was a big mistake. This place looked fancy. Nice place settings, real wood furniture, etc. I was dressed like a bum and probably smelled bad.
But the head waiter came out and treated me like royalty. Fresh baked bread, a sauteed flounder that he filleted right at the table and all around baller service at a very reasonable price. I was the only person there but it was early so I didn’t think much of it. I figured that if their food and service was this good when they thought I was a bum this is the place for me. I dropped a 100% tip and decided I’d go once a week and if I ever found a date I’d impress the hell out of her when we roll into a nice restaurant and the head waiter greets me by my first name and treats me like a big shot (aside: the first and only girl I brought there didn’t like their vegetarian options but ended up marrying me anyway).
Ever time we went the place was practically empty. This was one of the less fancy areas of Manhattan but they were still paying Manhattan rent. The food was always top notch and did I mention how awesome the service was? Mooci, the waiter once came back from vacation and insisted that I try some of the moonshine from his Sicilian Mother. Constant freebies too.
We decided there’s no way they could be turning a profit and assumed it was a mob front. Some older NYers may remember when the story broke that SPQR was a mob front, so it seemed pretty likely.
Well a few years ago we went back after moving out of state. The restaurant was under new management and everything sucked. Crappy place settings, shitty generic food and I didn’t recognize anyone there. It turns out they weren’t a mob front. They were just great cooks that sucked at running a business and ran out of money :(
I mean, Sicilian and living in NY, I would suspect it was a front too.
Where I live they legalized marijuana, but didn’t issue licenses for legal dispensaries for almost two years. Nearly every corner store and head shop is a front . There’s even a pizza shop near by with weed for sale openly.
Pizza and weed sounds like a good business model, tbh
To be fair, when I slung pies in a college town back when, one of the night guys was a local shroom dealer and would take orders for “custom” pizzas. We didn’t do delivery, so little bundles of fun went out the window inside the pizza boxes (tucked in with the parm & chili flake packets) on the regular.
Funny story, when they first legalized it in Colorado but before issuing licenses, I was there for a weekend and there was a guy selling “I❤️CO” bumper stickers, but where the heart is a weed leaf, for 50 bucks a piece that come with a complementary eighth. He delivered like a pizza guy.
That happened a lot in NY too, I think we called them sticker shops
Which state? Asking for a friend.
Town of 20k people, we had a wool shop… just sold wool only. Always thought it was a front, years later found out they won the lotto(2mil) blew it all keeping the wool shop open almost 10 years with zero customers lol
I knew a guy in my town who worked a shitty job at the Oasis factory making the green foam that florists stick flowers into, just so he could keep a tiny book store he owned open. As an adult, I now wonder if he also sold weed on the side.
Aww, that’s touching. I hope his store made him so happy that he didn’t care about his foam drudgery
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You do have to admire that sort of commitment though.
Like wool clothing or raw wool? I love wool clothing, but who has a use for raw wool?
People who make wool clothing!
I would have thought they meant finished yarn for knitters and crocheters (and likely accessories for knitting and crocheting.)
Are you in Switzerland? Another commenter was mentioning a wool shop with no customers that seemed like a front, lol.
Hell yeah, now that’s how you make good use of an unexpected influx of cash
Tax write off, get thee behind me, capital gains tax!
There is a Psychic and Tarot card place in my town that I never see anyone going in or out of but always has at least two or three high end sports cars in the parking lot. Something is paying for those cars and it ain’t palm reading.
These usually aren’t fronts per se. They do everything there. Tax prep, scams, consulting, private eyes. These psychic places are never JUST a psychic place that’s usually just what the sign says.
You know you’re screwed when you need a psychic to prepare your taxes.
That’s a bit of a stretch. The most likely explanation is that they clearly foresaw the lotto numbers.
A lot of car washes popping up near me with a monthly fee unlimited washes program that I’m positive is just a better version of what Walter did in Breaking Bad. Scan your app’s QR code and away you go, meanwhile someone behind the scenes rings it up as a cash sale and throws $15 into the till.
An appliance store in my area. There are always crazy nice cars out front. Car brands I don’t even recognize. The store is super crappy looking and run down. Went in one time when we were looking for fridges. Everything was so expensive. Very old models of fridges out on the floor. No customers. Very weird.
Sounds like one of the car dealerships around here. Lots of expensive luxury cars. All white. I never see anyone there. The place is way too expensive for the shitty neighborhood its in.
Stores that sell very expensive items would only need to make 2 or 3 sales a month to stay a float. For example, if you sell super cars, you just need to sell around seven cars a year and still make profit.
There is a wool shop that never has any customers, in the center of town, so not cheap real estate, and I saw someone go in there after looking in the windows, and got yelled at to get out.
It’s in Switzerland, so shady financial stuff isn’t exactly rare.
Not defending this particular wool shop but often those sorts of specialty shops also have an online side. Weird that they would throw customers out though
Eh, it also depends on where you live. I don’t know what it’s like over there, but we have an addiction crisis where I live. People steal many odd things, sometimes because they like them, sometimes to sell them, and other times because they hatch a crazy plan that they give up on halfway through.
We definitely have certain people that are regularly kicked out of stores due to prior misbehaviour. (Assult, theft, biohazard stuff, etc.) Sometimes there’s only so much that you can deal with from the same person, you know? It can get to the point where you just ban someone.
Which canton of Switzerland?
Basel Stadt.
Oh, yup, makes sense and sounds reasonably suspicious haha
I’m not saying all cash-only bars are laundering money, but I am saying that the owner is probably at the very least not declaring all of their profits.
It’s usually just not declaring profits in my experience, it’s brutally addictive to slap 30% ish profit on top of everything.
My boss at a pizza place had 2 registers he would use for various reasons but it all boiled down to one being reported to the IRS and the other not.
I know a liqour store that has a small bar inside thats cash only, I got friendly enough with a manger that basically admitted the locals that hung out there were mostly blue collar and came in after work where they got payed cash. Meanwhile the retail liqour customers largely were card users. So the owner made the bar cash so he could report less. Makes sense why its the cheapest bar around by a large margin.
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Not declaring all your profit is actually the opposite of laundering money, so it’s going to be one or the other, never both
Galaxy brain: Opening a front to launder your main business’s undeclared profits.
Circle back to: the reason you launder money in the first place
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There are none that I know with 100% certainty, but there are a few types of businesses that are generally known to be fronts where I come from (and I suspect in many cities), and there are a few specific ones I’m confident are fronts.
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Massage parlors are commonly fronts for prostitution all over the world, or offer “extra” services. This is so common that many of them have prominent signs explicitly saying they do NOT.
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I swear, there must be more video stores than there are working VCRs in my city. And they seem to have kept mostly the same stock of VHS tapes for the past 30 years. They are rumored to be fronts for, again, prostitution.
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I have strong suspicions about psychic readers. There are a ton of them, and many are open at odd hours of the night in places that are not busy enough to get any legitimate foot traffic.
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Gyms are all fronts for…gyms. I mean, the gym business is corrupt enough that I feel like that counts.
Helsinki is, for some reason, full of massage parlours.
There’s a neighbourhood called Kallio that was formerly rather cheap but has become much more expensive and gentrified, and the massage parlours remain. I have no idea how they can afford their rent, as I’ve never seen anyone going into or coming out of one of those venues.
Obviously they provide “extra services”, but I don’t think that can be enough to sustain them. I suspect money laundering from drug sales etc.
Please reassure me Roskapankki is still operating.
Some friends of mine saw them carry a dead rat out the back room and throw it out onto the street while they were waiting for me there.
Yeah, it’s still there, but I’ve not been in for ten years.
I see things haven’t changed ;)
If you are in NYC, usually, from my understanding they are fronta for multi-family kinda squat houses. That’s why the curtains are so close to the front door and you almost never see anyone in there…actually, in all my time I’ve never seen anyone in one of those places. But they’re all set up the same. Pull back those curtains and it’s like a huge illegal house
You’re talking about psychic readers in NYC? I’ve definitely seen some foot traffic in the places downtown.
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There is a pizza place. We once went in to order food. There was no food, no menu, no drinks. We stood there and asked for a menu. They looked at us like we were nuts. We turned around and left.
To be fair, after COVID some of the diners started to only do delivery. So maybe it was that (most likely not, though)
We have a fireworks shop. They just sell fireworks, and are open all year round. In the UK we have like 4 days a year when it’s acceptable to set them off.
They even have a number in the window for you to ring outside of regular opening hours.
It might as well just be called Mike’s Heroin and Weed Shop.
There’s a few in Bradford, but then again we’re pretty much guaranteed a display at around 11pm every night.
