For those of you flooding me with (imaginary) hate mail deriding my subject matter as frivolous and impractical, I present to you:
IMAGINARY COMPANIES CAPTURE NAZI WAR CRIMINALS!
Okay… a bit hyperbolic. But still true.
The year is 1985, and budget cuts have ravished the US Marshals Service. There are fugitives that need wrangling, and not enough law men to rope them all in. Suddenly, the dusty old agency is aflutter with creative energy as some smarty pants flicks on his light bulb halo and gets to scheming. They pull off two brilliant ops, but then quickly go back to (expensive & inefficient) business as usual – no doubt hammered back into mediocrity by the dead-eyed bureaucrats in charge. Here’s the skinny on the going when it was good:
Puño Airlines
Miami, FL
Puño was a fictitious airline made up by the Fugitive Investigative Strike Team (FIST) division of the US Marshals Service. They quietly set up a check-in counter next to the Air Haiti booth, created some letterhead, and sent out 200 notes to baddies on the lam informing them that they’d won an all expenses paid trip to the Bahamas and $350 in cash. All they had to do was pack their bags and show up at Miami International Airport to claim their prize.
The gimmick netted fourteen total dupes. Among them was war criminal Konrad Kalejs, a Latvian who rounded up Jews and Gypsies for the Nazi Einsatzgruppen death squads.
LOL PWNED!
Flagship International Sports Television, Inc
Washington, DC
Same M.O. on a bigger scale. This time, 3,000 notices were sent out informing local renegades that they’d won free tickets to the Redskins – Bengals game. About 100 suckers piled into the DC Convention center for their free brunch and ticket handouts. All of the ushers, wait staff, janitors, caterers, and Flagship International employees were played by cops from Virginia, Maryland, DC Metro, and of course, our friends at FIST.
At first I was all like...
... and then I was all like...
Oh, and for the monolingual readers who missed the joke: puño is Spanish for fist. Muy engañoso!
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