License to Pawn: Deals, Steals, and My Life at the Gold & Silver

by Rick Harrison

  He always came in carrying bags of gold. Piles of it.

  “I need to pawn,” he said. “Casinos won’t give me no credit.”

  The casinos wouldn’t give him credit because there was no way for them to hold him accountable for his gambling debts. Once he left the country, they were out of luck. And the kind of money he gambled wasn’t available at the nearest ATM. This guy needed serious cash.

  And that’s why the casinos, although they wouldn’t give him credit, knew exactly where he could get some cash. Not only that, but they would personally drive him there—in style.

  He didn’t sell his gold because he always wanted to get it back. He’d pawn it, gamble to his heart’s content, and then get money wired in to retrieve the gold. It was just the way he chose to do business.

  On every visit after his first, he would bring us gifts. He was a gregarious, happy guy, but it was clear to us from the beginning why he insisted on pawning his gold instead of selling it: It wasn’t his to sell. He was gambling with his country’s money.

  Oh, well—we aren’t here to judge.

  If medical researchers want to attempt to find the gambling gene, I’ve got the perfect family for them to study. These people—and again, it’s important that I be somewhat vague—were phenomenally thorough in their compulsion to gamble.

  The father owned several large antique shops in another state. When he died, the wife moved with her three sons—all in their thirties—to Las Vegas. They closed the stores and kept the merchandise.

  All they did was gamble. All day every day, gamble gamble gamble.

  We were their bank. One of the sons was the “banker” in their gambling enterprise, and he came into the store so frequently he should have had his own key. He’d pawn and pick up, pawn and pick up. One day I looked at him and said, “How in the world do you keep track of all this?”

  He shrugged and said, “Oh, it’s not that hard. We have a pretty good system.”

  They had been doing business with us for about eighteen months when curiosity got the best of me. I logged onto the computer to add up their pawns and pickups.

  It takes a lot to astound me, but I was astounded.

  Over the course of a year and a half, they’d had thirteen hundred pawns and thirteen hundred pickups. Thirteen hundred! A lot of times it was the same stuff going in and out, probably a couple of hundred items total, but still—this floored me. How could they possibly do that?

  They didn’t lose one thing. Not one! They got every single item back. This was like a streak that’ll never be broken, like Joe DiMaggio’s fifty-six-game hitting streak. That takes planning and organization, two things not normally associated with compulsive gamblers.

  This family was an endless source of fascination for me. They had some money, and they apparently had the inventory from the businesses, but they simply wanted to live in a completely different way. These people were the embodiment of why I love what I do: unique people you’d never meet anywhere else in the world but Vegas, and nowhere else in Vegas but my shop.

  The mother was a prim, nice-looking older woman, always dressed well. She looked like she spent quite a bit of time every morning putting herself together before she went out to the casino or the pawn shop. The sons were polite, clean, articulate guys. We always had good conversations. Apparently gambling didn’t seem to tear the family apart. To the contrary, they were always together and always getting along. They didn’t act as if their chosen lifestyle was any different than anybody else’s. They enjoyed gambling, so they gambled.

  They always gambled at one particular casino. There are perks, of course, to being a frequent guest, and this casino handed out raffle coupons every time a customer won a jackpot at a slot machine. The raffle was for a new house.

  And I’ll be goddamned if they didn’t win the raffle! They were given the option of taking the house or $150,000 in cash.

  They should have taken the house.

  They chose the cash.

  Which meant we went quite a while without seeing them. There was no need to pawn the antiques with that much money at their disposal.

  And then, six months later, one of the brothers walked in with one of the antique pieces. They had gambled away the one hundred and fifty grand, and they were back to Gold & Silver Pawn to fund their enterprise the old-fashioned way.

  When he came in, he wasn’t sheepish or embarrassed. He matter-of-factly shook my hand and we discussed what had happened. I couldn’t believe it. I knew they had won the money, but when he told me it was all gone I couldn’t help myself.

  “Are you fucking nuts?” I asked him, as politely as possible.

  He kind of laughed a little, and for the first time I could see the faintest sign of embarrassment.

  “If I were you guys, I would move as far away from this town as I could,” I said. “I wouldn’t want to see another casino again in my life.”

  He shrugged as if to say, That’s life.

  I shook my head and stared at him, slack-jawed. He really didn’t have anything to say, and he didn’t get pissed off at me for being so blunt. He knew how the system worked, and the family had made its decision: This is how they chose to live.

  I wrote up his pawn slip, and things were back to normal for them. Pawn, pick up, pawn, pick up.

  It was like the raffle never happened.

  It’s hard to believe in our age of big-box stores, of Wal-Marts and Costcos and Targets, but it wasn’t all that long ago that our economy had room for specialty stores. There were stores that sold only shoes, and only dresses, and only suits. One of the more successful specialty-store chains sold only hosiery.

  This one particular chain was huge, with fifteen hundred stores across the country. The owner of the chain also owned a significant piece of a major cosmetics company. The owner had children, and one of his sons turned out to be the black sheep, slightly wild and incorrigible and not fit for the polite society that swirls around folks who own hosiery empires.

  He was nice to me, though. I liked him well enough. He was one of my customers for the better part of a decade. He might have been the family’s outcast, but he wasn’t aced out of the will. He lived in Vegas on a trust that paid him twenty-seven grand a month.

  It wasn’t close to enough.

  He got paid at the beginning of every month, and by the fifteenth of every month, he was in the shop pawning all his shit. Like clockwork.

  I was his de facto therapist. He’d come in with this sheepish look on his face and say, “Rick, I just can’t live on twenty-seven grand a month.”

  “Well,” I’d say, “I know a lot of people who’d like to try.”

  He’d laugh a little, but he really did believe that he couldn’t live on that amount of money. He gambled not for sport or entertainment or the rush. It was like he gambled for sustenance, day and night, day after day, week after week. I’m sure he had to win some of the time, but it never seemed like it changed his routine. That trust was the only thing standing between him and a cardboard box on the street.

  He was another guy you’d never guess was a degenerate gambler if you saw him walking around. He always wore a suit when he came into the shop, and he didn’t appear to have any other vices. He wasn’t a druggie, or a drinker, just a compulsive gambler. He talked about having a daughter in medical school, so maybe he had some other expenses that ate into his twenty-seven grand a month, but not enough to explain his continued presence at the pawn shop.

  He used to crack me up because he’d come in and start bragging like a little kid about things that seemed insignificant to me. He liked to gamble at the Flamingo, and one day he walked in with a big smile on his face.

  “You look happy today,” I said.

  “I am,” he said. “Last night the Flamingo gave me my own parking spot.”

  He didn’t look at this situation the way most of us would. I’m looking at him thinking, If I owned a casino where you dropped more than twenty grand every month, I’d have no prob
lem giving you a parking spot. I might even roll a red carpet up to the parking spot and make sure a hot babe met you at the door every time you put it in park.

  Him? No. He was just happy to have a special spot to park his car. Simple pleasures, I guess. It never occurred to him that he could rent an entire parking lot with the money he was losing on gambling.

  Like most of my stories, this guy’s story gets better. He had been telling me for a few years that he couldn’t wait for his fiftieth birthday. Most people dread it, but he was looking forward to it because on that day he got a $3 million payout bonus from his trust fund.

  His birthday came and he got his money.

  It took him thirty-six hours to blow it at the Horseshoe.

  He played craps and blackjack and whatever else.

  Thirty-six hours to blow three million bucks.

  I shit you not.

  He walked back into the shop, holding something to pawn. I looked at him and my jaw dropped. “No,” I said. “No. Don’t tell me . . .”

  He kind of made this sad face and shook his head and shrugged his shoulders.

  As he was telling me the story, I thought I was going to be sick. Thirty-six hours? I thought. You couldn’t stop? I didn’t say anything, though, except to tell him I was sorry.

  When he finished, there was a dead pause between us, but then he broke into a big smile.

  “You know the good part?” he asked. “When I left, they guaranteed me a room for life at the Horseshoe.”

  There are so many subcultures in our society. Races, religions, sexual orientations, occupations—representatives of all of them shop at the store. And I have learned something from each of them.

  Up until our son Jake was born in 2003, my wife Tracy worked in the store. She was a great employee. Her manner exudes calm, which is a great advantage in a place that often feels like it’s moving a million miles an hour. She was really good at helping people pick out jewelry, and she was remarkably patient with the customers. The old ladies loved her, that’s for sure.

  Another person who loved her was a transvestite who started coming in and looking at the jewelry. He was about five-foot-six, always needed a shave, and made a habit of wearing the shabbiest women’s clothes you could find. There’s nothing like a cross-dresser who has let himself go. He was quite a spectacle.

  A lot of the men in the store—especially my dad, if you can believe that—didn’t want anything to do with this guy. This was back when we had only twelve employees, so the available pool of salespeople was quite a bit smaller than it is now. This guy would walk in and clear out the counter. He might as well have been waving around an Uzi. Two steps inside the door and there’d be nobody there.

  Tracy saw this happen a couple of times, and she felt bad for the guy. She also thought we were being ridiculous and childish by avoiding him, and she was right about that, too. Anyway, she has a different attitude. She looked at him and said, “He’s fucking harmless. I’ll help him.”

  She was extremely nice to him, and he liked that. I don’t think he was used to being treated that way, so he really appreciated Tracy. Pretty soon he was spreading the word among the transvestite community in Vegas. Go see this lady named Tracy. She’ll take care of you. It didn’t take long before every transvestite in town was walking into the shop, looking around to get his bearings, and then asking, “Do you know where I can find Tracy?”

  It got to the point where we’d just call Tracy out when one of them walked in. “Tracy, customer here for you.” She knew what that meant, and the transvestites were happy when they didn’t have to come up to one of us and ask.

  Tracy had no problem with any of them, and they all bought jewelry. She had her own little subculture as her clientele. And the best part about transvestites is that they buy big jewelry. I don’t know if they were overcompensating or what, but they bought the biggest, gaudiest jewelry we had in the store, and they bought a lot of it.

  It turned out they were good for business, but when Tracy left, they took their business somewhere else. She told them, “I’m going to stay home and raise my son,” but that didn’t matter to them. They were upset, and they didn’t come back.

  I tell everyone that works for me: Don’t look down on people. If you’re nice to people, if you take a minute to talk to them, it’s good for business whether they buy anything or not. Just because they don’t look like they have money doesn’t mean they don’t have money.

  You can’t tell by looking at somebody, especially in this town, and especially in this business.

  I learned that lesson shortly after I started in the business. We were struggling to make it through every day, and one day I got impatient while waiting on this little Asian lady. She looked like she didn’t have a dime to her name. Her clothes were torn and she didn’t look like she took care of herself. She was like a bag lady who didn’t stink. She was asking me to pull out this piece of expensive jewelry and that piece of expensive jewelry, and the whole time I’m thinking this is an absolute waste of my time.

  About the time I was ready to walk away and tell her I didn’t have time to do this all day long, she pointed to one of the most expensive pieces and said, “I’ll take that one.”

  I’m stunned. I’m thinking, There’s no possible way.

  She reached down and pulled four grand out of her sock.

  Out of her fucking sock.

  With my mouth hanging open, I took the piece out and walked it over to the register.

  That’s the last time I let my assumptions affect the way I treated a customer.

  I have a pair of alligator cowboy boots in the back room that a guy literally took off his feet to sell to me.

  He walked up to me, pointed to his boots, and said, “Twenty bucks?”

  I looked them over and said, “Sure.”

  He kicked them off right there in the shop, took a twenty-dollar bill, and walked out of the shop in his socks.

  When I tell that story, people always get this disgusted look on their faces. They scrunch up their noses and ask, “And you took them?”

  I answer, “Hell, yes I did—they were my size.”

  Really, it’s just stuff. I can’t emphasize that enough. I don’t have a personal connection to it. Sure, I love a lot of the cool things we have in the shop. I love some of it so much I won’t sell it. But I always cringe when people ask, “Don’t you think it’s morally wrong to buy stuff that has sentimental value to them?”

  No. Just no. Again, it’s stuff. A roof over your head or an education for your kids is more important than a little Tiffany box that was handed down from your great-grandmother.

  Here’s a perfect example of how I view material possessions: I’ve gone through about twenty wedding rings. Most of them I’ve sold right off my finger. I don’t have one right now, but the last one I had was platinum. I sold a lady’s wedding ring in the store that was made out of platinum. My jeweler came to me and said, “We don’t have any platinum sizing stuff.”

  I took my ring off and said, “Now you do.” What was I going to do? I was getting $11,000 for the lady’s ring.

  Everybody falls in love with what they have, but sometimes what they think they have isn’t what they really have. I’ve had people come in thinking they have the perfect diamond because their grandfather bought it for their grandmother and everybody in the family always said it was a perfect diamond because Grandpa said it was.

  I have to be the one to break it to them: Grandpa was cheap.

  As you’ve seen on the television show countless times, there are a lot of fakes out there. A guy walked in one summer afternoon with his wife. He was wearing a Red Sox cap and a Red Sox T-shirt, and he was interested in selling his Red Sox 2007 World Series ring. He was a member of the organization in some behind-the-scenes capacity—bat boy or clubhouse guy—and he wanted to know how much he could get for his ring.

  Everything about the ring checked out, but when I took out my jeweler’s magnifier—known as a loupe
—and looked closely at the inside, I could see the Josten’s brand mark was not consistent with every other Josten’s mark I’ve ever seen. It was a hand-carved J and not the typical emblem.

  I showed it to the guy and explained what it was supposed to look like, but he was convinced I was wrong. He was cool about it, but his wife was starting to get agitated about one of two possibilities: (1) someone gave her husband an illegitimate World Series ring; or (2) her husband never had a real World Series ring.

  I felt bad for the guy, and someone might wonder whether anyone who came into the store would know enough to check the emblem. The answer is yes. People who are serious collectors—which means those who would consider spending more than twenty grand on a World Series ring—would make it their business to know the difference. And that’s why I don’t deal in someone else’s sentiment.

  Look, you’re dealing with a guy who buys gold teeth all the time. I’m the only pawn shop in town that’ll do that. Old people know the deal; they know the teeth are worth money. They’re the ones who come in to sell them after making sure their dentist gives the tooth to them after it’s been pulled.

  All of the young people who work in the shop will look at the teeth and say, “Ewww.”

  You know what I tell them? “Take the damn thing. You can wash your hands afterward.”

  Everybody sees the equation from my side, but they never flip it over and look at it from the other end. Take the example of the guy with the alligator boots: If he hadn’t had them, there’s a good chance he wouldn’t have eaten that day.

  The best nights in Vegas are fight nights. Big fight nights. Those nights are Vegas at its best: teeming masses of humanity flowing down the sidewalks like water; people hanging out of the windows of honking cars; degenerate gamblers throwing bones shoulder to shoulder with A-list celebrities.

  Anything’s possible on a fight night.

  The best fight nights were always the Mike Tyson fight nights, because he brought out an amazing array of humanity. The night Tupac Shakur was murdered on the street was a Tyson fight night. (Against Bruce Seldon, for you trivia buffs.) The night they closed the tables at the MGM Grand amid the stampeding frenzy of gunfire in the lobby (reported, never proved) was the night Tyson chomped on Evander Holyfield’s ear.