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

by Rick Harrison

  If you wanted to know what America looks like when it’s off the rails, when it’s letting its hair down and not giving a shit, you needed to spend a night in Vegas on a Mike Tyson fight night.

  And if you happened to be working the night window at Gold & Silver Pawn on a fight night, you never had a second to yourself. You got to see the drifters, the leftovers, the people who spilled down Las Vegas Boulevard, away from the glitz and glamour and bright lights. People would be frenzied down here, too, like the sidewalks were electrified. It was unlike anything else.

  The rise and fall of Tyson seemed like a uniquely Vegas story. He moved here permanently shortly after he won the heavyweight title, and all his outlandish stories seemed to take place here. He bought a ridiculously huge estate, married Robin Givens, had tigers and cheetahs and whatever other exotic animals as pets—he was an outsized Vegas story in every respect.

  Everything about Tyson was big news around here. When it started coming out that he was essentially bankrupt, a gang of five landscape guys came into the shop. They were down and out, and they were carrying all their tools to pawn.

  About two weeks later, they came marching in together, laughing and joking. They were as happy this time as they were sad the last time. They paid to get their stuff back, and one of them said, “Now it’s time to go shopping.”

  I said, “I’ve got to ask: You guys win the lottery or something?”

  They laughed at that, and one of them said, “No, but close. We just got crazy money for repossessing all of Mike Tyson’s palm trees.”

  It turned out a nursery had hired them to go to Tyson’s house and pull all of these enormous palm trees out of the ground, load them up, and bring them back. They were getting a few hundred dollars per tree.

  That, to me, is a quintessential Vegas story.

  One man’s misfortune is another man’s fortune.

  CHAPTER 5

  Old Man

  If there’s one lesson I’ve taught my son Rick and my grandson Corey, it’s the importance of taking sentiment out of business. You can probably gather from watching the television show that I’m not a sentimental guy when it comes to people’s stuff, but I’m going to tell you straight-out anyway.

  If a guy comes marching into the shop spouting about sentimental value, I’ve got no time for it. “Oh, this means so much to me and my family.” Really? Then go home and put it in a goddamn drawer. ’Cuz that’s where it belongs. And ’cuz I ain’t paying for your sentimental value.

  Besides, it’s not my sentiment; it’s yours. To me, it’s just something I have to store and then sell. I love the rare and unusual stuff that comes through the door, but I only like it if it’s something I can make a buck from. If it ain’t, then it doesn’t mean anything to me. I’m worried about two things: The price I pay and the price I sell. I’m pretty black-and-white that way.

  There’s a phrase I heard a long time ago and adopted as my own: All gold is not yellow. I think it fits my philosophy: If I can make money off something, I’m going to buy it. I can sell anything. I could walk out of my office right now and sell every single thing in the case. I might not get the price I want for it, but I could sell it. No doubt in my mind.

  I tell my employees, “Use common sense.” There are a lot of things I want to buy, but I’ll let stuff walk if I can’t get it at the price I want. And I know one thing: There’s always going to be something walking in behind it. It’s a lot like poker, and I know about poker, too. I supported myself in the navy playing poker, and blackjack, and loaning out money on account of me being the paymaster. I’ve been playin’ poker one way or another every day since.

  I’ll tell you something else: Being a television personality makes it a lot harder for me to get my work done. Before we had the television show, we had twelve employees. Now we have forty-seven. We’ve got an entire crew of people who do nothing but sell T-shirts and bobbleheads and other kinds of crazy stuff.

  A lot of it’s crazy stuff with Chumlee’s face plastered all over it. I see enough of that guy to know I don’t want to be walking around with his face on my T-shirt. Or shot glass. Or baseball cap. Or whatever else they can think of to put his face on.

  We’ve had to turn the daily operation of the shop over to people outside the family because we’re so involved in filming and promoting the show. We’ve got departments for this, and departments for that. It ain’t what it used to be. I still come to work every day, though, no later than 7:30 A.M., and I try to keep track of everything that comes in the shop and everything that goes out.

  Back in the day, I could tell you to within a hundred dollars how much cash we had in the safe at any given time. I could tell you within a couple hundred dollars how much business we’d done at any given time during the day.

  When we had a handful of employees, the shop was truly a family business. Now that we’re bigger, we’re still trying to run it like a family. It’s just a damned large family now. We’re doing the kind of volume that you’d associate with a big corporation, but we’re trying not to lose the sense of family. I guess every successful business goes through growing pains. I still check on my employees and make sure they’re being treated properly. We’re one of the few businesses that provides full medical benefits to every employee and their families, and they don’t pay a dime for it.

  I don’t have to work anymore. The day I walk in here and it’s not fun, I won’t walk back in the place. But damn, I love it in here. It’s new every minute. Something different every time you turn around. This type of energy is hard to find anywhere else.

  But it’s changed. I can’t deny that. On a typical day now, I get to the shop in the morning, have some coffee, and take a look at the receipts from the night crew. I make sure we open on time. I check the line outside to make sure the security people are doing their jobs. That’s another by-product of the television show: We’ve had to hire someone to stand outside to keep order and let people in sixty at a time. Some mornings there are a hundred people out there waiting for us to open the door.

  I can’t work the counter anymore. I can’t, Rick can’t, Corey can’t, Chumlee can’t. Not that I want Chumlee working the counter, but he can’t anyway. I can’t tell you the name of someone who walked in here and pawned something, even if it was Barack Obama or Tom Cruise. It’s against the law. So if I’m standing at the counter writing up a ticket for a pawn, there are fifty people crowded around taking pictures and videos. It kind of takes the “private” out of “private transaction,” so we have to stay in the back of the store unless we’re filming or someone comes in with something unusual we have to take a look at.

  The only time we come out is to pose for pictures. It sure is nice that people like us enough to go out of their way to come into the shop and get their picture taken with an old man like me, but we can’t stand there all day long. Sometimes people get irritated when I tell ’em I’ve got to go back and do some work.

  So that’s what success has caused: I can’t even work in my own shop.

  Ain’t that the damnedest thing?

  I tell people I’ve got one of the most dysfunctional families in the world, but I do my best to hold it together. I think I do a good job of that. It might not always be pretty, but we make it work.

  Here’s something you should probably know about Rick as a kid: He was a fucking handful. That’s the only way I can accurately put it. They all were, but he was the worst.

  You want an example? I’ll tell you a story: When Rick was a teenager, we took a family trip to Hawaii. I was in the navy, so we stayed in a military hotel on Oahu. I was feeling generous and we were on vacation, so I gave each of the three boys twenty bucks a day to buy some food and whatever else.

  As far as I could tell, the vacation went well. The kids stayed out of our hair and had their fun. I didn’t hear any complaining.

  On the morning we were flying back to San Diego, I checked out of the hotel and got hit with a six-hundred-dollar restaurant and room service
bill. That’s when I learned Rick was ordering from room service and eating from the restaurant and charging everything to the room. He was eating goddamn lobster on my dime.

  What a horrible little kid he was.

  The biggest problem I’ve had with Rick over the years is simple: He’s smarter than me, and he knows it. Now, don’t get the wrong idea: I’m pretty damn smart myself. But that kid was always a step ahead of everybody, whether it was teaching himself to build his own house or becoming an expert in old coins or figuring out how to put a lobster dinner on my hotel tab. He’s book smart and street smart. That’s a tough combination for any dad.

  * * * *

  I went into the navy in October 1958 and got out for the first time in February 1962. I stayed out for fourteen months, and I went back into the navy to get medical benefits for my daughter Sherry.

  JoAnne and I have been married for fifty-one years, and there have been some ups and downs along the way. We’ve had our share of heartbreak. Little Sherry was born disabled, with Down syndrome. She was the light of my life for the short time we had her. She was six when she passed away, and there’s a little bit of her still alive in all of our hearts. I believe that.

  I loved the navy. It kept me away from home a lot, though. I was on ships for most of the 1960s and ’70s, and by the time the three boys—Joe, Rick, and Chris—became teenagers it became too hard for JoAnne to handle. I had been in about twenty years by that time, and I would have stayed in for thirty, but three teenagers changed those plans.

  I told my wife when I came home that I’d never leave her again, and I haven’t. Except for going to work, we’ve been together ever since. That’s one of the reasons I don’t go on all the publicity tours for the show; she’s in pretty poor health, and it’s too hard for her to travel. She tells me to go anyway, but I didn’t until Chumlee and I went on a trip to Indiana to do a personal appearance at an Indian casino. The people there seemed like they couldn’t get enough of us. But other than that, I go to the shop and head home to JoAnne. It’s all about demographics and I don’t fit the demographic. That’s fine with me; I’d rather stay home and work anyway.

  It’s funny to me that we’re so closely associated with Las Vegas, because I had no idea I’d ever end up here. My wife opened her real estate office in San Diego in 1973. She ran it, and I worked part-time there. It went along pretty well until 1981, when interest rates got up to 18 percent and we damned near went completely bankrupt.

  I had to do something. We didn’t have much, and I’d always bought and sold gold on the side for a little extra cash. The real estate market didn’t have any appeal to us anymore, and we weren’t about to sit around and wait for it to recover.

  I got the idea to move to Las Vegas and open a store where I could sell gold and silver, maybe get to the point where I could open a pawn shop someday. Why not Vegas, right? It’s got to be the best place to be a hustler, and at that point hustling’s about all I had going for me.

  We moved out here in April of 1981 with about $5,000 to our name. I opened my little buy-and-sell store in a three-hundred-square-foot shop at 1501 South Las Vegas Boulevard. Called it Gold & Silver Coin Shop. Five years later we moved from that spot to Fremont Street, near the huge downtown parking garage, and in 1987 we got our license as a secondhand store.

  We lost our lease there and eventually landed where we are now in 1988. It hasn’t been easy, I’ll tell you that, and if Rick hadn’t been so goddamned persistent about getting us a pawn license in 1989 I don’t know where we’d be right now. Can you believe Rick called the city statistician every single week? That’s the kind of persistence I admire. It’s a family trait.

  People want to know the secret to success. Here’s mine: I worked seven days a week, ten hours a day, for ten years with no vacation. That ain’t a secret, that’s just life. I had to do that to make this place work. I was so damned stubborn I wouldn’t quit. I didn’t know how it was gonna work, and I didn’t know if it was gonna work. I just knew I had to be here to make it work. It wasn’t gonna happen all by itself.

  There are moments that can change your life as a businessman. Sometimes it’s luck, sometimes it’s hard work, sometimes the two come together. Getting a television show is one moment. Another one happened to me before we got our pawn license, when we were running the little gold and silver shop in the early 1980s on Las Vegas Boulevard South.

  A fella by the name of Al Benedict was president of the MGM Grand. At the time, the MGM was probably the biggest and best-known casino/hotel in Vegas. Well, one night Al was robbed of close to a hundred grand in jewelry, and the Vegas cops made it known it was a priority to find whoever did it and make him pay.

  Within hours of the robbery they distributed photos of the jewelry along with an artist’s sketch of the suspect. They knew the robber might end up at a pawn shop or a secondhand store or a hole-in-the-wall, three-hundred-square-foot buy-and-sell store like ours. It was a good bet this guy wasn’t stealing a hundred grand worth of jewelry because he liked the design. We taped the flyers to the back of the counter, where we could see them but the customers couldn’t.

  Sure enough, a couple of days later a guy comes waltzing in with some jewelry. He fits the composite sketch, and the jewelry matches up, too. I talked to him for a little bit and tried to distract him while I grabbed a shotgun out from underneath the counter. I held that shotgun down around my knees so he couldn’t see it until I came around the corner. By then, it was too late for the poor son of a bitch.

  I was probably a little quicker on my feet back then, and when I got around the corner, I pointed the shotgun at his chest and told him to hit the goddamned floor or bits of him would be all over the shop. I stood over him with the shotgun until the cops got there. Damned guy got more than he bargained for, if you ask me. By the look on his face, I don’t think he expected that kind of reception.

  The Vegas police showed up and cuffed him. Shook my hand, too. I made them look good, and from that point forward we were treated right by the police. We helped them, and they helped us. To this day, if we hit the alarm in the shop, they’re here within seconds.

  Al Benedict was happy about it, too. I was a VIP in the MGM for as long as he was in charge. He told all his employees to treat me right, and I couldn’t even leave a tip in that building for a long, long time.

  It didn’t stop there. They sent business our way, too. The rich Japanese gamblers who couldn’t get markers? MGM sent ’em to us with their Rolexes and Patek Philippes. They sent their winners to us, too—people who had taken the MGM’s money and maybe wanted to buy a Rolex or Patek Philippe. It worked for both sides.

  But the way I look at it, that bastard with the stolen jewelry was trying to screw me over, too. I wasn’t going to sit back and let him rob me by selling the shop something hot. But the whole Rambo deal with the shotgun wasn’t a big deal. It wasn’t the first time I stuck a shotgun in someone’s face to protect my business interests.

  Who knows? It might not be the last, either.

  I love crazes. That’s something I taught Rick, and he taught Corey. It’s the lifeblood of this business. I love it when people get excited over something like a Tickle Me Elmo doll and we can make money off their craziness. People go wild over stuff and they’re willing to pay anything to get their hands on something they think might be worth more down the line.

  And then, just as fast, these crazes end. You don’t know when they’re going to start, and you don’t know when they’re going to end. Your only hope is that you can get into that wave at the right time and ride it as long as it lasts.

  Like Rick says, if you have a sociology degree, you’d throw it away if you spent a day watching the people in the shop. You can learn more about human nature here than in any classroom.

  Here’s a short list of things that made us serious money: blue jeans, Zippo lighters, bomber jackets, Tickle Me Elmo dolls, baseball cards, comic books.

  Bomber jackets. Oh, I loved bomber jackets.r />
  Back in the day—when we were just a gold and silver shop—a guy came in with a ton of stuff to sell. People knew I would buy things and then look to sell them at flea markets and swap meets. He had model trains and dolls and comic books and a hundred other things. Deep in the pile of stuff were two World War II bomber jackets.

  That weekend we gave the bomber jackets to a good friend who was setting up a booth at a flea market. He put those two bomber jackets on the counter, and within minutes a couple of Japanese guys walked up and tried them on.

  “How much for these jackets?” one of them asks.

  “Seven each,” our friend says.

  They don’t blink an eye. They nod their heads and reach into their pockets, where they pull out a roll of hundreds and peel off seven thousand each for the bomber jackets.

  Our friend was thinking seven hundred, but he didn’t argue.

  That’s when we knew bomber jackets were going to be another irrational craze.

  And that’s when Rick started doing whatever he could, just short of breaking his neck, to get his hands on bomber jackets.

  One thing you’ve got to do in this business: Be careful who you hire. We’ve lost half a million dollars to employee theft over the years. We deal so much in cash, the temptation is great. And if the economy’s bad for the people coming into the store, it’s probably bad for the people looking for a job in the store. We’ve got to be careful, because some people are looking for the easy way out.

  I’ve got one guy who sits all day long looking at the cameras. The cameras are on the employees. That’s his job—to sit there and watch the employees.

  Right now, as I sit here, we’ve got more than a million dollars out in loans. I have $290,000 worth of stuff sitting in the back room that we paid out in pawns over the last thirty days. It’s a bookkeeping nightmare: We’re buying stuff every day, stuff comes off pawn every day. But I’ll tell you what: We balance the cash every day to within two or three dollars.