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

by Rick Harrison

  During Prohibition, you had to have a prescription to get whiskey. On the side of the container it says, “Recommended by physicians and surgeons.” On the front it says, “Strictly for medicinal purposes.”

  I’m not sure whether alcoholism was considered a medical condition that necessitated a prescription for grain alcohol, but I’m guessing it was. Just looking at that container and reading the restrictions and conditions fascinates me. It really wasn’t that long ago, in a historical sense, that people were dealing with that.

  And part of what I love about looking at something like the medicinal whiskey is thinking about how many different directions it can lead. There are a million tributaries that flow from each item, and each item has both a narrower and a broader story that tells something about our culture at the time.

  There’s a great Prohibition story about Charles Lindbergh. He was coming to visit San Francisco, and apparently he enjoyed a glass or two of wine. The mayor of San Francisco at the time sent some cops to Napa to get some communion wine from the famous Christian Brothers Winery, since communion (or altar) wine was the only alcohol that was legal at the time. They drove a paddy wagon and headed north from the city to load up on wine for a big dinner commemorating Lindbergh’s visit. They figured a few cases of wine would do the job.

  When the cops arrived, the winery refused to sell them any wine at all. The brothers told them there were rules to follow to make sure the winery didn’t get in trouble with the feds. They outlined what the cops would have to do in order to be eligible to purchase wine.

  First, they had to have a note from a priest. Second, every person with a note from a priest would be entitled to purchase three bottles of wine and three bottles only.

  The cops returned to San Francisco with the bad news. The mayor regrouped, and the next day there was a line of a hundred cops outside Christian Brothers Winery, each holding a note from a priest.

  Some of the weird laws make sense. It’s been a dozen years since someone tried to sell me dental gold that looks gray and ashy, but I’ve had more than a few people try it since I’ve been working in the shop. Those people get a quick response: Get the hell out. It’s a felony to sell or buy crematory gold. It’s another weird, obscure law, the kind that makes you wonder what events took place to necessitate such a law in the first place.

  And then again, some things are best left unconsidered.

  As I’ve said, television has taken away some of the one-on-one contact I have with my customers. It was an unavoidable by-product of the visibility, but it is a downside. It’s a little less personal these days.

  There are exceptions, though, and one of them is a big-time sports gambler I’ll call David. He lives for the NFL season, and he has a routine he follows for the NFL games every weekend. He bets five-team parleys for $2,000, and he always takes the Monday night game.

  The odds on a five-team are about 50:1, so it’s a $100,000 ticket for him if it hits. Being the degenerate gambler he is, he rolls in on Monday morning, broke off his ass, but he’s already hit four teams on a five-team ticket.

  He also knows the power of ready cash, which is what I have and what he needs.

  “Hey, Rick, can I borrow fifty grand to back up my bet?”

  He’s hedging here. He’ll bet the other side in the game that night, knowing he’s going to win either way. And if I lend him the money, I know I’m going to win either way, too. So I’ll take parley tickets as collateral. I see the ticket, I double-check all the scores to make sure he’s right, and I go down to the window with him to place the $50,000 bet myself. The money never leaves my hands, and I hold all the tickets until the bet is settled.

  The next day I will go down to the casino, go to the window, and collect the money. I don’t care who wins. If the hedge bet wins, he’ll pay me back my $50,000 plus the 10 percent vig. I’m making five grand either way. He’s making money either way. With long days of filming and constant demands on my time, it’s inevitable that some of that personal touch gets lost in the mix. But if David walks in next Monday morning one win away from a five-team parley, asking for $50,000, one of the guys at the counter better come and get me.

  The guys working night shift have their hands full. They cope. I worked the night shift on and off for the first ten years we had the shop. We couldn’t afford to pay more employees, so we had to take turns doing the work. It’s amazing how bold people get when they’re drunk and there’s a couple inches of bulletproof glass separating you from them. I guarantee you I hold some kind of record for most times being told to fuck off. I’d put my record up against anybody on that statistic.

  There’s another statistic I wish I’d kept track of: The number of times I was offered sex in exchange for some money out of the pawn-shop coffers. This is a good one, because imagine for a moment the type of woman who would walk up to a pawn-shop window in Las Vegas in the middle of the night and offer the guy behind the window sex. I’ve had women offer to give me a blow job for two bucks.

  I have a standard reply, too.

  “Sorry, ma’am, I have a two-tooth minimum.”

  You really can’t get mad at these people, even the ones who get pissed when you refuse them. You just have to laugh and accept them for the idiots they are.

  The basic fact is this: If you’re working the window in the middle of the night, you’re the party-stopper. You’re the asshole behind the window saying no. You might as well be a cop rolling up on them, because they come in thinking you’re their friend only to walk away thinking you’re part of the authoritarian regime or some such crap. I won’t apologize for that, because if you’re out partying on a Sunday morning at 3 A.M. and the pawn shop is the only place you can get cash, you should probably just go home.

  I don’t deal with drunk people. That’s just a basic rule. This doesn’t always go over very well, that’s for sure. When people come up and I say, “No, I can’t give you any money for that tonight,” they get pissed. Very pissed. Loud and pissed.

  And then when I say, “You’re drunk, I’m not dealing with you,” they take it up to a whole new level of pissed. I won’t budge, though, and I tell my employees the same thing. It might reduce business, but if they’re blatantly drunk I don’t believe it’s morally right for me to be complicit in their behavior. If you’re not in your right mind and you’re trying to sell me something, especially something that’s been in your family for generations, I’m guessing I stand a pretty good chance of being sued when you sober up.

  God knows I’ve been sued for everything else in the world, so I’m not interested in taking my chances with a drunk guy selling a family heirloom to get a few more drinks. Or, more likely, being sued by members of his family when they realize Mr. Black Sheep sold great-grandma’s silver tea set to get another bottle of Hennessy.

  There are different ways to cope sitting in there all night. Chumlee had his dog, a sixty-pound pit bull named Nevada, for companionship and protection. Other guys sit bug-eyed staring out the window, waiting for the next show to start.

  For many years I had a camera setup that allowed me to see what was going on at the window from home. We have regular customers who pawn expensive jewelry, and sometimes their schedules don’t coincide with mine. The cameras allowed me to look at the items people bring to the night window to ask for more money than the night shift can access. I’m in bed reading at eight most nights, while they could be wandering up to the night window at three looking to get twenty grand for pawning some expensive jewelry.

  My night guys don’t have access to that kind of dough. I trust them, but . . .

  Put it this way: You’ve got one guy in the store with ten grand in cash and everything you own in the world sitting there. It’s a good thing we have guns behind the counter and Las Vegas Metro less than three minutes away every time we hit the panic button.

  (If we accidentally hit the panic button, Las Vegas Metro is there in three minutes. This has happened four or five times over the past twenty yea
rs, and Metro has to respond the same whether the alarm is tripped accidentally or not, since they have no way of being sure. When the button gets pushed, a call immediately comes in from the police. “This is Metro, are you being robbed?” “No, it was an accident.” “OK, what are you wearing?” The guy says, “Black Gold & Silver Pawn polo, jeans, Nikes.” “OK, come out of the store with your hands up, we don’t want to see any guns.” This is a pawn shop, so they know we’ve got guns on hand. The guy will walk out the front door and there will be cops with shotguns drawn around every corner. It might be a little scary, but that’s the price you pay for pushing the damned button.)

  There was a woman who was always losing her ass gambling, and she had some rings and necklaces that she regularly pawned when she got low. They’d call me up and I’d ask, “OK, you got the rubies?” And the night guy would hold them up. “You got the diamonds?” He’d hold them up. This was stuff I’d seen a hundred times before, so I just needed to know she had them with her before I headed down there to get the money.

  I can’t count the number of times I got a call in the middle of the night to look at the cameras to assess someone’s stuff. Then if it was legit, I’d get dressed, drive to the shop, and handle the transaction myself.

  I stopped doing that a few years ago, though. Now it’s Corey’s job. He’s had to get up from a dinner in a restaurant and tell his wife, “Got to go. You pay the bill.” Everything in the family trickles downward, the way it’s supposed to.

  We took a trip to Hawaii in September of ’01, and we got stuck there when the planes stopped flying after 9/11. Rick being Rick, as Tracy would say, we spent a lot of time roaming swap meets while we were on the island of Oahu.

  There’s a huge swap meet in the parking lot of Aloha Stadium, and I was in heaven just walking around trying to find stuff that I could bring back home. (I also wanted to do some surfing, so I bought a surfboard off a kid for $15. It was cheaper than renting one.) I was amazed to find a guy at one booth selling Hawaii emergency money.

  The back story: During World War II, the massive troop buildup in Hawaii after Pearl Harbor created a massive shortage of money. There was still a great fear that Hawaii was going to be invaded by the Japanese, so the government took steps to protect U.S. currency in the event Japan took over Hawaii. The government didn’t want Japan to have the ability to reuse the money, so it created a system where Hawaii used a separate currency from the rest of the country. These bills had a big stamp on them—“HAWAII”—that kept them from circulating with normal U.S. currency. If Hawaii was invaded, the government could immediately announce that all those bills were null and void.

  After the war, those bills were recalled, but some of them pop up now and again. I got a $20 bill for $30, and I sold it back at the shop for $200. It never hurts to look around. I never know what’s going to walk through my door, but I also never know what I’m going to walk into if I take the time to look around.

  My buddy Dave Knuckles worked for me for a while. He was the best man in my wedding to Tracy, and he was a character. One day he was working the night window and a guy tried to pawn a plaster of Paris monkey head. The thing was worthless, maybe less than worthless, but the guy was only asking for $10 so Dave thought what the hell. It would make a good story, anyway.

  Well, a few weeks later the guy paid the pawn and picked it up. Probably the most ridiculous thing anybody ever repaid a loan—with interest—to pick up.

  We had one dumbass employee who bought about $5,000 worth of DeWalt tools. The customer had a line of credit with Home Depot and he was short on cash. This was his scheme: He was going to buy tools at Home Depot with his line of credit and sell them to us without even opening them.

  The employee takes the first three tools and checks them out—they’re good. We have rules on whatever we get. You’ve got to test it, which means making sure it works. Plug it in, turn the crank, whatever you need to do. Well, he tests these tools and sees the box is still sealed, the tools are intact, everything looks good.

  The guy keeps coming back with more and more tools. He’s apparently going to Home Depot every day to buy tools. The employee keeps buying them, but by now he’s just carrying the boxes into the back room and handing the guy his money.

  Corey went into the back room and started organizing these tools, and he opened more than a dozen boxes that had nothing but bricks in them. We got fleeced by this guy—for $5,000—because our employee couldn’t be bothered to open the damned boxes.

  We have a way of dealing with people who steal things. Corey’s pretty good at stuff like this, and one day someone reached over the counter and stole a Rolex. We caught him red-handed, dead to rights, stealing a Rolex out of the case.

  It’s one of those things where you can call the cops. They’re going to give the guy a ticket or take him to jail. If they press charges, he’s not going to show up in court. This whole ordeal is likely to waste six months of my life.

  Someone in the shop—I won’t say who—asked the guy, “So, you want an ass-beating or you want to go to jail?”

  Well, any self-respecting criminal will take the ass-beating any time. This guy was no exception. So this unnamed employee walks up on him and spits in his face. Then the unnamed employee says, “Wipe that off your face and I’ll break your nose.”

  The guy just stands there, and the unnamed employee says, “OK, now give me your driver’s license or ID.” The guy starts hemming and hawing—“No, don’t do that.” The employee looks at him like he’s going to make good on his promise to break the guy’s nose, so the guy reaches into his wallet and gives him his driver’s license.

  The employee calmly walks behind the counter, to the wall near where Old Man sits, and pins the driver’s license to the wall.

  “Oh, no, man,” the Rolex-stealer says. “You can’t do that.”

  “I can’t? Why don’t you call the cops and tell them that?”

  “Oh, man, now you’re going to make me go to the DMV?”

  We figure it’s worse to go to the DMV for six hours to get an ID than it is to go to jail. Most of the guys we’ve caught stealing seem to agree.

  Photographic Insert 1

  My dad, twenty-one years old, in a 1962 Navy photo.

  Family portrait, 1968: My mom Joanne and Old Man in the back. I’m on the right, about four years old, with my brothers Chris (middle) and Joe (left).

  Mom and Dad on a trip to Vegas in the early 1970s.

  Here I am, full of energy and bad thoughts, in fifth grade.

  Here I am at twenty-two, with a full head of hair in the shop at 413 Fremont Street.

  My two oldest sons, circa 1997: Corey (right) is four years old, Adam is three.

  The original shop, three hundred square feet at 1501 Las Vegas Blvd. South. Gold & Silver was the first shop in Vegas to buy and sell gold twenty-four hours a day. This building, which housed our business for six years, is eight blocks from our current location.

  This 1950s Coke machine, bought for $3,500 and on sale for $4,995, was one of the first to allow purchasers to buy more than one flavor of soda. Before this machine, one flavor: Coke.

  This ormolu clock, from the early 1800s, had to have been made by someone under thirty-five years old, since almost all gilders who worked with mercury to produce these clocks died by that age. I coined the term “Death Clock” for these; it helps sales. This one, on sale for $9,500, was purchased for $5,000.

  The piece on the right is a three-hundred-year-old thunder mug, also known as a signal cannon. Used on ships, it was fired off to announce arrival in port. When port officials heard the cannon, they came out to board the ships to check for disease or contraband, and to collect taxes. The piece on the left is an 1800s explosive projectile—minus the explosives—used in cannons until after the Civil War. Both pieces are roughly three inches in diameter across the bottom.

  This 1920s Gibson ukulele/banjo is a bizarre instrument that nobody knows how to play. It is unique because its dru
mhead is original and has more than two hundred signatures from the 1920s from random people.

  These two original battle plans for the World War II attack on Iwo Jima were sold to me by a man looking to finance his daughter’s wedding. Since then, I have done extensive research and can find no others. I vowed not to sell either of these, but I sold one for $10,000. I’m keeping the other one.

  American long jumper Joe Greene’s bronze medals from the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona and the 1996 Games in Atlanta. Each of the Olympic medals—gold, silver, and bronze—carry identical markings with the likeness of the goddess Nike.

  This is a Blunderbuss-style musket made by a famous Italian maker named Lazarino in the 1650s. Lazarino’s work was so good and his guns so popular that people were faking them as early as the late 1650s. This one has the original barrel but was restocked in the early 1700s.

  Both of these Super Bowl rings came from players who rarely saw the field. The Patriots’ first Super Bowl ring (right) is extremely valuable because owner Bob Kraft ignored NFL rules regarding ring size and the number of diamonds to produce a truly gaudy piece of jewelry. The two horses on the Broncos’ ring denote the team’s second Super Bowl victory. The Broncos’ player traded the ring to his landlord for six months’ worth of rent, and I bought it off the landlord.