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

by Rick Harrison

  It was late. I probably wasn’t thinking straight.

  I grabbed a pair of pliers from under the counter and told her I’d need a driver’s license to hold so I make sure I get my pliers back. She nods and hands her license through the slot. No big deal to either of us.

  About a half an hour later, she’s still nowhere to be seen. I’m thinking it’s awfully strange that someone gave up their driver’s license for a pair of pliers at three in the morning in a pawn shop in Vegas. Then again, it is three in the morning in a pawn shop in Vegas, so maybe it’s not so strange.

  Anyway, she finally shows up at the window with her mouth full of toilet paper. She drops a gold tooth and the pliers through the slot.

  A gold tooth covered in blood.

  For $40.

  So now I’m wishing I hadn’t given her the pliers. If I had been thinking, I would have realized why she wanted the pliers. The idea wasn’t to refuse the pliers out of any moral judgment—she’s got to do what she’s got to do. I just wouldn’t have supplied her with the means to do that.

  I’m looking at the tooth, thinking, “Well, Big Hoss—now you’ve got to buy it.” After all, she did go to all that trouble to bring it to me.

  I had a hooker come up to the window and try to sell me a Rolex. She slid it through the slot, and I took one look at it and slid it back.

  “It’s fake, I can’t take it,” I said.

  Just then, out of nowhere, a guy in a purple suit—I kid you not, a purple suit—comes flying around the corner and starts beating her up. We have cameras trained on the night window, of course, and it was like this guy centered himself in the frame before he started hitting her.

  Dude, you’re on camera, buddy. Besides, I’m guessing it wasn’t her fault the Rolex was fake.

  I got really good at telling the difference between a real Rolex and a fake Rolex. If I hadn’t, I might still be mounting tires.

  But I wasn’t always. The first week I worked the night window, I bought seven fake Rolexes.

  Seven.

  Even though my dad said he never wanted me to work in the shop, he was always teaching me about stuff. He’s an enthusiastic guy, and he has all this knowledge stored up inside him. Sometimes he just has to air it out.

  He had shown me Rolexes, and how to tell real from fake. They’re a big part of our business. I was young and thought I knew a whole hell of a lot more than I did.

  So. Seven fake Rolexes in a week.

  To the tune of $25,000.

  These weren’t pawns, either—these were purchases. Evidently word spread in the fake-Rolex community of greater Las Vegas that a guy at Gold & Silver Pawn didn’t know real from fake when it came to watches.

  My ears still have the scars from hearing my dad and Old Man yell at me.

  I thought for sure I was going to have to find another job. My dad was cool about it, though, and decided to chalk it up to a learning experience. When you see us on television, we’re always a commercial break away from getting an expert onto the floor to examine something and tell us whether it’s real and, if it is, what it’s worth. That’s TV, though, and there were no cameras rolling at 2 A.M. when I was buying fake Rolexes. I couldn’t call a jewelry expert—or my dad—to show up and save the day.

  The sad part is, I sat on my stool behind the bulletproof glass thinking I was robbing these guys blind. I was paying way less than I normally would for a new Rolex, and every time one of them walked away I chuckled to myself.

  Turns out the joke was on me.

  One of the tricky things about the business is the way people build their reputations within the shop. Some guys will offer everyone $5 for whatever they’re selling, and it’s inevitable you’re going to end up with a few steals that way. There are too many desperate people walking through our doors, and a lot of them don’t know what their items are worth. So if you low-ball everybody, there’s a chance they’re going to bite and you’re going to look like a hero. That shouldn’t be mistaken for knowing the business, though. It takes talent and skill to know the value of something. It also takes time and patience.

  I learned that the hard way. But I learned. Now, if I happen to be burned by someone, I’ll research and read to make sure I don’t let it happen again.

  This is a crazy life even without a television show. I went a little nutty working the night shift. You can’t make the mistake of thinking any of this—the city, the shop, the job—is normal. If you do, it can get inside your head.

  The worst is when it’s five in the morning and you’ve been up all night dealing with crazy, desperate people. Nights of big fights are the worst; it’s like all the wild, crazy people in the world decide to descend on Vegas and turn it into a horror movie or something. On “normal” nights there’s still a steady flow of people. The second you think you’ve got some time to stretch out and take a break, there are twenty people standing in line peering in at you with pleading eyes.

  Charles is the longest-running employee we have. He’s worked the night shift for fifteen years straight. He’s a great employee, one of our best, and he deserves to be on the day shift. He deserves to be a manager. But all those years on the night shift have taken their toll. He spends twelve hours a night working by himself dealing with the night creatures. He gets jumpy. He can’t function in the daytime when there is actual human interaction.

  It’s a different world outside that window. Once a guy came up in the middle of the night to sell his Skil saw. It was a busy night, probably ten people behind him in line, and he’d waited awhile to pawn his saw for a couple hundred bucks.

  When he got to the front of the line, our night guy saw that the guard had been removed from the saw.

  “I can’t take it,” he told him.

  “Why not?”

  “I can’t sell it because it’s not OSHA approved. It’s worthless to us.”

  The guy argued. He didn’t want to hear that.

  “I’m going to pick it up when I get back on my feet. You’re not going to have to sell it.”

  We can’t operate that way, and the night guy told him so.

  By this time, the people behind him in line were getting pissed off. They wanted him to leave so they could take care of their business. One guy was particularly loud. He told Saw Guy to get the hell out, to stop wasting everybody’s time.

  Saw Guy snapped. He turned around, raised his saw like he was going to throw it, and started pounding the guy’s face with the blade. Over and over, he smashed that blade into the guy’s face until it was a bloody, unrecognizable mess.

  By the time the police and the ambulance came, Saw Guy had done enough damage to require five hundred stitches in the other guy’s face. Our night guy said he couldn’t get the image out of his head.

  How are you going to stay normal when you repeatedly see that side of humanity?

  One of the dumbest things you can do is sell a stolen item to a pawn shop. That doesn’t mean people don’t try it; it just means it’s really stupid. Every item we buy or pawn goes into a database that gets downloaded to the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police every morning. Every item we buy or pawn is held for thirty days to give the police time to determine if it is stolen. The system is pretty airtight.

  I probably write five thousand tickets a month—sale or pawn—and we might have six things put on hold. I’ve been subpoenaed more than two hundred times, but I’ve never once been called to testify in court. These guys always make a deal before it reaches that point; the case is rock solid once they get a signature on a pawn slip and the video from our surveillance cameras.

  During the first season of the television show, a guy came into the shop to sell us a pair of diamond earrings. He agreed to do the negotiations on camera, and after the usual back-and-forth, we agreed to pay him twenty grand for the earrings.

  On camera, we asked him why he was selling the earrings, and he said, “Oh, you know, I’m tired of having them, I need a little extra cash, this just seems like the right time.�
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  We do the paperwork, file the transaction with the police department and Homeland Security, and the next day we get a call from Las Vegas Metro.

  The earrings turned up hot.

  I’m thinking, Dude, you’ve got to be the world’s dumbest criminal. You’ve got a camera in your face! You know they’re stolen and you still did this?

  For an encore, I think that guy left our store and robbed a Dunkin’ Donuts.

  As my dad always says, “You never know what’s going to come through that door.” One day in 2007 a guy in his late twenties walked in and said he had a bunch of possessions to sell. I walked outside with him, and the first thing he wanted to discuss was an All American Chopper, beautiful and tricked-out.

  “I paid seventy thousand dollars for this,” he said.

  We went back and forth, and I told him the most I could give him was eight grand. It was so personalized it was going to be a tough sell, and since my offer was so low I was surprised when he accepted it.

  With that deal done, he started to move on to the next item. That’s when I started to be a little concerned about him. He didn’t look desperate or broke, but he was going about this operation so systematically that I started to think he might be selling everything as a prelude to suicide.

  I was a little uncomfortable, so I asked him why he was selling everything.

  “I’m heading back to Iraq in two weeks for my third tour with Blackwater,” he said. “I’m going to party in Vegas for the next two weeks, because this time around I’m leaving with half the crew I had the last two tours. If I make it back, I’ll have three hundred thousand dollars in my pocket to start over. If I don’t, I won’t need this stuff anyway.”

  So, yeah, my dad’s right: You never know.

  A lot of things that happen in Vegas pass through our doors, in some form or another. It could be stuff, it could be people, but you could write a pretty good history of the city over the past twenty years through our store. We see celebrities, politicians, athletes. And we also see people who inhabit some of the seedier corners of the city.

  During the summer months of 2007, I bought a couple of brand-new Rolexes from two different girls within a week. Both of them turned up hot, which meant I got burned for about twenty grand. The police tied it to an operation this guy—Arfat Fadel—was running out of Mandalay Bay.

  It went like this: He hired girls to go into the spa lockers at Mandalay Bay to steal wallets and credit cards. Then he would send them to the Shops at Caesars to buy the watches, which a girl would bring to me to get fifty cents on the dollar.

  We have no way of knowing these watches are hot—we get a lot of brand-new watches from people who can’t get markers from the casinos and use their cards to buy expensive jewelry and watches to bring to us for their gambling money. It might not be the way you get your hands on cash, but some people don’t have as many options.

  So we’re on to this guy. I’m pissed, because he burned me. The cops are pissed, because he’s running a pretty sophisticated operation and they can’t build a case because he’s keeping his own hands clean.

  Until about two months later, Arfat Fadel himself walks into the store, by himself. I recognized him from the police “wanted” posters. This time he’s got an eighteen-carat Rolex Submariner.

  I saw him from the time he walked through the door, and I’m trying to stay cool. He comes up and I greet him like everything’s normal. (I hope.) He talks about the watch a little and then hands it to me.

  I grab the watch and put it on my wrist and twist it around like I’m analyzing it. You know, look at it from one side and then the other, like I’m making sure it’s the real thing. The whole time I’m trying to beat back the adrenaline that’s pounding through my veins as I keep an eye on the bastard on the other side of the counter.

  The idea was to walk around the counter, calmly, and proceed to beat the shit out of him until the cops got there and saved his ass. I got around the counter, but apparently I didn’t hide my feelings as well as I could have. He started for the door the second I turned the corner, and I yelled after him, “I’m calling the cops to tell them you’re selling stolen watches again.”

  I called Las Vegas Metro and told them, “I’ve got another stolen watch from your buddy in here. I’m holding it for thirty days.”

  They did a search and called me back: no report. He was in here selling his personal watch. Oh, well—he obviously didn’t come back for it, so I at least got some of my money back from being burned on the other two.

  Eight months later, on June 16, 2008, a wide receiver for the Oakland Raiders named Javon Walker was partying in Vegas when he made the mistake of getting into a Range Rover with a couple of guys who had been hanging out in the same clubs and casinos. Walker was drunk, and before long he found himself beat up—broken teeth, the whole works—and tossed into the parking lot of an abandoned condo complex a block off The Strip.

  He was also missing about seventy-five grand in jewelry and several thousand in cash. The guy who beat him up and stole the jewelry—including diamond earrings that were yanked out of Walker’s ears—was named Deshawn Thomas. The driver was Arfat Fadel.

  If Fadel had stayed out of the thuggery business and stuck with the idea of stealing credit cards out of spa lockers at the Mandalay Bay, it might have been harder for the police to catch him. But he didn’t. He went after an NFL player, and that’s how the cops caught him. He ended up pleading out and getting a sentence of two to fifteen years. Thomas went to trial and was convicted, too.

  That story made national news because Walker was an NFL player, but we knew Fadel before Walker did.

  Here’s a cute little story from the front lines of Gold & Silver Pawn:

  Three of us were closing up the showroom one night around nine o’clock. There’s usually a fifteen-minute period where we have to close completely in order to get the showroom shut down and open the window to let the night shift guy take over.

  Two other employees, Brady and Travis, were closing up while this skinny little tweaker was at the window throwing a fit that we weren’t helping him. He could see us in there, moving stuff around and taking stuff out of the cases to lock up for the night. He figured if we were in there, he should be our first priority. Well, he wasn’t. We told him we’d get to him, but that didn’t help.

  He was out of control. “You fucking assholes, I need some help here!”

  We told him to wait again, and he went down the line pointing at us—“Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!”

  We’d had enough. This guy was probably trying to pawn his Xbox games to get enough money to buy some more crank. It wasn’t like he was going to make a difference in our bottom line. And since I quit, I have a hard time dealing with these guys. I probably should have more compassion, but I get disgusted by that drug.

  Finally, Travis walks over to the window and says, “Screw you. We’re not helping you. Go away.”

  The tweaker screams some more, but he does go away. We finish cleaning up and walk to the parking lot. It’s the three of us and Old Man Dave, one of our security guys who is an ex-cop. Travis is walking toward his car, and out of nowhere the tweaker comes around a corner and gets in Travis’s face. Travis spins on him and pushes him onto the ground, and that’s when we notice the six or seven other guys popping up out of nowhere to take us on.

  We’ve gone from telling this one guy to take a hike to fighting the entire Tweaker Nation.

  I’m near my truck, so I open the door and get a ball-peen hammer out of the front seat. (I always carry a ball-peen hammer.) When I turn around, one of the tweakers is charging me so I smack him on the head with the hammer. By now my uncle who runs the tattoo shop across the parking lot is out there helping us out.

  The whole time I’m waiting for Old Man Dave to end this. I know he’s carrying a gun; it’s part of his job to sit in the store and work security while armed. Instead, he’s just beating on these guys—a sixty-something-year-old ex-cop just p
ounding these young guys. It took about thirty minutes for the police to get there, and by then the tweakers had scattered.

  As we’re standing there, I ask Old Man Dave about the gun.

  “It was much more fun this way,” he says.

  We watched the surveillance video of that fight just about every day for the next two weeks. We had a great time with that. And the funniest thing was, a week after the fight Leftfield Pictures showed up to shoot the pilot for Pawn Stars. So a week before my big break as a television star, I was standing in the middle of a huge brawl in the parking lot.

  Pawn Stars was originally supposed to feature me, my dad, and my grandpa. Then they dropped Chumlee into a couple of scenes and people just loved it. They were smart enough to include him as a main character, mostly as comic relief, and now his swag sells more than anybody else’s. People come into the store looking for Chumlee T-shirts and shot glasses and baseball caps. What a crazy turn it’s been for all of us.

  Even a small slice of fame has its weird elements. I met my wife, Charlene, when we were in fourth grade. We were together from sixth grade through her junior year of high school, and then we took a five-year break in there. You can probably guess which five years those were, and what nasty habit I engaged in during the time.

  A couple of years later, I finally got tired of hearing my mom say, “You really ought to find a nice girl like Charlene.” So I asked her out, and we went out once and couldn’t stand each other. About a year later, we went out again and a year later we were married.

  Charlene didn’t marry a guy on television, but she’s been thrown into the craziness. Girls seek her out on Facebook and harass her about me. About me. That’s when you know something is happening that (1) doesn’t make sense; and (2) is a little bit creepy.

  We were at a bar with some friends one night. Charlene was down the bar talking to her friends, and this girl came up to me. My wife walked over and said, “Hi, I’m Corey’s wife.” The girl started talking to her and asked, “Do you guys have any kids?” When my wife said we didn’t, the girl said, “Well, then you’re not really married.”