It all leads me to believe one thing: If you had a degree in sociology and came to work in my pawn shop for two hours, you’d throw it in the trash.
Diego Corrales was one of the most entertaining boxers of his time. He was fearless, sometimes to his own detriment. He fought Floyd Mayweather Jr. in Vegas on January 20, 2001, for the WBC super-featherweight title. Floyd knocked him down five times, and Corrales got up every single time, ready to fight. After the fifth knockdown, his corner threw in the towel even though Corrales was screaming at them to allow him to keep fighting.
The Mayweather fight was seen as Corrales’s coming-out party. He lost, but he gave an undefeated champion all he could handle. He fought him tough, and captured the imagination of the public when he was knocked down three times in one round and kept getting up.
As it turned out, though, he’d had better nights. And this one, strangely, ended up including us.
At the time he fought Mayweather, Corrales had vacated the IBF super featherweight title he had won the year before.
After the Mayweather fight—that very same night, as a matter of fact—he walked up to the night window and pawned his IBF belt for $500.
Remember, these guys don’t get paid right away, and apparently Corrales wasn’t in the mood to wait for his Mayweather money after this fight. He took the $500 and bought a shitload of cocaine. After some unknown amount of time, he went back to his house in Vegas and proceeded to get arrested for knocking around his pregnant wife, a move that ultimately cost him fourteen months in prison.
The belt was a conversation piece in the shop, but we didn’t give Corrales a whole lot of thought afterward. Given his penchant for self-destruction, it was unlikely that we’d ever hear much from him after he got out of prison.
Wrong. He came out of prison and got right back to business. In 2005, he beat Jose Luis Castillo for the WBC lightweight title in the best fight of the year, by far. The tenth round was one of the most amazing rounds in boxing history. Castillo knocked Corrales down twice in the first minute. After the second knockdown, Corrales barely beat the count to get back up, and then he was penalized a point for spitting out his mouthpiece too many times. It didn’t seem like there was any way he was going to win the fight, but he did. He drilled Castillo with a perfect right hand, stunned him, then got him against the ropes and pummeled him until the referee stopped the fight.
This guy was one tough dude, and crazy. Corrales and Castillo fought again, but Castillo weighed in too heavy for it to be a title fight. They fought anyway, and Castillo won. They were supposed to fight a third time—“The War to Settle the Score”—but this time Corrales weighed in too heavy and the fight was canceled.
On May 7, 2007, Corrales got drunk and went for a ride in Vegas on his Suzuki GSXR 1000—the fastest bike in the world. He misjudged the distance between him and the car in front of him while trying to pass and clipped the back of the car. They couldn’t determine how fast he was going, but the only reason you have a bike like that is to go fast. He died at the scene.
I never wanted to sell his belt. This guy was a legend, and the story about how we got the belt in the first place was one of my favorites, the perfect Las Vegas story.
Unfortunately, someone in the shop didn’t get the memo and sold it for just $1,500. That’s one time when I tripled my money on a sale and wasn’t happy about it.
Gold & Silver Pawn is not in a good part of town. Nobody expects to find a pawn shop nestled among multimillion-dollar estates, but our neighbors are pretty shaky. There’s a low-rent strip club/adult bookstore next door, and when I say “low-rent” I mean the kind of place you probably wouldn’t want to walk into without wearing a hermetically sealed suit. (You’d throw it out as soon as you walked out, too.) We share a parking lot with the place, and the guys walking in and out of there are enough to make you question your faith in humanity.
Sometimes it’s funny to see the tourists as they pull into the lot and look around before getting out of the rental car. They know the shop from Pawn Stars only and I know they’re looking around thinking, OK, I see the palm trees and the sign, so it must be the right place. I’d love to hear the conversations as they decide whether they want to risk getting out.
They don’t know the neighborhood used to be a lot worse. Across the street there’s a relatively new government building, three stories and about a square block in size, which is about 20 percent occupied right now. When the housing boom was in full swing, they built this place to house the Building Department. Now that nobody is building anything in Las Vegas, there’s no need to have the building. The most prominent parts of the building these days are the “For Rent” signs covering a lot of the windows.
Next to the government building is a parking lot for the employees. The lot used to be occupied by the infamous and ludicrous Normandy Motel. For years and years, the Normandy had a marquee outside that read, “Elvis Slept Here.” That, apparently, was the only thing to recommend the place, and they kept using it long after anyone would have been excited to sleep in a building where The King once laid his head.
There might have been a time when the Normandy was a respectable place to stay on a trip to Vegas, but that time was before we moved in across the street. Come to think of it, there might never have been a time when the Normandy and “respectable” could be in the same sentence. For more than ten years, the Normandy was not only a dive, it was a whorehouse dive. The Normandy was a haven for skanky whores and crackheads and any other bottom-of-the-barrel types who found themselves on the wrong end of Las Vegas Boulevard.
The Normandy was also a source of entertainment for those of us working across the street. Our night window, which is essentially a bank-teller window, looked directly across to the front of the Normandy. It was our movie screen. While I was working at night, I saw girls run after guys buck naked down the street. There used to be a one-legged hooker who worked out of the Normandy. Some days she had a prosthetic leg, but on others she left the fake leg behind and got around with crutches. I saw a segment of society through that window that most people would like to pretend doesn’t exist.
I know this sounds like a version of a guy-walks-into-a-bar joke, but I swear it’s true. One day a nun walked into the pawn shop to sell some Hummel figurines. She had a lot of them, so there was a lot of busywork going through them and deciding what kind of condition they were in and how much we’d pay for them. (This was one of the rare cases where I wanted to pay someone as much as possible, because I don’t want to go to hell.)
I’m sitting in a stool behind the counter in the spot closest to the bank-teller window, which is on my right. The nun is across the counter from me, far enough away from the window that she can’t see through it.
The whole time I was attempting to get through the Hummel figurines and get the nun her money, one of the guys I’m working with—he’s sitting directly to my left—is kicking me in the shins trying to get me to look out the window.
I tried to shoo him away, but I could tell he was trying to stop from laughing. After six or seven kicks, I could feel a crowd gathering to my left. They were laughing and pointing. Finally, I couldn’t help myself, so I stole a glance out the window and saw the cause of the commotion:
Two African-American hookers, completely naked, dancing on one of the Normandy’s room balconies, in the middle of the day.
It was really hard to keep a straight face in dealing with the sweet little nun, I will tell you that. The juxtaposition of the nun and the hookers—let’s just say it was surreal.
However strange it was, it is nowhere near the strangest scene involving the Normandy Motel and Gold & Silver Pawn Shop. That honor goes to an incident involving a man I’ll call Donnie, who happened to be a regular customer of both establishments.
Donnie was a black man in his late twenties who had a great propensity for finding elderly white women who were interested in funding his fledgling rap career. He was a character, and his charms were such that
he routinely came into the shop with a new elderly white woman and a new CD. It was always the one that was going to propel his career out of Las Vegas and into the hearts and minds of music fans worldwide.
It needs to be said that Donnie was a horrible rapper. I don’t think much of rap in general, but his rapping was tragically bad. His songs had titles like “My Bottom Bitch” and other horrible things that make it even harder to believe he could recruit these elderly white women to fund his enterprise.
He was trying to look the part of the famous rapper, which is where we came in. Depending on the wealth of his lady friend of the moment, he was always coming in and either buying or pawning gaudy rapper jewelry. If it hung below the belly button or looked like it could be used as a lead for a horse, he bought it.
Back then, customers could still park on Las Vegas Boulevard, before the city added the palm trees. Anyway, Donnie pulled up late one night and parked in front of the shop on Las Vegas. He came to the night window and pawned some jewelry, and then he took the money back over to the Normandy for a night of fun and frolic with some of the working girls.
A few hours later, the night-shift guy was looking out the window and he saw Donnie coming back across Las Vegas Boulevard toward his car. About halfway across the street, Donnie dropped like a rock. Facedown—boom! Down goes Donnie.
Well, evidently Donnie did some drugs at the Normandy in addition to whatever else he was doing. The night-shift guy immediately called 911, and the emergency vehicles were there right away.
The next morning, the night-shift guy was all abuzz when we walked in to open up the store.
He told everyone, “Donnie dropped dead right in front of the shop last night. He was walking across the street and just went down. The paramedics came and worked on him for a while, then they put a sheet over his head and put him in the ambulance.”
This was big news, because Donnie was the kind of customer every employee knew and every person who was ever in the shop at the same time would remember. The word spread: Donnie died. People wondered if he had family, or if there would be some kind of service where all the elderly white women who financed his stillborn rap career would come together to mourn him.
About three months later, I was working in the shop and a weird hush came over the store. It’s hard to describe, but I was sitting at a desk behind the counter—next to Old Man—and it was obvious enough that I looked up. Everyone had stopped working and was staring at someone in the showroom.
I stood up to see . . .
. . . Donnie?
Donnie.
Guys were nudging each other like they were seeing a ghost. Donnie was walking up to the counter with a new elderly white woman. He was carrying another new CD that nobody would ever buy.
He was acting just like he always did, like he was on the brink of stardom and the rest of the world was just slow to catch on.
Nobody said anything to him. He was starting to look around at us like he was confused.
Since I’m the boss, I figured I better do the talking.
“Uh . . . Donnie?” I said.
“Yeah, Rick?”
“We thought you were dead.”
“Oh, that?” he said, swiping his arm through the air toward the street.
“Yeah—that,” I said.
“Oh, no. Just a bad night is all, man. Just a bad night.”
CHAPTER 11
The Legend of Bizzle
The history of Gold & Silver Pawn wouldn’t be complete without the story of Bill Urlaub, our most legendary customer. If we had a Hall of Fame, he’d be the first inductee, and the voting would be unanimous.
Bill was six-foot-seven and skinny as a garden hose. He wore shoes held together with duct tape and a set of dentures that he specifically had custom-made without lines. That’s right: no lines. He looked like he was wearing a white mouthpiece. Whenever people saw him for the first time, you could see them staring at his mouth, trying to figure out what they were looking at.
Bill was in his late forties when we moved into our current location on Las Vegas Boulevard. Shortly after we opened as a full-fledged pawn shop in 1990, he started showing up every day. Often multiple times a day. At his peak, Bill averaged four visits a day.
And this went on for years.
Bill was a West Point guy, a retired firefighter, a retired schoolteacher. These were his stories, anyway. He was in the West Point class of ’65, and there’s some debate as to whether he graduated. He admitted to shooting himself in the foot and receiving a Section 8 discharge for being mentally unfit for service. He was last in his class in 1965, and even someone with Bill’s mental issues knew what that meant: a less-than-favorable assignment in Vietnam. Bill decided to get the shooting out of the way early, and on his terms.
He eventually became a firefighter, and he was let go from that job because of his psychological disability. Despite his obvious mental illness—his moods were contingent on his compliance with medical prescriptions from the first time he walked into the shop—he somehow got a job as a high school teacher, and he lost that job also.
What he was left with was a $300-a-month rental apartment in downtown Las Vegas ($400 with utilities) and $4,000 a month in various pensions or disability payments from the fire department and school district. He had no car and no other fixed expenses that we knew about. And just imagine where you’re living if you’re paying $300 a month for an apartment in boom-time Las Vegas. Hint: not a penthouse.
And yet, on the ninth day of every month—not the eighth, not the tenth—he would start pawning his stuff. He came in every day, but it was mostly to talk to us and hang around Old Man and generally make a pest of himself. We were nice to him and helped him out when we could; over time he became almost like the pawn-shop mascot.
Shortly after we opened the shop, when Bill was just getting to know everyone, he told Corey he would pay him $50 to deliver some carpet to his apartment. It was an easy $50, so Corey figured what the heck? When he got to Bill’s apartment, Corey was amazed. Through him, Old Man and I got an idea of what Bill was spending his money on. Bill was renting, and yet he had crown molding on all the walls, fresh paint, a nice TV on the wall. He was decorating the place like it was the Ritz.
We also knew he gambled, but the money he gambled wouldn’t account for blowing his entire monthly income in eight days. He must have lived hard-core during those days, though, because everything he picked up on the first was back in the shop on the ninth. And that was part of his deal: He couldn’t live with himself if he didn’t pick up all of his pawns when he got his money on the first. He thought we wouldn’t like him anymore or something, because he had this compulsion for coming in on the first, walking up to the counter like he just won the lottery, and saying, “Well, I’m here to pay for my things.”
Old Man loved Bill. If it wasn’t for him allowing Bill to pawn his stuff, Bill probably would have struggled to eat. Old Man was the first one in the shop to make Bill feel like he was worth something, and he took pity on Bill and actually enjoyed his company, in small doses. Bill would talk Old Man’s ear off, and Old Man would just nod politely or laugh. They went back and forth trading insults, with Old Man usually going easy on Bill by letting him get the last word.
One time they had a bet. I don’t remember what the bet was—probably something Bill came up with and Old Man played along with—but I remember the stakes: If Old Man won, Bill couldn’t pawn any of his crap in the shop for a month. If Bill won, Old Man had to take him out to a steak dinner.
Well, wouldn’t you know it? Bill won. And Old Man—and my mom, for some reason—took Bill out to a fancy Vegas steakhouse. I think my dad was amused by the proposition until reality hit in the form of Bill ordering—and eating—three steaks before clearing everyone else’s plate. I think it was the last time Old Man made a bet with Bill.
But Bill’s capacity for placing a bet was legendary. Bill would bet on anything. And when I say anything, I mean literally anything. He hu
ng out at Leroy’s Sports Book in the Sahara, because Leroy’s allowed betting on stuff that nobody but Bill would have any interest in betting on. He would come in and ask our advice on his bets, and he would try to convince us that we were really missing out if we didn’t take his advice on bets. He always had a tip for us, and he always said it like it was inside information, like he knew some athlete—or a whole team—was on the take and the bet was a sure thing.
One day he walked into the store like he’d seen the rapture.
“Rick, did you know that Leroy’s allows you to bet on Ukrainian professional volleyball?”
I said, “No, Bill, I didn’t know that. Why would I know that?”
“Well, they do, and I’m thinking about betting on this one team. Here, let me show you why.”
He proceeded to pull about five scraps of paper out of his pockets, all of them filled with his unintelligible scrawl. Apparently hidden within the scrawl were the secrets to betting success when it came to Ukrainian professional volleyball. To me, it looked like unintelligible scrawl.
After he was through, I asked, “Urlaub, how much are you going to bet on this?”
He looked up from his papers and said, “Five bucks.”
He came into the store one day acting high as a kite, bouncing around talking to everybody. I watched him, thinking, I don’t think Bill took his meds this morning. But as soon as he got close enough for me to understand the words that were firing out of his mouth like automatic gunfire, I discovered the source of his excitement: He’d won a superfecta on a horse race.
Winning a superfecta is a rare feat. It’s when you pick the first, second, third, and fourth horses to finish in a race. Bill did it, and he was jacked.
“How much you win, Bill?” I asked.
“Oh, not that much,” he said.
“Well, how much did you bet?”
“A nickel.”
License to Pawn: Deals, Steals, and My Life at the Gold & Silver Page 16