It ain’t easy being a public servant today, what with left-wing “diversity” consultants snooping around the office to see whether we have a representative number of Aleutian Islanders on staff here at the Massachusetts Alpaca Fraud Squad, and right-wing “small government” types who think that COVID-19 isn’t the most deadly disease since the bubonic plague and that COVID relief payments are just a license for people to loaf.
I’m just doin’ my job, making’ sure that badly-needed COVID bucks get to good, honest, hard-working people–after responsible bureaucrats have skimmed off their $100,000 a year salaries and gold-plated pensions. If it weren’t for guys like me, all that free cash would end up bein’ money-laundered and spent on difficult-to-trace assets like bearer bonds, precious metals, rare coins, jewelry, expensive cars–and increasingly, alpacas.
Of course, John and Jane Q. Public don’t think of alpacas when the topic of money-laundering comes up. After all, you can’t put an alpaca in your pocket–unless you have really big pockets. You can’t put an alpaca in the bank–unless you have a humongous safe deposit box. You can’t use an alpaca to buy a house–unless it’s a little bungalow located in some isolated dump in the Andes where the national currency has been inflated to the busting point and they’ve gone back to a barter economy.
But it’s real, lemme tell ya. Last week we caught a guy, wasn’t so long ago he was living paycheck to paycheck, all of a sudden he’s got a herd of alpacas in his backyard and the neighbors are starting to complain. I sidled up to the fence he shared with the family on the other side of his property line with my sidekick Pete and slipped the lid off his COVID-relief scam like it was a can of honey-roasted peanuts.
“Nice herd of llamas you got there,” I said slyly.
“They’re not llamas, they’re alpacas. People often conflate them,” the guys said, like he was a staff writer for The New Yorker.
“What’s the difference?” Pete asked.
“The most noticeable difference is their size,” the guy said. “Alpacas are larger, around 47 inches at the shoulder . . .”
Before you could say “South American camelid mammal” we had him down on the ground and Pete was hog-tying him with plastic zip cuffs.
“Okay, maggot. You wanna come clean or do we have to beat it out of you?”
“You got nothin’ on me,” he said.
“Oh yeah?” I asked, one eyebrow arched so high in skepticism it was scratching my head where the hairline recedes. “You got it exactly backwards. Alpacas are smaller than llamas, only about 35 inches high at the shoulder.”
We took him down to the Alpaca Fraud Detention Substation, and gave him the third degree, after properly applying the first and second degrees in numerical order. The guy was a tough nut to crack. It took two hours of politely beating him with phone books, rubber truncheons and stuffed alpaca “plushies” to get the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
It was a typical story: the guy had claimed 50 employees at his pizzeria when he only had five, four-full time. He’d pulled down a $350 thousand “Paycheck Protection Program” loan, but the only paycheck he ended up protecting was his own when the loan was–in the wisdom of Congress, who never has to pay anything back–“forgiven.”
“I hate scumbags like you,” I said as I pulled a pre-printed confession off the giant-size roll we kept on a paper towel dispenser.
“What kind of scumbags do you like?” he asked.
“The kind that . . . wait, is that a trick question?”
“No, it’s genuinely sincere.”
“Well, I guess my favorite kind of scumbag . . .”
At this point Pete intervened like a good sidekick.
“He’s pulling your leg,” Pete said with the stoic cynicism he’d acquired busting alpaca-shops up and down the Atlantic coast, from the frozen back alleys of Portland, Maine to the sun-drenched shores of Point Judith, Rhode Island–and Judith has been grateful ever since.
“I didn’t touch him,” the scam artist said.
“Oh, so all of a sudden you’re going to go ‘literal’ on us, huh?”
“Aren’t you supposed to give me some kind of warning before you beat a confession out of me?” the guy whined as we turned him over to the tender mercies of the Massachusetts Correctional System.
“You been watching too many TV cop shows,” I said. “This is what you get for tryin’ to fleece the American public.”
“I didn’t fleece nobody.”
“You play with alpacas,” Pete said drily, “you’re gonna get fleece on your hands.”