Guns & Kidnapping: The Perils Of Selling Sneaks Online
First up, in Louisiana . The kid arranged to meet an interested buyer and he came… along with five homies. They pretended to go and get some cash for the pair but returned with a pistol, racking four pairs of sneaks off the kid and all his cash. This is unfortunate, but people aren’t about to stop selling shoes on Instagram, so if you are doing it, use some common sense and make sure you get the buyer’s name, phone number, email and Facebook profile (and get a friend to keep a copy of the details); meet the ‘client’ in a public place, like a mall; and roll in with a few of your own closest dawgs. You don’t have to look all shady swapping sneaks in back alleys, you’re not actually doing anything illegal – maybe don’t do it in front of cops though, the fuzz hate to see money changing hands unless it’s going into theirs.
There’s not much advice we can proffer to learn from the second instance though, other than never give your address out to anyone who isn’t a friend and don’t sell your product from your own residence. It wasn’t exactly a kidnapping (that headline looks dope though, eh?), but a sneaker seller and collector in East Bridgewater, Massachusetts was tied up and had his home raided by a bunch of assholes with glocks. ‘I woke up at 2:30 in the morning with four dudes in my house with guns taking my sneakers off my wall,’ Shawn Raymond told the . ‘They took a bunch and put them in a trash bag,’ he said. ‘They tied me up and took their time. They tied up my 13-year-old sister and my grandmother and grandfather.’ Raymond even got pistol whipped by the scum folk.
The element both incidents have in common, other than sneaker theft, is all assailants were arrested. And therein lies what many people (who don’t care about the welfare of others) would consider as the major disadvantage of stealing sneakers – you will almost definitely get caught. We’re talking like even worse odds of getting away with it than rolling snake eyes at Caeser’s Palace and then taking a babe back to your room that you didn’t pay for. We see a lot of these crimes pop up and almost always the cons are caught. It ain’t fun going to the pen and telling your new chums in jumpsuits that you’re in there for stealing shoes, some of ‘em won’t understand – you’ll probably find yourself at the bottom of the food chain.
So, don’t get eaten, stop tainting our culture! Maybe just become a reseller yourself – you’ll find you have no spare time to get up to mischief because you’ll be in lines all the time, and enough sneakerheads will treat you like a criminal you’ll still get your illicit thrills. Fly, pelican, fly!