The last thing I need is a mob of angry fortune-tellers outside my office, waving their crystal balls, shrieking my name backward, rattling their hoop earrings, cursing me for daring to write about their latest curse-lifting scam.
Perhaps you've heard about the ruse, uncovered the other day just outside Naperville.
Fortune-tellers fake up a curse, then convince the sucker that the curse is real, only to lift the curse for a hefty fee, which the poor sucker is only happy to pay, because that is what suckers do.
The fees in this case may come to about $100,000, authorities estimate.
"It's not a few dollars," DuPage County State's Atty. Joseph Birkett told me Wednesday. "It's a lot of money. The bond itself should tell you that."
The alleged fortune-tellers, Tracy and Eric Tan, were each being held in jail on $750,000 bail, and no doubt psychics, fortune-tellers and the like will shoot off angry letters to my editor, accusing me of cynicism.
But my grandmother fought such people. She was a famous curse-lifter back in the old country, in Arcadia, Greece, in the finest village in the universe, Rizes.
Yiyia Angela would never put a curse on anyone. She was an exorcist, removing curses by saying prayers from the Bible and dissolving three drops of olive oil into lukewarm water. It's true!
Sure, she loved me, and I loved her, even though she did a few things that made me cringe.
For one thing, she kept her teeth in a glass of water next to the bed. And in this country, she'd force my dad to pull over to the side of the road whenever she saw tasty wild greens in a field, and get out to pick the greens for dinner even if my friends were in the car with us.
Someday, I'll tell you how she removed a curse from Truman, my dad's mean, stumpy and bow-legged white mule that was named after an American president. But today's business isn't about mules.
I visited the Tan home Tuesday morning. It's a shack on Route 59 with cars abandoned outside, and in back, at least two barbecue grills, including a decent offset smoker for the slow smoking of ribs, that had been left to rot and rust.
A sign advertised "Psychic Readings" for just $10. A bargain at any price. Another sign reading "No Press or Media" was stapled to the door.
Here's how the scam allegedly worked.
Some foolish person would knock on their door and ask the Tans to read their fortune, sometimes with the use of tarot cards, those strange decks most often associated with old women who have too many black cats.
The Tans would see terrible omens. And the suckers were told they were cursed.
Naturally, the suckers were relieved, since curses explain everything, from bad pitching to bad managing.
So then one of the Tans, usually and allegedly Eric, would offer a remarkable solution: Pay us thousands of dollars, and we'll work our magic, and remove the curse.
The suckers paid. The Tans were happy, and apparently, so were the suckers, because they got the curse lifted. Therefore, even the suckers got something out of the deal.
It is ingenious, and I can't see how it's illegal.
If I tell you the sun would rise tomorrow, but only if you paid me $50,000, and it did rise and I collected, am I a criminal? Or am I a politician?
And unlike the friends of politicians, the Tans didn't sic some city inspectors to muscle some business owners. Unlike gang leaders, they didn't use a gun or a club or the threat of a match to gasoline, or a little scary guy named Stevie or a big scary guy named Louie or zoning lawyers or cops.
Rather, the Tans used the future. And how is using the future illegal?
"That's an argument we're willing to make in front of a finder of fact, a judge and a jury, once this case comes to court," Birkett told me Wednesday.
If I were the Tans' lawyer, I'd argue that anyone foolish enough to believe I could tell the future and control curses should be encouraged to lose their money.
That way, the foolish people won't have money to spend on fake diamond rings, so they won't get engaged and raise families of fools, to perpetuate an American idiocracy that will someday allow China to conquer us without firing a shot.
Some DuPage County psychics, such as Catherine Marks of Psychic Readings by Catherine in Oakbrook Terrace, aren't happy.
"I would say this always gives psychics a bad name," said Marks.
Do you know anyone who can cure curses?
"There are people who say they can," Marks said. "You hear things, you get people who say things."
My grandmother would never accept money to lift a curse. But those were real curses, when curses were curses in the mountains of yore.
These days, some bureaucrat would have hammered yiyia for daring to erase mysterious curses without a license. And she'd be forced to assume another profession: economist.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opin ... ory?page=2
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
