$650 Large - The Wheelman

CENTER CITY PHILADELPHIA BANKS ARE NOT HIT BY takeover teams very often, and with good reason: there are very few ways out.

You get a lot of lone-wolf crackheads doing business, but not many pros. Billy Penn designed Philadelphia to be a tightly locked grid of streets named after trees stretching from the Delaware River to the Schuylkill River. Colonial homes gave way to brownstone mansions which gave way to tightly packed office towers which gave way to a glut of office space. The streets are narrow and often blocked, especially where they lead to interstates. If you are smack-dab in the center of Center City—which Lennon’s team was—Interstates 95 and 76 are barely five minutes away. But it can take fifty minutes to reach them, if traffic is shitty enough.

Bling gave Lennon the background. Bling was a Philly boy; Lennon was not. Lennon owned a place deep in the Pocono Mountains just an hour and a half away, and he had people he knew in Philadelphia, but he would never work there. The closest he’d work was New York, and even that was a bit too close.

However, the bankroll was running thin, and Lennon and Katie were finished rolling off a nice long wasted winter, with no work for either of them. It was a nice winter: mostly cooking and reading and drinking. When Bling called Katie in late February, it was the right time to go back to work.

The setup sounded nice, too. Bling needed a wheelman for a three-man takeover. A Wachovia Bank, three blocks from city hall, was set to receive a fat shipment of cash on March 29, straight from the federal government. It was part of the mayor’s “Operation Fresh Start,” a scheme where he was planning to dump over $650,000 on the shittiest ten-block area in the shittiest part of town, just to level it flat and hope that a national developer would want to build a Barnes & Noble or Bed, Bath & Beyond in the middle of the drug-addled badlands. Most of the money was going to pay one hundred or so holdouts who wanted to stay in their crumbling row houses. Bling told Katie that the mayor was going to hand out between $40,000 and $80,000 to each holdout—in cash—in exchange for surrendering the property.

Why cash? Mayor comes from that area, Bling said. Folks there don’t trust nothing but cash. They want to get paid. Plus, somebody in the mayor’s office thought it would be a good visual for the TV crews: the mayor, launching “Operation Fresh Start” by handing out thick stacks of green to the neediest people in the city. Never mind that gangbangers would probably pounce on the recipients the moment the cameras were turned off. That wasn’t the city’s problem.

Plus, Bling planned to take the money first.

Bling had a city council snitch who told him about the cash. Bling then told Katie how he planned to pull the thing off, and it sounded like a good idea. So Lennon decided to go back to work.