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Deals, a dealer, dishonesty and a short story...


R.L.

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Not sure how many of you here were around in the early days of Sturm in the early 90's. It was a different format, a different time with different board behavior, more characters and definitely different prices for C3 stuff.

I like to call it the Wild West days of Sturm. Anyone remember Hoodenpyle, Neanderthal, the Anarchy board, Vollmers and some of the other individual characters ,self included, at that time?

What a wonderful time it was! The flaming between board characters, and other boards ran amuck at times, but Buddy reined it all in when it got out of hand. Buddy was like the ref in heavyweight bouts.

Man I miss those times.

Anyhooo..I had a dealer (who will remain un-named in this post) that came out of nowhere onto the Sturm scene and decided he was going to muscle his way in at Sturm. I was selling NOS 1919 parts at that times along with other belt fed gear.

He contacted me privately off the Sturm boards one evening. He was a Florida dealer,07/type 2 and no it wasn't Ruben, Jim Corby or any of the other long established good guys in Florida. This guy as it turned out was a real passive agressive chameleon. 

He'd post under different board names, attack other dealers and individuals anon, thinking he'd never get caught, then deny it when accused. Eventially he did and was put off the board.

During this conversation he decided to confide in me about a recent "STEAL" he had pulled off. Now why he came to me instead of others who were far more qualified to answer his questions, I don't know. Maybe he was worried about be outed by the better known authorities? I was a relative nobody at Sturm. I guess he felt safer talking to me. None the less it was a big mistake for him.

Anyway... seems this dealer met a WW1 vet that had a few aircraft mg's. Pretty rare stuff I might add. Of course the old vet had no idea what this stuff was worth. So this scum dealer begins to try to scare the poor old fella into selling him the weapons, you know...so he doesn't get in any trouble, blah, blah, blah. Now mind you the weapons were papered, complete with capture paperwork. He sold this scum dealer the weapons, pennies on the dollar!!!

As we continued the converstaion he starts to laugh and tell me how "he stole" the guns off of that old guy, fooling him into believing he needed to get rid of the weapons fast!! He's now bragging to me about how he screwed thus guy over and my blood began to BOIL!!!!

Fellas, my dad was a decorated Navy Commander. He's gone now but I loved that man more than life. He gave to this country selflessly for his entire lifetme. He gave to me things I can never repay him for. Stealing from this poor old WW1 Vet was like someone stealing from MY dad. I became totally unglued at that point.

I told this worthless POS to never ever contact me again, probably no as kind as this sounds here and punctuated with some of my favorite curse words. I couldn't believe it...this worthless POS bragged about stealing from a guy who fought for his country in the Great War to end all wars. What a worthless human!

To this day this guy is lower than whale shxt at the bottom of the ocean to me. And of course like most flash in the pan, white shoed, checker pants carnival barker types...he's no longer a part of this community. 

Everyone wants a deal, there is a difference between a deal and total dishonesty. Integrity, honesty, and the truth will always prevale.

 

FWIW,

R.L.

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R.L, what a friendly reminder of how people can actually be and it is pretty SAD. (reminds me of Dana)

We, as a community, are still bombarded by email scams that seem to come in waves. Then there are the scammers that post up ad's, we generally catch those pretty quickly, however there are some folks that see a Great Price and get sucked in and their money is gone... These scammers are all Worthless Humans as R.L mentions.

Here is some simple advise for those that read this, unless you know the dealer, do an FFL EZcheck, it is Free and Fast to check. I have had a few Bogus FFL's emailed to me and without doing the FFL EZcheck, I might have been scammed.

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What good is I'll gotten gains when your burning in hell for it! 

I simply have a hard time buying from old people as I pay too much because I don't want people to think bad of me and I just plain feel bad for the elderly. 

Friend of mine died about 2 yrs ago, he had about 900 guns . Sold off alot and was down to 58 guns when he was at death's door. I tried and tried to get him to let me take them and get top dollar for his wife, he always said some day. Well , some day never came, . Local dealer swooped in and bought all the guns and ammo for litterally next to nothing. Then dealer is laughing to me how cheap he got everything. Some of the guns he made over 1000.00 on. How can you rob a widow? 

I've actually dispersed a collection for a widow before. Didn't make a single penny on it, nor would I. 

Character is very hard to find today. 

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