Pascale’s Wager
Brent Finnegan -- April 23rd, 2008
I don’t know how this landed in Google News this evening, considering the story appears to be at least nine years old, but I couldn’t stop reading all five pages of the Washington Post story about how local business owner Charlie Pascale got himself tangled up in a Nigerian money scam in the early 1990s. It reads like a bizarre extended transcript of To Catch A Con Man. Apparently Charlie’s story is also part of a book called The Pan-African Nation: Oil and the Spectacle of Culture in Nigeria.
This guy is nuts! I’ve been to Lagos and, trust me, some of these folks should not be messed with. However upon arriving in the country, you quickly understand their motivation for these scams.
The Nigerian people have nothing and have no hope of ever having anything. These bribes and scams are how they feed their families. I drove down “toll roads” where neighbors would take turns blocking the road and collecting “tolls.” I can’t tell you how many “police officers” we bribed during my stay. Even the custom officials rummaged through my suitcases asking what they could keep.
While I think that Mr. Paschale exercised poor judgement at almost every turn, this culture of corruption in Nigeria – as foreign as it is to us in the U.S. – is just a function of a human being’s desire to survive.