Requiem for a Bootlegger

I've never been farther east than Montreal, so I've certainly never been to the Red Shed. But it sounds like it was quite the place. Until the provincial government killed it.

Sprinkled amid the ordinary folks were some politicians. The mayor of Charlottetown, a few members of city council, even a provincial Cabinet minister had come to pay his respects to Prince Edward Island’s most beloved bootlegger.

“I guess, back when Gordie got started, that he decided that he wanted to keep the family tradition alive,” Mr. Kitson says.

Bootlegging, or selling alcohol without a liquor licence, and the Dunn clan go a long way back. Gordie’s grandparents were bootleggers. Their daughter — Gordie’s mom — was a bootlegger even though her husband went to work each day as an engineer with the provincial government.

Little Gordie, who would succumb to cancer at age 69, broke into the family racket about 30 years ago. At first, he started small, in a house next door to the house on Chestnut Street where he grew up.

As the money came in, the one-time streetcar operator in faraway Toronto expanded the business. He bought another house, a red house, at 57 Chestnut St., on the opposite side of the family homestead.

Gordie renovated the place, turning the upstairs into a private apartment and the downstairs into an icon everyone in Charlottetown knew as The Red House, including the cops, who would occasionally raid the joint.

The Red House was a bar, an illegal (nudge, nudge, wink, wink) bootlegging bar, with a couple of sitting rooms, a men’s — and a ladies washroom — a pool table, a patio, a basement for the overflow and even a place where the local fellow who didn’t make it so big, but had a guitar, could sit and play a few songs.

It was like Cheers, the old sitcom: It was the place where everybody knew your name. And if they didn’t, they would not let you in the door.

...

Mitchell Tweel grew up around the corner from The Red House. His family has known the Dunns for generations. Mr. Tweel is a city councilor now, and he isn’t much of a drinker, and he wasn’t ever a regular at The Red House.

But he understands what Gordie’s booze can meant to his community.

“Gordie was a kind soul, a gentle soul, and if you came to him for something he’d help you out,” Mr. Tweel says. “He wasn’t just trying to reap the benefits. He helped a lot of people, and it was not something you’d ever see on the front of a newspaper.”

The bootlegger sponsored minor hockey teams, bought new playground equipment for a neighbourhood elementary school, cooked for and fed people on Christmas and made those who did not have any family to go home to feel as though they always did.

Gordie, see, could not walk three blocks without handing someone $20. He put nieces and nephews through college, bought plane tickets, paid for hotel rooms and won a Governor-General’s medal for heroism for pulling two people from a burning house.

But he never once asked to be thanked. And he never talked about the things he did. It was not his way.

On New Year’s, he would open his doors for an annual levee, a come-one-welcome-all Maritime tradition where revellers were greeted with a bowl of chowder and a cold beer. Politicians would pop by, and the police might even pop in to The Red House — to share in the merriment, not shut the place down.

But eventually, they did shut Gordie down, though bootlegging and booze cans were an Island tradition, a holdover from a time long before Gordie’s time.

Fire codes and safety standards turned the illegal bars into political dynamite and, after a rancorous debate in 2004, then-premier Pat Binns’ government blew away the illegal bars for good by increasing bootlegging fines and empowering police to seize a bootlegger’s assets in a bust.

It was the last call for The Red House.

“Gordie’s whole life changed after that,” Mr. Kitson says. “He basically went downhill. Once they shut them down, they shut part of Gordie down, too.”

He would try being a customer, being a guy on the other side of the bar. And, for a time, he even contemplated buying a legitimate establishment.

But it was not the same. Things could never be the same as The Red House. The death of an Island tradition killed something inside the bootlegger with the gentle soul.

“Gordie was Chestnut Street,” Teddy Kitson says. “At the end of his life, when he was in the hospital and would not be going home again, I think he gave up.

From the National Post.

Customs NZ

Anyone interesting coming to New Zealand ought use whole disk encryption prior to travel, using a randomly chosen key left with someone out of country, then phoning home to get the key on arrival.

Customs here may be following overseas trends in using customs powers as an end-run around warrant requirements.

Bruce Schneier helpfully explains how to protect yourself.

Travel safe...

Correlated risks

During the 2008 election campaign, Key advocated having the New Zealand Superfund invest up to 40% of its assets in New Zealand. This seemed utterly absurd. Superfund investments will be drawn on when domestic tax revenues are low and superannuitant commitments are high. When will domestic tax revenues be low? During a domestic recession. When are NZ investments worth least? During a domestic recession. Since overall government funding of superannuitants will come from a mix of domestic tax revenue and returns from the investment portfolio, a sensible strategy would underweight domestic investments relative to international ones to avoid correlated shocks.

When Bill English asked whether the Superfund could massively increase its domestic holdings without compromising its duty to invest the fund on a prudent, commercial basis, the managers of the fund told him no.

NotPC reports that the Earthquake Commission has invested heavily in domestic assets - mostly government stocks and bonds. 67% of its asset base is government securities. Some of this would be an artefact of the financial crisis with different parts of the asset base having different responses. But it does seem very high.

Again, correlated risks. The Christchurch earthquake is going to be expensive, but it could have been much worse. Something much worse would have nailed NZ's credit rating and killed the value of a good part of the commission's asset base at the exact time it would need to liquidate it to pay out on claims.

Suppose that your wife tells you that you could save a lot on house insurance if you just paid her the premiums every month and she'd pay you if the house burned down. Seems like a good idea - keep the money in the family. She invests the premiums you pay her in getting the kitchen redone. Yup, the insurer's asset base looks good now. But come the fire...

Hopefully it's not as bad as all that. If they're clever, the reinsurance picks up everything beyond some minimal amount, so the Earthquake Commission's asset base only needs to cover what would effectively be a deductible. In that case, heavy domestic investment in government assets is silly rather than reckless.

Stuff Indian Men like

@kalimkassam points to one bit from the OKCupid post that I'd missed: Ayn Rand shows up as one of the top terms in male Indian profiles.

That doesn't surprise me a lot. When I'd looked at Google Search data on Rand, India consistently showed up as a hotbed of Objectivism.

So at least I'll be able to get a decent Sag Gosht in Galt's Gulch.

HT: @kalimkassam

It would take an earthquake...

It turns out that the talk of Mayoral prospect and Member of Parliament Jim Anderton having quipped that it would take an earthquake for him to lose the election was apocryphal.

But the trading data doesn't lie.

The Christchurch Press also picked up the price move.

I've been on the wrong side of every turn on this contract. Started out long on Parker as I couldn't imagine that an incumbent with no particular problems should be sitting only at 30 cents against an almost-retired MP. I reversed out of that position when Parker seemed to be completely screwing up at every turn in the campaign, with absolutely nothing on the radar that seemed likely to help him. Then the earthquake hit, 4:35 am Saturday 4 September. Folks started buying Parker and shorting Anderton around 9 AM. My internet access was good enough for tweeting, but not good enough for trading. And, we were a bit busy with other things.

Since the quake, Parker's been able to do no wrong and Anderton's disappeared back to Parliament except to muse about whether or not he should resign as MP should he win the mayoralty race.

I swear he's doing it just to kill my portfolio.

I wonder whether Parker's not a bit over-bought - the election is still a month away. The city's response in the immediate aftermath has been great; whether they can continue to make everybody happy for another month...

The iPredict forums have been gold.

Greek tragedies

Michael Lewis in Vanity Fair on Greek finances:

When Papaconstantinou arrived here, last October, the Greek government had estimated its 2009 budget deficit at 3.7 percent. Two weeks later that number was revised upward to 12.5 percent and actually turned out to be nearly 14 percent. He was the man whose job it had been to figure out and explain to the world why. “The second day on the job I had to call a meeting to look at the budget,” he says. “I gathered everyone from the general accounting office, and we started this, like, discovery process.” Each day they discovered some incredible omission. A pension debt of a billion dollars every year somehow remained off the government’s books, where everyone pretended it did not exist, even though the government paid it; the hole in the pension plan for the self-employed was not the 300 million they had assumed but 1.1 billion euros; and so on. “At the end of each day I would say, ‘O.K., guys, is this all?’ And they would say ‘Yeah.’ The next morning there would be this little hand rising in the back of the room: ‘Actually, Minister, there’s this other 100-to-200-million-euro gap.’ ”

This went on for a week. Among other things turned up were a great number of off-the-books phony job-creation programs. “The Ministry of Agriculture had created an off-the-books unit employing 270 people to digitize the photographs of Greek public lands,” the finance minister tells me. “The trouble was that none of the 270 people had any experience with digital photography. The actual professions of these people were, like, hairdressers.”

By the final day of discovery, after the last little hand had gone up in the back of the room, a projected deficit of roughly 7 billion euros was actually more than 30 billion. The natural question—How is this possible?—is easily answered: until that moment, no one had bothered to count it all up. “We had no Congressional Budget Office,” explains the finance minister. “There was no independent statistical service.” The party in power simply gins up whatever numbers it likes, for its own purposes.

Once the finance minister had the numbers, he went off to his regularly scheduled monthly meetings with ministers of finance from all the European countries. As the new guy, he was given the floor. “When I told them the number, there were gasps,” he said. “How could this happen? I was like, You guys should have picked up that the numbers weren’t right. But the problem was I sat behind a sign that said GREECE, not a sign that said, THE NEW GREEK GOVERNMENT.” After the meeting the Dutch guy came up to him and said, “George, we know it’s not your fault, but shouldn’t someone go to jail?”

As he finishes his story the finance minister stresses that this isn’t a simple matter of the government lying about its expenditures. “This wasn’t all due to misreporting,” he says. “In 2009, tax collection disintegrated, because it was an election year.”

“What?”

He smiles.

“The first thing a government does in an election year is to pull the tax collectors off the streets.”

“You’re kidding.”

Now he’s laughing at me. I’m clearly naïve.

Wow. HT: Marginal Revolution [Update: autoqueued when Tyler first posted, now everybody's pointing to it. Oh well.]

Single favourite line:

“every single member of the Greek Parliament is lying to evade taxes.”

The Germans must love paying for this.

Read the whole thing, seriously. How does Greece get out of this mess? Can anything save a civic culture this broken?

Duelling maps

Crowdsourcing yesterday brought us MapQuake. Today brings us the more official one from ECan.

I'll be curious to see which proves the more reliable: the once sourced from official stats, or the one that's crowdsourced.