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The Magic Key

Ten years is a long time to have a Magic Key and technician Riley Grey, a four-month employee of the QE Services' Macon, GA, branch, had completely and utterly used, abused and took it for granted for a very profitable tax-free decade…within reason. After all, he wasn't suicidal, just greedy and complacent and there is a reasonable rhythm to a dishonest technician's skimming schedule. Grey had an MO (method of operation) that he stuck to, and like most successful criminals, he never violated his MO habit...

April 30, 2019 | Mark Manney

Ten years is a long time to have a Magic Key and technician Riley Grey, a four-month employee of the QE Services' Macon, GA, branch, had completely and utterly used, abused and took it for granted for a very profitable tax-free decade…within reason. After all, he wasn't suicidal, just greedy and complacent and there is a reasonable rhythm to a dishonest technician's skimming schedule.

Grey had an MO (method of operation) that he stuck to, and like most successful criminals, he never violated his MO habit. But after he was terminated from his only employer since high school in such a transparent Mickey Mouse fashion, the Magic Key became more than just the entry into his own personal vending ATM machine…it became a tool of consuming revenge.

After all, he knew that they had suspected he had a Magic Key, but they were supposed to catch him and prove it, and they couldn't because he was slicker then a politician's promise. The fact that they didn't play by the unofficial rules and used some nickel-and-dime excuse to manage him out…after 13 years of service…that wasn't fair! So what if he helped himself to what he deserved now and then, with more now than…then… happening every month?

Now Grey wanted more than the constant small-time flow of dollar bills the Magic Key provided…and the lifestyle to which he had become addicted. He wanted to hurt the company that had been a way of life and livelihood for him since high school.  

"Have a frosty cold Cobalt Cola" was more than an international marketing motto for about the last century. Grey collected Cobalt Cola memorabilia; his house was decorated with it, his daughters played with the stuffed polar bears that had become one of its iconic symbols, and now they had fired him! They had tossed him aside on a two-bit nickel-dime progressive corrective action cellphone misuse write- up! They would pay … and pay and pay with a vengeance. Hell hath no fury like a managed-out dishonest mechanic!



Ten Years Earlier

Twenty-one-year-old Cobalt Cola technician Riley Grey was pouring over the credit card bills trying to figure out how he was going to pay them. When his daddy was alive, he had always told him to "act your wage," but Grey was spending a lot more than what he made. Not only was he in debt with no emergency fund to fall back on, but his car's transmission blew, and he was living in a too-expensive double-wide.

Then the first dark thought tiptoed across his mind. It didn't even sound like his voice talking to himself, almost like there was someone else in his head offering slippery advice. There was no key control at the Cobalt Cola branch and he had a Starlite master key that he knew no one knew he had. He had it for six months and he could swear sometimes that the key was whispering to him. It was a soft seductive sound … almost a hiss.

There was no key log, no controls, and the supervisor who had given it to him in an emergency was in his grave for five months and three weeks following a car accident. Grey kept waiting for someone to ask for it back….but evidently no one knew he had it…or that it was even missing! He remembered an old Sunday school lesson about fleeing temptation…and he knew he should turn the key in…give it back…end the argument he was having with his God-given conscience…but he kept it. The soft, hissing whisper turned seductive.

 

A Plate Of Crow For Lunch And A Piece Of Humble Pie For Dessert

The Cobalt Cola operations manager who had hatched and executed the plan to manage out Riley Grey through progressive corrective action for his constant cellphone abuse was having a hard time sleeping, plus he was being squeezed hard by his boss. He felt guilty knowing Grey was plying his profession and probably his character flaws at a vending company (and Cobalt customer) called QE Services.

What really bothered him was that firing Grey not only didn't stop his cash losses…it seemed to have thrown gasoline on the financial fires of his red-inked P&L. He knew Grey had been skimming for years, probably with a stolen master key… that had to be it? They had tried and tried to set him up, yet the seemingly uncanny sixth sense of the thief and his cautious MO had prevented him from taking the bait on one phony salted service call after another. Evidently since Grey was fired he had unleashed the dogs of cash theft skimming war on Cobalt Cola.

The cash shortage at the district was through the roof, climbing to 3%. One prominent clue pointing to Grey was a hospital nurse married to one of its drivers who had seen a short, squat, muscular guy wearing a Dr. Pepper Snapple shirt sporting a Mohawk haircut leaving the breakroom at 8 p.m.…a breakroom where only the Cobalt Cola machines were completely cleaned out of all cash. Grey looked like a TV wrestler sporting a buzz cut Mohawk...it had to be him.

The driver didn't want his wife involved. After all, Cobalt Cola had hired two off-duty police officers to be in the room when they fired Grey on his third cellphone write- up and escorted him off company property. Grey's brooding persona, cocky swagger, known unhinged temper and no-neck weight-room hulk topped off by the buzz-cut Mohawk left everyone uncomfortable around the TV wrestler wanna be.

The Cobalt Cola operations manager invited the QE Services operations manager, Cord Dale, out for lunch and asked him how his cash shortages were. When Dale told him they had exploded, his face flushed as he blurted out the real reason Grey was managed out and the hospital incident. He apologized for not being honest when Dale had called him to follow up on Grey after he applied at QE, and then he blamed HR and the fact he was told to keep the real reason Grey was managed out in-house to avoid any liability.

He knew there was more than one way to alert Dale and avoid passing on a corrupt mechanic, but he had eagerly washed his hands…but now they still felt dirty. It was an awkward meal and when the waitress asked if they wanted dessert the Cobalt Cola manager felt like ordering humble pie to go along with the plate of crow he had just swallowed. He needed QE's help. Dale then told him QE had just hired a loss prevention consultant (yours truly) and this sounded like something he could kick upstairs and maybe turn over to the hired gun.

 
Paladin Paladin Where Do You Roam?

As a boy, my favorite TV show had been Paladin starring Richard Boone. In 1960, at 10 years old, I had sat transfixed in front of the glowing black-and-white tube watching Paladin, a professional gunfighter who resided in an upscale hotel in San Francisco in between subject-matter-expert jobs throughout the post-Civil War lawless West, confronting bad guys of all types and stripes. Paladin played chess, quoted philosophers, dressed in black, and when on a case decidedly dealt with all the multi-layered paradoxes of complicated beings who are human.

 
The Investigative Chess Board  

I had taken up chess as a 10-year-old, and became a serious student of not only the game but of its strategic and tactical thought processes. I always approached a business investigation with the four principles of chess in mind: force, time, space and pawn structure.

Force: The strength of the pieces, both individually and collectively, also known as material advantage.

Time:  When you can focus your pieces – your material advantage – to a particular part of the board either faster than your opponent or without him realizing it until it is too late.

Space: When you have an advantage in space, you control more territory than your enemy; you box your opponent in, squeezing him, restricting his movements. By applying the principle of space you can win a game by taking so much space away from an opponent that all he can do is pace back and forth in his little cell, waiting for you to proceed with the execution.

Pawn Structure:  Clearly the weakest piece on the board is the pawn, but in reality the pawn is the foundation on which most chess strategies are built. You can defend with pawns, you can attack with pawns and they make excellent bait.


Force

An investigation-planning meeting was held at the QE office and then a followup meeting at the Cobalt Cola office with all the pieces, all the material advantage gathered together to leverage its collective power. I was joined by QE regional manager Robert James, general manager Hugh Thomas, and Macon operations manager Cord Dale, along with two Cobalt Cola managers, their regional investigator, and a private investigator I brought in to do some grunt surveillance work.

Cobalt Cola agreed to pay for the PI in silently understood penance for their past sin of not warning QE about Gray's true character, or lack there of, and the real reason he was terminated – a professional faux pas in any industry. QE general manager Robert James was so angry when he found out about Cobalt Cola's silence while QE was hiring Grey, that he was looking for an opportunity to "jerk a knot" in whoever held back on the rest of the story on the corrupt mechanic.


Time

At the second meeting of all the material advantage players at the Cobalt Cola branch office, QE Macon operations manager Cord Dale zoomed into the parking lot excited to meet first with Hugh Thomas and me, and with good reason. Part of the investigation plan had been to install a covert GPS system on Grey's company van. It had worked as the previous week's data had shown him going someplace that made no sense and could at the very least provide a piece to the dishonest technician puzzle.

Then, the unit cut off the day before the meeting, Grey had brought the van in at lunch and was busy in the shop.  Dale slipped inside the van to check the GPS unit, and found it had been discovered and deliberately disabled. But he noticed the ashtray open just an inch and saw the glint of something in it that caught his eye…a key! The quick-thinking manager snapped a photograph of the key with his cell…he knew it wasn't a QE key. He slipped back into his office without Grey knowing he was in his truck, then sped to the material advantage planning meeting at Cobalt Cola with a printout of the photographed key. At the meeting, when it was identified as a Cobalt Cola Starlite master key, and the three Cobalt managers starting salivating. All they wanted was that key…but I wanted more, in time I wanted to conduct a public execution, during rush hour, in the public square of the Macon branch, with Riley Grey's Mohawk scalp on display.


Space

I pulled into the Home Depot parking lot with the ex-cop from Alaska who now worked as an investigator for Cobalt Cola, to stake out a QE Services machine Grey would soon be called to for a setup service call…with $38 in marked bills jammed up and begging for a skim. My thoughts drifted to my boyhood Paladin fantasies and how he had ended up making his living riding into cities confronting bad guys of all types and stripes.

I churned this case over in my mind and what I knew about Riley Grey deliberating on the best interrogation approach, always planning future moves on the business chess board, knowing the Magic Key was probably (and hopefully) still sitting in the ashtray of Grey's QE van. If Grey took the bait or not, I would soon be sitting across from this bad guy with an opportunity to play with the space that was under the buzz cut Mohawk and find out if the projected persona was as unhinged and tough as the façade.

 
Pawn Structure

Part of the pawn structure in the strategic approach of checkmating a dishonest technician is the ubiquitous vending machine needing a routine service. The setup outside the Home Depot was perfect as the two machines together – one a Cobalt Cola and the other a QE machine would be known in chess terms as "hanging pawns." In a chess game, hanging pawns are often also referred to as a "pawn island," consisting of two pawns side by side on the fourth rank of the chess board.

Sometimes, hanging pawns are the source of dynamic energy for an attack; at other times they become a target subject to a frontal attack by the enemy, but I liked to use them as bait. As Riley Grey pulled up to answer his third service call for the day, the force, time, space and pawn structure all came together for what I hoped was technician Riley Grey's final move leading to a swift and sudden confrontation checkmate.


Gambit Time

The PI sat slumped in his car blending into the ocean of parked cars in the lot. As Grey pulled up, the PI's telephoto lens zoomed in taping him approaching the two machines in front of the Home Depot: a QE Services machine and a Colbalt Cola machine, both without a hockey puck lock on them, the perfect hanging pawn bait.

Grey scanned to the left and to the right, then the parking lot. He looked like a wolf sniffing the air, his eyes probing with an unnatural piercing scan. As Grey opened the QE machine, he had a tempting double hit at his fingertips, $38 in jammed up bills in the QE machine and a Colbalt Cola machine right next to it that he has the Magic Key for, that hisses "open sesame," sitting in his van's ashtray.

The Cobalt Cola investigator and I were in another car angled perfectly with a clear view of the machines. I had my ole one-eye binocular pressed against my right eye.  The one eye had served me faithfully back in the day in the retail big-box world when I hunted the elusive American shoplifter. Although I was 40 yards away, I could see the blackheads on the wily mechanic's face.

As Grey pulled out the jammed cash, he glanced over at the Cobalt Cola machine and my heart skipped a beat as a dark look and a sly grin smirked across the dishonest technician's face. Grey swiveled his head to the left and to the right with the snappy double-sided glance I had seen on each and every one of the over 400 shoplifters I had personally apprehended the split second before the dirty deed was done. Grey unconsciously scratched his butt with one hand then folded the jammed bills in half pulling them out of the machine and palming them with his other hand in one fluid seemingly casual movement. The soft almost seductive hissing voice inside his head whispered encouragement.



To be continued in the next issue of Vending Times…