« Assorted links | Main | I wish Obama were more like FDR »
Markets in everything, gypsy threat point edition
I do not read Italian, but Stefano offers me the following summary:
Gypsies exploit their bad reputation to make money. That's what happened in the provinces of Macerata, Ascoli Piceno and Ancona. A group of Gypsies coming from Veneto figured out an original way to swindle real estate agencies. Three of the Gypsies would show up at construction sites driving an expensive car and wearing nice clothes; they would get in touch with the sales office and and put down a down payment in cash for an apartment, sight unseen. After a couple of days they would then show up with their entire families, obstreperous and in tatters. This would trigger an immediate buy-back of the sale contract: the real estate agency would promptly pay back three times the amount of the down payment to get the apartment back (an apartment that the Gypsies did not in fact really want). Real estate agencies reporting this scheme to the police set in motion an investigation that resulted in three of the Gypsies being indicted for fraud. Their loot has been estimated around 300k Euros.
Here is the article.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on March 27, 2009 at 12:57 PM in Current Affairs | Permalink
Comments
Why is this fraud, and not inadequate due diligence on the part of the seller?
Posted by: lc at Mar 27, 2009 1:08:12 PM
That's very funny. And it doesn't look like fraud to me.
But it makes me wonder in what part of the real estate business the "Roma in America" were involved with - running Freddie and Fannie? AIG maybe?
Posted by: fish on a bicycle at Mar 27, 2009 1:14:07 PM
Holly Coase! How cool is that! And how crooked is their legal system if it is cheaper for the real estate company to "convince" the state that this is fraud than to do a simple due diligence.
Posted by: deriuqer at Mar 27, 2009 1:35:37 PM
Not only is this not fraud, but the claim that it is fraud reveals the essential bigotry of the underlying legal system: fraud is, if anything, concealing a relevant fact, and the fact that they are gypsies ought not to be relevant.
Sounds more like arbitrage to me.
Posted by: Paul Gowder at Mar 27, 2009 1:55:40 PM
Not only is this not fraud, but the claim that it is fraud reveals the essential bigotry of the underlying legal system: fraud is, if anything, concealing a relevant fact, and the fact that they are gypsies ought not to be relevant.
Sounds more like arbitrage to me.
Posted by: Paul Gowder at Mar 27, 2009 1:56:15 PM
This was an interesting book about gypsies:
http://www.amazon.com/Little-Money-Street-Search-Gypsies/dp/037541116X/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1238177130&sr=1-3
Posted by: bob at Mar 27, 2009 2:06:27 PM
Doesn't sound like fraud to me either, but it's possible that there are salient details omitted in the short summary.
Posted by: bbartlog at Mar 27, 2009 2:37:02 PM
http://chuckross.blogspot.com/2009/02/midwestern-gypsy.html
i wrote a little blog post about gypsies in my town. for all of their problems, they are keen businessmen, in a weird sort of way.
Posted by: Chuck at Mar 27, 2009 2:45:47 PM
I'm guessing the fraud is in the details - namely, was there an application & did they lie on the application? Otherwise, I don't see the fraud either.
Posted by: Andy at Mar 27, 2009 2:54:36 PM
Fraud... I don't know...
In Italy, it is in theory against the law to discriminate against foreigners, but in practice it is extremely common, so I'd say turnabout is fair play. When calling around looking for apartments, I've often got a very brusque "where are you from?" (with the informal tu!), which I find to be a bit offensive. I'd say the real problem here is probably twofold: 1) racism is alive and well in Italy (*), and 2) if the people moved into the house and stopped paying, they could stay there for a long time before finally being turfed out.
(*) http://padovachronicles.welton.it/2009/03/24/tu-razzista
Posted by: David N. Welton at Mar 27, 2009 3:11:31 PM
As someone with some gypsy ancestry, I shall go ahead and take
offense at yet another obvious instance of anti-gypsy bigotry.
Clearly not fraud.
Posted by: Barkley Rosser at Mar 27, 2009 3:27:21 PM
Marginal Revolution readers don't seem to know much about Roma economics.
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Mar 27, 2009 3:32:32 PM
This has been happening in Portugal for a while as well. I think gypsies use the internet.
Posted by: Joao at Mar 27, 2009 3:47:27 PM
(Whoops, sorry about the double-comment.)
I have to wonder if this sort of thing would work in the U.S. too, perhaps against known racist landlords. Have black people with a white-sounding name call and put down a deposit on a place, then show up. Or, perhaps, if nobody will rent without a personal visit, it would be a great way to screw with homophobes. Gay person shows up alone, puts down deposit, then shows up with partner... muhahaha.
Posted by: Paul Gowder at Mar 27, 2009 3:54:48 PM
Not wanting a typical gypsy clan to move into your new apartment development -- rank bigotry! After all, they almost never kidnap children anymore to use as crippled beggars, like they kidnapped Adam Smith:
"At the age of 4 he was kidnapped by a band of Gypsies, though prompt action by his uncle soon effected his rescue. 'He would have made, I fear, a poor Gypsy,' commented John Rae, his main biographer."
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Mar 27, 2009 3:56:59 PM
That's right Steve. Three hundred years of history are completely irrelevant in predicting what people do. If people who happened to share a few phenotypes with someone committed kidnappings in the 18th century, well, they must be kidnappers today. Idiot.
Posted by: Paul Gowder at Mar 27, 2009 4:09:40 PM
Paul - in the US, we already have a Federal agency that targets racist landlords using "testers" who are essentially undercover enforcement personnel posing as renters or buyers.
http://www.hud.gov/offices/fheo/
A quick Google did not turn up any recent press releases but I know they've done it extensively in the past. I think much of the legwork is done by state-level HUD agencies who receive block grants from the federal agency to perform their enforcement work.
Realtors know this and most avoid implicating themselves like poison. Some years ago, a friend of mine was looking at townhouses in Miami with a Realtor. They looked at some, then went to another development where identical models were priced $10,000 less. When my friend asked why, the Realtor said "I can't tell you." Whe pressed, the Realtor said "You might be from HUD!"
The simple truth is that, in Miami at the time, housing units in Spanish-speaking neighborhoods sold for somewhat less than equivalent units in English-speaking neighborhoods. But saying so could have cost the Realtor his license.
Posted by: Bob Knaus at Mar 27, 2009 4:41:48 PM
share a few phenotypes
What does this even mean?
they must be kidnappers today. Idiot.
Gosh, I don't know about kidnapping; but how about this? In any case, if you think the Gypsies are just like everyone else, I recommend Peter Maas' excellent book, King of the Gypsies.
Posted by: bbartlog at Mar 27, 2009 4:49:28 PM
Bob, It's mostly done by Fair Housing Councils nowadays, which are technically private non-profit organizations but work with housing agencies (and help get evidence pissed off legal-aid lawyers like I used to be, which is why I'm intimately familiar with this system), get some federal money, etc. But they still catch people. They catch people like crazy, who are stupid enough to do obvious things like tell the black couple no places are available and then tell the white couple that places are available.
But it would still be fun to screw over the racists without using the legal system.
Posted by: Paul Gowder at Mar 27, 2009 4:51:25 PM
Gosh, bbartlog and Steve Sailer and Hitler are all right.
Gypsies should just be rounded up and...
Posted by: Barkley Rosser at Mar 27, 2009 5:10:14 PM
Wups, ya Godwined it. Anyway, I guess an enthusiastic attack on strawmen is probably your best shot; you'd have a hard time defending the thesis that gypsies, on average, behave just like everyone else except for a few insignificant quirks.
yet another obvious instance of anti-gypsy bigotry...the claim that it is fraud reveals the essential bigotry of the underlying legal system
We can't be certain without more information. It's certainly possible they got railroaded on flimsy pretexts by a bigoted judge (or just one in the pay of the local landlords), but it's also possible that there was some factual misrepresentation in their original application. There's also an outside chance that the law prohibits the overall structure of the behavior without any of the individual components being illegal, in the same way that English law prohibits blackmail even though the act of revealing the information would not be illegal.
Posted by: bbartlog at Mar 27, 2009 8:04:38 PM
The Gypsies have been horrifically persecuted down through the seven centuries they've been in Europe. Otherwise civilized European countries are said to have subjected them to lethal "Gypsy hunts" all the way up into the 19th Century. Hitler massacred hundreds of thousands. The Communists tried to strip away their culture (but failed), and the newly democratic countries of Eastern Europe have tried to wall them off. For example, one of the first acts of our allies in the Kosovo Liberation Front in 1999 after we bombed Serbia into submission for them was to ethnically cleanse the Gypsies from Kosovo.
So, it can seem churlish to mention any reasons why their tormentors acted so dreadfully. In polite society, you are supposed to assume that this appalling history was simply caused by a 700-year long mass hallucination. But, you can't understand modern Europe without understanding the Gypsies, who make up a rapidly growing part of it (about 10 million people, with much higher birthrates than the European average).
Gypsies, who are evidently of South Asian origin, are often compared to Jews because of their victim status. Yet, in many ways, they are the anti-Jews. The part-Jewish, part-Gypsy American author Isabella Fonseca reported:
"The Gypsies have no heroes. There are no myths of origin, of a great liberation, of the founding of a 'nation,' of a promised land. . . . They have no monuments, no anthem, no ruins, and no Book. Instead of a sense of a great historical past, they have a collective unease, and an instinctive cleaving to the tribe."
Growing up in Southern California, far from the centers of Gypsy life, I knew only endearing, exciting images of Gypsies derived from Romantic masterpieces like Bizet's Carmen and Hugo's Hunchback of Notre Dame. My disillusionment began when backpacking around Europe in 1980. Wherever American and Australian college students came together, the conversation soon turned to how to avoid being victimized by Gypsy thieves, especially their small children.
As an American, I knew that the teenage males of some ethnic groups had a higher proclivity to steal, but I had never before heard of a group where many parents trained their toddlers to steal. Even more horribly, some parents break their children's teeth or bones as part of an insurance scam or to make them into better beggars.
We're not supposed to think about the victims of Gypsy criminals because, after all, crime victims are not real victims (i.e., they are just random human beings, not an organized political pressure group).
In their defense, gypsy criminals are less violent than most criminals, preferring swindles to brute force. Still, the National Geographic reporter Peter Godwin, sent to write a major story about the persecution of the Roma (April 2001), was, in a scene reminiscent of anti-American correspondent Robert Fisk's famous encounter with a Muslim mob, beaten up and mugged by a gang of gypsies he was trying to help.
In reality, the Gypsy culture trains its children from a very early age to be economic parasites. The Gypsies possess a classic "in-group morality." While extremely loyal to their clan, their culture inculcates in them an almost sociopathic disregard for the rights of outsiders.
The Rev. Larry Merino, who evangelizes among American Gypsies in Indiana, notes:
"Gypsies believe a myth that says a lot about the conception most people have of this group. It seems that a Gypsy stole a fourth nail at the crucifixion site that was destined to be used to nail the Savior's head to the cross. Since this act of larceny turned out to be an inadvertent act of mercy, God gave Gypsies the right to take things that didn't belong to them. Many Gypsies believe this is actually true! This being the case, it takes a missionary to this group a long time to undo what has been part of their culture for centuries."
That's why there's never been a Zionist or separatist movement among Gypsies. Jews could successfully start their own national homeland, away from their persecutors, but the Gypsies can't imagine living in their own country with no productive non-Gypsies to leech off.
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Mar 27, 2009 8:54:44 PM
I read not long ago that the Gypsies in Europe are almost the exact opposite of the Amish in America. The Amish pay taxes, use almost no government services, and commit almost no crime. The Gypsies pay few or no taxes, use all sorts of government services, and commit plenty of crime.
Posted by: Peter at Mar 27, 2009 9:24:51 PM
Here are some Gypsy Facts, courtesy of The Guardian:
"In the Czech Republic, 75% of Roma children are educated in schools for people with learning difficulties, and 70% are unemployed (compared with a national rate of 9%). In Hungary, 44% of Roma children are in special schools, while 74% of men and 83% of women are unemployed. In Slovakia, Roma children are 28 times as likely to be sent to a special school than non-Roma; Roma unemployment stands at 80%."
Gypsies in Europe tend to score poorly on IQ tests -- an average of 80 in one study. Whether that is caused by low general intelligence or by a very high rate of dyslexia is unclear. Gypsies do seem to suffer more problems with reading than other groups do. This is perhaps somehow related to their musical skills, which are very strong on average. A prominent concert pianist once told me of a Roma classmate who faked his way through the top classical music conservatory in Hungary without ever learning to read music because his ability to play by ear was so tremendous.
One Nobel prize-winning scientist, August Krogh, was half Gypsy. Charlie Chaplin, among other British actors, is often said to be part Gypsy. Probably the most famous Gypsy is the great jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt.
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Mar 27, 2009 10:25:50 PM
The scheme appears cool to me. However this is not fraud. The seller should have been more alert before the transaction. This Lizzy from Israeli Uncensored News
Posted by: Lizzy at Mar 27, 2009 10:38:12 PM
