I had interactions with members of the terrorist organisation ISIS - they were surprisingly friendly even after I told them that I was not going to join Islam or their organisation. They also wanted to teach me arabic.

My dad met a corsican bandit (Antoine) on the run in Provence sometime in the late 60es (edit : probably 1964). They were staying at a place in the hills (in the Luberon), I’ve been there, it’s remote, beautiful. He tells me how Antoine taught him to throw knives. He thinks Antoine had an affair/fling with my grandma’s friend who was staying with them at the time.
After a few days, one morning Antoine is tipped off by some guy (?). A short time later, police with dogs show up, even a helicopter. He had already fled in the forest and wasn’t found afaik.

My dad has kept a handful of 8mm reels from that time. I’m not sure if we see Antoine in them, I think he was being super cautious.

I looked him up, his name was Antoine Orsini. He was a suspected member of the gang La Brise De Mer : https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gang_de_la_Brise_de_mer
Assuming that’s the same guy, at least the dates seem to coincide. Not big enough to have his own wiki article apparently…

Very pleasant for me, my girlfriend in the late 90s and early 2000s was a mildly upmarket dealer, and I got work through her contacts which was usually safe. I ended up doing a lot of work through her dealer, who was the big fish in a town of about 300K people.

I got nice presents, got paid to chaperone his daughter and her friends for a week (free holiday!), got better work contacts for myself, very cheap electrical goods, free drugs, and had a favour I never got around to calling in.

I did spend a day digging up his garden looking for a nine bar of resin that he’d buried while high, which was hard work (we didn’t find it), and there was a time I was interviewed by police while I was hiding enough speed in my house that it’s sale could have bought said house, but it was otherwise just an informal business relationship with occasional blowjobs.

10/10 would do again.

I had a friend who lived deep in the ghetto. So deep she was swarned by cops on multiple occasions while going home because “the only reason a white person would be in this area is to buy drugs.”

Her next door neighbor was the largest xanax dealer in the city, and there were a few sell houses on the street.

Everyone there was amazing. They were all super friendly and we got invited to parties and BBQs constantly.

The overriding memory of that life was right at the beginning when an old timer that I’d just started to roll with told me this: “There’s no such thing as victimless crime - so choose your victims carefully.” That really stuck with me.

Having been a young white dude in the US, ive had all of the various christofascist or conservative terrorism organizations make a pass at me at one point or another.

Turning Point USA was recruiting from my school when I was a senior (right when it was starting up), a couple of the kids at my school were fairly well known for being in the KKK, and they tried to get basically every white kid at the school to come to their events. My college was a fairly small STEM college, so unless the FBI or the CIA count as organized crime, we didnt have a lot. After college the job market was still awful from Bush’s recession, I ended up with a job in a small town where the KKK, the Proud Boys, and the Republican Party held a weekly rally at the towns main intersection and liked to block traffic and generally be a nuisance…but the police chief liked to show up to the rallies (all 3), so you just learned to avoid certain areas on certain days.

Years ago (early 90s) my mother had a female friend. The friend had an uncle “Tony” no idea if a real uncle or just friend of family.

My mother’s friend also had a sister who was engaged. One night sister and fiance got into a fight and it hit violent. Sister ended up in hospital for a week, several broken bones and multiple injuries. Somehow, “Tony” found out. The next morning the boyfriend woke up and left the house for work. He never showed up to work. He never was seen or heard of again. Maybe he’s buried, maybe he’s in the walls of a building or under the pavement of a road. I have no idea, but sister got a beating and when “Tony” found out he ensured the guy would beat anyone else ever.

Thought of another instance, even less details on this. Coworker was from Trinidad. One day he didn’t show up, ok cool everyone takes time off. Next day he is also not at work, I ask manager and told “he had a family emergency”. I think it was a week later he returned and I was curious and talked with him. He told me he had relatives in Trinidad and one started a new job at a port basically checking to make sure fees were paid and paperwork was filled out. There was a boat with a shipping container that was not documented and was not labeled. He opened container, supposedly top to bottom, front to back was white powder. I assume coke but could be anything. He closed the container and kept silent to not cause issues with the gangs. He went home, told family what he saw over dinner, then went to bar for a drink. Next morning he wasn’t in his bed. He wasn’t in the home. He told someone what he saw and that was a mistake. The ship was docked and allowed to leave. Maybe corruption, maybe not… Don’t know, don’t want to know.

Fairly pleasant, TBH.

I worked for a summer camp specifically for kids from some particularly dicey neighborhoods. Every so often I had to go set up shop in those neighborhoods to meet with parents and whatnot. Some guys in a local gang came to talk to me, learned I was there to offer something helpful to their kids, and from then out made sure I and my car were safe whenever I had to be in the area.

Nice guys, at least in the capacity I knew them.

I went on a ‘Business Enterprise’ programme back in the UK in the very early ‘90s. Basically it was how to run a business 101. Six sessions on different things: accounting, HR, etc. etc.

One of the other guys on the course turned out to be the son of the biggest coke dealer in the city.

He was a nice kid. By the end of the course a bunch of us had bonded and someone invited us all to a house party.

The son of the coke dealer turned up with a briefcase literally full of cocaine. That was a fucking awesome party, let me tell you.

I grew up in a town where it was general knowledge that retired Italian mobsters retired to.

They made sure that town was clean, safe, and with very little crime. Chased out encroaching gangs and were generally an overall positive for the community.

Since they stopped retiring there a few years ago, the town has gone to shit.

I would say ‘Nice try FBI’, but this was back when I was a child, so fuckit, here goes…

Back when I was only 7 years old (1989), living on a ~40 acre horse ranch/junkyard, my dad and his friend decided to teach me to drive a stick shift truck. Plenty of open space ya know, so yeah…

Anyways, dad’s friend literally told me to drive through the pond in the back end of the property. It was only a couple feet deep anyways, so it shouldn’t have been any big deal right?

Well, we did exactly that, drove through the pond, only for the truck tires to end up completely shredded. So like what the actual fuck?

Apparently I ran over a bucket to a bulldozer buried in the pond.

Well, as we came to find out later as time went on, the previous owner of the property had been stealing bulldozers and other county equipment, grinding off the serial numbers, repainting them, and selling them back to the county.

Yeah that caught up with him, I never actually met the previous property owner, but that motherfucker also had people removed from the gene pool if they reported him…

I knew someone who lived in the same block as a well known motorcycle appreciation society. It was an incredibly clean and safe area. And the local dive bar was fun without a hint of shadiness or trouble. They did not shit where they ate.

When my girlfriend’s dad was a kid he was once paid very good money to help unload crates off a boat and not ask questions

Also, and even less directly relevant to my life, I live a couple blocks away from a very famous dead gangster’s old hideout. One of the members of the gang, who lived down the street from me, went on to have a fairly iconic role in a classic mob movie

I was driving on I-70 and saw a member of an MC execute someone.

One of my dad’s friends is in a local chapter of the same MC.

I worked near a clubhouse which used to be a lot more publicly active, in a trade that used to skew a lot more “rough”.

I heard that they trafficked women and that they would come to the job site to “work”. There were people with serious drug problems who could not be let go because of their affiliation. This last one I find the hardest to believe for some reason but apparently people were pressured into buying t shirts? Like with the clubs name and logo. Seems strange.