Don’t let Vice trick you into being a drug mule
There’s better ways to supplement your income
Internets,
An article yesterday in Canada’s National Post is the best article I’ve ever read. I hope the guys who wrote it receive Canada’s equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize (the McPulitzer), and I hope Vice is permanently shut down as a result of their reporting.
Ideally, Vice co-founder Shane Smith would be perp-walked out of the company’s Williamsburg headquarters as if he were Taxstone, on an episode of the Vice HBO series, which would then be canceled, because that shit is boring anyway.
The article breaks down how this kid Slava P a/k/a Slava Pastuk (née Yaroslav Pastukhov) was using Vice’s Canada office, in Toronto, to manipulate bummy, talentless children into carrying large quantities of drugs on airplanes, as if they were members of Junior Mafia.
The way it worked was, Slava P would use the company’s internal messaging system to contact some desperate permalancer or intern who was about to be out of a job. He also targeted people who’d recently been “let go,” probably because they were on drugs.
Anyone working there would be susceptible to this scheme, because Vice’s writers only make about $30,000 a year, i.e. roughly the same amount you’d make at a minimum wage job in some places, if you could get them to put you on the schedule for 40 hours a week.
His offer involved carrying two suitcases filled with cocaine from Las Vegas to Australia, for $10,000. The trip was all-expenses-paid, like a prize on Wheel of Fortune, and you got to stay in both places for two weeks.
Initially, the offer was presented as if it were a freelance assignment for Vice, where Slava P was an editor, and some of the kids the National Post spoke to said they were initially under the impression that this was the case.
Also, the kids said they didn’t want to report Slava P to management because he was high up in the company and friends with management. I took this to mean that management may have been in on the scheme or at the very least copped coke from Slava P.
According to people who work there, who spoke anonymously so as not to endanger their lucrative music journalism careers, Vice employees snort coke in the office, at a bar where they gather for drinks after work and at the company Christmas party.
It seems improbable, to me, that they weren’t getting their coke from Slava P. We already know he shits where he eats. In the pic that ran along with the story, he looks like someone who deals coke in his workplace, complete with ’70s porno mustache and male-pattern baldness.
Slava P’s little scheme came to a grinding halt in late 2015, when one of his drug mules, a black kid, was busted at the airport in Australia. I don’t know what Slava P was thinking sending a black guy, even a suspect-looking blipster. They probably pulled him out of line precisely because he was black!
Seriously, who ever heard of a black guy taking a vacation trip to Australia? I’ve heard the girls there are colossal sluts who will bust it open for literally any American guy, but according to guys I know who were in the army, there’s other countries with girls like that, and they aren’t nearly as far.
This black kid has been sitting in an Australian prison for a year now, awaiting trial. The maximum penalty for the crime he’s been charged with is life imprisonment. Just for traveling with some suitcases? I hope his lawyer is Jewish.
Slave P, meanwhile, is probably still in Canada selling drugs. He was let go from Vice going on a year ago, but he hasn’t been charged with a crime, and it isn’t clear that he’s even under investigation.
Could you imagine a black guy running a drug ring from the offices of a company that’s supposedly worth $4 billion and getting away with it? Irv Gotti bought a screenplay from a guy who used to sell crack back in the ’80s, and was perp-walked out of the Def Jam building with a quickness.
Vice has already been caught in a lie, claiming to have conducted a thorough investigation and to have reported Slava P to law enforcement. 5–0 says there was no such report, and Vice employees say there was no investigation. They didn’t even know why Slava P was fired until just now.
Until we can ascertain the extent of their involvement in this scheme, it might be necessary to shut down Vice’s operations. And can’t the police seize people’s property, even if they haven’t been convicted of a crime, just because they think it might be involved in drug dealing?
I see I might have to purchase a media organization at auction.
Take it easy on yourself,
Bol
Originally published at tinyletter.com.
