By Frances Bryce, July 16, 2020 — I am sure that there are many offers that people refuse, as was the case I learned about many years ago as my oldest brother told me about something that happened to him as he was managing a business in Lawrence, South Carolina. [It] is a small business and they had a club. The people on the weekend came from smaller towns—even smaller than ours—at that time when he was telling me the story; they had about 10,000 people with that population there. In this business that he was a manager, they sold food. [The] entertainment mostly was from he called “the jukebox” that allowed people to play songs and dance. In the back room [there was] a private area where men gambled. I learned that sometimes men lost most of the money which they would cash on their paycheck and had to borrow money from the business before going home.
And in a small town, like small towns everywhere, everybody knew my brother’s name because he was a manager in the big thing in the small town. So one day he was approached by a drug cartel, or a drug business person, and said to him, “You know, this kind of money and this kind of time you’re spending, I can set you up in business if you’re willing to work with us, and all you would have to do is handle the books. And then I would offer to build your mom any kind of house she wants and send all your siblings through college and a salary—” [the kind] that was unheard of at that day.
He said that the drugs had moved to the small town because the drug business was not leaving any place that they could make more money and the young people and their families were the victims of the drug trade. The [offer of] money without any things attached and then the lure of it [meant] a lot of young people took them up on it, and there were problems and devastation with these leaders. Keeping the books, money received, were to be his job. He made the decision that there are no upsides for him and his family in this except the money and destroying the user and changing the lives of people. It was an offer he could refuse and he did.