Dude chuckled, "Yeah, you're right. They think they're gangsters, but they're just pranksters!"
A compact man in old dress shirt and pants, Bill Bringhurst was his name, and he was in Atlantic City to peddle programs at the Miss America Competition, with events all week-long leading to the finale on Sunday. He said it wasn't unusual for him to make $250 a night, just selling programs on commission, and he had worked Eagles and Phillies games, too, and concerts. "Beyonce wanted me to go on tour with her, so I could sell her programs."
"You're full of sh*t!"
"You don't know, man, I'm good at what I do. I'm the best!"
He said his family arrived in the "1400's," and were among the first settlers of Germantown in Philadelphia. Well, Columbus reached the Americas in 1492, and Germantown wasn't founded until 1681, but maybe the Bringhursts were kidnapped by Martians, then dumped in Pennsylvania a couple hundred years earlier. Anything is possible. By this point, I was starting to wonder if here was just some homeless guy talking out of his ass, but hot air is all too common in a city with a faux Taj Mahal, and where the last mayor lost his job for lying about being in the Green Berets during the Vietnam War. This he did to win the election, and to collect extra benefits from the Veterans Administration. As the expose heated up, Bob Levy simply disappeared for two weeks, leaving embarrassed A.C. without a mayor. It turned out this former life guard had checked himself into a mental health clinic. "The hope you deserve, the help you need. Depression. Anxiety. Bipolar Disorder. Schizophrenia."
Leaving Bringhurst, I ran into a man who had hung his jacket and khaki pants on an electric meter box outside Papa John's Pizza. "I like to mark my territory," Tony B., explained. Tony's scheme was to buy Delilah's Den, the strip bar, "for maybe $400,000. No more. They're really hurting. There are four strip bars within three blocks, and that's too many! I'll turn it into a special ed school." Tony also let out that his father had been a hitman for the Gambino, "like Carmen Campisi." Within two minutes Tony had told me all this, and given me his phone number also, then he disappeared.
I was left alone momentarily, but then a young, snub nosed girl in a pale, loose smock approached, "You have a cigarette?"
"Sorry, but I don't smoke."
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