It Ain’t Easy Livin’ Like A Gypsy

Talk about a tough way to make some extra cash; Here is a Breitbart/AP story entitled “Man Sentenced in Glass-Eating Scheme”. From the article…

A man was sentenced Thursday to more than five years in jail for his role in a multistate insurance fraud scheme in which federal prosecutors said he and his wife intentionally ate glass fragments and collected more than $200,000 in compensation.

Ronald Evano, 49, also was ordered to repay $340,000 for his role in defrauding restaurants, grocery stores, insurers, hospitals and doctors in the scheme in which he and his wife claimed that there was glass in the food they ate.

Prosecutors say Evano and his wife, Mary, who remains a fugitive, filed fraudulent insurance claims worth more than $200,000 and incurred more than $100,000 in unpaid medical bills in several states between 1997 and 2005.

There has been about a hundred times in my life that I thought of some way to get rich but, eating glass never crossed my mind. Let me get this straight. This guy, Ronald Evano and his wife go to a restaurant, eat some glass, then go to the emergency room, and somehow get the glass removed. Hold it, how do you get glass out of a person’s stomach? Is that something you can do with a normal stomach pumping procedure? Or, does it require some other special care?

Who knows; off the track. So, Evano gets the glass removed, then goes after the restaurant’s insurance company and gets them to settle somehow for approximately double what the hospital bill is.

That hardly seems worth the trouble.

So, Evano gets five years in the tank, has to pay back 200 grand in settlement money and 100 grand to hospitals. And, the kicker, his wife is on the lamb! He took the fall for his wife!

What could possess a man to do this. What could drive a man to repeatedly eat glass, go to the hospital, deal with multiple insurance companies, go to jail, and take the fall for his wife?

It aint easy
Livin like a gypsy
Tell ya honey how I feel
Ive been dreamin
Floatin down the stream n
Losin touch with all thats real

from the Arrowsmith song “Mama Kin”

Evano says that the reason he did all of this stuff is, he is a gypsy.

More from the article…

Evano asked the judge for mercy, saying in court that he and his wife are members of the minority Roma community, and needed the money to pay for dowries and other costs associated with the marriages of his sons under cultural practices.

That’s right, the day to day cost of being a gypsy is too high and Evano had to resort to a life of crime. It was peer pressure. Surely you can imagine, in the high stress gypsy community, how difficult it is to compete with other, more successful gypsies. And then, there are some gypsies that just get everything handed to them on a silver platter. It all makes perfect sense, for Mr. Evano to keep his tenuous status in the gypsy community he had no choice; He had to do something. He could have opted for a more traditional means to make some dough, like say, a roofing scam, a driveway sealing scam, painting some houses with thinned down paint, having his wife read palms, procuring money from people by promising to cure disease by some mysterious ancient ritual, kidnapping or bribery. But, he needed real money, to pay dowries and such. So, he ate some glass. How can you blame the guy? I mean, what would you do if you had sons that were getting married and you had to pay dowries?

A Word From Our Sposor:

Today’s sponsor is eMusic. Download 25 FREE songs for any MP3 player! I’m not your average music fan. I’m usually looking for stuff that’s, shall we say, off the beaten path. I may be wanting to hear Tal Farlow with the Red Norvo Trio or something by Captain Beefheart. That’s why I think eMusic is hip, they have catalogue stuff that nobody else carries. They have been around a while, the first song I ever downloaded was from eMusic (Big Bill Broonzy’s “Key To The Highway”). The cool thing is that they give you 25 free songs to try it out. If you look around for awhile and don’t find what you like, you still get to keep the 25 songs.

I will be playing with the Double E Riders at the Double E Steakhouse in Highlandville, MO tomorrow night and Saturday. If you are in Highlandville, stop by. It’s a fun gig and ol’ Gary Hodges will be playing drums with us. Hours are 7:30-9:30.