playing the coal game

Some interesting characters at a Montana operation.

snip

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As night fell, a driver traveling along a state road some 20 miles away from Bluefield noticed a man on the roadside: a disheveled Mr. Price, who was rushed to a hospital. He told investigators he had been abducted by an outlaw biker gang that drugged him and took him to his motorcycle shop where they robbed him before loading him into a van and dumping him on the roadside. When surveillance cameras showed there hadn’t been a robbery, he changed his story, saying that the gang had asked him for coal train schedules for a scheme to traffic methamphetamines by rail.

The truth was, Mr. Price hadn’t been kidnapped at all. As he later admitted in court, he had staged his own kidnapping, a last-ditch attempt to escape investors’ wrath for embezzlement schemes totaling more than $20 million that he’d hatched with the president of the Montana coal mine.

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