This special edition of Asphalt Jungle first appeared in The Promote, a bracing new publication from my friend Hiten Samtani, former Head of Content at The Real Deal.
Whether you’re a commercial real estate investor, operator, or just an enthusiast, a routine dose of Hiten’s rapid fire zeitgeist nuggets will do you good.
Check it out here:
If you kill enough of them, they stop fighting.
US Maj. Gen. Curtis LeMay
Andy is a money manager and a happy bear hug of a guy. He loves America, being a dad, and his black Lab, Sam. If you’re a friend and he hasn’t seen you in a while, he’ll grab you by the shoulders, pull you in close, and ask if you’re ok. He regrets never having served, but after a chance meeting with a combat veteran, he found an outlet for his patriotism - helping former special forces folks ease their way back into polite society.
Dylan is a grizzled former Navy SEAL, with sharp elbows and no filter. Sometimes he stares too long. He’s feral, but that’s where Andy comes in.
I met Dylan for the first time at Andy’s holiday party. He’d been charged with picking up an older guy who no longer drives, a Navy vet we call Captain (“Cap’n”). Andy figured two military men could get to know each other.
When the pair arrived, I saw Captain make a beeline to the bar, and I went over. “The sonofabitch is nuts”, he said, draining a Jonnie Walker and nodding toward Dylan.
He recounted their trip: as they turned down the two-lane road to Andy’s, a woman passed them, flipping Dylan off, weaving back and forth off the shoulder. Dylan said nothing but gunned his pickup until he was on her driver’s side bumper. Then he floored it, forcing her to spin out into the ditch in front of them. As he pulled in behind her, she jumped out of her car staggering and screaming. She threw an empty bottle at Dylan but he spun away, grabbing her from behind and putting her in a sleeper hold until she went to sleep. Dylan reached into her car window, pulled the key from the ignition and threw them into the roadside weeds.
“She could’ve killed someone,” Dylan said. They drove in silence the rest of the way.
Whenever others learned Dylan’s previous profession, they peppered him with questions. They wanted to live combat vicariously – but without the pesky risk of death.
To their questions, Dylan’s answer was always the same.
“Dude, did you kill anyone?”
“Hard to say”.
“What’s it like to jump out of a helicopter?”
“Hard to say.”
“Were you in on the Bin Laden raid?”
“Hard to say.”
He combined this phrase with an insincere half-smile and the dead eyes of a stripper - making it obvious any additional inquiries were futile.
Dylan warmed up to me after Andy took us on a three-state fly-fishing road trip odyssey. On the return trip Dylan invited us to come by his house, one of those suburban mini-mansions with multiple exterior finishes.
When we got close, Dylan instructed Andy to pull over and hopped out with a pair of binoculars and surveyed the house. He gave us the all-clear to proceed.
We came to learn that the home contained not one piece of furniture. And the windows were papered over. One of the corner guest rooms - his room - had two spotting scopes on tripods each looking out windows where the newspaper had been pulled back. On the floor was a sleeping bag (no pillow) and a laptop with other gadgets and wires.
His eyes lit up when he showed us the garage. It was gigantic, with room for three cars, but it housed none. Instead, it was a private armory. The walls were lined with guns of all types and, except for a grid of walking paths, the floor was covered with tactical gear.
Dylan unfolded camp chairs for us and we sat in a circle. Andy broke the silence:
“Dude”.
“What?”
“What is this? What’s going on?”
What was going on, Dylan explained, was “contract work.” He’d get a text on a burner phone with some instructions, a photo or two, and he’d hop a commercial flight - usually to a far-flung country, where he’d take care of business using the tools he kept in here.
The pay was exceptional and the office politics nonexistent. He never met his boss, never had to deal with HR, and attended no meetings. He was paid to an offshore account, no 1099.
The downside was making enemies with unsavory people, and the second-order effects of that.
I realized I was a guest of a jet-setting mercenary charged with targeted population decreases, but the biggest shock was sitting on the folding table next to me: a shopping center aerial photograph.
Beside the photograph, recognizable to the trained eye, was a stack of commercial leases. Flipping through the top one, I saw the lessee was a leading coffee chain, and the property was one of the best shopping centers in the city. I knew it well - it had been on the market just a few months ago; we’d taken a hard look and bowed out when we realized we couldn’t compete with the big-box REITs. It then struck me that I never heard who ended up winning the bid.
“Why do you have this stuff, Dylan?” I asked.
“What.”
“This stuff. What’s up with this stuff?”, I said, pointing to the table.
“Why?”
“Because it’s weird for you to have it.”
“Not if I own it, it isn’t”, he said.
“Wait, what? You bought this? How in the hell were you able to pull that off?”
Dylan raised his head, looked through me, and with a grin, said: “they didn’t fight me on it.”
“What do you mean? How’d that happen?”
“Hard to say.”
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