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so he was about six three six four kind of lanky but played basketball so muscular like huge nose big lips
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this is maya and when she was 19 she was infatuated with a guy named adam these names aren't real we're using fake names
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for reasons it'll become apparent later just kind of hit all my personal buttons
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in a way that honestly very few people have since then it was almost as if he was my physical ideal
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and i actually remember seeing him for the first time my freshman year and really feeling like my
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breath had been taken away when you're infatuated with someone you can convince yourself of a lot of things like who
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they are and what they're capable of and maya was infatuated i had this feeling of really not being able to
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believe that i was like allowed to physically touch this person but just because you can touch something
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doesn't mean it's real i'm phoebe judge and this is criminal [Music] so our first date was actually pretty
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hilarious i'm not sure exactly how it was arranged but i was very very very excited about it for
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multiple reasons um one that i was just physically kind of putty when i looked at him even
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but also because he lived in brooklyn and so we both went to nyu but he and i lived in the dorms in
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the city and he had an apartment in brooklyn and i think i've been to brooklyn once
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so that night we actually went to a magazine party because he had worked at a magazine briefly before school so i
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was at this very sophisticated party and he people were very much in love with him
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there and women were all over him there the way they were everywhere but it was definitely an older crowd i mean we must
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have been 19 and everyone was probably in their late 20s and i got completely hammered like so shit-faced
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that i think he actually had to carry me back to his apartment which was of course mortifying so we went back to his
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apartment he put on some d'angelo i think he smoked weed or we both smoked some weed and i was like this is actual
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heaven like this is my understanding of what heaven is but then nothing could really happen because
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i basically blacked out [Music] the next day i woke up and they were you know like blunt papers kind of all over
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the floor and this and that and he was like yeah you passed out so i basically just smoked weed and like listened to
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music and i was really embarrassed and then so we started our trek back to the city i wasn't really sure how to get
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home and we got our kind of the standard bacon egg and cheeses and i think i got
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a coffee and he got a snapple and he we went to the train station and he swiped me in on his metro card and then
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jumped the turnstile immediately a plane closed police officer started chasing him
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so i was stuck holding his breakfast while he takes off like a bolt of lightning and is literally being chased
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around by a cop i see him hiding behind a trash can i see the cop running up a flight of
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stairs and i just got on the train and went back to my dorm with his breakfast and my own and he finally called me
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either that night or the next morning and just tried to play it off and she let him it didn't seem like that
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big of a deal it was kind of a funny story so while it's not the typical foundation
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for a successful relationship they ended up going out again and again they dated for a couple of years
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but slowly maya started to notice other little things like he told her he grew up in the bronx when he was actually
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from new jersey he was always borrowing things from people asking for favors and he managed
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to almost never spend money his whole thing was figuring out how to live with nothing so
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at two points when we lived together we lived for free he had this incredible way of talking his way into kind of
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people's homes and then saying he would do something for them and he just i've never seen anything like it he would
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just get away with not paying rent they graduated from college maya was taking acting classes adam wasn't
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working and those little things the lies and the mysterious ways in which adam always got his way began to escalate one
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of the biggest things he did was steal a projector from a hotel that he was just
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kind of walking through randomly and he found a conference room with a really fancy projector and just walked out with
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it and was very excited because it was something like ten thousand dollars and he didn't know if he wanted it or if he
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wanted to sell it um but it i got really upset and he basically bullied me into saying you
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know this corporation or these people have so much money they're stupid for leaving it out and i need it and i want
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it and i took it it was there so he's doing all of these things you kind of know about him what he's doing
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did he you ever help him uh well i didn't help him until we started counterfeiting money
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um so how did what do you mean until you started counterfeiting money well one day i came home uh to the
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apartment we were living in again living in for free and he very proudly showed me a 20 bill
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and i said where did this come from and he explained that he had this color printer
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and he had spent the entire day scanning and then you know kind of lining up copies
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of 20 bills so that he could create something that was two-sided and actually it looked pretty decent and he
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went through a period of kind of trying to find the right color and finding the right paper because
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you know now bills feel and are very slick they're very hard to kind of wear down but back then you could still have
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kind of a nubbly or very rough feeling bill wait a second it seems it seems to me like you you need more
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than just like a color printer to counterfeit money or like just some special paper i mean isn't that what
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like there are thousands of people that just spend their whole lives trying to make sure that you can't just buy a
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color printer and start printing hundreds it was child's play kind of i mean it couldn't
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have been a more basic and kind of pathetic operation i mean it was two kids in their twenties
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um you know [ __ ] around in brooklyn and it worked [Music] how long did it take him to convince you
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to actually use the money do you remember the first time it really left the house
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um it did not take long the first time we went out um we we did discuss it and we i think we tried it
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once or twice at a deli and it didn't work i mean what do you mean it didn't work so they would just say this is fake
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were you mortified like i would just i would i would pretend to be like are you kidding me i got ripped off like no i
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had a whole song and dance every time i got caught like are you kidding what am i supposed to do how did this happen i
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can't believe this oh my gosh i'm so sorry and it was kind of through these these like pathetic little plays that
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we'd put on that we realized that people were much nicer to me if i was the one who did it and got caught they
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just kind of treated me like a stupid little girl but would actually get much angrier at him
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so what we figured out then was that we really couldn't we wouldn't be successful if we were doing it at a
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place where people had the opportunity to pay a lot of attention to the money that we were handing them so any place
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like a well-lit bodega or a supermarket wasn't gonna fly so we quickly realized that we needed to do it at bars
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places where bartenders were busy places where it was dark and people were distracted
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and what we were doing we weren't interested in drinking or partying we were just interested in getting the
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change so you know six dollar beer 14 back and you pocket that um and maybe drink part of the drink and
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leave so one of the first places we went i got caught and i you know performed my
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little performance and i remember very distinctly the bartender saying i'm going to choose to believe your lie
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but this isn't real and you need to get out of the bar and i kind of skedaddled and freaked out
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i made my boyfriend drop the next bill that's what we called it dropping bills at another bar and it was actually a
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female bartender and she flipped out and chased him out of the bar and said she was going to call the cops
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and he was laughing but he was terrified and that's where we really realized that
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i was the person who was going to be most successful maya didn't realize this at the time but
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she and adam were part of a trend lots of young people were getting printers and making their own money
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in two thousand forty percent of all counterfeited money about seventy two million dollars came off of inkjet
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printers it's a big deal counterfeiting is a federal crime investigated by the secret
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service if you get caught you're facing up to 15 years in prison and massive fines i
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don't think we ever hit up more than six places in an evening but inevitably during one of those during those nights
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someone would stop me somewhere i remember we were on a good streak and then i had
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to go to this one bar and these were all bars that i liked and had gone to previously and this bar had a bouncer
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out there that particular night and there was a cover charge and i tried to pass off a bill to him
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and he said that it wasn't real and i was a little bit drunk at that point so i did my whole song and dance and i kind
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of sensed that he knew that i was full of [ __ ] but he again just kind of let me
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wander away and did did you ever go home after like you know the the night where
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the bartender said i'm gonna choose to believe you would you go home a night and say to him this is nuts like i don't
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i why are we doing this this is not worth it i do not remember ever doing that um i
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think i didn't have the balls because i think that he thought it was really fun and i thought it was a little bit fun
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myself the final time that i was caught was so bad that that's what made us stop
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but it took getting that close to being in serious trouble for the rest of my life
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for me to kind of snap to it maya says the whole operation had only ever been the two of them they never
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told anyone what they were doing and never used the fake money when they were out with others
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then one night maya had a childhood friend come to visit he was wealthy and wanted to go someplace a lot nicer than
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the dive bars they had been going to so we go to this you know super swanky club
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varied 90s club scene kind of place and i have a stack of bills in my purse and a copy of macbeth that i was using
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because i was memorizing a monologue from lady macbeth's and he i think also had bills on him but as
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usual i was kind of the one in charge how much would you carry when you say you were carrying like a stack of bills
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how much how much counterfeit money would you carry on you at one time i think at that point i would i probably
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had around 100 or 140 dollars and he probably kept the same amount so he dropped one bill successfully at a
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register and drank whatever drink he was given then i successfully dropped a bill
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at another register and we kind of just kept the evening going and then at the end of the night
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we were kind of toward the back of the club as one of those places that had multiple bars in multiple areas
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and i was kind of staking it out it was the one we hadn't gone to yet and we were not doing a very good job of being
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subtle and i was very aware of the bar tent this hot female bartender was aware that we were looking at her and she was
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kind of staring right back and then i kind of entered into this kind of bizarro dream state where i knew that if
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i dropped a bill with her i was going to get caught and i physically couldn't prevent myself from walking over to the
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bar and doing it so i walked over i ordered a drink and i slapped down the bill and she
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immediately knew it was fake and i kind of tried to launch into my little song and dance and she said she grabbed my
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hand and she said i'm calling security and i don't know if she got on the phone or pressed a button but i was
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immediately swarmed by security guards and taken into the back of the club they didn't go through my bag um i
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refused to give them my id and i just kind of kept saying i don't know where this came from i'm so sorry this is so
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stupid i then uh tried the tactic of getting really angry and saying that my friends were waiting for me and then
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they got on their walkie-talkies and they said check all the registers and then i thought
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i was sunk because there were definitely bills and other registers and at that point i thought okay i'm done
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she waited while the bartenders carefully checked each piece of cash and somehow which seems just like incredible
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luck no one found anything the bartenders must have already passed the fake 20s on as change to other customers
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they let me go and i did not act cool i immediately kind of tore through the entrance and pushed
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through pushed past the bouncers and pushed through the line instead of the exit and i went out alone away from my
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friends i just felt like i just had to get out of there and what i didn't realize was that by doing that i was
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causing a scene and essentially incriminating myself so my friends followed me out and then the same
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security guards who had been detaining me intercepted me on the street they went
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through a back exit of the club and they said why are you in such a rush to get out of out of there and then this is the
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whole scene that unfolded in front of my friends they said okay we're searching you you
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know this and that and i said you can't you can't that's not legal and they said
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again it's either us or the cops and finally i just gave them my purse and they they looked through my wallet and
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didn't find any bills because the bills weren't there and then they flipped through
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the macbeth and they didn't find it they just didn't they just flipped past it i think probably because there were only
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a few bills and it wasn't it didn't cause enough of a gap for like when they were skimming their finger over it to
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find it but it was i didn't understand how that happened it was almost impossible
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and where was your boy was your boyfriend watching this whole scene he was watching and all also are all of my
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wealthy friends what happens next do you go home with your boyfriend so i went home with my boyfriend uh we
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were both really upset we both agreed that we weren't going to do it again and then i met up with my good friend
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from home the next day and he said so are you counterfeiting money and i just looked at him and i said nope
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and we kind of had a mutual moment where we decided to agree to believe my lie because he
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definitely didn't believe me and i definitely wasn't about to tell him the truth
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[Music] do you think of yourself as a criminal i don't why i think i must i'm not sure why so this
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is i've never really considered this before but i didn't even though i did have criminal intentions you know i
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wanted this money i wasn't trying to hurt anyone and don't feel that i particularly hurt anyone
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although certainly i guess it's possible that if a bartender was caught you know if if they were caught
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with a counterfeit bill in their cash register that they could get fired and that's totally possible
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but to me it was so stupid and has kind of become a bit more fun in retro it's become both more fun and much
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more embarrassing in retrospect you know it's a great story to tell at a party because i wasn't caught
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and how long did you and adam last after this incident not long [Music] maya left new york she went to
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california to try to get adam out of her life forever which was hard because as much as she was scared of what he could
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make her do she was still just as fascinated with him as she was from the start it's been more than 15 years but as far
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as she remembers they only profited about 400 and frankly she doesn't know what they
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did with it she does know they didn't spend it on anything nice because adam was so cheap
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[Music] the show is produced by eric menno lauren spore and me julianne alexander
00:16:39
does our episode art if you like what we're doing you can subscribe on itunes or visit our website
00:16:45
thisiscriminal.com we're on twitter at criminal show i'm phoebe judge and this is criminal
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[Music]