Originally Posted by
dawg80
Speaking of which...
unfortunately a friend and one-time business associate, a real estate developer, Mike M. purchased an old building here in Natchitoches, it dated back to the 1920's and had been used for various uses, a single-family home, an office building, and its last use was as a divided apartment for renting. Mike hired some guys to salvage the bricks. It was a slow, pains-taking, expensive, labor-intensive task. After several weeks they were almost finished and had been stacking the cleaned bricks on a trailer parked at the site. One day a guy shows up in a truck and tells the workers he had been sent by Mike M. to carry them off. The workers, having no reason to suspect anything, just shrugged. The guy hooks up and off go the bricks...
Police tried to find them, but never have. Then a couple of months later the empty trailer was recovered, backed into a side road out in the woods.
Mike took a beating on that whole deal. First, I told him he was paying too much for the property, and then after spending many $tens of thousands trying to salvage the building finally agreed it had to be taken down and a new structure built. The old 100-year structure could not be saved, all the main support beams had rotted, it was a total mess. So! he was going to save the bricks and use them in the construction of the new building. Two years later it remains a vacant lot, now for sale.