the worst thing is when these people who make millions with this ongoing fraud finally wind up without a single peach to take to the fruit dump since when they drive to the dump they need to have at least an outer row of fruit crates to present at least an appearance of legitimacy you know what a farm trailer looks like it’s a rectangle and along the sides you need at least a row here another one here one here and one row here along the outer edge of the trailer you have to line up fruit crates that can be seen from the exterior while they go to the fruit dump even though on the inside of the trailer you might put stones iron and all the rest and so these people who have run through even those few peaches that they had come to you to buy crates of your fruit to construct this exterior row on the trailer so they can jump ahead of you in line to go to the fruit dump passing by you without a second thought while you’re still sitting there in line and of course they pay a ridiculously low price for your crates of fruit

another time it even happened that after you filled up the last load of summer at the end of harvest after spending a week there in line sitting on your tractor outside of the fruit dump while waiting for them to let you dump your fruit in the hot sun surrounded by that increasingly disgusting stench and as you’re waiting you watch the attendants letting in who else but the tractors that came earlier to buy crates of fruit from you to create the fake front surrounding the trailer and when finally on the eighth day they let you in with your trailer full of rotten fruit and you drive up onto the scale to weigh your load the gentlemen standing around tell you that if you want to dump the fruit you’re welcome to do so but they aren’t going to weigh it because the fruit dump’s maximum quantity has already been reached so you won’t be paid for your load because the collection centers have assigned quantities and once they’ve taken in three hundred and thirty tons you’re free to unload as much fruit as you want but the AIMA won’t pay you for it anymore

no one could object because the cooperative that had set up the fruit dump belonged to them and everyone knew who was behind them and then the treasury agents on duty didn’t say anything and the policemen didn’t say anything to them everything seemed to be normal because many of them in fact all of them were paid by the clan in the evenings the clan would take policemen and treasury agents out to dinner at a restaurant and then there was the panel of experts I was forgetting this detail every collection center that a cooperative set up was examined by a panel of experts from the AIMA they were inspectors who checked to make sure that everything was being done in accordance with regulations and those gentlemen were likewise taken out to dinner every evening and they wanted to be paid immediately they wanted their cut of the day’s take so if that day for example thirty-five tons of material had been weighed and twenty-eight tons of that was fraudulent then the AIMA inspectors were due twenty percent of the reimbursement due for the twenty-eight tons and they would be paid this money that same evening not later when the money was finally paid out