Too Much Money

New Orleans got a good news this past week, The NBA announced it would hold it's 2008 All Star Basketball game in the city. That's a 100 million dollar impact to our dying city and a message to other companies and business that the NBA has faith that we will be able to handle a major event by 2008. Also, we have seen a trend that convention bookings for the city are starting to increase.
The NBA announcement may make other event and convention business a little more easy to snare. Prior to the storm, New Orleans was one of the leading special event cities in the U.S. Now it is still a heap of debris in some areas.
A quick personal story that illustrates why some people have too much money. I was in a local Home Depot (a home and gardening supply retail business) the other day to check on buying a replacement freezer for the one that is leaking and old (I may be old, but at least I am not leaking...yet). I met a former teaching colleague of mine and we chatted about the usual school and hurricane news. Russell told me his home had 8 feet of water that sat in it for weeks and that it was ruined, not unusual for his section of the city, devastated Lakeview.
He is a wealthy man, as his family (which had mafia ties) runs TAC amusement Corporation, the biggest local gambling and family entertainment machine enterprise in New Orleans. Russell and his kids literally empty machines of their cash every other day and make millions a year supplying and servicing the very expensive machines to businesses (restaurants, bars, amusement centers etc.) which in turn receive a percentage of the machine revenue for putting them in their retail outlets.
When I asked Russell, who has been a physics teacher many years (But not because he needs the money from the job!) if he lost anything valuable, she shrugged and replied that everything in the bottom floors of his home was ruined. Then he added, " I was worried because I left a weeks proceeds hidden in my house. I hadn't deposited it in a bank yet and worried it would be stolen by looters."
I asked him how much and he said, "A little over $200,000....but no one took it. It was nice that it was still there when I returned to my home a month later." Haha "Nice"!! I don't know about you, but I would be ecstatic if I recovered that much money. But since Russell is a millionaire many times over, he said it in an almost matter-of-fact way.
Well...at least the hurricane didn't discriminate against rich and poor in assessing the damage we all have. Russell also lost a huge second home in nearby Slidell. I didn't have the heart to ask if he had money in that one when it was swept into Lake Pontchartrain. But I wondered if it really mattered to him.