While most of the strangeness (and obvious criminal activity) at MG happened in 2022, I started noticing weird behavior and conversations all the way back in 2021, when we had additional employees and help at the shop. We had a graphic designer named Richard who helped me with different customer assignments and was learning some pro tips from me along the way. We also had [[Al]] as a client during Richard's time here. I don't really consider Richard a "main character" in all of this except for this singular, strange moment that happened towards the end of 2021. Al seemed like a normal customer, a really nice and genuine guy, wanting to push a certain campaign using one of his older songs "Whoop That Trick" on tee shirts, I assumed to promote Memphis and the Grizzlies, since he was all about Memphis. I had already made a logo for Al and done his other graphics. This task seemed pretty straight forward to me so I left it in Richard's court. I left the room for a bit, right outside the door and heard something about using a different font that he (Al) had on hand. I came back in shortly to see a few different color concepts using a specific font that was already settled on it seems. It looked plain to me, but hey, he liked it! I thought "well this was easy" but realized shortly after that there was something about the font that I'd seen before... Days after this I did some Googling to see if I could find that font. It was bugging me that I didn't know what it was called or where it came from and Richard had already flattened the vector files so the original font data wasn't on the finalized files. I didn't have it anywhere on my computer, in my font book or any of my normal font repositories, which was super odd to me since I have thousands of fonts and know where to find pretty much anything else that I don't have. I did some digging based on the font type and oddly enough, it appeared to be an officially trademarked font for some NBA teams. "How did he get a hold of this font!?" I thought. Surely it had to be available from a website or something that I was missing. I searched for over an hour but came to the conclusion that the font just didn't exist for the general public to download. There were some fonts that were similar, and of course I could have made it from scratch, but this came from somewhere... I felt a bit off thinking about it, but brushed it off. Fast forward to early 2023, we start to print more of these tees as the "Whoop That Trick" campaign seemed to really be taking off. I started seeing more and more copycats of the shirts, but with slightly different fonts, without Al's logo, etc.; all typical knock-off fair, but I still couldn't help but thinking about the font. Al assured me that next season he would end up taking legal action against the copycats but I didn't feel that was truthful. Ernest told me that Al had connections to different people in the entertainment industry and that he even wanted to do a "mini-documentary" because of the success of the tee campaign, but looking in on it from the perspective of sales, it wasn't insanely impressive for a sports campaign even though it was super impressive for our humble shop. Every time the video shoot was supposed to happen, Ernest would re-schedule or tell me that it was getting pushed back. I didn't think he was lying to me at the time, but kept wondering why he didn't see it as a priority. This would have been a huge promotion or push for our shop, but he totally dropped the ball. Looking back, I know this was all intentional, but I must have been the dumbest man on the planet to believe him at the time. During this busy time, I heard Al ask Ernest if he could get "coke" and I immediately left the scene as he started to discuss. I couldn't believe that Al would be asking about that and definitely didn't want to believe that Ernest would oblige or entertain the idea, but boy was a wrong... [[The Pallet]] incident took place weeks later, letting me know this was all part of the plan. I realized I was just a smokescreen for the real business happening at MG. I was [[The Pawn]] and nothing more it seemed...