Loan Sharks, How Cliché

This Week In Blunders – March 23-29

Some guy named Joey and his brother Jimmy ran a loan-sharking racket in Philly – and if you didn’t pay them? Well, you’d pay, if you know what I mean.

“You’ll go to the bottom of the Hudson, so figure it out,” Joey reportedly says to a woman who fell behind on her payments. “‘I want to be paid.’”

Besides literally threatening the ol’ “cement shoes” treatment, Joey added the possibility of kidnapping her kids or planting a bomb in her car.

And the heck of it is, Joey wasn’t even the enforcer for the organization.

That job fell to his brother Jimmy. He did things like club a lawyer with a flashlight because he was assigned to a case involving the seizure and sale of Joey’s assets. The lawyer required six staples in his head following the attack he endured on the streets of Philly.

Jimmy also threatened to harm one of his company’s employees who pleaded guilty and agreed to rat on the organization.

What kind of cheesy mob epic is this?

Par Funding: Dis how youse wanna end up? (Illustration: AI generated)

[[[Don’t Miss: The Business Blunders Hall of Shame.]]]

Joseph LaForte, 54, received a 15-year prison sentence on Thursday for all this menacing and so much more. In addition to petty street crimes, Joseph LaForte defrauded investors out of $288 million and cheated the IRS among other offenses.

His brother, James LaForte, 47, (who, by the way, has denied his reputed links to the Gambino crime family), got 11.5 years on March 13.

These two thugs were running Par Funding, a company making high-interest-rate loans to small business owners who were less than creditworthy.