Fake IDs

For about the last 18 months of my pre-21 life, I used an old ID of a buddy who had already turned 21. Our mug shots looked similar enough that it worked. But all a bouncer had to do was notice that I wasn't 6-3. None did. When we went to the bars together, he'd usually go in first, and I'd follow a few minutes later. One time, we went to a club in DC and they brought our entire group in for ID checks at the same time. The dude looked at our IDs at the same damn time and didn't notice the same name. That was by far the closest I ever came to getting caught. Usually, it was a breeze.

 

Was that Flashjack's on Yonge?

 

Oh, it's all true.

Was heading back to the burbs from the Bronx, and didn't feel like I was going any faster than anyone else on the highway, and was pissed that I got pulled over.

I gave the cop some lip as a result, which he didn't appreciate. He threatened to give me a breathalyzer, which I told him I was happy to take (though he never made me take it).

Probably because I had admitted to having one beer hours earlier, I gave him my brother's license, which had my picture on it.

He game me a speeding ticket, and that was that.

My brother, who is one of the nicest people on the planet, wasn't even that pissed at me, and never told my folks -- at least not until decades later.

So, he went to court. The cop told the whole story, and remembered everything, since I had been a bit of a dick.

My brother got to cross examine him, and asked if he could identify him as the driver, which he couldn't.

He did have to admit the car was owned by my father, but the judge dismissed the charges.

My brother said the cop was really pissed.

 

One time in high school, before I got my picture on my brother's license, my buddy and I wanted to got to a bar that had become popular, and where a couple girls we knew were going to be that night.

The bouncer and bartender were guys we knew who were only a few years older than us.

My buddy had gone to grade school at a place named St. Michael's, and had a couple of stickers from the school. For some reason, he also had a laminating machine. So he decided to make up a couple of college IDs using St. Michael's College in Vermont as the school we attended.

Problem was, we didn't have pictures.

But, because of his older brother, we did have a high school yearbook that included the pictures of both the bouncer and the bartender.

So, we put their pictures on our IDs.

We showed up at the bar, and presented our IDs to the bouncer, who thought it was so fucking funny, he let us in.

 

Always a mandatory stop on trips downtown for this kid from Brampton.

 

This was the place in Times Square where we got our IDs as high school freshmen:



You can see they weren't shy about advertising their ID business.

 

Where poor Bernard almost choked himself out.

http://youtu.be/oBnWE-llJgg?t=17m

 

I got one when I was 17 in San Francisco. I paid $10 for it. It looked remarkably similar to a Nebraska license and worked like a charm for three years. It worked about 99 percent of the time. I was smart about using it carefully for a couple years. When I was 20, I got overconfident and was using it all the time, at places where they were strict. I got it confiscated at a club about six months before I turned 21. I went back to the same club the next day and paid a bartender $20 to get it back for me, not so I could use it, but so they didn't turn them over to the cops. I realize now that the chances that they could find me (or would care enough to) are about zero percent, but there would have been no convincing me of that 20 years ago.

 

At one point in the 1990s, New Jersey driver's licenses were so easy to fake that a random 20-something in Philadelphia made millions selling fake ones to college kids along pretty much the entire East Coast.

Some Rutgers kids were the ones to get caught, and the whole thing unraveled from there.

 

I'm guessing getting a good fake today is about a thousand times harder/riskier/more expensive than it was when I was younger.

The way it was explained to me back in 1991 was, pick a state that you would likely never be in and one that bouncers/liquor store cashiers don't see on a regular basis.