If he goes to prison, what's the worse that could happen?
He'll still be rich. He'll come out and host a talk show with Snoop Dogg. Not too bad of a legacy, if you ask me.
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It's just a screwy story. Sounds like a movie script for a wacky comedy about bumbling kidnappers. I have no idea what the real story is, but this explanation seems intentionally confused. I don't trust the guy (ESL) at all and don't have the criminal mind to come up with a theory. It just smells. Bizzare. Hinky.
Timing is curious too. FWIW
It's very easy to believe that a disgruntled AutoZone employer had it out for Eddie.
I could believe it was fake if the guy never got caught or if Eddie didn't press charges. But who would go to prison for 15 years for Eddie? Sure doesn't sound like the kidnapper got any money out of it either.
@Wx0jPvp-mhr Yeah that doesn't sound at all strange/sarc
Here's the part about the kidnappers.
" In 2004, Renaldo Rose, the ringleader, was sentenced to 15 years in prison. He was released early, in July 2016, and returned to his native Jamaica, where he now runs the Foreign Ink mobile tattoo studio, out of a van. Reached by phone, he willingly gave his version of the kidnapping. He recalls that, after serving in the Marines, he “hooked up with some friends and they were already doing jobs.” They encouraged him to focus on wealthy local targets, and he read about Lampert in a news article “that showed he was one of the wealthiest, if not the wealthiest, at the time.”
Rose says that after being abducted Lampert “freaked out and one of the guys started punching him in the head. So I had to yell at them: ‘Listen, you both calm down. Keep quiet and you’re gonna be all right.’ I made [Lampert] a promise, ‘Listen, you don’t give us no problem and we’ll let you go.’ And he did, so he never freaked out again after initially.”
It still haunts Rose today that he might not have gone to prison had he killed Lampert and the other kidnappers: “So it was either like, O.K., get rid of everybody. [But] with Shemone Gordon, [Lampert] was like family almost. He argued against all that. I still think we should have just got rid of everybody. But, I don’t know. I did have to consider that. Lampert . . . never gave any problems, so I kind of had to keep my word on that.”
Rose dismisses the idea of the AutoZone executives offering $3 million for Lampert’s murder as the fabrication of one of his cohorts. But he recalls an intriguing exchange that he says took place between Gordon and Lampert:
“I heard Eddie. I heard some of the discussions, because there was even a discussion when it came to him buying Kmart. He was asking questions such as ‘When I get out of here, do you think I should do it?’ . . . He said he felt that Kmart was tied up with something with the Mob or Mafia. They used it as a piggy bank. That was the first time I’d ever heard. I’m like, ‘Sh--. The Mafia is still around?’ But he was really hesitant about doing it.” (Through his spokesperson Lampert denies he made such comments.)
In the end, Rose says, the main reason he decided to let Lampert go was that his partners were so inept. By using Lampert’s credit card, against Rose’s instructions, his partners in crime had alerted police to their whereabouts. Rose says they released Lampert not to get the ransom money but to call off what was by then a hopeless caper. "
Fake Kidnapping.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/03/the-strange-odyssey-of-hedge-fund-king-eddie-lampert-sears-kmart
“THEY COULD HAVE MADE A DIFFERENT DECISION”: INSIDE THE STRANGE ODYSSEY OF HEDGE-FUND KING EDDIE LAMPERT
In 2003, many were skeptical when Lampert married Sears to Kmart. Now, with hundreds of stores closed and thousands thrown out of work, Lampert defends his strategies in his first in-depth interview in 15 years. The author also tracks down the man who kidnapped Lampert before the Kmart deal went through.
In the years since, Lampert has not talked publicly about the kidnapping, nor have the more puzzling aspects of the case been cleared up. When I asked him about it, he frowned. “You’re not going there, are you?” he says. “I don’t really want to talk a lot about it for a lot of reasons, but I know it’s not an unimportant event.” All he’ll say is that the experience was “not good” and “they could have made a different decision—let’s put it that way.” Did it change your life? I asked him. “Yeah, yeah,” he says. “I’m just not comfortable talking about it.”