The Lone Drainer & Carlose the Evil Plumber

Around Los Angeles there is a plumbing service known as the Lone Drainer. The Lone Drainer typically drives around in a van and responds to various plumbing issues. To my astonishment, there are Lone Drainers all over. I even saw a Lone Drainer in Australia a few years ago.

I used the Lone Drainer for the first time in 1997. The Lone Drainer showed up at our door one Saturday afternoon in response to a clogged sink. He was wearing a straw cowboy hat, which he tipped at me when I answered the door. He seemed to be Mexican and spoke in broken English with a very heavy accent.

The house I was living in was on stilts and perched on the side of a cliff—the fall was hundreds of feet vertically. The plumbing was all beneath the house on a sloped concrete platform. Were the Lone Drainer to fall, he would plummet some 200 feet to either his death or at the very least suffer many broken bones.

I informed the Lone Drainer that this kitchen sink was backing up all the time despite the fact that we never put anything but water down it. With this information, the Lone Drainer became more interested in the home’s overall plumbing than in just the sink and the current clog.

Instead of working on the sink itself, the Lone Drainer spent the majority of his time climbing beneath the house. He arrived at approximately 1:00 pm and spent at least 4 or so hours exploring beneath the house and hanging from this rafter and that. Finally, around 5 pm he emerged from under the house and announced that he had found a solution:

“There’s a huge grease trap that is backing up your drain,” he announced. “I am going to open it up and release the pressure. The grease will come out like a fire hose and go down the side of the mountain.”

Without knowing quite what to expect, I gave him the go-ahead and he proceeded beneath the house. A few minutes later I heard some gurgling coming from the kitchen sink, and then a giant torpedo of grease and water the thickness of my leg shot at least 30 feet out the side of the house for a few seconds covering the side of the cliff beneath our home.

The Lone Drainer emerged from beneath the house, his face and coveralls dripping with grease. “My work’s done here!” he exclaimed. He lit a cigarette, put his straw cowboy hat back on, and wrote us up a bill. I don’t believe it was for more than $250. Not only did the Lone Drainer fix our problem, he was honest and did not charge us a lot of money.

“All these houses probably have the same problem with their grease traps,” he told us. He began waxing philosophical about the situation. The Lone Drainer had seemed fascinated with what he had done and stuck around 30 minutes or so chatting about his experience unplugging the grease trap and his climb beneath the house. “They are all built on the side of this cliff and have similar systems to capture grease.”

The Lone Drainer drove away. I kept his number, and that was the last I thought I would ever see of him.

The next morning, I received a call from my neighbor on my cell phone as I was driving to brunch with my girlfriend.

“Is the Lone Drainer legit?” he asked me. “He’s recommending some work on a grease trap. He just showed up at my door.”

“He’s definitely legit,” I told him. “In fact, he’s first rate, and his prices are very fair. I was extremely impressed. He figured everything out. Our water pressure is even better in the house now. And I thought all that was wrong was a stopped-up kitchen sink.”

When I returned home a few hours later I saw the Lone Drainer’s truck at the house next door. I peered around the side of the house, and sure enough, the Lone Drainer was working underneath it, fidgeting with some pipes. Sometime thereafter, I looked up from my newspaper and saw a giant blast of grease and water shooting out of my neighbor’s house as well.

I’m not sure how many homes in that neighborhood the Lone Drainer provided his services to that day, but he ended up contacting just about all my neighbors up and down the street and drained the grease traps of all the homes that would pay him to do so. To this day, I don’t know what a grease trap is—or even why all these 1950s-era homes had them. What I do know is that the Lone Drainer did a lot of business and got a lot of business in my neighborhood that he otherwise would not have gotten had it not been for my backed-up sink.

The Lone Drainer’s visits ended up having some strange and unpredictable consequences.

As I said earlier, our house was on the side of a cliff. By the end of the Lone Drainer’s second day of draining grease and water down the side of all the homes, the cliff was covered with the grease from at least 10 homes. It was actually a pretty disgusting sight—but the grease was largely odorless.

On Tuesday I came home from work to a very strange scene. Several coyotes had gathered on the cliff side beneath my house and were calmly licking at the grease. In all the time I had lived at this house I had never seen a coyote. Now a small group was here, in broad daylight, lapping at a collection of grease discharged by the Lone Drainer.

After a few weeks, each night we would hear terrible shrieking sounds made by cats. Up and down the street, our neighbors with cats—one by one—found themselves losing their animals to the coyotes. From what I could tell, the coyotes had decided to remain in the area, waiting for more grease after they had finished up what they’d originally found. Eventually these coyotes became hungry and started picking off the local cats.

I did not live in that residence very long. Five or so years later, I was living in another part of Los Angeles when one of the pipes in my backyard exploded. Since I did not have a lot of experience with plumbers, I pulled out the Lone Drainer’s telephone number and called him. The Lone Drainer did not pick up and the name of the plumbing company had changed.

Within an hour or so, another Mexican man showed up at the house and immediately declared the situation with the exploded pipe in the backyard to be extremely serious. By this time my entire backyard was flooded; there was water everywhere. The plumber needed to root around in the backyard in boots and ended up calling a few other trucks from his company to assist him.

Over the next several hours, they ended up plugging the pipe and pumping all the water that had flooded our backyard back into the storm drain.

The bill was somewhere between $3,000 and $4,000.

“What happened?” I asked the Lone Drainer’s successor as I wrote the check.

“You have galvanized pipes in this house,” he said. “You need to replace them with copper pipes. The pipes you have are all corroded on the inside and are going to continue to give you trouble. You need to replace all the pipes in the entire house with copper.”

“How much will that cost?” I asked.

“Are you interested in paying more than you should—or paying a little above what it costs to do it?” he asked.

“A little more than it would cost to do it,” I told him.

“If you pay a little bit more than it costs to do it, I can do it with some of my friends for around $4,000. If you want to pay more, my company would charge around $12,000 to do it. I will use the same materials and workers, who are just as good; it just will not cost you as much,” he told me.

Now, I’m sure you can understand the moral dilemma I was under here. I was faced with the choice of spending either $4,000 or $12,000 for what was essentially the same service. I understood—instinctively—that what was being proposed occupied an ethical gray area. But I had not signed any contracts with the plumbing company. I was paying them what they’d asked for the service being provided. But what was being offered still seemed suspect.

“When can you and your friends start?” I asked.

Within 48 hours, a couple of young Mexican men who spoke no English were working beneath my home with blowtorches. One after another, pipes were being cut out and replaced with new ones. Around the third day, something went horribly wrong. The water in the home stopped working completely. The basement flooded and I frantically called the man I’d contracted from the plumbing company. He was forced to drop what he was doing on the other side of town and rush over to try and fix the problem. This happened several days in a row, as the problems with the plumbing work continued to worsen.

Years later, I can still remember how water exploded out of walls and how my backyard flooded again. I remember the basement flooding and how water came out of the pipes all rust colored. Meanwhile, we’d not been able to shower all week. By Friday, the toilets and sinks started to back up without any provocation. They just decided to go into reverse. It was like a bad horror movie.

Just when I thought things could not get any worse, as the home was flooding on Friday and the plumber and his assistants were running around in a panic, two well-dressed men in a Jaguar (who later told me they were from Iraq) showed up at my front door, wearing lots of gold and looking very angry.

“Where’s Carlos!” they demanded. “What is he doing here! He’s supposed to be at another job. We’ve installed GPS on his truck. Is he doing work for you on the side?”

Carlos came out looking very frightened. Now, mind you, Carlos was very well built. He had all sorts of poorly made, ominous-looking tattoos all over his body and did not look like a particularly nice guy. But the sight of these two men definitely put him on edge.

Within moments, the Iraqis fired Carlos and confiscated the keys to his work van and Carlos and his young friends vacated the house. The Iraqis then told me how upset they were. One of them went out to the street and shut off the water they saw oozing out of the house in various directions.

“We gave him a chance! He was fired from his last job for doing the exact same thing and he promised he would never do it again. Now here we are again!”

The Iraqis then told me they’d be back the next day to finish the job. Honestly, these guys were so terrifying looking that I was not sure what else to agree to. They told me they’d finish the job for the same price that Carlos was going to charge. This sounded like a great deal.

That evening, my wife, an office colleague, and I returned from dinner to find Carlos and his two worker friends standing outside our front door. It was 10:30 in the evening.

Carlos was clearly upset. He had just lost his job. His workers were upset too. Despite my paying him over $2,000 for the job so far, Carlos had not paid them a dime.

Carlos came in and told me he wanted to finish the job.

“You want to finish the job?” I asked. “I’m not sure that’s such a good idea. Your bosses look like they have killed people—several people—and I’m not sure I want to upset them.”

“That’s probably true,” Carlos said. “This is big. Did you know they only hire people like me who have done lots of time because they know we know how to hustle and intimidate to get people to pay more for work? These guys will only hire Mexican gangsters who have done time for drug-related crimes. I wouldn’t have gotten this job unless I’d done seven years in San Quentin for dealing and assault. None of the guys working here would have. Being a plumber is just like being a drug dealer,” he told me.

I was starting to get real nervous. What was I dealing with here? Carlos was clearly not messing around. I was now involved in something far more significant than I’d imagined.

“Listen,” Carlos told me. I’ve called all the local networks and one of them is going to do a story about these guys. I also told them about what happened today and one of them wants to come out here and do an interview with you for the 5:00 and 11:00 pm news tomorrow. This is a big story. You have one of the largest plumbing companies in Los Angeles and it’s made up of nothing but guys who have done serious drug time and is being run by a couple of guys who got some type of amnesty here from Iraq after the Persian Gulf War. Do you understand how big this is?”

For the next 60 minutes or so, Carlos filled me in on all the ways that his company had taken advantage of me. He told me that the leak he had charged thousands of dollars to fix the first day was simply a broken valve that cost less than $1.00 to fix. He told me the other people who showed up the day of the yard leak were not plumbers at all but illegal immigrants to which the company paid $50 a day so they could look like plumbers and inflate the total bill. He related several other scenarios—taking advantage of the elderly, taking advantage of the sick—you name it. The stories went on.

He talked about his tattoos and how they actually meant he was a good person.

“See this one,” he said turning around and lifting his shirt. “That’s a bat coming out of a cave. It means coming out of darkness. I got that one the first time I got out of prison and resolved to turn myself around.”

Carlos also told me about getting pumped up lifting weights in prison.

Carlos then asked me if I would mind lending him a few thousand dollars so he could get his life back in order. He said that he was worried he might have to go back to a life of crime.

Since I had no reason whatsoever to trust Carlos, I did not do this. Nevertheless, I felt extremely sorry for his workers. On one occasion they’d even worked a full 24-hour stretch when things were at their worst with their plumbing job.

I ended up paying the workers what they’d told me Carlos owed them—which was around $1,000. They left and I never saw Carlos or the two workers again.

The next morning the two Iraqi guys showed up with an ex-con who did not appear to have a neck. The Iraqis were dressed in their usual silky shirts, creased pants, and immaculately shined shoes. One, who carried a thermos that did not appear to have ever been used, was driving a large, shiny Mercedes; the other was driving the Jaguar from the day before–a Jaguar that I realized was an unusual model I had never seen before, so I asked about it.

The older Iraqi then told me how he had “fine tastes” and had specially ordered the Jaguar, a limited edition, and as he talked I could not but help thinking about the absurdity of the situation. Here was a rich plumber who probably wasn’t even a plumber telling me about his refined tastes and special Jaguar, while he hired ex-cons and was running a huge scam.

After I’d established some rapport with the Iraqi, I mentioned my pending news appearance.

“Yes, that’s right. Carlos told me that Action News at 5 is going to interview me here at the house today. They’ve already left me a message at the office.”

The Iraqis looked terrified. First, one of them took the ex-con without a neck aside, and within 30 seconds he was in the plumbing van and driving away. Then the Iraqis mumbled something that didn’t make much sense and disappeared as well. I never saw them again. I also did not have the opportunity to get on the news. I called the reporter back and she never returned my call.

The next day an established local plumber showed up at my house.

“This is the worst re-piping job I have ever seen!” he told me.

“Yeah,” his assistant said. “Ain’t no one stupid enough to hire a plumber like this.”

Long story short, I got the job done properly—for around $25,000—and everything ended up working out just fine in the long run. Unfortunately, the bad plumbing work had created collateral damage–to walls, floor, bathrooms, even light fixtures–which had to be either fixed, ripped up, or replaced. So the total, final cost? Something like $50,000.

You may be wondering what the lessons are in this crazy story—and there are lessons. The most important is this:

The Better You Understand Your Client, The More Effective You Can Be

 The Lone Drainer was very smart. He could have easily come into the house and unplugged the sink. In fact, my guess is this work could have been done with a plunger or a snake. But unlike most plumbers, the Lone Drainer studied the situation more completely. He spent a few hours climbing beneath the house and realized that some sort of grease trap was backing up the water in the house.

READ THE REST OF THE LESSONS AND FULL ARTICLE HERE: https://www.harrisonbarnes.com/the-lone-drainer-and-carlos-the-evil-plumber/