SnapShot: My Life of Organized Crime, The Maytag Mafia

Ever wonder what happens when teenage impulse meets small-town boredom? Aaron's wild tale of the "Maytag Mafia" perfectly captures that moment when youthful indiscretion transforms into the stuff of local legend.

At just sixteen years old, Aaron was already juggling multiple identities in 1990s Alaska: responsible pizza shop manager, dedicated police Explorer spending thousands of hours in uniform, and typical teenager hanging with friends who embodied the baggy-pants counterculture of the era. These worlds spectacularly collided one night at 3 AM when Aaron and his friends spotted a 20-foot inflatable Maytag repairman balloon outside a local appliance store. What followed was the absurd heist of a $4,000 promotional balloon that would make headlines, prompt aerial searches, and eventually find its way back to its rightful owner with a cheeky note signed by "The Maytag Mafia."

The story might have ended there—just another ridiculous teenage prank—but life has a funny way of bringing things full circle. Years later, when applying to work at the same police department where he'd been an Explorer, Aaron found himself facing a panel of familiar faces who had one burning question at the end of his interview: "Can you tell us about the Maytag man?" This hilarious and cringe-worthy confession reveals how our past decisions, even the seemingly harmless ones made while young and impaired, can float back into our lives when we least expect them.

Have you ever had a youthful mistake follow you into your professional life? Share your story with us and let us know if you've ever been part of your own "Maytag Mafia" moment!

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Chapters

• 0:00 Small-Town Alaska Life
• 1:45 The Pizza Boys Party
• 3:17 Stealing the Maytag Man
• 5:04 Return of the Balloon
• 7:02 The Past Comes Back
• 9:00 Confessing to the Crime

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

And it's a Murders to Music Snapshot. Today I'm going to tell you guys the story of a dumbass. So I'm going to take you back to about 1990. Well, let's go all the way back to 1994. 1994, I started with Explorer Post in Alaska and, as you know, in a uniform, riding with the police, 94 to about 97, 4,000 hours with the police department in a uniform, learning about the job. I know them all by name, we're all friends, we hang out after police work together. I mean, it's just, I'm in a cool place, right? So that's what I got going on. Well, I think I'm in a cool place, but in reality I'm still a 16, 17 year old kid. So at that time I was working at a restaurant called Pizza Boys and Pizza Boys was a is a great pizza restaurant in on the Kenai Peninsula in Alaska. If you ever get up there you've got to get in and check it out. It's amazing. But this story is not about the pizza but at pizza boys.

Speaker 1: 1:10

I was running a pizza boys location at 16, 17 years old, and by running it I mean the owner did commercial fishing in Alaska. So he would take off for four or five, six months at a time and I was left to run every aspect of the business. So I would go to school and then I would go to work five, six months at a time. And I was left to run every aspect of the business. So I would go to school and then I would go to work five, six days a week and work all night long. I would manage people, I would run the office, I would do all the finances. That was my role and I got paid very well for it.

Speaker 1: 1:39

Then something happened and I decided I was going to leave the Kenai Peninsula and I was going to move to Phoenix, arizona. So we're at my pizza place one night at three in the morning, drinking and drunk because that's what you do and you got keys to a pizza place and you're all drinking. You go there and you get free pizza and you eat it and you have a good time. Right, that's what you do. Now. My town was very small. There wasn't a whole lot to excite us. There was no farms for cow tipping, but there was lots of weed, there was lots of alcohol, there was stuff that kids do to party and have a good time.

Speaker 1: 2:15

I lived a double life. If I wasn't in a police uniform. Then I had a group of friends that I didn't smoke any dope, but they smoked a lot of pot. We drank a lot, we partied a lot, we listened to music. This was the days when you would wear pants that were like 20 sizes too big and they'd hang down around your ass and they were really big and you'd walk around. That's the world that I was in. These guys were snowboarders. It was just kind of a cool place to be at 16, 17 years old.

Speaker 1: 2:45

Now it's with this motley crew that I find myself at Pizza Boys at three in the morning, and it's about a week before I'm getting ready to move to Arizona. So we're at Pizza Boys and we're partying and having a good time and the music is on and the girls are there and the guys are there. It's just all a good time. And we look out into the parking lot and there it was, next door to the pizza boys, was a Maytag home appliance store and in the parking lot they had a 20 foot Maytag balloon. This is that inflatable balloon that's got the blower up its ass and it stands there and its arms kind of go and it's not like the one that was, like you know, sail here like the flippy floppy one. This is a ginormous fricking balloon 20 feet tall, 15 feet across the bottom arm span of about 25, 30 feet. This thing is huge, it's blue and it's asking to be taken home with us. So, as anybody would do in that situation, you oblige what it wants. So we backed up to it with our little geostorm and unplugged the blower. It deflates and we push this thing into the backseat of this geostorm. Now this thing is so freaking big it takes up the entire trunk and backseat of this geostorm. We throw the blower in there and we're off. We've stolen the Maytag man. This is big stuff in our little town.

Speaker 1: 4:12

This was such a big deal that it made the media it was on talk shows out of Anchorage. It was on the television and this is what the news report said in the newspaper, and I quote troopers were called upon Monday to investigate the theft of a 20 foot inflatable Maytag repairman balloon and the fan to keep it full of hot air from the parking lot of the Red Diamond Center over the weekend. The balloon and fan are valued at $4,000 and troopers are investigating this as a second degree theft. A second degree theft. What that means is. This is a felony theft of this big ass balloon that we wanted to take because we were drunk, making piss, poor decisions, and we wanted to take it to my going away party. That was the whole thing. I'm about to throw a rager going away party and we wanted this balloon there. So that's what we did. We took it to the party, we inflated it, we blew it up and I must have really good friends because nobody ratted on me. But then in the morning, after we sober up and after you've made poor decisions, sometimes you feel guilty about it and that's what happened. So I felt guilty about this balloon, but I had done enough with the police department. I knew what I thought about fingerprints and analysis and this is a felony and I'm going to go to jail and I'll never be a cop, and oh my gosh. So we took this balloon and we laid it out on the floor of my buddy's shop and I wiped that balloon down from tip to tail, from hat to boots, all the way down, and I wiped all my fingerprints off of it.

Speaker 1: 5:45

In the meantime, another news article comes out the owner of the Maytag store has rented an airplane to fly around the area and see if they could spot the quote big guy end quote. He's invested hundreds of dollars in an airplane to try to search out and find the people responsible for this heinous crime. This has made the news and I'm at the center of it. So I wipe this balloon down, we stuff him inside of these ginormous garbage bags big orange garbage bags and I find a piece of press board and by press board I mean it's like that wall board you know that your grandma used to have up. And this was a piece. And I broke a chunk off a corner and I wrote on it and this is what I wrote. I said hey, my fellow Maytag friends, I'm back and ready to have fun. So place me back in my old spot, for my feet are getting cold. Thanks, the Maytag Mafia. And that is what the note said. You see, they had a blanket over his feet to help keep that air in. So I load this thing back up in the Geostorm and we drive it back there and we set it out on the doorstep of the Maytag store and we put this big note on top of it and he returned and everybody was happily ever. After we thought, after we thought.

Speaker 1: 7:04

So I move on with life and I decide that you know, I'm moving next week. I go to the police department to say my goodbyes and when I walk into the police department there's this note from the Maytag man hanging on the bulletin board. It's there, it's like propped up and hanging there on the bulletin board on our whiteboard in the police department and I'm like, oh my God, they know it was me. I mean they have to. But they're all laughing about it. They think it's kind of funny, they're talking about it. It's that thing that we talk about in a joke. But I'm paranoid and I'm like, man, do they know about it? And they're just joking to see if I'll joke with them. But really they know that I'm responsible for it. Man, talk about that nervous feeling when you get called into the office and your butthole puckers. That's where I was and I was like holy cow. And all these people who are being nice to me are they really being nice to me? Are they just psychologically mind screwing me because they know that I'm responsible for this? These are all the thoughts that I'm having.

Speaker 1: 7:59

Then I leave town to only think about the prank that I pulled and I moved to Arizona. When I get to Arizona. I live about three, four years there. I work, I go to school, I get married, the Maytag man and the Maytag mafia has disbanded. It's a thing of the past and I'm no longer living my life of organized crime. I'm a clean, I'm a repented new person, right. So that's what I got going on.

Speaker 1: 8:25

But then there's an opening at that very same police department. So I have to go back and I want to apply at that police department. Part of the application process is to tell about all the bad things you've done and then they polygraph you on it to make sure that you're not lying or leaving anything out. So in my application process I went through and I told them about stealing bowling shoes and having a fake ID and drinking when I was younger and stealing the Maytag man and blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 1: 8:54

So now I go to my interview and I'm sitting there in a panel interview and it's me and a bunch of guys that I knew from when I was an explorer. I rode with a lot of them. A lot of them were my supervisors. A lot of them investigated the Maytag man and we go through my whole interview and we almost done and I'm like man, the Maytag man hasn't come up. That's way cool. So, aaron, we really thank you for your time. Do you have any questions of us? Blah, blah, blah. Thank you, oh, aaron.

Speaker 1: 9:23

There's one last thing we want to talk about. Can you tell us about the Maytag man? And they stare at me with this cold, blank stare and I'm on pins and needles. I don't know how to respond. I'm embarrassed, I'm ashamed. I think it's funny. I don't know if I could laugh. I don't know if they're going to laugh.

Speaker 1: 9:39

So I tell them about the Maytag man. I tell them about the whole story I've just told you. I tell them about the Maytag Mafia that organized crime doesn't really pay off. I go through this whole thing and at the end of the day, it didn't stop me from getting my job because I told the truth about it, but it was definitely something they had to look into. And at the end of the day, what I did as a 16 year old, stupid drunk kid came back to haunt me and I had to talk all about the Maytag man. So now for years the Maytag man has haunted me and has been that little thing that nags me. That I ended up having to tell on myself about that, my friends, is a story about a dumbass from a small town in Alaska with too much booze, not enough adult supervision and keys to a pizza joint, so signing off the Maytag Mafia.