Speaking with a Jamaican accent, Colin Ferguson said he was from Louisiana and needed a room. The India-born general manager of the Royal Motel in Long Beach, California, looked at his would-be guest, a bulky black man who admitted to being unemployed, and said, "O.K., but if you're not good I won't let you stay here." "But," Nick Bhakta recalls, "he was good. Every day he did not stay in the room. He came only in the nighttime." Bhakta charged $35 a night; Ferguson stayed three weeks. In retrospect, all he really needed was 15 days -- the time it took...
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