Historian pro-tip (pun not intended): tipping is rooted in slavery.
Fortune magazine just published a glowing profile of a former FBI special agent – someone whose entire career was supposedly about investigating financial crimes and upholding the law:
Former FBI special agent says he uses a simple trick to get the best hotel rooms in the world—and it’s all about showing love to the front desk
- Teaching corruption techniques on TikTok
- Bragging about 20 years of systematically bribing hotel workers
- Framing it as a life hack instead of what it is: paying for unfair advantages
- Getting positive press coverage from Fortune magazine for it
The cognitive dissonance is awful.
This guy investigated financial crimes, Ponzi schemes, and embezzlement. He knows what corruption looks like. He understands how small payments to circumvent official systems scale into institutional rot.
And yet, he’s pumping a detailed script for corruption:
- Identifying vulnerable low-wage workers
- Flattering them while placing $20 cash on their keyboard
- Explicitly requesting preferential treatment
- Claiming it’s about “appreciation” when it’s pure transaction
The really horrible part: He spent 26 years investigating financial crimes while simultaneously (by his own admission) corrupting hotel systems across Hawaii and the mainland.
And now he’s monetizing this on social media as a “simple trick” – spreading the practice further, teaching others to do it, normalizing the worst inflationary behavior. This is exactly how corruption works wherever it has become endemic – starts as optional, becomes expected, then becomes mandatory just to receive baseline services you’ve already paid for.
The pre-payment is the key (pun not intended). This is NOT kind or gratitude, it’s a quid pro quo. He even scripts it:
If you could get me a decent room, I’d appreciate it [while he puts cash on their keyboard].
He’s not subtle. He’s saying to those who refuse, they will lose income to those who participate in his scheme.
The fact that Fortune wrote this up as business travel advice rather than “Former FBI Agent Admits to Decades of Small-Scale Bribery” tells you everything about how normalized corruption is when it’s framed as “savvy tipping” behavior.
It’s absolutely wild. As I documented in 2014, American tipping culture was deliberately revived by the KKK in the 1920s as a way to deny fair wages to Black workers after emancipation. This FBI agent is now teaching people to extend a racist exploitative system.