Jaidon Ash: Making Money in More Than Just the Music Business
by Jennifer Haynie @JenniferHaynie1
Blogger’s Note: Hear from Jaidon Ash, the antagonist in Operation Music Man. He’s made a lot of money. Tons. But not all of it’s from the music business.
Operation Music Man comes out tomorrow. Yeah, it talks about something I’m not too proud of. Things is, I got myself into a financial mess. Then, when I got offered a way out, I took it. Somewhere along the way, I found myself in a mess of a situation with no way out.
The Great Recession did it to me. You see, I’m the owner of a music tour management company called Music Man Productions, headquartered in Nashville. I married a former country singer, Cassie. Yeah, she’s good, really good, at singing, even to the point where the record label where I used to work signed her on for an album. She toured but hated it. After I started Music Man Productions (MMP), we got married and had a daughter. I still wanted her to have a place to sing. That’s how much I love her.
I took a risk, took out a loan using our house, Music Man Productions, and our cars as collateral, and opened a music club call The Music Man. There, she could sing, and it became known as a place to go if you were a musician and wanted to be noticed by the Nashville music set. Except The Music Man barely broke even, and I wound up paying the loan back through profits from Music Man Productions.
And then the bottom fell out with the Great Recession. Business with MMP fell completely off, and we finished in the red for the first time ever. It also wiped out some of the savings we’d set aside for emergencies. The bank came after me when I started missing payments on the loan I’d made for The Music Man.
That’s when I got approached by an old friend. I’ll just call him The Distributor and let you figure out who he is when you read the book. You see, The Distributor runs a human trafficking ring of national proportions, and he wanted to set up a network in Nashville. He made an offer I couldn’t refuse. He’d pay off the money I owed to the bank if I’d open up a brothel in the upstairs to my restaurant. He already had the people in place to run it for me, including the woman who manages the restaurant.
What could I say? If I said no, I’d lose the restaurant, MMP, and my house. But if I said yes, then I’d be committing a crime that Cassie, who is very involved in an anti-trafficking organization, would find utterly despicable. She’d leave me in a heartbeat. And there’s that little matter that I knew too much after he talked to me. Yeah, in my mind, I had no choice.
For the past seven or so years, I’ve run a brothel as well as a restaurant. My alias is The Producer. The guy who recruits the girls for me is The Agent. And the girls? We call them The Singers. A very organized network, it is. And it paid off that bank loan and then some. Having grown up poor, I’d always feared living in poverty for the rest of my life. Now, I don’t have to worry about that—ever.
But I do have to worry about this little side business of mine. If Cassie ever found out? I don’t want to know what would happen.
Jaidon Ash hides a lot, especially from his wife, Cassie. #OMM #LastChanceSeries #AmReading #Suspense Share on XQuestion: Where do you think human trafficking exists in your community?
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