Jason Statham isn’t ashamed of his street-hawker past, said Ivan Solotaroff in Details. Growing up in a poor South London neighborhood, Statham was schooled by his father in the art of selling counterfeit jewelry. “We’d set up shop, mock auctions, the run-out,” says the action movie star. “These are all words and names describing the way people get ripped off.” The ersatz-goods trade paid well. “Man, we was doing 1,000 pounds, 2,000 pounds”—about $1,600 to $3,200—“selling s--- you’d buy for maybe 60 pence? That’s bunce, pure profit.” He doesn’t feel any pity for his old customers. “It’s people’s own greed that allows them to get ripped off. If your intuition served you at all, you’d never be in that shop,” he says. “And we never said, ‘That’s gold, that’s Cartier.’ We just never let them ask. If they insisted, you’d say, ‘I’ll get a price in a minute. My mother waited nine months for me. You can wait another minute, can’t you?’” Statham doesn’t see much difference between his old career and his new one in Hollywood. “So much of this industry is bulls---. But I did it for a living. I see it before it enters the room.”
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