Arkansas (2020)
Bayou Drug Dealer uses Front Businesses to Disguise his Drug Operation, While a Close Associate Withdraws all the Proceeds from their Joint Bank Account
Arkansas, is a southern noir-crime thriller about two low level drug dealers working for a drug kingpin they never met before. Kyle Ribb (Liam Hemsworth), a local drug dealer and courier gets promoted to run an operation in Little Rock, Arkansas. Klye self identifies he’s at the bottom of an organized crime outfit run by an elusive guy named Frog. He moves in and out of random phone booths, bathrooms, laundromats, moving his product. Kyle believes the ‘Dixie Mafia’ in the south is overplayed and organized crime is not that organized, rather, just a lose affiliation of deadbeats with no code of honor, yet he sees it as mostly boring and solitary work.
Kyle partners up with a wise guy named Swin Horn (Clarke Duke) to transport drugs from Little Rock to Corpus Christi, Texas. The two drive a commercial flatbed pickup truck stacked with visible cardboard boxes containing the contraband. After one of the ties on the cover breaks along the highway, they stop to repair the ties, only to be confronted by the local Park Ranger, Pat Bright (John Malkovich). Bright inspects the truck and questions Swin about this tie down skills, but also the unusually large volume of kitchen faucets as cargo.
Bright tells the two that he works with Frog and there is a change of plans as Frog is running a new operation through the park. As such, Kyle and Swin are seconded to living and working at the park under assumed identities supporting their new boss, Bright. Initially, Kyle and Swin believe Bright is truly Frog, but feel it is going to be a long time before they ever meet the real Frog. In the interim, they traffic Frog’s (and Bright’s) drugs across state lines to Alabama and Louisiana. However, one deal goes sideways with Bright getting killed. Kyle and Swin continue their drug dealing operation, however, they hold onto the money in a washing machine waiting for Frog to show up.
Unbeknownst to both, Frog uses a series of pawn shops as front companies where he advertises, he ‘buys and sells anything,’ but does not sell anything. Previously, Frog brought on two teenagers (Tim and Thomas) to help run his operation and they used a donut shop as their front company. The two teenagers, later as adults, are sent by Frog to kill Kyle and Swin because of the loose ends from Bright’s park operation. However, the attack is botched with Swin getting killed and Tim seriously injured.
In the end, Frog visits his accountant to wrap things up financially only to learn Thomas sold everything, cashed out all the accounts, stocks, bonds, etc. The accountant tells Frog this is the danger of joint bank accounts in that you can never be sure of what is going on in another person’s mind. In the US, a joint account is an account co-owned by two natural persons that provides equal ownership to the account. The danger of joint accounts, whether by marriage, parent/child, partners, friends, close associates, etc. is one person can unilaterally act on the account without the permission of the co-owner as both persons named on the account have equal rights to the contents of the account. With Frog having no money and people, he starts to set up shop again.
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