{"id":1942,"date":"2026-05-25T17:05:13","date_gmt":"2026-05-25T17:05:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/booksvantage.com\/demos\/eli\/?p=1942"},"modified":"2026-06-01T20:15:58","modified_gmt":"2026-06-01T20:15:58","slug":"flashback-toronto-2015","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/booksvantage.com\/demos\/eli\/flashback-toronto-2015\/","title":{"rendered":"Cam the Scam"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t

Cam the Scam<\/h1>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tFlashback, Toronto 2015:<\/strong>\n\nCamille Roche arrived already smirking.
We called him Cam. He hated it ;
\u201cZee name is Camille.\u201d He’d spit with a grimace. It was a tiny, nourishing victory we enjoyed daily.
He was beautiful in the way men are when consequences have only ever been theoretical. A massive tattoo climbed his chest, slithered up his throat, grazed his jawline, and threatened his earlobe like it was considering squatting there permanently. Paired with a thin Qu\u00e9b\u00e9cois accent, the effect on women was immediate and alarming. Release him into a bar and he\u2019d form a following faster than a cult with free wine.
Cam spoke exclusively in over-confident half-truths. He had the cadence of someone who had never finished a thought because no one had ever asked him to.
Like me, he was a booking agent. Like me, he\u2019d hustled his way into the biz alone. Unlike me, his roster was almost entirely big-room EDM (electronic dance music). DJs;\u00a0 the USB-stick leisure class;\u00a0 it was back when international DJs were being paid $25,000 to $75,000 a night to press play for three hours in big city superclubs built on cocaine, sex(ism) and regret.
Cam landed an internship at The Agency Group, splitting his time between our New York and Toronto offices . In Toronto, he effectively became my assistant, which in hindsight was a bit like letting a raccoon manage your pantry. We started plotting an in-house electronic department, and after six months of relentless optimism, the partners agreed.
TAG EDM was born.
We celebrated in clubs designed for people who consider debt a personality flaw. Cam greased bouncers with folded bills held and passed like communion wafers. Nights blurred. Reality loosened. His \u201ccasual\u201d cocaine habit became aspirational, which is a drug I avoid because it reliably turns men into motivational posters with bad math and worse breath.
At TAG, all bookings were tracked in a weekly-printed digest \/bible called the Route Book. It was boring. It was authoritative. It had never been wrong.
Cam, however, was creative.
His monthly numbers started inflating into the low six figures. Management began storming into our shared office, Route Book in hand, pages bleeding orange highlighter.
\u201cHow,\u201d they demanded, \u201care you booking shows that don’t exist?\u201d
Then my phone started ringing.
A promoter in Tucson, calling at midnight, wondering where their headliner was. An artist called, stranded outside a club in Orlando \u2014 not on the listings, not expected, definitely not getting paid \u2014 despite having flown in that morning from Paris. Or Ibiza. Or Berlin;<\/b>Somewhere expensive enough to justify the lie.
Eventually, even denial lost interest.
Cam wasn\u2019t confused. He wasn\u2019t overwhelmed. He wasn\u2019t young.
He was running a messy but elegant scam. double-booking artists, inventing shows, collecting commissions (& most crucial to his scheme, deposits) on bookings that existed only in his Google Calendar and imagination. He was a one-man Ponzi scheme with good cheekbones.
He was fired immediately.
TAG EDM died the same month it was born, which is impressive even by electronic music standards.
Cam vanished. I remained , apologizing to promoters, calming artists, repairing trust with nothing but honesty and a suddenly very uncool haircut.
Cam walked away untouched,
but the damage stayed, fully booked and non-refundable.\n\nMixtape moment:<\/i>
TSOA #15: the TAG EDM years<\/i>
https:\/\/tidal.com\/playlist\/fb7bcc00-5e8e-4832-b5f0-7db5a64c77f1<\/a><\/span><\/u><\/b>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Flashback, Toronto 2015: Camille Roche arrived already smirking.We called him Cam. He hated it ;\u201cZee name is Camille.\u201d He’d spit with a grimace. It was a tiny, nourishing victory we enjoyed daily.He was beautiful in the way men are when consequences have only ever been theoretical. A massive tattoo climbed his chest, slithered up his…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"elementor_header_footer","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1942","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/booksvantage.com\/demos\/eli\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1942","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/booksvantage.com\/demos\/eli\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/booksvantage.com\/demos\/eli\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/booksvantage.com\/demos\/eli\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/booksvantage.com\/demos\/eli\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1942"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/booksvantage.com\/demos\/eli\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1942\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2012,"href":"https:\/\/booksvantage.com\/demos\/eli\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1942\/revisions\/2012"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/booksvantage.com\/demos\/eli\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1942"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/booksvantage.com\/demos\/eli\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1942"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/booksvantage.com\/demos\/eli\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1942"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}