Even though intense cultural pressures for monetary success and an institutional social structure dominated by the economy are viewed in anomie theory as stimulating criminal motivations and accounting for criminal behavior with an instrumental character, patterns in criminal earnings have not attracted much scholarly and empirical attention. Earlier studies based on inmate interviews concluded that most inmates had overestimated their monthly criminal earnings in an effort to rationalize their poor criminal performances. This study re-analyzed some of the earliest self-reported monthly earnings and concluded that meaningful patterns in criminal achievements easily emerge when allowed to do so, offering a telling story about differential criminal opportunities. The paper claims that earlier emphasis on temporal inconsistency and response bias (boosting past benefits of crime) misrepresented the facts and misjudged those persons agreeing to tell the story. Further, it concludes that, for a “criminal subculture” to have any persuasive or binding effect, its participants must be reasonably assured that their chances of “making crime pay” are not so remote as to become unattainable. Notes, tables, references, figures