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A good friend of mine called me and wanted me to explain to him how to format a hard drive. I tried explaining, but he wasn't getting it. I asked questions. Do you have a Windows cd to reinstall from? No. Do you know it costs hundreds of dollars? No. Is it broken? No, not exactly. Why do you want to reformat it? I just do. Then, it switched to, could I do this for him?
After enough back and forth questions, he grudgingly revealed that he had stolen the laptop from the local university. He had a job as a janitor there. Apparently, there was a group of the janitors that did this regularly, and my friend felt he had stumbled across a good thing.
I was so incredibly angry. Angry at the level that I didn't know how to deal with the feeling. He wasn't going to tell me any of this. He only revealed it because I pushed him on it. He tried to trick me into helping him commit crime. He's stealing laptops from a university, a place that objectively makes the world better.
I stopped returning his calls and talking to him. That was 24 years ago. We had been friends for 10 years. I don't know why I did that. I often wonder if there's something wrong with me, something that makes it easy for me to cut people out of my life and not feel regret. I wish that I had at least said why I was angry. I didn't say anything. I just stopped talking to him. I should have just turned him in. But at the time, it was hard to do that to a friend.
Cutting ties seems appropriate in that situation. Turning him in for something like that puts a big burden on you. Maybe he comes after you for doing it? Maybe others get taken down with him and now they're mad at you? It's not your burden to stop imo, at least at that level.