I met Jay Jones in late January 2003, several months before he had to report to prison, and that winter and into the spring we spent a lot of time talking and driving around rural Oklahoma in his 1975 powder blue Cadillac Deville. He liked the Deville for the wideexpanseitgavehimbehindthewheel,andwedroveinitto visit some of the mile-markers in his life-down to Shawnee, where he and his wife, Jennifer, began their marriage; to Musko-gee, where he had started up the company with his business partner, Bill Bartmann. The driving helped distract him from thinking about what lay ahead. Trying to be helpful, a friend had given him a handbook called Down Time:A Guide to Federal Incarceration,writ-ten by an ex-inmate who counsels white-collar defendants. It told about a $175 monthly spending limit at the commissary, the three hundred monthly phone minutes and the rules on visitation. But it said little to ease the anxieties that ranked uppermost in Jones's mind. He had seen the prison movies. Would the guards down there be nasty to him? What about the other inmates? Would he be safe?
One morning we headed up to Blackwell, in the wheat-growing area near the Kansas line, where Jones spent his boyhood and where he hadn't visited in several decades. A thick wet snow was falling, so you couldn't tell where prairie left off and sky began. Blackwell loomed in the distance by virtue of its grain elevators shooting up at the south end of town. Driving onto Main Street, Jones was taken by how many of the old brick-front stores had gone out of business or had been replaced by curio shops offering up relics of the town's past. No more Sears, no more JC Penney. "A single Wal-Mart can pretty much clean out half of one of these little towns," he said. Jones came from humble origins and started out in the workaday world while still in his teens. His father spent most of his adult life as a route man for Wilson foods, taking meat orders from small-town butchers. He died of a heart attack at age fifty-seven while fixing up the camper truck he planned to take on fishing trips during retirement. To earn extra money, the whole family would go out on weekends picking pecans at local orchards. Jones's younger brother, Joe, about half his size, climbed up to shake down the nuts so the others could scrabble for them on the ground. Unlike his straight-arrow brother, Jay admits to taking a few financial shortcuts as a boy-stealing change out of the newspaper racks on Main Street, charging a carton of cigarettes at the corner store supposedly for his mother, then selling them to his friends. "Jay was more the adventurous one, more willing to go the route, take the risk," said Joe, now a preacher who teaches physical education at a college in Lawton,
Oklahoma. "I was more 'One in the hand is worth two in the bush.' His was 'Let's shake the bush and see what comes out.' "
Their boyhood differences persisted into later life. "Our folks grew up in the Depression and raised both of us that the object of life was to find a big company, a stable environment, find something that is solid and stay with it," said Jay, whose cheerful, jokey personality tends to mask the real thoughts churning around in his head. "Joe pretty much has done that, and I did for a long time, too, worked for Wilson foods for thirteen years and had a pretty decent job. But I just came to the conclusion one day that people who did well financially were those who had their own business, and I figured if I was ever going to do anything, I'd better get on with it. And so I did, and it's been a roller coaster ever since."
After failing at several different ventures, Jones ran into Bart-mann, a lawyer who had moved to Oklahoma from Des Moines and had gone bankrupt selling oil pipes. Together they started CFS in 1986 and in the next decade made it into a huge financial success. In addition to his regular salary of $1 million-and that was tax free, since every April the company also covered whatever he owed the IRS-Jones took an annual distribution from company profits to the tune of several millions more. And since CFS was a partnership and Jones owned 20 percent of the company, on paper his net worth added up to between $500 million and $1 billion.
In those months before prison, when he wasn't sleeping well and his eyes would blink open at two or three in the morning, Jones would sometimes kill the time until dawn by taking a sorry inventory of the material riches in his life that were now lost. He would think about the $5 million, fourteen-thousand-square-foot dream house that he and his wife had started building south of Tulsa. As conceived, it had granite walls and huge gables, a main staircase inspired by the one in Tara from Gone with the Wind and two artificial ponds connected by a waterfall. To people driving past, it would have looked as if someone had managed to airlift in a full-blown chateau from one of the wine regions of France. It didn't look that way at the moment, to be sure. Right then it sat forlornly in a field of mud, its siding wrapped in tar paper and its windows open to the rain and the snow. Around it was a chain-link fence with a big padlock on the gate and a sign advising people that the U.S. government had a lien on the property.
He also thought about those trips in the company's $25 million, fifteen-passenger Gulfstream G-IV, which he ordered up for spur-of-the-moment vacations for his wife and two grown daughters and their husbands and two or three other couples as well. Fly to Paris and the Caribbean, to Bulls games in Chicago, front-row-center seats, put it all on the company tab as a business expense. Give all that money to the government, it would only waste it. Most frequently, he and Jennifer flew to Las Vegas, where they both gambled heavily. Jones's game of choice was craps, and he could easily drop $30,000 in a weekend. Her husband playing craps is a picture that Jennifer still keeps in her head; she loved the way he would try to make a point, bent out over the table, his fist shaking with the dice and a foot flailing loose in the air. "I find it hard to describe what it was like," Jones said about being so suddenly so rich. "It was the realization when you walked into a store, no matter what kind of store it was, not that you could just buy anything you wanted but that you could buy the whole store! It was a feeling, I don't know if 'power' is the right word. More, I'd say, 'awe.' "
Another thing feeding on his mind those nights was how he might have provided his life story with a more positive ending. Aside from the criminality involved, the downfall of CFS had its roots in the company's very success. In the late nineties it grew so fast-from fewer than two hundred employees in 1995 to twenty times that number just three years later-that it lost the personal touch on the telephone that had produced such a high rate of return. Back in the early days when he and Bartmann were calling debtors, they developed a patter that was "sweet as peaches," Jones recalled. "First you get into their minds, let them know you're there and you're not going away. Then you get into their hearts, create a friend: 'I'm here to help you, not hurt you, harass you. We don't want to see you suffer. I been there myself; I know how it feels.' Then, after you get into their minds and their hearts, you get into their pocketbooks."
The ability CFS developed to wheedle money out of former deadbeats had generated an A rating for the bonds it sold to investors. That meant more money so CFS could buy more loans. But with collections beginning to flag in early 1997, it needed the bond money even more, not only for new loans but also to pay the interest and principal on previous bond issues that could no longer be covered by loan collections. In essence, CFS embarked on a garden-variety Ponzi scheme, borrowing hundreds of millions from new investors to pay off old ones, hoping somehow that collections would pick up in time to cover the difference. As a stopgap measure, CFS started selling off some of its loans to a firm in Chicago to make it appear to investors that its collectors were still reaching their monthly goals. That September, however, the Chicago company announced that it would buy no more loans, and CFS suddenly faced disaster.