I hooked up my laptop to my room’s high-speed Internet connection and sent Esther the efficient office admin an encrypted e-maiclass="underline" Please check with the New York State Banking Department whether McHanna Associates need a license to act as a liaison for a Swiss bank in currency transactions for U.S. citizens. If such a license is necessary, please see if one was issued to McHanna. Also, ask the FBI field office in Manhattan whether there’s an ongoing investigation regarding that company’s possible involvement in money laundering. Finally, check if McHanna ever filed any tax returns listing Harrington T. Whitney-Davis as an employee, or engaged him as an in de pen dent contractor.
The latter two questions were legitimate, but the chances that the FBI would discuss the first question, even though we were both agencies of the U.S. government, were slim to none. As to the tax returns, the IRS could not, under federal law, share that information without a court order. Neither the FBI nor the IRS were the bad guys in this bureaucratic nightmare. They had to maintain a stringent procedure for information exchange. But maybe Esther, with her quiet demeanor, could achieve what I couldn’t with my big mouth and aggressive attitude.
I had a free evening. But Zurich at night is as exciting as having a warm beer with an overly talkative blind date you agreed to meet during a temporary moment of insanity. Swiss TV isn’t any better. I called my children and went to sleep.
In the morning, I had barely shaken myself awake when I turned on my laptop computer. There was an incoming encrypted e-mail from Esther: There’s no need for a license from the New York State Banking Department if the company isn’t doing any banking activities in New York, such as taking deposits or making loans to the public. Providing liaison services alone requires no license. As for the FBI, I received an evasive answer regarding any investigation of McHanna Associates. The IRS says officially that they can’t help us, but unofficially I was led to understand that Harrington T. Whitney-Davis’s name never appeared on McHanna Associates’ tax filings, although it’s possible that an alias was used. Please let me know if you need anything else. Esther.
I returned to New York. Unenthusiastically, I pulled out the files again. I checked the names of the perpetrators in the remaining eight cases. By now, what I found didn’t surprise me; it was all so obvious that I almost expected it. All eight men had left the U.S. in 1980 or 1981. Their respective names had resurfaced briefly, one with each of the banking or other scams perpetrated. Then each had vanished again. Since I discovered that the name of Whitney-Davis resurfaced, I ran a check on all other names to see if we had a wholesale revival. But the answer came as expected. No. No resurgence of any other name.
I had a hunch that the suspected perpetrators’ disappearances weren’t coincidental. There was a clear pattern. Since none of the men had any meaningful criminal record, or a troubled past, I didn’t suspect that they had cooperated with the thefts of their identities, although I couldn’t rule that out altogether. I had to decide on a direction. But I had no idea which way to turn.
CHAPTER SEVEN
There were additional questions I wanted to ask McHanna about his contacts with Whitney-Davis, but I decided against it. The information I had received in Switzerland was, at best, just raw intelligence, and confronting McHanna before I had hard evidence could be damaging.
I called David Stone. He had always been a good sounding board for my queries. David’s physical appearance as a typical absentminded university professor with profuse white hair and eyeglasses slipping to the tip of his nose was misleading. Although nearing retirement, he was very alert, and all brain. He was always the first to come to the office and the last to leave, the exact opposite of a lot of guys in his position, who are just there to mark time until their pension kicks in. I tried to imagine what David would do in retirement, but it seemed so out of character for him that no clear picture materialized in my mind’s eye.
“Let me put you on speaker,” he said. “Bob Holliday is also here, and I want him to get involved.”
“OK, I’m facing an interesting question. Who would know that a bunch of apparently unrelated young American men in their early twenties left the United States at about the same time, leaving no trace behind them?”
“There are many young men, Americans and other nationals, who take off and never return to their homelands. That’s no news,” David answered.
“I think there’s at least one common denominator to all these cases,” I continued, “but the FBI takes it even a step further. They think all the scams were perpetrated by the same person.”
“I saw that. Their conclusion is based on paper-thin evidence. You know that from a false premise, any conclusion can be drawn. I tend to think that the FBI found itself in a cul-de-sac, or it wouldn’t have off-loaded the file on us.” David sounded tired. “I didn’t get back to you on this because I had no answers either. So maybe you shouldn’t follow their way of thinking, or you’ll end up where they ended-facing a brick wall.”
“This is strange, now that you mention it, David,” I said. “Because it goes along with my line of thinking. If what I’ve discovered so far checks out, then the entire theoretical structure the FBI is working from will collapse. They had just one chink in the armor. Maybe we don’t have Albert C. Ward III assuming eleven aliases. Maybe we’ve got ourselves a Mr. Anonymous with twelve aliases, including one as Albert C. Ward III.”
“I hear you,” said David, digesting my words. “Anything to support it?”
“Ward had a pronounced stutter. None of the imposters is described in the files as having that disability. On the contrary. The suspect in each of the eleven indicted cases actually has been pretty articulate,” I said, gaining confidence with my theory.
“Go on,” said David, sounding interested.
I picked up speed. “Let’s establish, just for the sake of our little discussion here, that twenty-year-olds couldn’t have pulled off the scams, because they weren’t sophisticated enough, and because the little evidence we’ve gathered shows the perpetrators appeared to be much older. Therefore, let’s suppose that whoever assumed the identity of four, and maybe even all twelve, young American men made a hit on a bank or on un-suspecting investors and ran with the money. Now, I don’t even have this con artist’s picture, if Ward’s identity was also stolen. The yearbook picture and the photos that Donald Peterson, the retired school principal, sent me were definitely of Ward. But apparently the FBI never asked any of the victims whether the scam artist’s photo was in a photo array that included that year-book photo of Ward. If my target wasn’t Ward after all, then whom was I chasing? I’m back to square one, hunting a single ghost or a cemetery’s worth.”
“Dan, it’s Bob. Didn’t you just tell us that you think the FBI was wrong, and even the person calling himself Ward was an imposter who assumed Ward’s identity, and not Ward himself? So if the FBI was wrong on that, why wouldn’t they be wrong on the entire concept? Take your idea even further.”
“How?”
“How do we know that the twelve cases are connected? Maybe just two or three or none at all,” said Bob.
“The FBI said so.”
“They could be wrong, you know. You’ve just suggested it,” added David.
“Anyway, the FBI’s conclusion isn’t proof, but assumption,” concluded Bob.
“OK,” I said. “Although we’ve enough doubts concerning the FBI’s conclusion, we also must make assumptions that could turn out to be just as baseless.”
“Like what?” asked Bob.
“Like the one that seems most logical at this time, and take it from there.”
“Fine,” said David. “How about that? Assuming that all of the cases are connected, who could mastermind such an operation?”
“If it went beyond the one-person-crime-spree pattern we see in the usual identity thefts, I’d see a criminal organization with international activities, or some other structured body.”