“Any basis for that?” Bob asked, more in curiosity than as a challenge.
“No proof, just my hunch.”
“Why?” Clearly, like David, he wasn’t the kind of guy who would settle for easy answers.
“Because it involves young American men, none of whom apparently knew any of the others, who first left the country at about the same time, each for reasons of his own. Only after they left the country did the common denominator kick in: their identities were stolen. The first step of the conspiracy didn’t start here. It started somewhere, anywhere, wherever these guys lost their passports. Take Ward. He was traveling in Africa and Asia without known incident until he stopped writing his friends here. Since we don’t know where the others went, it could have happened anywhere. But the fact remains-their passports were also taken. Therefore, my conclusion is that an organization that operates in more than one location could be behind it. Besides, why limit ourselves to thinking it was a criminal enterprise? Maybe there’s a foreign power or a terrorist organization behind this.”
“Any basis for that?” asked David.
“Not at this time, but need I remind you that we lost our innocence on nine eleven? Things that weren’t plausible earlier are a reality now.” I didn’t want to elaborate, but in my mind was my Mossad training concerning planting sleeper agents in target countries. Those passports could now be used by foreign agents operating in any country that welcomes U.S. citizens. These could be used for far more dangerous purposes than money siphoning. I had no proof, just a hunch that I registered in my mind to develop later.
David brought me back to reality, which he was very good at. In fact, I sometimes felt as if he were my anchor, always keeping me tethered only to the facts at hand. Yet one more thing I was going to miss when he was gone. “Maybe the passports were taken in just one location by a sophisticated scam artist?”
“Sure,” I agreed. “That’s also a possibility.” But I suspected that David’s new theory was more farfetched than mine.
Bob developed the idea further. “Have you thought of the possibility that these young men simply sold their passports to finance their trips, claimed they were lost, and applied for new ones?”
“I did, and so did the FBI. The State Department told the Bureau that none of these men applied for a replacement passport. Besides, if all they did was sell their passport, why have they disappeared for good?”
“Did you investigate whether these guys had more than one citizenship? They could be selling their U.S. passports and continuing to travel with their foreign passports.” Bob’s tone was per sis tent. He seemed unwilling to consider my speculations unless I could prove that I’d considered every possibility. I realized he was only doing his job, and so far it hadn’t reached the point where I found it to be irritating.
“No go. If any of them had a foreign passport, his entry into the U.S. with that passport would have been recorded, and it wasn’t. Therefore, the genuine Ward left the U.S. only once and never returned. His passport and identity were given to someone already in the U.S., or who had initially entered the U.S. with a different passport under a different name, and then took Ward’s identity. It is possible that either all the additional passports were delivered to that someone while he was already in the U.S., or they were brought into the U.S. with him. That is, if all these cases are connected.”
“Yes, but…” said Bob continuing to be the devil’s advocate. “To begin with, why does he need passports to steal identities? He just needs the bio details, Social Security numbers, and such.”
I had an answer to that. “Because a U.S. passport is the best way of getting a copy of your old Social Security card, a driver’s license, and many other personal documents. Once you have these documents, the passport becomes secondary in the identity-theft scheme, other than for leaving the U.S. with your loot.”
Bob wasn’t deterred. “Fine, but how do we know that Ward didn’t have yet another passport with an alias that he used to exit the U.S.? It’s not a big deal. If he managed to get eleven passports with aliases, he could get twelve.”
“I still think there’s some organization behind it,” I said, but with less conviction.
After we got off the phone, I decided to explore that direction. Was Ward the only solid name I had to look at? What about the others? I decided to stick with him, because chronologically he was the first to disappear. But the age issue made me more confident in my earlier theory that we had ourselves a case of identity thefts. All victims described the perpetrators as men in their late twenties or early thirties, but the young men whose passports were used were in their early twenties at the time the scams began. Although a victim doesn’t usually ask a purported business associate for a passport, in retrospect the discrepancy was too obvious to ignore.
I turned to my desktop. I wanted to see if there were any news items about Ward. Maybe he’d sold photographs to some magazine in India, or had been arrested after a bar brawl in Indonesia. With more than ten thousand daily newspapers published around the world, maybe he had done something nice, or not so nice, that had been reported. Ward had disappeared in the early 1980s, before most international news was routinely computerized, and had then resurfaced irregularly starting in the mid-1980s. Still, I might get lucky. Maybe Ward’s irregular resurfacing was intended to establish a “clean” alias between scams? None of the other aliases turned up again for more than the one scam.
I first ran a Google search. Nothing relevant. Then I tried the Dogpile search engine. Still nothing. Next I tried legal retrieving services and limited the search to newspapers and magazines. After scrolling down over hundreds of items, and just as I was about to give up, I got a hit on Albert C. Ward III. It was in a newsletter issued by the Jewish community in Sydney, Australia. A bigamous wedding was averted at the last moment last week, before Rabbi Applebaum was scheduled to celebrate the marriage of Mr. Herbert Goldman from the United States to Miss Sheila Levi, a member of our community. Just hours before the ceremony was to be held at our synagogue, Rabbi Applebaum received a facsimile from Loretta Otis, of Lexington, Kentucky, claiming that Mr. Herbert Goldman was still married to her. In the fax Ms. Otis said she had no objection to Mr. Goldman’s marriage, provided that he divorces her first and that they settle “some outstanding financial matters.” Rabbi Applebaum called Ms. Otis, who told him that Herbert Goldman’s real name is Albert C. Ward III, and he is using the name of Herbert Goldman because he acquired a U.S. passport in that name while living in the U.S. Ms. Otis told Rabbi Applebaum that Goldman informed her that he was traveling to Australia for business. According to Ms. Otis, Goldman rang her weekly from Australia, but recently told her, “I’m marrying an Australian woman, Sheila Levi, because that way I can get permanent residence in Australia. You shouldn’t worry, because it will only be a sham marriage, and I will always love you my sweet Loretta, my only true wife.” When it dawned on Ms. Otis that Ward was not going to return to the U.S. or pay her father back the $34,000 he had borrowed from him, she faxed several rabbis in Sydney and the Sydney Registry of Births, Deaths, and Marriages, hoping to frustrate Goldman’s marriage plans. Rabbi Applebaum commented that Ms. Otis’s contact was timely, not just because the marriage would have been bigamous, but because he opposes people marrying out of their faith. According to Ms. Otis, Goldman, also known as Albert C. Ward III, is not Jewish.
“I’ll be damned,” I said in deep satisfaction. I looked for the date. It was only ten days old! I called David Stone.
“David, I need to do additional searching and verifications, but it seems that I might have a lead on Ward’s trail.”