“But that doesn’t explain why the Bureau waited so long,” I said in frustration, David’s compliment notwithstanding. “Maybe it landed on the table of this year’s recipient of the phlegmatic agent award?”
“Let me make some calls, and I’ll get back to you,” concluded David.
CHAPTER FOUR
Getting David’s help was the easy part. I had been working for him long enough to know he accepted reasoned arguments and never dug in his heels in a position proven wrong. But people change when they see retirement coming up. And in any case, David would still need to crack some bureaucratic walls. If you spend enough time in Washington, you know that sometimes it’d be easier to get a date with a reigning Miss America than to move things faster between government agencies. For sure, I knew that I had to get a breakthrough before David retired. With his clout and experience, he could back me up on almost anything. But when a new chief comes, things could be different, for better or-more likely-for worse, just because he’d be new on the job.
A week later I went to Washington for a routine staff meeting. After the pep talk, David asked me to stay.
“I thought it over and made some inquiries,” said David. “The bottom line is that the FBI did have a reason to send us these files. But before we go over them, let me call in Bob Holliday. He’s my new deputy.”
“Who is he?”
“He’s a Department of Justice veteran with many years of successful commercial-litigation experience, but with no international exposure. I hope you’ll help him get acquainted with your work.”
Bob Holliday had wide shoulders, smart brown eyes, and a thick mustache, and appeared to be in his early fifties. We shook hands when he walked into the office.
“Dan,” said David, “I concluded that the Bureau has already found common points. All of the names used during the scams were of white American males who one: were born within a few years of one another, but had no apparent connections among them; two: had obtained passports also within a few years of one another; three: left the U.S. and then disappeared; four: resurfaced years later just long enough to scam banks for millions with a reasonably consistent modus operandi-for example, never a bank insider, so never named on a list of persons barred from employment in financial institutions, but gets bank insiders to provide investor victims-and five: disappeared again without a trace.”
“I see,” I said with a mild tone of sarcasm. “What do we have here twenty years later?-millions gone, multiple names, one scam each, consistent MO, no investigative direction.”
David smiled, and turned to Bob. “What do you think?”
Bob Holliday wasted no time in getting to the Bureau’s motives. “At this point the Bureau sensibly concludes that it could spend scads of resources on these dogs and still come up with nothing re terrorist financing or anything else. Wanting at least to improve its statistical picture, and with money plus an international link such as the use of passports, albeit tenuous in the extreme, the Bureau thinks of David and off-loads eleven open cases. David thinks of you. Voila!”
Bob Holliday sounded as if he knew what he was talking about. Normally I didn’t like it when someone came across as too self-assured, but I didn’t mind it with Bob. He managed not to let confidence slide into arrogance the way a lot of people do.
He continued. “The Bureau came up with these cases when trying to look for terrorist financing where they’d never looked before. But it hit a dead end with them domestically.”
“But why just now?” I queried. “And where is the international connection? Just the passports?”
“I know that the international angles are questionable,” conceded David. “All I’m going to tell you is that the dollar amounts in these scams are so high, and it’s so common for proceeds of large scams to leave the U.S., that it seemed worth our taking them on, at least preliminarily. I don’t want to tell you any more about the Bureau’s analysis, because I want you to take a completely fresh look at them. I’m interested in whether you see something in them that others haven’t.”
I returned to my office in New York and sat motionless behind my desk looking at the files, going back over each of the eleven cases. Were there eleven perpetrators, or just one with many aliases? There were conflicting assumptions in the FBI reports. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one confused.
I read each and every bit of testimony of the victims, the bank managers, and the landlords. Their descriptions of each perpetrator were very similar, except for one person who recalled the con man speaking with a slight accent. I was intrigued by this detail and pulled out the FBI FD-302 interview report from the file. Louis B. Romano, of 45-87 West Street, Gary, Indiana, was interviewed at his home by an FBI special agent. I looked up Romano’s number and dialed.
An elderly woman answered. “I’m sorry,” she said when I asked for Romano. “My husband passed away two years ago. Is there something I could help you with?”
I hesitated. “Well, ma’am, I’m sorry for your loss,” I said. “I’m Dan Gordon, an investigative attorney with the Justice Department. Your late husband was interviewed a few years ago about one of your tenants, and I wanted to ask him a few more questions.”
“Who was the tenant? Maybe I could help you. We’ve got only two rental apartments, and I remember most of our tenants.”
“The tenant was Marshall Stuart Lennox. Ring a bell?”
“Of course I remember him.” She paused. “If you don’t mind me saying, I never really liked the guy.”
“Why?”
“He was a real oddball. Never opened his mail.”
“How’d you know?”
“I saw unopened envelopes in the garbage bin a few times. Back then, we were living in an apartment we own in the same building. And I never saw him use his mailbox to leave letters for the mailman to collect.” She let it sink in. “He also installed a telephone line under a different name.”
“And how did you come across that?”
“After he left, a bill came to that address with a strange name on it. I opened it, and the telephone number was the same as Lennox’s. I have no idea why he did it, but he never left a forwarding address-just took off.”
I sat up in my chair. “Do you still have that phone bill?”
“Nope, I threw it out ages ago. The charge was for, like, $6, so I guess the phone company just wrote it off.”
“So what name did he use for the bill?” I asked, trying to keep too much interest out of my voice.
She sighed. “It’s been forever-I really couldn’t tell you. But I think it was just a regular American name, nothing special. You know, Jones, Brown, Evans.”
“Your husband mentioned that Lennox had an accent. Did you notice that too?”
“No, but Louis was always the one who dealt with him. I know he had one, though. Louis used to teach drama and English, so he always did notice accents. I did hear about it. Louis liked to identify people’s origin and background by listening to them talking. After listening to a person’s dialect, Louis could tell where the person grew up, and sometimes how educated he was. He loved doing that.”
“Did he discuss Lennox’s accent with you, or just mention it?”
“Well, he said Lennox definitely didn’t grow up in Wisconsin, which is what he told us.”
“What made him say that?”
“Louis used to go every summer to Wisconsin to teach drama to local kids in a summer camp. He could do that accent really well. So, one day he mentioned to Lennox that he’d been teaching in Oconomowoc, in the lake country. Lennox tried to change the subject, and he mispronounced Oconomowoc. Then Louis made a joke about people from Wisconsin saying ‘cripes’ a lot, but Lennox didn’t seem to get it either. Louis thought it was really weird. But I told him, ‘What do we know? Maybe Lennox left Wisconsin when he was young. Anyway,’ I said, ‘why should we care? He pays rent on time and doesn’t damage our property.’ ”