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.
What happened next is the thing Jones now regards with deepest regret. Although he founded the company with Bartmann, his main task as vice president had been to devise the computer program that rated the collectability of the loans; once that was done, he largely stayed on the sidelines, came into work when he wanted, practiced his guitar in the office. He recalled: 'Here I am, sitting out there, fat and happy. I've got millions in the bank and many more millions in the company, and a gazillion dollars as far as net worth, I mean cash, unencumbered. When I was worrying about the cost of the house we were planning, the accountants told me, 'You fool, you're worth so much money you don't have to worry!'
'So in late September of ninety-seven, somehow I became aware the Chicago company is not going to buy any loans this month. Bill had this amazing ability to convince you to do something before you-I have a hard time describing this-but he could in some manner plant a thought in your mind to make it your idea before he proposed the idea or even brought it up. He's a great thinker, and somehow I became aware we are not going to reach our goals in September, and if we don't, I thought at the time, in all probability it's going to destroy our bond rating. So I said, 'Hell, I got the money in the bank, I'll buy 'em.' And Bill says, 'You can't do that, you're an insider.' And I said, 'What if I find somebody to do it for me?' And he said, 'Maybe.' ' (Bartmann's attorney did not return calls.)
That very day, Jones recalls, he phoned a lawyer friend down in Shawnee and got him to set up a straw corporation called Dimat, into which Jones fed money from his share of CFS profits so that the company could begin purchasing loans from CFS as a replacement for the firm in Chicago. The scheme provided camouflage for a year, to the tune of $63 million in bogus loan purchases. Then in October 1998, an anonymous letter arrived at Standard and Poor's, one of the rating firms that had been giving CFS bonds their A rating. The letter revealed that Dimat was really a sham corporation and that all its 'purchases' of CFS loans were a ruse, paid for by money from CFS itself, to give investors a false picture of the company's financial health. Virtually instantly, the market for CFS bonds dried up; with no cash coming in, the company defaulted on payments to previous bondholders. Bankruptcy ensued, and by the following July, CFS was no more.
Needless to say, this was not the way Jones thought things would turn out. In his mind, the Dimat scheme was only a temporary arrangement, to give CFS managers time to get collections up to their previously high level. 'The choice was certainly mine, whether I fully realized it or not at the time,' Jones told me. 'That first time, when it started, the company wasn't in that bad trouble. But as it got further, I should have recognized that if we'd quit after the first two times, if we did that, there would still have been no harm, no foul. We could have simply said, 'Guys, we've missed the projections here.' We could have said, 'We're going home, and you've got to figure out what to do.' I wouldn't have liked that, it wouldn't have been great for investors, but certainly there would have been no criminal activity.'
A blizzard of investor suits rained down on Jones and Bartmann-as well as its white-shoe law firm, Mayer Brown and Platt in Chicago, which had advised CFS on how to sell bonds based on nothing but deadbeat debt, and also Chase Securities, which had vouched for and sold many of those bonds. The workings of the fraud, however, proved so complicated that it took the U.S. attorney's office in Tulsa three more years, until the end of 2002, to sort things out. At that point, Bartmann-who owned 80 percent of the company and insisted that he knew nothing about the Dimat scam, that it was Jones's idea alone-was indicted on fifty-eight counts, including conspiracy, bank fraud, mail fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering, all of which added up to a possible seven hundred years in prison. Jones, on the other hand, was allowed to plead guilty to a single count of conspiracy as part of his agreement to testify against Bartmann, whose trial was set for the fall of 2003.
In Jones's mind, it was Bartmann's fault anyway that the company had ended up selling more bonds than it had the capacity to pay off. A take-no-prisoners entrepreneur and a mesmerizing salesman, Bartmann harbored a streak of grandiosity remarkable even given the brash and bold style of Oklahoma's business world. On out-of-town trips, he traveled with an entourage of armed security men who talked in code words over Secret Service-style radiophones. And for one company outing, he chartered a fleet of Boeing 747s to fly some three thousand CFS employees and their spouses to Las Vegas for the weekend, gave them each $500 to spend at the tables, and then strode onstage for a pep rally at the Thomas and Mack arena dressed as Julius Caesar. 'Instead of selling a bond issue for, say, $200 million, if we had sold it for $100 million, the company would still have prospered and grown, not as dynamically, but the collection goals would have been achievable,' Jones said. 'But 'Nooo, we can't do that.' Bartmann had bought and sold stuff his whole life, and if he could sell something for ten, you'd be a fool to take five. My former partner, if I had to describe him in three or four words, it would be, 'He always tended to take a bridge too far.' '
If Bartmann was the one who steered the company into choppy water, it was Jones who proposed breaking the law to get it out, an action the government insisted came out of pure avarice. When it comes to looking out for himself, Jones seems to allow a degree of moral wiggle. After he had to stop construction of his dream house, he bought a Gothic stone structure in South Tulsa for $750,000 in cash and then put it in his wife's name. Should any of those angry investors persist in coming after him for recompense after he gets out of prison, he also shielded himself by making Jennifer go through a divorce of convenience last spring and asked the judge to set alimony at $7,500 a month. If a court ruled that the alimony took precedence over Jones's enormous debts, the first $7,500 he might someday make each month could effectively be his.
His daughter Holly, thirty-six, a graduate of Oklahoma State University who for a while worked as a midlevel manager at CFS, says that she thinks there was also a psychological dimension to why her father did what he did, something deeper than avarice. 'What he did was totally plausible to me,' said Holly, who lives in Dallas with her husband and who gave birth to Jones's first granddaughter shortly after he went to prison. 'I had seen some of the fights Dad and Bill had had. Dad ended up doing nothing. They excluded him from everything, future planning. He sat there and watched TV and played his guitar. As humble as he is, he's just like any other person who likes to think he's important. I can see my dad would do this for Bill by virtue of the fact that here was his chance to say: 'Hey, I'm doing something. I'm making a difference. I'm helping to save the company.' '
Maybe some of that's true. But Jones also admits that along with saving the company, he had this other idea of taking over those $63 million in CFS loans himself-the ones that he had bought surreptitiously through Dimat-and setting up a junior version of CFS in Nevada as his own company, handy to the gambling casinos.
He even formed a shell corporation for this purpose called Card Services of Nevada. 'The plan was that I'd leave CFS, and it pretty much stayed as that throughout the whole period. Then one day that anonymous letter bubbles up.'
Winter passed into spring, a lushly green period in eastern Oklahoma, and Jones was trying to keep himself busy. He bought a smoker, which he used for practice in barbecuing great slabs of meat, thinking that maybe he would open a rib-and-country-music place after he got out of prison. He also worked on a list of things he had long wanted to do but had never found the time for-seeing the Chicago Cubs play at Wrigley Field, taking a rafting trip down the Snake River in Idaho. Jennifer, meanwhile, often sat alone at home, not holding up so well. For one thing, she had acquired a bad case of paranoia, imagining that out of anger over her husband's coming testimony, Bartmann was devising ways to harm the Jones family. She feared that people hired by Bartmann were following her while she was out on shopping trips. Returning home, she was sure a Bartmann intruder had been in the house and had moved things around in the kitchen to frighten her. Her doctor put her on Klonopin and Paxil, and she took Ambien so she could sleep. She was also drinking more than her daughters thought was useful, and she began to see a psychotherapist. 'I'm still feeling numb, so I can't tell sometimes if I have any feelings at all,' she said. 'Dr. Fer-raro says I need to make more concrete plans about what my life is going to be like after Jay's gone. He says, 'What I want you to do for us is to think of ways you're going to live.' But sometimes I just get to crying-like I missed an appointment with Dr. Ferraro because all I did that day was I didn't get out of bed, just spent the day crying.'
Whatever its ups and downs, her married life ranked as a definite improvement over what she had been through as a child growing up in Shawnee. The family lived next door to the Sinclair filling station run by her father, who was a fearsome drinker and a womanizer and had wreaked havoc on the family, right until he committed suicide in his garage via carbon monoxide fumes. A brother she had been close to died in an automobile accident; her sister was murdered by her husband with a shotgun. At the end, her family had dwindled down to just her mother and her. 'I went from my mother's house when I was eighteen to marry Jay Jones, and I have never been alone my whole life,' she said that spring. 'I don't want to live in this house by myself. It's just so big, and I'm terrified of being alone. There are so many places for people to hide.'
Along with her fears of being alone, Jennifer nurses a deep and growing anger at her husband-not quite so much for how he wrecked their lives as for not telling her about his crime until the day after he made his plea bargain with the government and knew he was going to prison. 'When this first unfolded for me, I didn't understand a lot about what happened, because I couldn't really understand what CFS did in the first place,' said Jennifer, who talks in a little-girl voice that is sometimes hard to hear. The three of us sat in their family room. Forsythia bloomed all over their yard, and Miss Celie, their fluffy Maltese, pranced around the inch-thick white carpet in front of a giant TV set. 'Really, I don't know what you did, Jay,' she said, gazing at her husband across the room. 'If I had to tell people what my husband did for a living, this is what I would say: he bought loans at a certain percentage and sold them for more. That's all I could tell you. And Jay did not tell me about what happened until the night before he had an appointment with his lawyer, who was going to tell me about it the next day. But somehow Jay blurted it out that night, that he was in trouble. He told me the details, but all I can remember taking from that is he did something wrong. I always told him, when he went with Bill Bartmann: 'You've got to tell me. I've got to be in on the decisions.' And he never told me, because if he had told me, if anything had been suggested that was improper, in any way, I would have said, 'No!' I really believe that's why I was always left out. Of everything. I know it was the reason.'
After his case hit the front page of the Tulsa World,Jay more or less went directly to ground. He stopped attending services, for instance, at the Harvard Avenue Christian Church, a modern brick edifice where his younger daughter, Terri, taught preschool and where he usually sat front and center with his wife on Sundays, singing loud enough for everyone to distinguish his voice. 'It's kind of like someone dies,' he said. 'What do you say? 'Sorry for your loss'? I just didn't want the people I would come into contact with to have to come up with some kind of statement like that.'
His minister, the Rev. Stephen Wallace, was one of the few people the U.S. attorney allowed Jones to talk to about details of his plea bargain, and Jones went to see him right after he knew it was all going to be made public. 'Mainly what I did was listen and ask, How can we be helpful to Jennifer and the daughters?' Wallace told me. The Jones family was also on the church's 'telecare' list, which meant they would get called every now and then to see if they wanted a prayer said for them in absentia. Jones wasn't his first congregant to run afoul of the law by any means, but Wallace found this sort of counseling somewhat challenging. 'How do you show mercy on the one hand-'You're a cared-for person; you're an important person in God's eyes; God sees us all as precious'-but at the same time say that what they did was wrong, it was hurtful to a lot of people? Sometimes people are willing to accept that kind of thing and sometimes not. They say, 'I didn't do anything,' and a lot of times you don't know what really did happen. But since Jay's consistently said, 'I messed up here,' it made it easier. We could move on to a message of forgiveness and grace and then repentance.'
As the reporting date closed in, Jay and Jennifer began to peel away their early hopes that some kind of miracle would keep him from going away. On May 9 of last year, when the federal judge put his imprimatur on the sentencing deal, Jennifer relinquished her illusion that maybe he would get some sort of house-arrest arrangement. Quite to the contrary, she learned, unlike the state variety, federal sentences are served in full, with no possibility of parole.
The most Jones could hope for was a 15 percent reduction for good behavior, which meant the earliest he would be out was the end of September 2007. In a letter sent to his lawyer, Jones's doctor tried to get him special consideration, saying he was deeply concerned about what prison might do to his health. He had suffered two heart attacks, after all, in 1986 and 1998, the last around the time he learned of the anonymous letter to the rating agencies, and was taking three different medications for high blood pressure. Jones's lawyer, Robert Nigh, a former public defender who represented Timothy McVeigh in the unsuccessful appeal of his death sentence, recommended against sending the letter on to the Bureau of Prisons. Their likely response would be to assign Jones to a special medical facility out of state, which would make family visits difficult.
Neither was Jones getting any comfort from his prison handbook, which suggested that his agreement to testify for the government at the Bartmann trial in September would not exactly endear him to the other inmates. 'The only-I guess 'disturbing' would be the right word-thing out of the whole book that I saw would be, and it's just something I'll have to deal with, I guess, is they don't like
