The corporate name changed again; the paperwork was redone. Another closing was delayed, then a new proposal: my client wanted to lease the lodge for one year at the rate of $200,000 a month, with all rentals to be applied to the purchase price. This led to a week of intense bickering, but a deal was finally reached. I reworked the contracts again and insisted my firm be paid half of our fee. This was done, and Mr. Copeland and Mr. Reed were somewhat relieved.
When the contracts were finally signed, my client was an offshore company operating on the tiny island of St. Kitts, and I still had no idea who was behind it. The contracts were signed by an unseen corporate representative down there in the Caribbean and shipped overnight to my office. As per our agreement, my client would wire into our law firm trust account the sum of $450,000 and some change, enough to cover the lease payments for the first two months, plus the remainder of our fee, plus some miscellaneous expenses. I would in turn write a $200,000 check to the sellers for each of the first two months, then my client would replenish the account. After twelve months of this, the lease would be converted to a sale, with our little firm due another sizable fee.
When the wired funds hit our bank, the banker called to inform me that our trust account had just received $4.5 million, as opposed to $450,000. I figured someone got carried away with the zeros; plus, there could be worse things than having far too much money in the bank. But something didn’t add up. I tried to contact the shell company that was technically my client on St. Kitts but got the runaround. I contacted the law school pal who had referred the case, and he promised to look into the matter. I distributed the first month’s rent and the attorneys’ fee to our firm and waited for instructions to wire out the excess. Days passed, then weeks. A month later, the banker called to say that another $3 million had just landed in our trust account.
By this time, Mr. Reed and Mr. Copeland were deeply disturbed. I instructed my banker to get rid of the money-wire it back to the source from whence it came, and do so quickly. He grappled with this for a couple of days, only to find that the account in St. Kitts had been closed. Finally, my law school pal e-mailed me instructions to wire half the money to an account in Grand Cayman and the other half to an account in Panama.
As a small-time lawyer, I had zero experience wiring money to numbered accounts, but a few moments of light Google research revealed that I was walking blindly through some of the most notorious tax havens in the world. I wished I had never agreed to work for the anonymous client, in spite of the money.
The wire to Panama bounced back-some $3.5 million. I yelled at my law school pal and he yelled at someone up the line. The money stayed put for two months, drawing interest, though we could not ethically keep any of it. Ethics also required me to take all steps necessary to protect this unwanted money. It was not mine and I certainly made no claim to it, but, nonetheless, I had to safeguard it.
Innocently, or perhaps stupidly, I had allowed the tainted money of Barry the Backhander to rest under the control of Copeland, Reed amp; Bannister.
Once he had possession of the hunting lodge, Barry did a quick renovation, spruced it up a little, built a spa, and put in a heliport. He leased a Sikorsky S-76 helicopter, and it took about twenty minutes to haul ten of Barry’s best friends from D.C. to the hunting lodge. On a typical Friday afternoon, several shuttles were made and the partying began. By this time in his career he had cast aside most bureaucrats and lobbyists and concentrated primarily on congressmen and their chiefs of staff. At the lodge, everything was available: great food and wine, Cuban cigars, drugs, thirty-year-old scotch, and twenty-year-old women. An occasional grouse hunt got organized, but the guests were usually more preoccupied with the stunning collection of tall blondes at their disposal.
The girl was from Ukraine. During the trial-my trial-her handler said, in thickly accented English, that he had been paid $100,000 cash for the girl, who was taken to the hunting lodge and given a room. The cash had been handed over by a thug who testified, for the prosecution, that he had been one of Barry’s many bagmen.
The girl died. The autopsy revealed she had overdosed after a long night of partying with Barry and his friends from Washington. There were rumors that she failed to wake up one morning while in bed with a U.S. congressman, though this could not be proven. Barry circled the wagons long before the authorities arrived on the scene. Whom the girl had slept with during her last night on earth would never be revealed. A media storm erupted around Barry, his businesses, his friends, his jets, yachts, helicopters, restaurants, resorts, and the width and depth of his sordid influence. As the press stampeded to Barry, his cronies and clients sprinted away. Outraged members of Congress chased down reporters and demanded hearings and investigations.
The story turned much worse when the girl’s mother was located in Kiev. She produced a birth certificate showing her late daughter to be only sixteen years old. A sixteen-year-old sex slave partying with members of Congress at a hunting lodge in the Allegheny Mountains, barely a two-hour drive from the U.S. Capitol.
The original indictment ran on for a hundred pages and accused fourteen defendants of an astonishing variety of crimes. I was one of the fourteen, and my alleged crime had been what is commonly known as money laundering. By allowing one of Barry Rafko’s faceless corporations to park money in my firm’s trust account, I had supposedly helped him take dirty cash he pilfered from clients, scrub it up a bit offshore, then turn it into a valuable asset-the hunting lodge. I was also accused of helping Barry hide money from the FBI, the IRS, and others.
Pretrial maneuvering eliminated some of the defendants; several were allowed to peel off and either cooperate with the government or have their own separate trials. My lawyer and I filed twenty-two motions from the day I was indicted until the day I went to trial, and only one was granted. And it was a useless win.
The Department of Justice, through its FBI and U.S. Attorney’s Office in D.C., threw everything it had against Barry Rafko and his confederates, including one congressman and one of his aides. It didn’t matter if a couple of us might be innocent, nor did it matter that our version of the truth would be distorted by the government.
There I was, sitting in a crowded courtroom with seven other defendants, including the most nefarious political operative Washington had produced in decades. I was guilty all right. Guilty of stupidity for allowing myself to fall into such a mess.
After the jury was selected, the U.S. Attorney offered me one last deal. Plead to one RICO violation, pay a fine of $10,000, and serve two years.
Once again, I told him to go to hell. I was innocent.
CHAPTER 8
Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal,
Roanoke Times,
