two years after the last scam and almost two decades since the first one, and where was the international connection? I silently cursed the anonymous FBI agent who had cleared his desk at my expense. I wished he’d drown in paper. I couldn’t decide who to grumble to first-David or the FBI.
When I cooled off, I remembered what Alex had always told our class: “When you find yourself at a dead end, start from the beginning. One step back may not be enough, because it will lead you to the same brick wall. Revisit all assumptions, and recheck all facts. One or more could be flawed.”
OK, Alex, I thought with a mental sigh, if you could only see how I apply your wisdom. I wondered what had happened to him. Ever since I’d left the Mossad, Benny Friedman, my classmate, had been the only lifeline to my professional past. For all I knew, Alex was still in the system, or maybe growing flowers in his village in northern Israel, enjoying retirement. I read the files again. Two hours later, I still couldn’t find anything I’d missed the first time. The only mention of anything foreign was Ward’s departure from the U.S. in 1980. But he returned sometime in 1985, as the credit reports showed. There went the international connection. I had no idea where to begin.
Think outside the box rang again.
The only thing left for me to do was go back and check the raw intelligence data the FBI was analyzing.
I was frustrated and intrigued at the same time. How could somebody evade the law for so long? It was clear that Ward knew well how to assume new names and identities. Was thinking that he had employed that skill to vanish, thinking within the box or outside it? I needed something to hang on to in this case, or the file would grow moss on my shelves, and I’d be getting polite but per sis tent reminders from David to report progress.
I called David Stone in Washington, DC, grimly bracing myself.
“David, how come you agreed to take Ward’s cases? They’re so stale that even the bookworms who lived in the reports died of old age.”
“Dan, the FBI is fairly confident that Ward is outside the United States,” he said. “That makes the case ours, at least as it concerns the $311 million he stole.”
I was startled for a moment. “$311 million? The amounts in the file don’t even come close to that.”
“Do the math again,” said David. “Eleven known cases-he fared nicely.”
“OK, I’ll look again at the numbers. But what makes them think he’s outside the U.S.? There’s nothing in the file to indicate that. Or the FBI is holding an ace up their sleeve.”
“The Bureau won’t tell us. So I guess it’s intelligence, not facts or evidence, and you know how zealously they protect their sources.”
“What do you mean they won’t tell us? Last time I checked we work for the same government.”
“No need to be sarcastic,” said David, trying to calm down my mounting temper, which he knew only too well. David himself could have a bit of a temper too, but he kept a much tighter lid on his than I did mine. “To the extent that any of it is grand-jury material, they can’t share it with other sections of the government working on the civil side of the case.”
That’s bull, I thought. “Well, David, as an attorney for the government I can receive certain grand-jury material for use in performing my duty. Besides, this case appears to involve bank fraud, so there’s an additional specific language allowing the disclosure. Let’s chew the fat here.”
I could almost hear David’s silent and subtle smile over the phone.
“You’re right,” he finally agreed.
“And?” I asked hoping to get support here. “Why is U.S. law enforcement extra-interested nowadays in high-dollar cases, even if stale? Have they just remembered it has an international aspect, and the post- September eleventh public outcry made them resurrect paper cadavers?”
“Go figure,” he said, joining in my despair.
I kept on pressing, “Unless someone at the FBI simply wanted to get rid of these cases to better his or her statistics, hoping we won’t cry foul, they’d better tell us what they have, or they’ll find these cases back on their desk in no time, dead and aging bookworms included.”
“Dan,” said David in his calm voice. “Think about how the Bureau handled the S-and-L cases in the eighties.” I remembered it well. Neither the Bureau nor federal prosecutors went after the money looted in bank and savings-and-loan frauds. We went only after perpetrators. The statistics we tracked were numbers indicted and numbers convicted. The government wasn’t going after the money.
“True enough,” I said. “Back then we never went after the money. But I never understood why.”
“One reason, I’d say,” answered David, “was because going after the money would have required separate civil proceedings. Decision makers concluded that these would be resource-intensive cases, with little likelihood of recovering anything.”
His point was that the U.S. government had been leaving millions of stolen dollars on the table, and U.S. taxpayers of course picked up much of the tab. Since that time, however, changes in federal criminal law have allowed us to get restitution, in criminal prosecutions, of ill-gotten gains resulting from crimes for which we got convictions. I’d been involved in many of these cases myself.
“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
