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.’ ”
It wasn’t much, but was at least something. “Did your husband continue to be suspicious of Lennox?”
She thought for a moment. “I don’t know if I’d call it suspicious. He was just a little uneasy about him. He thought maybe Lennox had made it all up-had this crazy idea that maybe he was on the run from the police. Anyway, I don’t know if it’s important, but Louis said something once about how Lennox stretched his a ’s and h ’s.”
“What, like a Southern drawl?”
“No, not like any American accent he knew. He’d taught speech for years, so Louis really knew his accents. Once he said he was sure that Lennox wasn’t even American. But you know, that was before nine eleven. What did we know?” That was an attention-grabbing remark. I picked up on that.
“Why do you mention nine eleven?”
“Well, you know…” She sounded reluctant to pursue the point. “He had sort of dark skin. Not like he was black or Latino. Just a little darker than your typical Wisconsin dairy farmer, I guess, who’s as white as his cows’ milk.”
I thanked her and hung up. I hadn’t considered that direction. The yearbook’s black-and-white photo wasn’t high quality enough to set Ward-or Lennox?-apart from the other awkward teenagers on the page. I flipped through the file quickly. The FBI field office in Milwaukee reported on state records that showed that a Marshall Stuart Lennox was born in Meriter Hospital, Madison, Wisconsin, on June 11, 1960. His parents were Arthur James Lennox and Gretchen Melanie Lennox, nee Schilling. Lennox attended local public schools and dropped out during the eleventh grade. He was issued a U.S. passport on May 1, 1980, and left the U.S. on a student charter flight to Athens, Greece. Both his parents died in a car accident two years later. Lennox had no siblings or any other known family members. A more recent report indicated that the neighborhood he grew up in had changed- people had moved out and small businesses and garages had moved in. From those who’d stayed behind, very few people who were interviewed remembered the family.
The first two aliases I’d randomly checked, Lennox and McClure, had some things in common: they both belonged to young men who grew up in the Midwest, had no known living relatives, and both had left the country in 1980.
I flipped through the pages of the FBI report and its attachments, pulling out the file on the first-reported savings-bank-fraud case in South Dakota. There, the con man had presented himself as Harrington T. Whitney- Davis. The FBI report went over the history of Harrington T. Whitney-Davis: born in Fargo, North Dakota, on April 6, 1959. Like a junkie looking for a fix, I quickly ran my eyes over the interesting, though now less relevant, stuff. All I wanted to know at that moment was whether Harrington T. Whitney-Davis had gotten a passport and left the country.
He hadn’t, or at least the FBI report said nothing about it. My hopes deflated. The strange thing was, the name Harrington T. Whitney-Davis stopped appearing on mailing lists, credit reports, and IRS records in 1981. I opened the next file folder.
The con man in this one had appeared in a small town in Nebraska as Harold S. McClure. The FBI report gave his date of birth as March 1, 1958. I wasn’t interested in the rest of the bio. Not just yet. Right now, all I needed to know was if he had disappeared from the U.S. like the others. It took just one glance to find out. Yes, Harold S. McClure had applied for a passport in July, 1980, and left shortly thereafter for Canada through a land- border crossing. Soon, his name stopped appearing in public records, until it resurfaced years later in the U.S. for a few months.
One thing was clear: we had ourselves a modus operandi. It was all too much to be a coincidence. Operating now with a solid lead, I decided to check the other eight names in the FBI file later. I had a direction.
