by Tod Goldberg
"But this new real estate business Dixon is in I find very compelling," I said. "I can't imagine it's on the level. Is it, Stan?"
"Mr. Fitch…," he started.
"Hank," I said. "We're friends. Call me Hank."
"Whatever you had with Mr. Woods before today, we weren't aware of that," Stan said.
"There it goes," Burl said. "We're fucking dead. Do you get that, Stan? We're fucking dead. Danny, we're fucking dead."
"You," I said to Burl, "quiet." I pointed the gun at him when I spoke, which was a mistake, because he immediately pissed himself. There was now piss and blood on the floor. Fortunately, the furniture looked pretty good. I was keeping the exchange of fluids pretty well contained to the fireplace region.
"Continue," I said to Stan.
"I want to help you close this deal," he said, like we were sitting in the front seat of his BMW talking about a house in a subdivision. "All I know, all my associates know, is the business end. Dixon tells us where the money is, we get it, we make it happen. All this drug stuff? That's not us."
"Of course it isn't," I said. I smiled, just to let Stan know I understood, let him know that this was all just a big misunderstanding. "You just come around and fleece defenseless women-is that right, Stan? Pretend to be a tough guy? Make a woman lose her house to a guy like me? Make her a fucking shell of a human? That what you do?"
Stan looked nervously at his two friends. "Well, it's…"
"It's what I say it is," I said.
"Yes, sir," Stan said.
"What about you, Burl?" I said.
"I can't feel my foot," Burl said.
"That's because you've been shot in the leg, and no blood is making it to your foot right now," I said. I was about to ask Danny, the guy in the striped shirt, if he agreed, too, but he still didn't look like he could be engaged in conversation.
"You were saying, Stan?"
"The problem, as I see it," Stan said, "is that in order for me to help you with your plans, it would be helpful if we could cut Dixon out of it. No need to have him involved, respectfully, if you're interested in getting into this market."
I had to hand it to Stan. He was a good real estate agent.
"Go ahead," I said.
"We have relationships in place already," Stan said. He rattled off the names of several high-profile banks where he had contacts and where he said he ran millions of dollars in silly loans daily. What he outlined was a nice criminal enterprise of faulty loans that no one would know about unless, well, unless the banks started paying attention, which I had a feeling was about to happen. Soon enough, if you watched the news, you knew everyone working in real estate would get caught, even the legit companies. "We could bring you into the fold. Get you started locally. Avoid all this crap with Dixon. This island? It's gold, Mr. Fitch." He explained that over the last year they'd become very adept at getting loans on properties all over Miami for far more than the property was worth, that they'd paid the right people using Dixon's connections and reputation and that it was now a flawless clockwork operation.
"We could use a person with your… flair… Mr. Fitch, to really take this to the next level."
"That's very generous," I said, though I wasn't precisely certain what it meant. But I had a feeling Barry might. "And in return?"
"You make sure Dixon doesn't kill us," he said, "or have his people hurt our families. You seem like the kind of person who could help with that."
His people. The only people Eddie Champagne had were probably living in a trailer in Sarasota, hoping to get bitten by a gator on state land so they could sue.
Hank Fitch, however, was precisely that kind of guy-Still, I had to hand it to Stan. In the face of adversity, he managed to bring his A game, negotiation-wise. He almost had me believing that this was all an excellent idea. But one had to admire a guy who could negotiate a deal to save his ass and get a new, meaner, more obviously psychotic business partner. Stan wouldn't make a bad warlord.
"There'd still be the matter then of the debt Dixon owes me," I said.
"We could cover that debt," Stan said.
"It's sizable," I said. I told him it was five million dollars. I figured that would cover all of my bases.
"We could cover that debt," Stan said, though he swallowed perceptibly.
"Wired," I said.
"Wired," Stan said.
"By tomorrow," I said.
"I don't know if-"
"By tomorrow," I said.
"By tomorrow," Stan said.
I extended my hand and Stan shook it. "You have a deal, Stan," I said. My cell chirped and I saw a text from Sam. Everything was working better than I could have possibly hoped for. "There's something I want you to see." I stepped Stan over to the window so he could see Sam drive up and park Cricket's Mercedes. Sam was behind the wheel. Cricket was in the passenger seat. And Nate was sitting in the back.
"You see those two men with Cricket?" Stan nodded. "You don't seem like a bad guy, Stan. And neither do your friends."
"Thank you," he said, because I think he thought that life was just getting easier and easier.
"But I am," I said. "You screw me? Those men are going to kill Cricket. There's nothing you'll be able to do to stop it. And you might notice that you've touched quite a bit of stuff in this room, Stan. Fingerprints everywhere. A good amount of blood and piss too. Let's not forget motive. You watch CSI, Stan?"
"Sometimes," he said.
"Watch it this week. See if anyone leaves that much evidence around anymore," I said. "Do you hear me?"
"I hear you," he said.
I waved at Sam to let him know he could drive off.
"Today," I said, "you go back to Dixon and tell him Cricket was gone. Tell him everything that happened here, if you like, except for the deal you've graciously made me. Tell him his money supply is gone. Tell him I'm looking for him. Tell him I'm right here, waiting. Understand?"
Stan said he did.
"You'll make sure your friends understand?" I said. Burl had fallen silent, the pain finally overriding the adrenaline and knocking him out. Danny? He was pulling bits of blood, flesh and teeth off of his shirt.
"Yes, sir, Mr. Fitch," Stan said.
"Do you have a business card, Stan?"
"Pardon me?"
"A business card. Something with your firm name on it? A way to contact you?"
"Oh, right," Stan said. He motioned to his back pocket. "I'm going to pull out my wallet, just so you know."
"Got it," I said. At least he was learning not to make any rash movements.
Stan rummaged through his wallet and came out with a gold-embossed card that said his name was Stanley Rosencrantz. What kind of guy named Stanley Rosencrantz would possibly think this was a way to conduct business? Stanley Rosencrantz should have been sitting behind a desk somewhere, permanently, his ass growing exponentially larger each day. His firm was called White Rose Partners. How friendly.
"Nice card," I said.
"We can get you one, too," he said. Now he was just babbling. "Whatever you want."
"I'll have an account set up tomorrow for the wire. You'll have the money ready."
"Tomorrow is a little early," he said.
"If you are who you think you are," I said, "you can have this done in forty minutes. I'm giving you until tomorrow as a courtesy, since you're going to need to take your friends to the hospital, figure out a way to lie to everyone you know, maybe get a script for some Xanax to get yourself asleep tonight, kiss your wife goodbye in case it turns out that I kill you anyway."
"Tomorrow, Stan. Tomorrow."
"Tomorrow," he said.
I stepped to one side, offering Stan a path around me. "Then by all means," I said, "get to work. And a word about your friends. You might want to avoid a regular hospital. I'm not sure you want to be talking to the police, Stan. Maybe go across to Little Haiti. Find a nice clinic, throw around some money, hope no one forgets to sterilize their surgical implements. Hate to have y
our friends die of an infection, after all they've been through."
Stan nodded, but didn't move. He was going to need to talk to someone about post-traumatic shock, but I figured I'd let him figure that out. "Do you have a card?" Stan asked finally, "some way for me to call you?"
"Did Dixon have a card, Stan?"
"Well, yes," he said.
Eddie Champagne really was an idiot.
"That's why I'm not Dixon Woods," I said. "When you think you need to contact me, I'll have already contacted you." That sounded ominous enough. I let it sink in. "Now, Stan? Get the fuck out of my house."
11
If you live in Miami and need to make millions and millions of dollars in a short period of time, but have no discernible skills that would allow you to either play quarterback for the Dolphins, first base for the Marlins or, with Shaq out of the picture, center for the Heat, you have three choices:
1. You can deal drugs. This is a good choice. Miami has a large transient population of Hollywood and New York types who like to ingest as much cocaine as possible over the course of a weekend and won't haggle over price. Miami also has a disproportionately large refugee population, which, while used to huffing glue, has become an equitable buyer of crack, meth and marijuana, as well, which is nice since it's hard to move glue these days. Selling drugs can be dangerous, of course, so if you're concerned about your life or liberty, you could just keep your business confined to the sixteen thousand members of the University of Miami's student body, at least a quarter of whom like to take some recreational drugs. And then there's the retirees who can't afford the really good Oxycontin or Vicodin on their fixed incomes, so if you had a contact or two in the retirement villages, you could probably make a nice living without ever being threatened at all. You need a million dollars? Get yourself some cocaine or heroin and move to Miami, set up shop, get to work. If you can't make your nut, you're using your own supply.
2. You can marry in. This is a better choice. Even though Miami-Dade County has a median income lower than the rest of the nation, it also has millionaires by the legion. You just need to know where to find them. Fisher Island, of course. Snapper Creek and Hammock Lakes in Coral Gables. Biscayne Park. Cocoplum. The entire stretch of the Keys. If you're a man, this might be slightly more difficult, though not impossible. If you're a woman, if you haven't been seriously deformed in an industrial accident, if your name is Star, or if it used to be, you could live a millionaire's life without any outlay of your own, apart from the cost of your belly-button ring and hair dye.
3. You can go into real estate. This is the best choice. The reason? Because people will give you money for nothing. People will give you money on the idea of land. The presumption of inflation. The chance that they'll be able to turn their own millions of dollars into millions of dollars more. The chance that when you promise them a huge, absurd return on investment-say, 20 or 30 percent-that you are just the finest real estate investment program in the history of real estate.
Of course, it helps if people think a former Green Beret is running the company, investing his own money in the venture, because an ex-Green Beret must be an honorable man. During this time of war, surely an ex-Green Beret wouldn't be defrauding people out of millions of dollars in fraudulent properties and mortgages.
But then, Eddie Champagne wasn't exactly an ex-Green Beret. Dixon Woods was. Eddie Champagne, not even a raspberry beret. But the people behind White Rose Partners didn't know that. They just knew he had money and reputation and stories. And he had connections to more money. And when things got dicey, when it looked like there might be a problem, well, he had a human ATM in Cricket O'Connor.
What they were running out of was time.
Or at least that's what Sam's source at the IRS told him. After Stan managed to drag his two partners back out to their boat, we got Cricket back to my mother's and let Sam work the phones to find out what he could on White Rose Partners and what more he might find on Eddie Champagne.
One of Sam's sources at the IRS was an investigator named Lenore. Like his source at the FBI, Kyle, Sam had never actually met Lenore face-to-face. But when an ex-girlfriend got into a bit of jam and was facing a potentially hazardous audit-one that would probably show her husband just how much money she'd spent out with Sam-Sam called in a few interagency chits and ended up on the phone with Lenore, who simply hit the delete key a couple of times, and Sam's girlfriend's problems disappeared.
Over the years, he'd found that Lenore was one of the more dependable people out there, if only because she never seemed to fall for any of his charms, which Sam found both admirable and baffling. He thought of sending her a photo of himself from his younger, more muscular days, but decided, ultimately, that if she worked for the IRS, she probably knew his financial portfolio pretty well and was sure that, charm-wise, that was a black mark.
Still, he always tried to put a dash of sugar into their conversations. He called her under the aegis of just checking into an investment opportunity, making sure all was legit. A perfectly reasonable thing for someone to do, Sam thought, if one had the connections. But as soon as he brought up the White Rose Partners, he could actually hear her training take over. "I'm going to need to call you back, Samuel," she said abruptly.
She always called him Samuel. She was the only person alive who called him Samuel. But this time it didn't sound remotely affectionate, like it usually did. Fifteen minutes later, she called him from a secure conference line, which required him to enter his social security number to gain access. That was the thing about talking to people at the IRS: A real paucity of secrets existed.
"Why do you want to know about White Rose, Samuel?" Lenore said when they were finally hooked back up.
"I've got a buddy, name of Eddie Champagne, who told me they were a great investment group," Sam said. He heard her clicking away in the background, and for a long time she didn't respond. It always bothered Sam that people in government had such poor phone skills, that they couldn't pretend to have chitchat while they sourced your every word. It was harder to do back when everyone was still working on typewriters, Sam wagered, though he was sure he would have been annoyed by the sound of the dinging return and papers being shuffled, too.
"Samuel, you know you're not investing anything. You need to see about getting more in your 401 (k), you want my opinion," Lenore said finally.
"I was just going to give them a few thousand dollars," Sam said, not that he had a few thousand dollars. "My girlfriend, she's looking to put some seed into…" Sam didn't know what he was saying. He figured if he just let the words drift, Lenore would pick them up. She did.
"Let me put it to you this way," she said. "You give them money, you'll never see it again and, most likely, you'll be a plaintiff in about two months."
Lenore explained that White Rose was under investigation for mortgage fraud, but the problem was that no one had rolled on them yet. They were still making investors money, or at least enough to keep them hoping it was all legit. Right now, she said, it was the banks who were flagging them.
It was a classic scheme: White Rose used straw buyers to purchase land at full or slightly above full price; then they would bump up the price significantly on the contracts they sent to the mortgage lenders, thus generating huge extra fees on top of the mortgage. To make it all work, they had an accounting firm, two separate mortgage brokers and three different appraisers on the payroll. They had paperwork in order, she said, W-2s, pay stubs, everything, but it was all falsified. They ended up with the land, which they could resell, and which they usually did, flipping parcels within thirty days if they could, often for even larger profits based on the faulty appraisals, huge back-end fees and loans they'd have to touch. "They got people who got other people, too," Lenore said. "I wouldn't be surprised if they had a few flexible people at the banks, too."
"I guess I won't give them any money," Sam said, trying to sound as innocent as possible.
"Samuel," she said, "you can drop tha
t ruse if you like. Our conversations are confidential."
"Are they really?" Sam said.
"Probably not," she said, "but if someone didn't want you getting this information, you wouldn't get it."
Sam knew that was one of the fringe issues related to working with me-there were forces on the inside working for and against me. And if I was being tracked, Sam was being tracked, and all of this was getting approved by someone.
"How not surprised would you be about persons in the banks?" Sam asked.
"Enough to know that it's going to ring some bells on Wall Street," she said.
That sounded fairly dire. If Sam actually had stocks or bonds or whatever it was people did on Wall Street, he'd figure out how to utilize that information. He made a mental note to tell Veronica, since he was fairly certain she actually knew about that sort of thing.
"You got anything on their investors?" Sam said, figuring, What the hell? Might as well just drop all pretense.
Lenore told him it was just as simple as could be. People were being duped, but paid. Investors put in their money, were probably promised a healthy return, and then, at least to start with, got it. The market in Miami was hot, just like in every other metropolitan area with a halfway decent view. And just like every other place, the market had turned to shit. "It's just a matter of time before they stop getting dividends on investment," she said. "They've been running this now for quite some time without a hiccup."
It made sense to Sam, knowing that they were coming to Cricket every two weeks for cash. They were probably seeding their largest investors to keep the money flowing in, waiting for the next explosion in the market. But that hiccup? It was here.
"So Stanley Rosencrantz," Sam said. "Ballpark net worth?"
"Enough to fill a ballpark," Lenore said. "Won't matter, though, when he's doing Fed time."
Sam liked it when Lenore threw out terms like Fed time. This got Sam thinking. "Would it be possible to get a few of the addresses they've bought and sold?"
