The Conviction

by Robert Dugoni

  “So it had to be someone already there.”

  Sloane nodded. “Somebody waiting around the bend.”

  “But that doesn’t make any sense.”

  “I know. If they were waiting for me, why would they save me?”

  Molia shook his head. “Nothing in this county makes much sense.”

  When they entered the bunkhouse and powered up the computer the Skype call from Alex was nearly instantaneous.

  “I think I might have something,” she said. “Remember I told you Trinity Investments was a limited liability company out of Aruba and that I thought it could be an investment company, a place for people to park money made out of the country to avoid Uncle Sam.”

  “You no longer think that to be the case?” Sloane asked.

  “The first column of numbers on the computer screens is a routing number, the second column are numbers for foreign bank accounts, likely in multiple offshore financial centers. I’m still wading through it all, but there are at least half a dozen.”

  “I’m not the most polished spoon in the silverware drawer, but that sounds exactly like people trying to hide their money,” Molia said.

  “It is, but I don’t think it’s investment money, and I don’t think it’s thousands of investors. One of the numbers in the left column repeats. Want to guess to which bank it belongs?”

  “Winchester First Street,” Sloane said.

  “I called in a friend who does this kind of stuff. She says whoever set this up knew what they were doing. It’s complex, sophisticated stuff, but in essence they built a computer program that divides Trinity’s so-called investment money into amounts well below any federal reporting requirements and makes deposits into dozens, maybe hundreds, of different bank accounts. That’s the second column of numbers. Only the money doesn’t stay in those accounts long, just a matter of seconds. Trinity is just a shell corporation, without any assets, and Winchester First Street is just a holding place for Trinity’s money to pass through.”

  “Pass through to where?” Molia asked.

  “The computer transfers the money out of the country to confidential offshore financial centers in the places we discussed like Aruba, Gibraltar, the Bahamas, Liberia, tax havens that allow for complete confidentiality and secrecy. Once the money is offshore, another computer program gathers all the accounts and issues transfer instructions. The money is consolidated into fewer accounts, likely somewhere in Switzerland. It’s laundered, good to go, and pretty much untraceable.”

  “You said so-called investment money, that Trinity is just a shell. What does that mean?” Sloane asked.

  “It means there aren’t any investors. The bank accounts are fictitious.”

  “So then where is all the money coming from if there aren’t any investors?” Sloane asked.

  “That’s the five-hundred-million-dollar question, isn’t it?”

  GOLD RUSH BREWERY

  HOPS PROCESSING PLANT

  TRULUCK, CALIFORNIA

  Dressed in a long-sleeve blue shirt, Wrangler jeans, and his well-worn, camel-colored Carhartt boots, Victor Dillon looked more like a country farmer than the CEO of one of the most well-known microbreweries in the country, which was his intent. Dillon escorted his three potential customers through the nutrient rich, deep brown soil, cultivated to perfection after twenty years in business. They strolled casually beneath a canopy created by the twenty-foot-tall telephone poles pounded into the ground at a slight angle and the spiderweb of wires crisscrossing overhead from pole to pole to discourage birds and to tie the vertical strands of coarse string up which the hop vines grew. The three men walked in shin-high black rubber boots. They had come for this business meeting in designer shoes to match their hand-tailored shirts and suits, attire hardly fitting for a tour through farmland. Dillon kept half a dozen pairs of the rubber boots just outside his office door. He had also encouraged the men to remove their suit jackets and ties and roll up their shirtsleeves, advising them that the heat of midday sun also made such attire impractical. Nothing made men more uptight than neckties. Wearing one demanded formality. Discarding it did wonders to help that man to relax, and Dillon liked his prospective business partners to be relaxed. He always started his business meetings with a tour of the Gold Rush Brewery plant and hops-growing operation. The suggestion of a tour usually caught his prospective buyers off guard, hence the improper attire. But Dillon believed a walk through the dark soil amid the plants evidenced he was much more than a wealthy CEO. It evidenced that he was knowledgeable about, and intimately involved in, every aspect of the growing process, unafraid to get his hands and his shoes dirty. He believed the impression translated into confidence in the quality of his product, which of course helped when it came time to negotiate the price.

  Dillon stopped in the shade of one of the plants to pull a bud from the stalk. “Each vine is grown from a seedling,” he continued to explain. “Each must be hand-trained to grow up the string. These plants are currently about nine feet in height, indicating they are growing on schedule. In this heat, you can almost see the vines growing before your very eyes. In two months, just before harvesting, the plants will reach seventeen feet. Some will reach the wires overhead.” He let that thought germinate. “The plants are harvested as they were planted—by hand. Workers drive the fields in a truck with a boom and cut the stalk at the base and the string at the top and the plant falls gently into the back of the truck.”

  Dillon invited the three men to mimic him as he crushed the bud between his thumb and index finger and brought it to his nose. “To the ordinary person it smells like grass,” he said. “But the trained nose can detect hints of citrus, berry, perhaps even garlic, depending on the hybrid.”

  This was a part of the tour Dillon favored, watching the three men pull their fingers away, surprised by the pungent odor of the oil within each bud. They smiled and laughed, speaking in Spanish, a language in which Dillon had become fluent. “Growing hops is an art, gentlemen. It requires attention to detail and experimentation to create the very best hybrids for the particular climate and soil. The heartier the plants, the more abundant the buds. This is of utmost importance in a labor-intensive industry. A man must maximize his profits through a quality product and an efficient manufacturing process.”

  Dillon discarded the bud and wiped the residue on his jeans. “Come,” he said. “Let us continue our tour.”

  Dillon led the men into one of several metal-framed warehouses at his factory. This one was empty at the moment but for the various machinery. In two months the warehouse would be filled with the itinerant farmworkers Dillon hired each harvesting season, as well as his regular employees who operated the equipment and oversaw the process. He believed it important for his buyers to see the full operation and explained to these men that the workers hung the harvested plants on the overhead cable that acted as a conveyor belt which took the plants to the machine that stripped the buds from the stalks. “Once harvested, it is a twenty-four-hour, seven-day-a-week operation, my friends. We work quickly to process the product and move it out. These machines are never turned off.”

  Dillon proceeded to the kilns and described how the buds were then spread evenly and dried at temperatures of 130 to 140 degrees. From there Dillon brought the men into another warehouse, this one containing two-hundred-pound bales wrapped in burlap sacks. The building was decidedly cooler and Dillon watched as the men reacted to the bitter aroma of the packaged hops. “It is strong, isn’t it?” he said, raising his voice to be heard over the sound of the heavy equipment at work. “That’s the oils in the buds you’re smelling. It’s one of the reasons we have to keep the warehouse at thirty-eight degrees. Hops have been known to spontaneously combust.” The men looked at one another. “Boom!” Dillon said, using his hands for emphasis, which drew understanding expressions. “Cold storage in metal buildings,” he said.

  Dillon walked the men to where a worker stood emptying the contents of an opened burlap bale into a machine
. “The hops can be processed in a leaf form,” he said, pulling apart a portion of the green bale and rubbing the leafy plants vigorously between his palms before holding it to his nose. “But I would like to show you the end product of this machine,” Dillon said.

  He led them to the other side of the machine, the pipes and temperature gauges white with a frost. “Liquid nitrogen,” he explained. Then he pointed to where the machine spit out the end product he hoped would seal the deal. The leafy hops had been processed into pellets that resembled rabbit food. Dillon grabbed a handful and showed them to his customers. Their eyebrows arched with interest. “The pellets make it much easier to transport the product. It can be weighed to the minute ounce and packaged in various sizes. Come.”

  The men’s curiosity sufficiently piqued, Dillon took them on the final leg of his tour, leading them into another of the metal warehouses. Here, three women and four men stood in a processing line weighing out various portions of the pellets and sliding the precise quantities into sealable bags specially made and emblazoned with the logo for the Gold Rush Brewery, as well as the particular brand of hop, the aroma it produced, and the typical beer style best suited for the brand, in this case lagers, pilsners, or wheat. He held up one of the bags. “One ounce. Twenty-eight point four grams and not a gram more,” he said. He tossed several packs to his customers. “We like to accommodate not just the large brewers, but also the home brewer,” Dillon said. “And to ensure the freshness of our product each bag is vacuum-sealed so that it emits no detectable odor. In the unlikely event any odor were to escape, say a bag was to be punctured, I assure you the smell of the hops, whatever the brand, would dominate.” Dillon smiled. “Comprender, mi amigos?”

  Alex continued to explain what she had learned, “It took some doing, but I finally got my hands on a copy of Victor Dillon’s juvenile records from San Joaquin County. Dillon was arrested multiple times for dealing marijuana, and it was a fairly large operation for a kid.”

  “He’s selling pot?” Molia asked.

  “I dug a little deeper into that company he worked for, PFI. It might have stood for Property Foreclosures, Inc.,” she said, “but it could have just as easily stood for Peter Finch, Inc.”

  “Who’s Peter Finch?” Sloane asked.

  “Finch was at one time suspected to be one of the biggest pot distributors in California, which made him one of the biggest dealers in the world during the 1980s. He was a big fish. It explains the company tax returns showing losses. PFI wasn’t buying the homes in depressed markets. It was acting as a hard money lender, financing them to fictitious buyers. Every six months or so PFI would repossess the note on the home when the fictitious ‘buyer’ failed to make the mortgage payments, then lend the money to another fictitious buyer or sell the home outright.”

  “They were using the business to launder the proceeds of the illegal drug sales,” Sloane said.

  “In part. PFI would lend the money to a fictitious buyer who would ‘buy’ the home. They would then go in and set up grow operations. It takes roughly six months to grow a mature marijuana plant,” Alex said. “After six months, maybe a year, they’d pull up stakes, reclaim the home, and sell it outright.”

  “They kept their operation mobile,” Molia said. “If the police ever raided a house they’d find a trail leading to a fictitious owner and PFI could plead ignorance, saying they were simply a hard money lender. Brilliant. So what happened to this guy Finch? An untimely death?”

  “An untimely disappearance. My friend says the ATF and FBI had a joint operation under way, but that Finch must have got wind of it. He fled the country to parts unknown. Never again to be heard from.”

  “Which left a gaping hole for a young Victor Dillon to step in and fill,” Sloane said.

  “The brewery would be the perfect cover,” Molia added. “Shit, Dillon has his entire distribution set up with the truck lines and hop processing plants.”

  “What he would need is cheap land to grow his crops,” Alex said.

  “And there’s no shortage in the Sierra Mountains,” Sloane said. “Especially in California’s current economic climate.” He left the table and returned with the map Lisa Lynch had provided depicting the location of Fresh Start, unrolled it, and laid it out on the table, placing the lamps on each end to hold it open. Fresh Start bordered the Eldorado National Forest. “We know that Dillon is buying up land around the Fresh Start facility, right?”

  “I have the records here,” Alex said. “I know what you want. Let me get the parcel numbers and I’ll map them out in relation to Fresh Start.”

  “So Fresh Start becomes the excuse Dillon needs to get the supplies he needs for his grow operations into the mountains without attracting attention?” Molia asked

  Sloane said, “He’s got hundreds of thousands of acres surrounding him. Remember what that parent liaison said about Fresh Start owning the surrounding land to keep out inadvertent hikers.”

  “And the hops growing is not only a perfect figurative cover, it’s a literal cover,” Alex said. “Hops are planted in the early spring and harvested between mid-August to September, which is very close to the gestation period for an outdoor marijuana grow. Plus the hop vines grow on string and can get upward of twenty feet, which would act as a further canopy to protect against aerial surveillance.”

  “I thought they used infrared now,” Molia said.

  “They do, but cedar and pine trees give off readings similar to marijuana plants. So do hops. It would make the pot plants damn near impossible to detect.”

  “And there’s a ready supply of water from streams and creeks,” Alex said. “Dillon could be preparing multiple grow sites and at the same time be harvesting others. It’s just like the homes, a mobile operation he keeps moving. And since they’re on public land, if someone does stumble onto one and reports it, the authorities can’t link it to him.”

  “How lucrative is it?” Molia asked.

  “Lucrative enough that Mexican drug cartels have moved their operations over the border to avoid the hassle of smuggling product across it,” Alex said. “My friend said the serious growers prefer the outdoor grows because they produce bigger plants with more usable buds, and outdoor grow operations can produce a lot of plants in a compact area. They’ve found grow sites as big as forty thousand plants.”

  Molia whistled.

  “What does that amount to in dollars?” Sloane asked.

  “He says it depends on the variety of the plant and how they’re cared for and harvested, but a sophisticated grow operation in business for as long as we suspect Dillon’s to have been would likely have produced its own hybrid that grows best in that climate. Somebody who knows what they’re doing can get up to fifteen pounds from each plant, with every pound having a street value of up to fifteen hundred dollars. And the way Dillon has it set up his costs are at a minimum.”

  “Hell, he’s passing those costs on to the county and to the families who are paying Fresh Start to incarcerate their kids,” Sloane said.

  “Who watches the grows?” Molia asked. “Somebody has to tend the plants. On-Guard?”

  “Unlikely. They would be too easily linked to Dillon. My friend says they usually use illegals smuggled across the border from Mexico. They’d have no idea who they’re working for and, according to my friend, they’re scared into believing that if they say anything their families back in Mexico will be killed.”

  “Outdoor education,” Molia said.

  “What?” Sloane asked.

  “You remember Lynne Buchman telling us about the inmates at Fresh Start having outdoor education, going out on survival hikes.” He searched through papers strewn across the table until he found one of the Fresh Start brochures and flipped it open. “They take them up into the mountains for outdoor adventures, some as long as a week.”

  “They could get a lot of work done in a week,” Alex said.

  Sloane studied the map. “Get me the parcel numbers, Alex. If we can pinpoint a likel
y grow area and find one, we’ll have something concrete to take to Barnes to shut down Dillon, and if we do that, we shut down Fresh Start. And that gets Jake and T.J. out of that place.”

  Three hours later, with the heat of the day turning the bunkhouse into a sweatbox, Sloane and Molia had colored in the parcel numbers of the plots of land purchased by Dillon on the map and were showing it to Sheriff Matt Barnes. The area they’d colored created a red, crescent moon shape above the Fresh Start facility that extended into the Eldorado National Forest. The information had helped to narrow the acreage of likely grow sites, but as Molia said, “That’s like saying removing a pinch of the hay pile made it easier to find the hidden needle.”

  The gross acreage of the Eldorado National Forest was some 787,000 acres, of which nearly 200,000 were privately owned, and that included Dillon’s significant chunk. Sloane didn’t know any of these facts, but Barnes was giving him and Molia a crash course on reality. Dillon’s acreage would not only provide grow sites, but also a buffer to keep out those pesky hikers and backpackers who might ostensibly stumble into Fresh Start, but which Sloane now thought really was intended to keep them from inadvertently finding one of Dillon’s homegrown forests of hallucinogenic plants.

  “If it was that easy ATF and Fish and Wildlife would be finding grows by the hundreds every year,” Barnes said. “Hell, if they find ten thousand plants there’s likely another million they don’t find. And if what you’re saying is even remotely true, this is a sophisticated operation set up to not be easily found.”

  “You wanted hard evidence, Sheriff,” Sloane said. “Those routing numbers are hard evidence. Dillon’s laundering tens of millions of dollars through a bank on which Judge Boykin sits as a director. And he isn’t pulling that money out of his brewery. The guy has a long history of knowing how to grow pot, and he’s put that knowledge to good use and developed a hell of a good cover.”