by Steven Gore
“But he’s a partner in one of the judge’s old law firms. Even though Brandon Meyer didn’t get assigned the case, I figured it couldn’t hurt. Who knows what goes on back in the judge’s chambers? Maybe Anston gets Meyer to put in a good word for me at sentencing time.”
“Did you get your money’s worth?”
“In the long run.” Charters smiled. “Well, the money made a long run.”
“You mean you paid Anston offshore.”
“Still at the top of your game, aren’t ya? But that’s his problem, not mine. It’s not my fault if he didn’t declare the income and give Uncle Sam his share.”
“You remember where you sent the fee?”
“I didn’t have to send it anywhere. The money just got transferred from one of my accounts at Cayman Exchange Bank to another one controlled by Anston. Quinton took care of it.”
“You remember the name of the account the money went into?”
Charters narrowed his eyes and bit his lower lip, then shook his head. “Quinton would know.”
“You ever hear of a company called Pegasus?”
Charters slapped the table. “That’s it. Pegasus.” He grinned like he’d been caught by his wife staring at a waitress’s breasts. “I thought about doing one of those myself.”
“Doing what?”
“A fake insurance scam.”
“How do you know it’s fake?”
Charters clucked. “I thought you were at the top of your game. You should’ve already . . .” Then he smiled.
“Let’s just say I thought it was some kind of tax gimmick,” Gage said, “but I hadn’t figured out the details. That’s why I’m here.”
That wasn’t the whole truth, but Gage didn’t want to risk scaring Charters off by telling him that money transferred into Pegasus might have been the reason for a burglary at Socorro’s and what had brought him to Las Vegas was fear for her and her children’s safety. The longer Charters believed Gage’s investigation only concerned tax evasion, the better.
“They did a riff on one of those old tax shelters,” Charters said. “First, the clients would wire fake insurance premiums to Pegasus, then it would wire the money back as loans to buy yachts or cars or vacation homes.” He hunched his shoulders, and reached out his hands. “Offshore captive insurance has been the best tax scam ever.” He pointed at Gage. “You ever deal with Stone & Whitman in New York?”
Gage shook his head.
“They set up the ones for TransCont Trucking and Universal Tractor and a bunch of other giants. But Anston’s genius was to make it available to the little guy.” Charters laughed. “You know, the one-billion-dollar company, not just the ten-billion-dollar company.”
“What was his gimmick?”
“Rent-a-captives, like Pegasus. Anybody could send premiums. Pegasus would bank the money, wait a couple of months, then ship it back into the States. It was sweet—swee-eet. Insurance premiums got tax deductions going out, and the money coming back in as loans was tax free.”
“Like those old fake offshore consulting schemes.”
“But way better. Because when you hire a consultant you’re supposed to get something in return. A marketing plan or an advertising campaign. And the IRS can come by and ask to see what you paid for. But with insurance? It’s a . . .” Charters cocked his head toward Gage. “What do they call those things in outer space that sucks everything in?”
“A black hole.”
“That’s it. Insurance is just a black hole people throw money into. Everybody knows it.”
“How did Anston get his cut?”
“And Meyer. The firm was Anston & Meyer back when it all started. Anston was the tax expert, but in the deep background. Meyer was out front. He’s the one who brought in the customers.” Charters lowered his voice. “In order to get into the deal, the client had to do two things. One was to buy a legal opinion letter from Anston saying the tax shelter was legit and the other was to pay the accounting firm. And they always used the Big Four to make it all look like it was on the up and up. The opinion letter alone cost a butt load. A hundred grand.”
“And he used the same one over and over.”
“Exactly. Plus he got ten percent of the money the client saved on taxes each year by using his gimmick. They save a million, he gets another hundred thousand. It was like an annuity. And the same thing for the accounting firm. Except they got half a mil up front in addition to their percentage because they managed the whole thing and were on the hook if the IRS came knocking.”
“You know how many of these Anston and Meyer did?”
“If I had to guess, maybe a couple of hundred. Thirty or forty million dollars a year, could be a helluva lot more. And most of their fees were paid offshore.”
“How did Anston & Meyer move their fees back into the States? I don’t see them telling clients how to evade taxes, then pay them himself.”
“How Anston & Meyer did it, I don’t know.” Charters leaned forward. “But I’ll tell you about a guy I know. He had real cool deal. Every month he’d have the Cayman Exchange Bank pull fifty grand in cash out of his account and hand deliver it to Citibank, right across the street in George Town. Citibank would treat it as kind of an advance credit card payment. That way my friend could spend all kinds of offshore money in the States and nobody would know. And no one knows where the money is from because Citibank credit cards all look the same.”
“Almost.”
“Yeah, almost.”
“Your . . . uh . . . friend still doing it?”
Charters grinned. “Naw. He switched to debit cards, harder to trace the transactions.”
Linda walked up, placed down their orders, then folded up the check and stuffed it into Charters’s shirt pocket.
“Graham’s is on the house, but you gotta pay.”
Charters bit his lower lip as he watched her work her way back toward the counter, then exhaled and said, “I should’ve divorced my wife and married that girl.”
“True love or only so she couldn’t testify against you?”
Charters bit into a French fry. “Both.”
“Did Anston and his people ever get investigated?”
“Yeah, because they made the same stupid mistake everybody else did. They’d send the money offshore and it would bounce back into the States from the same company. It was too obvious they controlled the money the whole time. IRS didn’t like it. Didn’t qualify as an arm’s-length transaction. So Quinton—oops.” Charters offered a weak smile. “I hope you knew that already.”
“Let’s say I did.”
“You’re keeping me out of this, right?”
“Right.”
“Okay, let’s say somebody like Quinton figures out a way so it doesn’t look so obvious.” Charters leaned in again, stretching his arms out on either side of his plate. “He sets up a regular finance company somewhere in the Caribbean—”
“So the premiums go into the insurance company, then to the finance company, and then back to the States as loans?”
“Boom. Boom. Boom. And the IRS is blind to the whole thing . . . Beautiful. Just beautiful. And there are about as many Americans who understand how offshore insurance works as there are people who understand how a black hole does what it does.”
“When did they add the third step?”
“About six, seven years ago.”
“Is that how Anston got hooked up with Quinton?”
“I don’t know. I just know they’re hooked up somehow.”
So how’d you get onto this trail?” Charters asked Gage as he pushed his plate away and wiped his mouth with his napkin.
“I’d rather not say.”
“Let me guess. We talked about Anston. We talked about Quinton. We talked about Meyer. We talked about Cayman Exchange Bank. Let’s see . . . let’s see . . . whose name could be missing?” Charters smiled. “Who could it be? Maybe Charlie Palmer? My dear investigator. Or, shall we say, Anston’s dear investigator, may he rest in peace.”
/> “Why ‘my dear investigator’?”
“I paid him fifty grand for nothing.”
“Why?”
“Because Anston told me to. He said we needed some investigation done. I think I just paid for Palmer’s summer vacation in the islands. I never got any benefit from it. He didn’t need to go down there and talk to people in Quinton’s firm or at the bank. By the time you and the FBI were done, everybody knew what happened and it wasn’t like I had a defense.”
“I take it you paid him offshore, too.”
“Yeah. It was to Pegasus.”
Charters took a sip of coffee, then said, “I don’t know where you’re going with all of this, and I don’t want to know. But I’d be careful if you’re thinking about taking on Anston. The way his mind works scares the hell out of me.”
Charters set his cup down.
“Anston figured it might help if I started going to church in case he wanted to put on a character defense. You know, get some minister to come in to say how I wouldn’t cheat people or, if I did, it was unintentional or maybe the devil made me do it. Anston took me with him one Sunday to get me hooked up with a preacher. The sermon was about the Book of Job, and the suffering God had inflicted on the guy. Real graphic. Skin lesions and flesh falling off. I felt like throwing up.
“As we’re driving away, Anston gives me this matter-of-fact look and says about the spookiest, most megalomaniacal thing I ever heard a man say. He says:
“ ‘The minister has it all wrong. The real lesson of the Book of Job wasn’t that God tortured Job and killed his wife and his kids and destroyed all his animals and crops. It wasn’t that at all.’ Then Anston does a long pause, and says, ‘It’s that Job made God come to him.’ ”
Chapter 62
I hate this place,” Boots Marnin complained in his third international call to Marc Anston. “Everything is filthy and noisy. I can’t even sleep at night, between the imams calling the rag heads to prayer and horns honking and those goddamn Bollywood soundtracks blaring out of sidewalk speakers. And every day there’s another idiotic Hindu festival for some god who looks like a mutant animal.”
“Then find Hawkins and get out of there.”
“What do you think I’ve been doing? You know how big Hyderabad is? Seven million dirty, sweaty, smelly people.”
“Are you even sure he’s there?”
“Positive. Some girl in his house overheard him tell a cop in town that’s where he was going.”
“Why do you believe her?”
“Because I gave her enough money to buy her folks two of them Brahma bulls and told her I’d come back and slit the throats of the cattle and her parents if she was lying to me.”
“How are you going to find him?”
“I’m hoping he’ll come to me. I hired some ex-cops to watch the dhabas. They’re food shacks along the highway where the hookers work. It’s the only place around where you can get teenage girls easy, and that’s what he’s into. Sometimes two, three at a time. Costs him about seventy-five cents each. Sneaking out to the dhabas is safer than bringing his own girls from Gannapalli. They might talk to neighbors and give him away.”
“And when you find him?”
“My guess is he’ll have a heart attack the moment he looks at me.”
“Get it done. I need you back here. We’re going to have to do something about Gage. He’s been cozying up to Porzolkiewski. Been to see him a couple of times.”
The mob of Indian truck drivers surged like an amoeba as the fighting cocks jabbed and clawed and pursued one another in the trash-strewn dirt patch behind the row of food stalls and shacks along the Hyderabad Highway.
Despite the setting sun and the gray-brown haze of the dusty road, Boots Marnin caught flashes of rooster wings rising above the screaming men. He was hunched low in the rear sleeping seat of the tractor cab parked to the east, hiding his face from the drivers passing by and from the prostitutes trolling for customers.
The circle surged again as the cocks tumbled toward the legs of the men standing close to the rear of the nearest shack. Boots heard the thump of sweaty backs slamming against the wooden wall as the men dodged the razor-sharp spurs cinched to the roosters’ legs. They re-formed the circle as the birds rolled the opposite way, toward the mango trees bordering the lot to the north.
Diesel fumes pumping out from the dozens of trucks parked around him once would have reminded Boots of his father’s garage, but now they merely choked him and engendered not thoughts of Houston, but fantasies of escape. The only break came in the form of the wind-driven odor of reused coconut oil, deep-fried samosas, chickpea balls, burned wheat chapattis, and cumin and coriander and turmeric and a dozen other spices that made Boots want to reach for a gun. For the few days of his surveillance, Boots would look at the cows wandering along the highway or grazing in the fields, then daydream about a T-bone steak. Now the thought turned his stomach because he knew the meat would taste like India.
Boots heard a cheer and saw triumphant brown hands raise the victorious cock above the crowd. He then watched men separate into groups and exchange rupees before wandering back to their trucks or to the small wooden tables spread along the front of the dhaba.
The skies darkened as he watched them eat, then disappear into the shacks, and drive off twenty minutes later, making room for a continuing stream of other drivers stopping to eat at the tables or screw on the dirty cots or sleep in their trucks.
Boots leaned forward toward the ex-cop sitting in the driver’s seat of the tractor cab.
“You sure this the right place?” Boots asked. “We’ve been here a long time.”
“I am still believing this is the only dhaba he is visiting along the Hyderabad Highway.”
They sat without speaking for another hour watching trucks, cars, and vans arriving and leaving, men cooking rice and lentils in stainless steel pots over open gas flames, women chopping vegetables and mincing herbs.
The ex-cop tapped Boots’s shoulder, then pointed at a yellow, canvas-topped auto-taxi pulling to a stop along the side of the nearest shack.
The taxi walla remained seated inside the three-wheeled, open-sided vehicle while a potbellied man slipped out the far side, into the shadows along the wall, then disappeared around the back of the shack.
“That is Mr. Wilbert, yes?” the ex-cop said.
“We’ll find out soon enough.”
Wilbert Hawkins, beer in hand, bald head illuminated by the shack’s dangling lightbulb, pants around his ankles, stared down at the naked teenage girl on her knees before him. He grabbed her hair and rocked her head back and forth—
Then flinched at the sound of the wooden door scraping the dirt.
“Close that thing,” Hawkins yelled. “I got this one.”
But the door didn’t close.
Hawkins glared into the darkness at an unmoving charcoal gray figure framed in black.
“Who the . . . ?”
The man stepped forward, but his head and torso remained in a shadow that cut him off at the knees.
Hawkins’s eyes alerted to the pressed Levi’s, then widened in terror as they fixed on dusty alligator-skin boots poised at the threshold. His scream choked in his throat as his erection died in the girl’s mouth.
Did he have a heart attack when he saw you?” Marc Anston asked during Boots’s call from India.
“Not immediately.”
“What about the body?”
“The Indian police will have it cremated.”
“Do they know who he is?”
“No. Just a white guy who could’ve been from anywhere and collapsed while getting a blow job. Dead men don’t have accents.”
“How much did Gage find out?”
“Gage knows Hawkins got a million dollars from Pegasus. He knows TIMCO understood from the get-go why the valve blew. And he knows Hawkins believed you were behind Palmer—but dead men don’t have beliefs either.”
“Any way to control the fallout?”
>
“Not easily,” Boots said. “Gage made a tape.”
“So removing Gage won’t solve our problem.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Gage has been telling pieces of what he knows to too many people,” Anston said, “but I’m not sure any of them would be able to put it together but him.” He fell silent for a few seconds, and then said. “We need to go after Gage’s weakness.”
“What’s that?”
“He’s like a bloodhound. We just need to keep dragging the scent down the wrong path.”
“Why not just take him out?”
“Gage is too well connected. And his pals Joe Casey and Spike Pacheco would never let it go. Especially Pacheco. He’s like a Gila monster. You’d have to cut off his head to separate his jaws.”
Chapter 63
Look Quinton,” Gage said, “we’ve got two dead people linked through Pegasus. Charlie Palmer and the OSHA inspector.”
Cayman Island barrister Leonard Quinton, QC, pressed his fingertips together on the top of his desk in his office overlooking Hog Sty Bay in George Town, Grand Cayman. He looked back at Gage with the dead-eyed gaze of British ex-pat lawyers trained to keep secrets.
“That’s no concern of mine,” Quinton said. “I’ll tell you the same thing I told you when you were here chasing after Phillip Charters. What companies do is their business, not mine. That would be like Citibank telling their clients what they can and cannot buy with their credit cards.”
“Good analogy.” Gage reached into his black leather folder, then pulled out a sheet of paper and slid it across Quinton’s Victorian mahogany desk.
“That doesn’t mean anything to me,” Quinton said.
“Look at it more carefully.”
Quinton slipped on his horn-rimmed glasses, then picked up the page.
“I don’t see the relevance. I’ve never had the pleasure of the acquaintance of a person named Brandon Meyer. More importantly, I don’t control to whom Citibank Cayman issues credit cards.”
“But you do control how the money flows.”
Quinton slid the page back across the desk.
