Auto Biography

by Earl Swift

  Arney leaves the courthouse and walks to Havana. It will be weeks before he tells me what he thought about as he stood in the courtroom, peering at Katherine Lee Martin and, sitting behind her, prosecutor Melissa E. O’Boyle, and at the FBI agents in the gallery, many of them women: that for the first time in his life, his fate was “in the hands of females,” and that these particular females were “going to fuck me,” and not in the manner to which he was accustomed; that the females were “digging it,” too, “because they were trained to have no emotion, to not trust anyone, and to destroy motherfuckers’ lives.” That he was one of the motherfuckers in question. That some terrible karmic leveling might be afoot.

  But on the day of his indictment, he’s not so downbeat. It’s been as good a day as it could possibly be, he tells me at the restaurant. Everyone at the courthouse was kind to him.

  And truly, the day is not without positive turns. When Slick calls Ben Woody and explains that Arney and the crew have been dealing with the feds all day, and thus won’t make the next day’s deadline for improving the car lot, Woody is understanding and extends it to the following week.

  There’s this sliver of luck, too: The Chevy is safe, at least for the moment. Had the restoration not been stalled by one frustrating distraction after another—were the wagon’s body bolted back to its frame, as should have happened months ago—the federal agents, whatever their shortcomings as automotive appraisers, would have tagged it for forfeiture.

  But the frame is in the Quonset, the body still on the rotisserie one hundred yards away, and the fenders, hood, and doors in another building still. The agents, it seems, don’t even recognize it as a car.

  FOUR DAYS LATER, a Tuesday, the car lot has been transformed. The gravel in front of Pop’s house is empty, the Jersey wall removed. New wire fence, wrapped in black fabric, corrals most of the inventory. The spoils from the lagoon excavation have been trucked away. Dragonflies and lethal-looking red wasps zigzag over the hole’s now-greenish water. The county has given Arney until midweek to put the place in order, and as he eats lunch in the office with his brother Billy, Skinhead, and Paul, it appears he’ll pull it off.

  Though it hasn’t been easy. The crew raised fences through the weekend and well into the last three nights, despite relentless heat, hunger, and a collective shortage of cash for lunch, snacks, and cigarettes: At one point, I witnessed Billy Arney, age fifty-four, bum a smoke from Bobby Tippit’s fourteen-year-old son, Anthony. “The fucking boss man is fucking broke,” Paul lamented to me one afternoon. “Working for a motherfucker who’s broke: We’re some stupid motherfuckers.”

  Arney reports as he eats that “teeny” Brad Schuler called this morning to say he’ll be inspecting the place at eleven the next morning; Arney says he told him that he won’t be around—he has to be in court. You don’t have to be there, Schuler told him.

  “So I said, ‘Skinhead will be there,’ ” Arney tells the crew. “ ‘If you have any concerns or need us to make any changes, we’ll do it in a day or two.’ ”

  “What did he say to that?” Skinhead wants to know.

  “He didn’t fucking say anything,” Arney says. “He hung up on me.”

  “He did?” Skinhead asks, incredulous.

  Arney chews for a moment. “I guess he had said what he needed to say,” he offers, in a tone so mild it seems that it couldn’t possibly be coming from Tommy Arney. He adds, as if to explain himself: “They have been very nice to me, I have to say. Which surprises me.”

  “You have to watch out,” Skinhead warns. “Whenever they’re nice, it means they have something up their sleeves.”

  “You might be right, Skinhead,” Arney says. “They know I’m going to be in court tomorrow.” A customer approaches the office to ask about a ’62 Pontiac Tempest outside. “Yes, sir,” Arney says, leaning back in his chair. “A nice car. I bought that from the original owner. He was a Filipino man.” The price: $4,500.

  The man asks about two GTOs on the lot. Arney says he’ll part with one for $5,000, and the other for $4,500. The man stands there blinking at the numbers for a second, then asks about another Pontiac parked out near the highway, “a ’68 or ’69.”

  “A ’70,” Arney corrects him. “That’s a ’70. I’d take four thousand for it.”

  The man thanks him and leaves. Arney clasps his hands on top of his head. “I think they’re going to love that fence,” he says of the county. “Don’t you, Skinhead?”

  “They better fucking love it.”

  Painter Paul agrees: “They better love it.”

  Skinhead: “They’ll either love it or they can lump it.”

  “It ain’t bad,” Billy grunts, “for a junkyard fence.”

  He barely gets the sentence out before Skinhead pounces: “It ain’t a fucking junkyard.” By then, Arney is spinning in his chair to face his brother, a fearsome scowl on his face. “Don’t ever use that term again,” he says, his volume rising with each word. “Do you hear me, you fucking piece of shit?”

  Everyone else in the room seems to hold his breath, half expecting Billy to make a smart-aleck remark—which, given the pressure the boss has been under, and the irritation the “junkyard” label provokes in him, might spark a stern fraternal pounding. But Billy hangs his head and doesn’t so much as smirk as Arney adds: “This isn’t a junkyard. It’s a classic car lot.”

  Billy nods. Arney peers at him for a moment, ensuring that the point’s taken, then turns back to Skinhead and the coming inspection. “I don’t think they’re going to be fucking dickheads,” he predicts. “But if they are, you be fucking nice to them.”

  Paul voices doubt: “You expect Skinhead to be nice?”

  “Skinhead knows how to be nice to dickheads,” Arney assures him. “Don’t you, Skin?”

  Skinhead looks Arney in the eye. “I certainly do.”

  IN COURT THE next morning, prosecutors announce that all of their evidence has been made available to the defendants—including more than a half-million documents that have been digitized and stored in a government database. Each of the accused is called before the judge. All plead not guilty. All ask for trial by jury. Arney is the last. The judge asks him, as he has the others, how old he is. “Fifty-six years old,” Arney replies.

  “And how much schooling have you completed?” the judge asks. Another standard question. “Fifth grade,” Arney says.

  The judge’s head jerks up. “Fifth grade?” he repeats, clearly surprised.

  “Yes, sir,” Arney says.

  The session ends a minute later, having taken a total of seventeen.

  Twenty-six miles to the south, the crew is slouched in the office, drained by a three-hour push to finish the back fence under an already-blistering sun, when a white Ford pickup pulls into the lot. Out step Brad Schuler and two other county officials. Schuler walks the property, snapping pictures with a small digital camera and every so often consulting a folded copy of the site plan. He roams past the lagoon, out by the paint shed, along the newly fenced northern property line, back to the Quonset. His one remark to the crew comes as he finishes: “All right. We’ll give Tom a call.” The visit has taken about as long as the court session.

  Most of Arney’s waking hours for the next five weeks are outgrowths of these brief proceedings. The county gets back to him to say that it’s generally pleased with the progress he’s made, but requires a fence on the south property line and a few additional refinements. The crew thus extends its long string of days spent in the high grass, brutal heat, and swarming mosquitoes along the fence line. Spirits sink even further. No one knows how Arney’s indictment will affect his little company, but all can guess the fallout won’t be good. No one has money. On some afternoons, Skinhead has to haul scrap metal to a local junkyard just for the cash to feed everyone lunch.

  Arney, scrambling to keep his little empire from collapse, isn’t around much—and when he is, he does little to bolster the crew’s mood. Of the conditions under which he must live
as a defendant, one of the most noxious is that he can involve himself in no transaction in which one thousand dollars or more changes hands, without first notifying (and, by implication, receiving permission from) his federal probation officer. This all but freezes his assets, including the accounts from which he pays his employees; he negotiates over several days for the latitude he needs to keep his waitstaff at Havana. But no tweaking of the conditions will alter the overriding reality of his new existence: For the first time in his adult life, Tommy Arney has to answer to someone. He is no longer his own boss.

  Gone is his freewheeling style. Gone are the days of thumbing a fat wad of cash girded in a rubber band and pulled from the pocket of his jeans. Scores of times I’ve seen him slip off the band, open the folded cash, peel away bills to pay for hay, auto parts, lunch at Subway. After his indictment, I no longer see the wad.

  And as if his finances weren’t in sufficient distress, he learns that the Hells Angels are taking him to court. The club’s bosses are seeking $25,000 in damages for his renting them an uninhabitable building. I learn this from Skinhead, who is utterly disgusted, if not insulted, by the development: “The Hells Angels, fucking suing somebody,” he mutters, shaking his head. “Can you believe that Mickey Mouse shit?

  “Whatever happened to firebombings?” he asks me. “What is this world coming to?”

  For all of this, whenever I see him Arney talks about finishing the Chevy. With the fence finished, Paul is going to jump back on the El Camino, he tells me, and as soon as he’s done—and he doesn’t have much left to do—he’ll be getting the wagon ready for the body drop. Not much to that, either: a day’s sanding, a day’s painting the interior, a third day’s “cutting in” the paint on the door sills, dashboard, firewall, and around the rear hatch. Then the reunion of body and frame, after which Paul can get to the rest of the paint.

  He can’t afford not to get the car squared away. He has, by his own estimate, between $38,000 and $40,000 in the car at this point; that includes his initial payment to Bobby Dowdy, maybe $16,000 in parts and materials, and Paul’s pay for seven months of full-time attention. If he tries to sell the car as is, he’ll get only a fraction of that, and the entire project will have been a voracious suck of time and money. If he leaves the car unfinished and the feds seize it, it’ll auction for even less.

  Mind you, getting more for the car will mean spending more. Six thousand for new carpeting, headliner, upholstery, door panels. Another three thousand to have the chrome redipped and replaced. New glass all around, including the expensive, curved windows that wrap around the cargo bay—yet another three; and three more to cover odds and ends—lights, lenses, tires, rims, and whatnot. Throw in Paul’s additional time and paint, and Arney’s investment in a fully restored wagon will approach $55,000.

  But he’ll spend what he needs to spend, he promises, and he’ll do it soon, because time is short. He’s scheduled to stand trial in six months. He seems resolved to finish the job. “I’m going to drive this motherfucker,” he tells me.

  Over the same period, Arney’s understanding of just how much trouble he’s in seems to sharpen. “It’s tough to work all your life, and to work sixteen- to eighteen-hour days, and to find that these motherfuckers can come along and take it all away,” he tells me one night as we stand on the sidewalk outside Havana. “And they’re going to do it. They’re going to take everything.

  “Cancer doesn’t compare to these motherfuckers. I did Stage Four chemo and two months of radiation, and I’d take both of them again instead of dealing with these people,” he says. “Cancer, in all reality, changed my life to make me a better person. This won’t do that.”

  He also seems to develop an ever-clearer view of his bank codefendants, whom he so long viewed as his friends, even mentors. “You become friends with the community bank, and you get comfortable,” he tells me. “And they’re able to use you in ways you don’t realize they’re using you.” Did he take the loans the feds say he did? Yes, I hear him tell a friend on the phone one afternoon, but he did not know the loans were illegal; no one at the bank ever told him so, even as they were encouraging him to take them. “If they had called me and told me: ‘Tommy, we want to loan you money so you can get current, but it’s illegal,’ I would have said, ‘Fuck you. Forget about it. I’ll let the payments go overdue,’ ” he says.

  By late August, an air of inevitability has crept into his discussion of the case. “They have unlimited resources. They have power that’s just unreal,” he says of the feds. All the time and money they need. Mountains of evidence. When he hires a monolithic refrigeration specialist nicknamed “Tiny” to repair a restaurant cooler, and notices that the fellow (who, quite talkative, informs me that he holds “a master’s in five areas of expertise” and can “propagate the words with the best of them”) has bandaged lower legs covering childhood burns that have never properly healed, Arney takes me aside. “You see his feet? That’s some fucked-up shit, there,” he says. “It reminds me of how lucky I am to have been indicted, instead of having to deal with something like that every day.

  “Hell,” he says, “I’ll just go away for a little while.”

  One more thing: His promises that he’ll never talk to the feds, never cooperate? He stops making them. Instead, in mid-August, comes this: “If I were younger I would fight this motherfucker, and do it to the end, because I don’t think I’m wrong.

  “But if you’re in a fight with a giant,” he tells me, “sometimes it makes sense to let him take a slap at you and not get up.”

  19

  TOMMY ARNEY PRIDES himself on being no snitch, on having never consorted with snitches, on having held snitches in the deepest contempt all his life. He isn’t so much resolved to tell the government nothing as he is biologically incapable of doing otherwise.

  But then comes a meeting with federal prosecutors at which they play a card he doesn’t anticipate. If you don’t cooperate, they tell him, we can’t guarantee that we won’t pursue charges against the nominee borrowers you enlisted to get loans from the bank. If you don’t talk to us, “R.A.” and “A.A.” could be facing indictments of their own.

  Arney is aware that he’s done his son and daughter no favors by involving them in his financial misadventures, but until that moment he has not recognized that their actions might be criminal. After all, they didn’t even know what they were signing. They put their names on the loans because he told them to. Clearly, it was all on him.

  But the feds characterize his children’s roles differently. Their signatures enabled Arney to defraud the bank’s shareholders, and by extension the American taxpayers. Witting or not, the kids were players in a criminal conspiracy. Arney has a choice: cooperate, in which case the government will agree not to prosecute Ryan and Ashlee—or don’t, and court incarceration as the new family business.

  And so it comes to pass that Arney agrees to plead guilty to three of the charges against him, and in so doing becomes a witness for the prosecution in United States v. Edward Woodard, et al. He admits to conspiracy to commit bank fraud, to participating in an unlawful monetary transaction, and to making false statements. In all, he faces up to twenty years in the penitentiary, $750,000 in fines, and restitution that could exceed $2 million.

  The written agreement he hammers out with prosecutors calls on him to forfeit to the government all properties he derived through his criminal acts, including Moyock Muscle and the Arney Compound, plus the contents of twenty-three bank accounts. He must provide “full, complete, and truthful cooperation” to Katherine Lee Martin, Melissa O’Boyle, and the FBI.

  If he does so, the government’s lawyers may petition the court for leniency, though they make no promises about the sentence he’ll receive; federal guidelines suggest that as things stand, he’s looking at sixty-three to seventy-eight months. More important, so far as Arney is concerned, the agreement states that they “will not criminally prosecute the defendants’ children, R.A. and A.A., in the Eastern
District of Virginia.”

  Still, his mind is not entirely settled when the agreement is signed. Slick has received a target letter in recent days. She, too, should receive immunity from prosecution, he tells the prosecutors, because the blame for anything she did in connection to the bank lay with him or his codefendants—she was his employee and simply did what she was told to do. By his account, he tells the feds that he’s willing to plead guilty to an additional charge, if that’s what it takes to clear Slick’s name. The feds opt to stick with the three charges he has already agreed to.

  On Friday, August 25, Arney presents himself before U.S. District Judge Raymond A. Jackson to make the pact official. The judge questions him at length to establish that Arney’s guilty plea has not been influenced by drugs, alcohol, mental illness, threats. He notes that Arney will forfeit a lot of property, not necessarily limited to that listed in the plea agreement. Arney, who is the picture of law-abiding conservatism in a pinstripe gray suit and muted olive and gray tie, says he understands.

  Jackson asks whether Arney has ever been convicted of a felony. Once, the defendant replies, back when he was a teenager. The judge peers at him from the bench. “You appear to have done well, notwithstanding that previous conviction,” he says. He asks Arney how he pleads. Arney answers “Guilty, your honor” to each charge.

  “The court accepts your plea and hereby finds you guilty,” the judge says. “You’re now a convicted felon waiting to be sentenced.”

  Arney walks out. Ryan and I meet him in the courthouse lobby. He cannot leave the building, he informs us; the feds want him to provide a urine sample, so he’ll have to catch up with us later. We watch him enter an elevator with prosecutors and federal agents.

  HIS FATE IS now assured. Arney will be sentenced within a few months, and go off to the penitentiary a short time later. He has a great many pieces of business to resolve in the interim, and a month after his plea, he focuses on one of the longest-running: He and Slick pick out an accent color for the Chevy, a companion to the Tangerine Twist, and buy the selection in quantity. It’s called Timor Beige, and it’s a deep tan, almost a café au lait—a far darker shade than one might expect to partner with bright orange.