by Dete Meserve
She pointed to the photo of Stephen Bening. “Stephen’s bio says he graduated from USC and the media has widely reported that as well. But a search of the deep web shows no record that he either attended or graduated from USC.”
I shook my head. “He told me that he was captain of the debate squad and they took first place in the National Debate Tournament. The trophy is on display in his library.”
Hannah typed on her laptop then swiveled it toward me. “This is the USC Trojan Debate Squad website. USC only took first place once. In 1996. And the captain of the debate team was named Esteban Diaz.”
I scanned the photograph of the four members of the debate team and the faculty coach. The young man identified as the captain had a thick mop of curly hair and skin pitted by acne scars. He was heavyset and wore black glasses—definitely not Stephen Bening.
“Also no record of him attending or getting an MBA from Harvard,” she added drily. “He must have figured a way to get into certain databases to make it appear as though he did.”
“So is this what it takes to be rich? You lie about your past?”
“And your present. Check this out.” On the monitor, she put up a photograph of a young woman in a black velvet evening grown. “Last year, Richard Ingram’s wife—they own El Mirasol—filed for divorce on the grounds that he was having multiple affairs. The judge awarded her nine hundred twenty-five million.”
“Dollars?”
“Not Monopoly money.” Hannah looked at me. “But while they all have secrets, I don’t see how any of this gets us closer to figuring out who Robin Hood is.”
I studied the photos of the wealthy victims. “Why don’t we ask them?”
She shook her head. “These are powerful men, Kate. You confront them about their dirty laundry, and they’ll have their lawyers make your life a living hell. If you can even get hold of them.”
“I’m not going to confront them. They’re going to help me figure out who Robin Hood is. I think he is someone they know.”
Thomas Speyer’s assistant told me he was traveling and would call me when he “returned to the States.” I got similar responses from every other estate owner, who all seemed to be traveling, in board meetings, or away at conferences and inaccessible for weeks. The messages were courteous but delivered with the quiet subtext: they were never going to call me back.
Stephen Bening agreed to meet with me. Sort of. His assistant said he was happy to meet with “Hale Bradley’s daughter” and “might” be available to meet me for a whopping twenty minutes if I was willing to come to his Bel Air estate at eight thirty the next morning. Once I agreed to eight thirty, the assistant e-mailed me ten minutes later, asking if I could do seven thirty at Shutters in Santa Monica instead. Once I agreed to that, the time changed to eight forty-five at his estate. Apparently being a rich entrepreneur means your schedule is undergoing constant transformation and down-to-the-minute management. It also made you extra cautious around media. “As a condition of the interview, Mr. Bening prohibits cameras or recording equipment.”
That didn’t go over well with David, who thought I was wasting time on an interview that wouldn’t produce any footage. Like me, he was concerned Channel Eleven’s journalistic integrity was in question if we let interview subjects call the shots. But after much deliberation, he and Bonnie agreed that another interview with one of the tight-lipped estate owners—with or without cameras—might yield important information.
I hoped we wouldn’t meet in Stephen’s study again, because the room was too distracting. Ever since my interview with him, the memory of that room had been ingrained in my brain and I could actually envision every architectural detail with my eyes shut. After years of nabbing interviews at the scene of accidents or tragedy, I’d yet to get accustomed to conducting an interview in beautiful settings. Other reporters might be put off by chaotic scenes of mangled bodies and crumpled cars, but that seemed easy when compared to talking to someone amid the splendor of an estate like this one.
I arrived a few minutes early and was quickly ushered into the study, this time by a man with a cleanly shaven head and a soul patch, the tech version of a butler. The silence in the study, apart from the ticking clock on the fireplace mantel, was deafening, but the room had the same effect on me as before. I tried to project my most nonchalant expression but decided against it in case it came across as phony.
At precisely 8:45 a.m., Stephen breezed into the room. “How is your father, Kate? What can I help you with today?” he asked before sitting in the chair across from me.
“Robin Hood is someone you know,” I said quietly.
He waved a dismissive hand at me. “It’s not a bad theory, but the FBI has been through all that with us. It appears to be a dead end.”
“The FBI may think that’s a dead end, but hear me out. Despite what he says, Robin Hood is not a man living on the outskirts of society in the slums of poverty. He has access to high-end technology to bypass sophisticated alarm systems. He’s a clever leader, making sure no one on his team knows anyone’s identities, and he inspires his team by telling them they are changing the world. He is not Russian, but probably American. He is someone on the inside. Someone who’s probably been to your house and who would know what luxuries you own and which ones are worth stealing. He is someone you know.”
He was silent for a long moment. I couldn’t tell if he thought my theory was brilliant or crazy. “Why would someone I know steal from me?”
“The Channel Eleven news team is looking into all of the owners who’ve been robbed, and some unflattering details are coming to light.”
The impatience left his eyes and in its place was a new expression—wariness. “What are you getting at here?”
“Every victim is one of America’s Wealthiest 100, including you. But in many cases, the victims are earning massive salaries even as they’ve laid off thousands of people and their stock prices have plummeted.”
“That’s not true in every case. Certainly not mine.”
I didn’t look up from my notepad. “And when that’s not the case, we find other curious details. Out-of-court settlements, puffed-up biographies, tax evasion, criminal charges, DUIs.”
“Where did you get this supposed information?”
“One of our producers is adept at mining the deep web for information that isn’t available through normal searching—”
“I know what the deep web is.”
“What I’m getting at is that perhaps Robin Hood has targeted this elite group because he wants to expose your wrongdoings.”
He shrugged. “Do you mean this is some kind of revenge? Blackmail? For what? For laying off people to improve stock performance? Big companies have to constantly evolve and produce shareholder value. CEOs often lay off people to achieve that. The wealthy are easy targets for lawsuits, hence the volume of claims against us. Besides, none of what you’ve said is true for me. I laid off fewer than ten employees last year and I don’t have any scandals to expose.”
I paused, rubbing the back of my neck. “We found some inconsistencies in your bio too. You claim to have graduated from USC, where you’d been the head of the champion debate team in 1996. But there’s no record of you graduating from USC, and that year, the captain of the debate team was a man named Esteban Diaz.”
He frowned. “You guys really are digging for dirt. It’s bad enough that we’ve been robbed of millions, but now we’re the targets of what sounds like a smear campaign. If it’s any consolation, I didn’t lie about being captain of the debate team. Esteban Diaz is me. I changed my name after college, anglicized Esteban to Stephen.”
I hadn’t expected that. “And Bening?”
His face flushed red. “Comes from my American father. He left before I was born, but I adopted his American-sounding last name in my twenties. Far more doors in the tech industry opened to me as Stephen Bening than they ever did for Esteban Diaz.”
“But the photo�
��”
He laughed, showing off expensive cosmetic dentistry. “Doesn’t look like me. I know. Once I got my first job at a tech company in Chicago, I lost sixty-five pounds, got my teeth fixed, and started wearing contacts.”
Was he telling me the truth? Or spinning a story to paint himself in a better light? People that rise to a position like his are adept at appearing trustworthy, even when they aren’t. I needed a way to determine if his story was true. “So you’re saying you’re actually the Esteban Diaz who graduated from USC and Harvard.”
The bald man with the goatee walked into the room and Stephen glanced at his watch. He stood. “Not only would both USC and Harvard confirm that I graduated—and with honors—but that I received what was later called the Wisdom scholarship—a full scholarship given by an anonymous donor to the top student in the LA school district.”
Stephen was lying. Every instinct told me he wasn’t telling the truth about being Esteban Diaz. You don’t get to be one of the top CEOs in the world without having great skills at spinning a story the way you want it told. But I couldn’t blame him for lying. His image would definitely be ruined by a story claiming he had lied about attending USC and Harvard.
Could that be the missing link? Was it plausible that Robin Hood had chosen the estate owners to rob because he wanted the stories of their shady pasts to come to light? These estate owners certainly had enough sordid stories to keep the media humming for weeks.
Back at the newsroom, I typed “Esteban Diaz” into one of the news department’s search engines. The software would search vast archives of newspapers, magazines, and publications around the globe for relevant articles, stretching back decades in some cases.
It turns out Esteban Diaz is a fairly common name, and I found articles about numerous people with that name in professions ranging from foot doctors to performance artists to hard-core criminals. I scanned through the articles, wondering if I’d be better off asking one of the interns to do some research on one of the many public records search engines.
A headline caught my eye. “Housekeeper Dies in Trousdale Estate.” The Beverly Hills Courier article was dated August 31, 1991, and read:
In the early morning hours of August 30, 1991, paramedics were called to the Dunne estate in the Trousdale section of Beverly Hills. Charles Dunne, producer of recent box-office hit Mortal Enemy, and his wife, Darlene, were asleep in their second-floor master suite. But downstairs, Delfina Diaz, the Dunnes’ housekeeper, had fallen down the sweeping granite staircase that graces the grand foyer of the Dunne estate and was dying of a head injury. She lay there for at least seven hours until discovered by the Dunnes’ cook that morning. Diaz was taken to Cedars-Sinai Hospital, where she was pronounced dead. She is survived by her son, Esteban Diaz, a junior at Roosevelt High School in East Los Angeles.
Diaz, who at age fourteen left Guatemala and crossed the border in the trunk of a car, had a nearly twenty-year history of working in Beverly Hills estates for clients who included celebrities, socialites, and fashion mavens. Funeral arrangements are pending.
Next to the article was a grainy photograph of the woman identified as Delfina Diaz. Thick waves of dark-brown hair were pulled back from her face and secured by a black headband. She appeared to be in her early forties, with a regal nose and almond-shaped eyes that bore a striking resemblance to Stephen Bening’s.
This woman had to be his mother. Wasn’t Stephen’s renowned software named Delfina?
I typed ‘Stephen Bening’ and ‘Delfina’ and found an article in Forbes magazine:
The idea for the Delfina software came to Stephen in high school when he saw how his mother, a housekeeper who worked in Beverly Hills homes, had to keep track of all the requirements of her half-dozen clients each week. She scribbled notes in a worn notebook, and when she lost it on the bus one day, she no longer had a record of the clients’ security system codes or phone numbers and lost track of their required cleaning routines. Stephen figured if a housekeeper needed help tracking customer information, big companies probably did too. He named the software after his mother, but she died in an accident years before the Delfina software became the leading customer relationship software used by Fortune 500 companies around the globe.
Stephen wasn’t lying.
Chapter Twenty-Two
I hate sushi. I’ve tried sushi everywhere from the most authentic Japanese restaurants with expensive tasting menus to trendy pop-up sushi restaurants, and there’s nothing about the experience that I find enjoyable enough to repeat. When Jake texted me to meet him for sushi, I should’ve suggested someplace else. So it was my own fault that we were at Sushi Zo, a restaurant so orthodox that there was nothing cooked on the menu except rice, they took offense if you ask for a fork instead of chopsticks, and the menu declared in several places, “Please refrain from asking for any substitutions or sauces on the side.”
Jake arrived dressed for a date. His hair was neatly combed, and he wore a light gray cotton shirt under a black lambskin coat. It was the first time I noticed he was wearing aftershave—woodsy but not overpowering.
We sat in a quiet corner of the crowded restaurant. At least we wouldn’t be easily overheard—or even noticed—but the narrow tables and dim lighting made it feel more romantic than I’d hoped.
I’d made a mistake coming here. Knowing how he felt about me made me hyperaware of how I looked at him, wanting to make sure I didn’t send mixed signals. The sake the waitress poured upon our arrival wasn’t helping either. So after a shot, I vowed to stick with water the rest of the evening.
Still, there was no denying that he was attractive. Was it possible that something real was developing between Jake and me? We had similar interests, including a dogged determination to solve crime mysteries. When we worked on the Suitcase Murder, it was as though we shared the same brain, blurting out similar theories at the same time. I glanced up from my drink and noticed him smiling at me.
“You still heading to the Big Apple next month?” he asked.
“I’m still figuring out what I’m going to do. But they’re making it hard to say no.”
He smoothed the linen tablecloth with his hand. “And your rescue captain guy, is he going with you?”
I shook my head. “He can’t get a comparable position with the Fire Department of New York.”
He avoided my gaze. “Yeah, that’s a problem.” There was an awkward silence for a moment. “But you’re still going?”
“I…don’t know.”
“You should go, Kate. This is what you’ve always said you wanted,” he said quietly. Then his expressive gray eyes met mine. “But if I were your fire captain, I’d be going with you.”
The warm way he was looking at me made me break my vow about not drinking the sake. I downed the rest of the cup.
As if Eric had a sixth sense, his text flashed up on the screen: “Can you meet me tomorrow morning?”
“Sorry,” I said to Jake. “Would you give me a quick sec to reply to this text?”
Jake nodded and I typed back. “Sure.”
“Running early a.m. training session in Bear Canyon. Will finish by 7:30. Meet me at 8 at Switzer Falls trailhead?”
“Definitely.”
I wasn’t sure where Switzer Falls was but I was glad we were finally going to see each other, no matter where it was.
The waitress arrived and placed a plate of salmon sashimi on the table. “Compliments of the chef.” She bowed, then took two steps back.
I looked up at the chef behind the sushi counter in the center of the room, and he waved. “Irasshaimase!” he shouted at us, a phrase that sounded like a stern directive but was actually a respectful way to say “Welcome.”
Jake dove into the sashimi with his chopsticks. His mood lightened. “Now that I’m at home during the day, I’ve been watching a lot of the Robin Hood coverage on TV. That, and The Price Is Right. I’ve seen every network’s stories, and your reports are the bes
t, of course.” He raised his sake cup in a semi-toast and downed a shot.
“You’re a little biased.”
“More than a little,” he said softly.
I took a bite of the sashimi and decided that maybe I could grow to like sushi after all.
Jake leaned forward. “But there is something I want to tell you. Something I just learned. It’s…off the record, of course.”
“Okay.”
He lowered his voice. “Robin Hood hacks into the security systems at each estate. All of the estates have Internet-based systems, so let’s say he’s exploiting a flaw in the systems and shutting them down remotely. That’s extraordinary in itself, but there are any number of hacker organizations—Anonymous and Lizard Squad being the most famous—who could carry that off. But then what?”
I shrugged. “Once the security system is down, a group of people who don’t know each other break in. Getting instructions called out via headset, they carry out a multimillion-dollar heist in under fifteen minutes.”
“Except they don’t break in. No broken glass, no jimmied doors or windows. They just walk in.”
I shook my head. “That’s not right. Police have repeatedly said the thieves broke into the homes. Forced entry, the chief said.”
His tone was strained. “That’s what we are saying, but there is no evidence of any forced entry. Ever.”
“Why are police withholding that from the media?”
“Same reason as always.”
I nodded. Police generally keep quiet about details only the criminals will know. That way if a suspect seems to know nonpublic information about a crime, it’s likely that he’s somehow involved.
