I thanked her and hung up. I hadn’t considered that direction. The yearbook’s black-and-white photo wasn’t high quality enough to set Ward—or Lennox?—apart from the other awkward teenagers on the page. I flipped through the file quickly. The FBI field office in Milwaukee reported on state records that showed that a Marshall Stuart Lennox was born in Meriter Hospital, Madison, Wisconsin, on June 11, 1960. His parents were Arthur James Lennox and Gretchen Melanie Lennox, née Schilling. Lennox attended local public schools and dropped out during the eleventh grade. He was issued a U.S. passport on May 1, 1980, and left the U.S. on a student charter flight to Athens, Greece. Both his parents died in a car accident two years later. Lennox had no siblings or any other known family members. A more recent report indicated that the neighborhood he grew up in had changed— people had moved out and small businesses and garages had moved in. From those who’d stayed behind, very few people who were interviewed remembered the family.
The first two aliases I’d randomly checked, Lennox and McClure, had some things in common: they both belonged to young men who grew up in the Midwest, had no known living relatives, and both had left the country in 1980.
I flipped through the pages of the FBI report and its attachments, pulling out the file on the first-reported savings-bank-fraud case in South Dakota. There, the con man had presented himself as Harrington T. Whitney-Davis. The FBI report went over the history of Harrington T. Whitney-Davis: born in Fargo, North Dakota, on April 6, 1959. Like a junkie looking for a fix, I quickly ran my eyes over the interesting, though now less relevant, stuff. All I wanted to know at that moment was whether Harrington T. Whitney-Davis had gotten a passport and left the country.
He hadn’t, or at least the FBI report said nothing about it. My hopes deflated. The strange thing was, the name Harrington T. Whitney-Davis stopped appearing on mailing lists, credit reports, and IRS records in 1981. I opened the next file folder.
The con man in this one had appeared in a small town in Nebraska as Harold S. McClure. The FBI report gave his date of birth as March 1, 1958. I wasn’t interested in the rest of the bio. Not just yet. Right now, all I needed to know was if he had disappeared from the U.S. like the others. It took just one glance to find out. Yes, Harold S. McClure had applied for a passport in July, 1980, and left shortly thereafter for Canada through a land-border crossing. Soon, his name stopped appearing in public records, until it resurfaced years later in the U.S. for a few months.
One thing was clear: we had ourselves a modus operandi. It was all too much to be a coincidence. Operating now with a solid lead, I decided to check the other eight names in the FBI file later. I had a direction. Three, maybe more, young American men in their early twenties left the United States in 1980, showing signs of life just long enough to carry out highly lucrative scams. Did Ward have anything to do with their disappearances? Did he know that they were absent from the U.S.? And if so, how? And then there was one more intriguing question. Without physical evidence, how did the FBI tie the eleven scams to Ward, despite the eleven different aliases? I couldn’t answer the first two questions, but I could take a stab at the third by asking the FBI itself.
I called FBI Special Agent Kevin Lee, the last agent named in the topmost file. After the unavoidable cordialities, I asked him how they had connected Ward to all eleven scams.
“Well, our guys down at Quantico are pretty good at this type of analysis,” he told me. “The physical descriptions of all the defendants made by all victims generally matched Ward’s. We’ve a similar MO, and based upon that and other evidence we concluded that all the cases were perpetrated by one person.”
“Other evidence? What evidence? I thought I had it all in the file.”
“Let me look,” he said. “This case is old.”
You’re damn right about that, I thought.
An hour later he called. “OK, we also discovered that each perpetrator used the same Delaware incorporation-service company to incorporate all the companies used in the scams.”
“Did you interview the principals of the service company?”
“No. The company went out of business, and the directors disappeared without leaving a trace.”
“Any additional evidence?” Based on what he’d told me, the FBI’s backing seemed thin. “You know, as in, did you ever have the witnesses take a look at Ward’s high school photo in a spread? Ask them to pick out the guy they gave their money to?” I tried not to sound like I was criticizing their work.
He sounded vaguely annoyed. “Well, I’ll have to look up the file again. It was a long time ago. Anyway, all eleven aliases were of white males born between 1959 and 1962 in the Midwest.”
“Did anyone check any passport applications of these people?”
“No. The State Department gets rid of routine passport applications after one year.”
“So there’s nothing on file?”
“The State Department may have something more. Why don’t you ask them?” he said, having lost interest. I hung up, shaking my head at the apparent incompetence. It would be my job to pick up the slack.
I called the principal of the Milwaukee Trade and Technical High School’s Evening School, from which Ward had graduated, identifying myself and my business. The secretary told me politely that the principal in the seventies and eighties, Donald Peterson, had retired to Arizona, but offered to give him my number. Within five minutes, my phone rang.
“Yes, I remember Ward well,” said Peterson. “I hope he hasn’t done anything foolish. Has he?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Please tell me about him.”
“He was a decent young man. Very curious, loved geography and photography, and he said he wanted to be a photographer for National Geographic Magazine someday. I always wondered if he fulfilled that dream. He did manage to graduate in spite of his handicap.”
“Handicap?”
“Yes, he was dyslexic, with serious learning disabilities. Until he graduated he had difficulty reading and writing. Now, compound that with his speech impairment, and you can understand why we really tried to help him.”
“But what speech problem do you mean?
“He had a serious stutter.”
My blood pressure went up. Stutter? None of the victims had mentioned that. In fact, most of them described a smooth-talking person. Although even a bad stutter can be cured, the hunter in me smelled blood.
“Thank you very much,” I said. “I’ve got one last question. Do you happen to have Ward’s picture?”
“You know, I must have it somewhere,” said Peterson. “Ward loved photography, and he took many photos of class events. I’m pretty sure he sent me copies of several shots he made at graduation.”
“If he was the photographer, doesn’t that mean he isn’t in those pictures?”
“No, I think he should be, actually, because he used a timer for the shutter, I guess. So he could run and be in the picture.”
“Mr. Peterson, could I ask you a favor? Could you please send me those photos? I promise to send them back.”
“Let me find them first.”
Four days later, an envelope came in the mail with three color pictures of smiling high school kids at a party. In the attached note, Donald Peterson identified most of the students by name, apologizing that he couldn’t remember them all. Ward looked like a nice kid, your neighbor’s son. No especially distinctive features, overgrown light-brown hair, brown eyes, nice smile. They were a lot livelier than his formal high school graduation photo in the file. I wrote down the names of classmates Peterson had identified, and asked Esther Quinn, our office admin clerk, to run a check on them with their current addresses. I wondered, grumbling to myself a little, why Esther and I were stuck doing the legwork the FBI had neglected.
I called Donna Swanson, the first name on the high school principal’s list, at her home in Los Angeles.
“Yes, I remember Albert, but I haven’t heard from or seen him since we graduated,” she said.
“If you need current information, you should call his best friend, Tyrone Maloney. They must have stayed in contact. They were buddies.”
Later, Esther handed me an address and phone number. “Tyrone Maloney has a bicycle store in New York,” she said.
I decided to get some fresh air and see a face. I went to his store in SoHo, on the southern part of Manhattan. Maloney was a stocky fellow, with blond hair and a broad smile.
That smile disappeared when I told him who I was and asked him about Albert Ward.
“Bad news?” he asked. “Has he been found?”
I ducked the question. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, has he been found? The last time I heard from him was more than twenty years ago, and I haven’t seen or heard from him since.”
“When was that, the last time you heard from him?”
“Let me see,” he said, frowning a bit. “That must have been 1982 or 1983.”
“Can you tell me about it?”
“He left the United States at the end of 1980 after saving up some money. He wanted to travel the world, take photographs and sell them to travel magazines. He had no family left in the United States, so he figured he could do anything.”
“Do you know where he went?”
“Yeah, I do. He went on a freighter to Hong Kong working as a cook’s assistant. He liked jobs where he didn’t have to talk a lot. Because of his stutter, you know.”
“Did he stay in Hong Kong?”
“He did, but then he moved on. I received a few postcards from China, Thailand, and Pakistan.”
“Which one came last?”
“I think the one from Pakistan. I haven’t heard from him since.”
“Did you try to find him?”
“I called a few of our mutual friends, but none of them had heard anything. None of his postcards carried a return address, so I could never write back. He didn’t write much, just one or two lines saying he was having a great time, see you soon, stuff like that.”
“Do you still have those postcards?”
“I’m sorry, no, I never kept them. Tell me, is he OK?”
“I don’t know,” I said candidly. “Not yet, at least.”
It was getting dark. I decided that instead of returning to my office, I’d go home and walk Snap, my happy-go-lucky golden retriever. Though he had a tendency to overdo it with his licking and jumping on people with his long front legs that almost reached my shoulders, he was a loyal friend who always seemed able to put a smile on my face even when I was in a bad mood, which wasn’t all that infrequent. He sure as heck deserved more attention than a bunch of stale files, now resurrected.
CHAPTER FIVE
I had to decide on a direction for my investigation. Shooting in the dark has its advantages, because sometimes you hit targets you didn’t know were there. But on the other hand, the odds aren’t great, and you waste time when you find out what you hit is irrelevant. I knew that Ward, for lack of a better name to call him, was already long off the U.S. radar. He wasn’t going anywhere years after he’d vanished, if he hadn’t done that thus far. So time wasn’t of the essence—a reverse form of a phrase I had frequently used when I (briefly) practiced law and wanted to move lazy people into doing something. He couldn’t get more lost. I thought of Alex, my Mossad Academy training instructor, who used to say that urgent is the legitimate son of neglect. But now, I was practicing futility. I needed to get a more current physical description of my man—or men. I called the OTS, the Office of Thrift Supervision, a federal agency that regulates the federal and some state savings banks and savings-and-loan associations. I was hoping that its examiners might have included identification information in their reports.
“That South Dakota case is a really old one, inherited from the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, our predecessor regulatory agency,” said Brian DiLorenzo, an assistant general counsel. “The documents may be archived. Actually, they may even have been destroyed under our regular document retention schedule. Hold on.” I heard him click on his computer keyboard. “Well, it seems that $20 million is a lot for just one in what looks like a series of scams. I see here that we still have these files open.”
“Could I please have a copy of any investigation reports? I’m trying to figure out where the money is. Maybe we could recoup some of it.”
A few days later a big envelope containing four inch-thick folders came by Federal Express. DiLorenzo’s attached note said, “You’re in luck. Enclosed are pertinent documents of the scams perpetrated by your con men against four regulated institutions. Please call me if you need further assistance.”
I leafed through the files. They included the reports of four savings banks that had been had by a con man—or maybe con men?— and various regulatory steps that OTS’s predecessor agency had taken when it seized the four failed institutions. One document attracted my attention. It was a letter written by Harrington T. Whitney-Davis on letterhead of Fidelity Trustees of America, Inc., the name of the firm he had misleadingly and fraudulently used to perpetrate his scam on the South Dakota savings bank. In the letter, Whitney-Davis confirmed that he had received $560,000 from the savings bank to purchase limited-edition treasury securities as an investment for the bank. There was an impressive looking signature by “Harrington T. Whitney-Davis,” but there was also a handwritten note attached: “Tim, I’ll call you later on today concerning dinner. HTWD.”
So the manager of the defrauded savings bank was having dinner with fraud artist “Whitney-Davis.” Maybe it meant nothing, but when you’re a manager of a savings bank, meeting for dinner the person who later took off with $20 million belonging to the bank and its customers might not be that innocent.
“No,” said the OTS attorney I called after reading that file. “There was no criminal investigation of the savings-bank manager. Why do you ask?”
“Did you try to figure out why he was such easy prey for Harrington T. Whitney-Davis’s scam?”
“I wasn’t working at the Federal Home Loan Bank Board at the time, and the only information I have is what I’m seeing in the file. Our examiners must have been satisfied that there was no criminal wrongdoing by anyone at the savings bank. They never made a criminal referral to the FBI about any bank insider.”
“Do you know who the bank manager was during the scam and whether he still works there?”
“He was asked by the bank’s board to resign after the scam was discovered. Being cleared of criminal charges doesn’t mean he should be allowed to make more mistakes. So the bank let him go. If it hadn’t, the regulatory agency would have done so when it took over the insolvent bank. His name is Timothy B. McHanna.”
I called FBI Special Agent Kevin Lee. “Sorry, I haven’t looked up the file yet,” he said.
“I’ve got a different question. Did you interview Timothy B. McHanna, the manager of the defrauded savings bank in South Dakota?”
“Let me see,” he said, clicking on his computer. “Yes, he was interviewed, but apparently he never became a subject of an FBI investigation.”
“And?”
“That means we didn’t establish that he might have been engaged in any criminal activity.” He sounded so formal.
“I guess being gullible isn’t a crime yet,” I muttered. But it was lost on him. “Do you know where McHanna is now?”
“Let me look him up for you.” A moment later he said, “He’s an essential witness against Whitney-Davis, if that defendant ever shows up again. So we’ve kept track of him. McHanna now lives in New York City.”
He lived on the posh Upper West Side of Manhattan, inside a prewar residential building, one of those sporting a royal name written in stylish lettering on a long green canopy, with a uniformed doorman who opens your car door. McHanna had certainly come a long way from his $37,000-a-year job as manager of a small savings bank in a small dusty town in South Dakota. Additional inquiries brought me to his business: McHanna Associates, business consultants, located in the equally high-re
nt Financial District. A quick search of public records showed that the company had four employees and described its activities as “providing consulting services to foreign banks seeking correspondence and other business arrangements with U.S.-based banks, as well as providing other services to the banking industry.” McHanna Associates also provided “consultancy services to charities in the United States for their international banking needs.” Nice niche with plenty of opportunities, I thought. I decided to pay him a visit.
In a small and nicely decorated office, I introduced myself to the receptionist and mentioned the South Dakota savings bank and Whitney-Davis. “Mr. McHanna will see you now,” he soon said.
“Tim McHanna,” said a short, bald man in his late fifties, and gave me his hand for a firm shake as I walked into his office. His eyes were a dark brown. He was dressed in a tailored dark suit with a yellow tie. His initials were embroided on his button-down white shirt, and he wore golden cufflinks.
“I’m really ashamed that Whitney-Davis conned me,” he said without my asking. He was eager to give me his version. Too eager, I thought. I went over the history of his relationship with “Whitney-Davis” with him. No great discoveries here—the same story already chewed up by savings-bank examiners and the FBI.
I decided to change course. “Please tell me about your business,” I said in an interested tone. “I hear you’re providing services to foreign banks.”
Clearly relieved that I had changed the subject, McHanna launched into explaining his company. Due to increased U.S. trade with many foreign countries, overseas banks found it increasingly important to associate themselves with U.S. banks that could be their correspondents to collect on checks drawn on U.S.-based banks, and provide for all their other banking needs in the U.S. The relationship could be unidirectional or bidirectional, meaning that each bank at its discretion could decide whether to use the other bank for a given transaction. There was no exclusivity commitment by either bank.
“Do you provide additional services? I read someplace that you also assist charities.”
The Chameleon Conspiracy Page 4
