The Last Act: A Novel

by Brad Parks

  Herrera inspected every scrap before it got tossed. Anything larger than a cardboard box got broken down into smaller pieces. Even the appliances were dismantled.

  It was slow going. When the first day was over and they still hadn’t found anything, they slept in the partially deconstructed cabin. Same thing with the second day. Herrera was a patient man. He had time, if only because if he didn’t find those documents, he would soon be out of it.

  Once the house was gutted down to the studs, Herrera had them take it apart, board by board. There would be literally no place left where the documents could hide. They filled the dump truck, emptied it, then filled it again.

  When they were done with the cabin, they took apart its cinder-block foundation and the small poured-concrete patio that surrounded it. Herrera thought there might be a trap door leading to a cellar of some sort. Or a hidden lockbox. Something.

  But no. Nothing. Herrera was starting to get frustrated.

  He still didn’t quit. When the men were done with the house, having reduced it to a patch of bare dirt amidst the weeds of the clearing, they moved onto the outbuildings, a shed and a detached garage.

  They did the same thing. They got the same result. They were staying at a local hotel by that point, having demolished any structure that might have given them shelter.

  Herrera kept sending them back to work. When they were done with the buildings, Herrera had them start walking the property in a grid pattern. All five acres of it.

  Those documents had to be somewhere. In a lean-to. A shack. A tree house. A hole in the ground. Somewhere.

  Except if they weren’t. After two weeks, having made the men walk the search grid three times, Herrera finally ended the operation.

  He was satisfied what he was looking for was nowhere on that property. In every other way, he was distinctly unsatisfied.

  CHAPTER 35

  My giddiness over Mitch revealing the location of the cabin lasted until Danny told me what was actually there.

  He speculated that the cartel’s people had reached it first, and also that they hadn’t found anything.

  After all, if they had, Mitch Dupree would already be dead.

  To Danny and Rick, it was a minor setback. To me, it was a catastrophe, and I spent the next few days stewing in disappointment. I had done everything I was supposed to do: insinuated myself into life at Morgantown, become friends with Mitch, gotten him to tell me where the cabin was.

  By now I should have been back with my lovely, pregnant fiancée, wealthy enough to start a new life with her.

  Now everything felt off the rails. If the documents weren’t at the cabin, where were they? And how was I supposed to get Mitch to tell me?

  With no other real plan, I continued palling around with Mitch, hoping something he said—about another hunting cabin his family owned, or about his favorite fishing spot, or about his condo in the Bahamas, or whatever—might be revelatory.

  Thanksgiving was on us before I knew it. As you might expect, Thanksgiving in prison was not easily confused with the version of the holiday celebrated elsewhere. You get the day off, but that only made things worse, because you had more time for absence pangs.

  I tried to console myself that, unlike some of the guys at Morgantown, this would be my only Thanksgiving away from my family, and that by this time next year, Amanda and I would be celebrating our first Thanksgiving as newlyweds, joined at a festive table by a baby in a high chair. But that only worked so much. The COs were in crappy moods, because they didn’t want to be working, and they took it out on us in vindictive fashion, with a contraband search that succeeded in grinding whatever joy out of the day I might have been able to falsely manufacture.

  At lunch, we were served a meal that appeared on the menu as “Thanksgiving Dinner.” It included processed, pressed-meat turkey; a light-brown mound of something that looked like mashed potatoes and tasted like sawdust; and an assortment of bland, wilted steamed vegetables. It was all covered in a cold, gelatinous substance that, by process of elimination, must have been the item called “gravy” on the menu.

  The phones were busy most of the day, crammed with morose guys pretending to sound upbeat as they called home to talk with second cousins and great-aunts. By the time I finally waited my turn, I reached Amanda on her cell with what sounded like a stadium full of people behind her, laughing and talking boisterously. She spoke circuitously, in case anyone was listening, but I was able to gather that she and my mother had gone over to Brock DeAngelis’ parents’ house, where Brock’s extended family was nearing the end of a multihour, eight-course Italian Thanksgiving dinner.

  She was clearly having a great time, and she seemed to want assurances that I wasn’t perfectly miserable. So I told her a local Quaker meeting group had come in and served a sumptuous meal of fresh turkey. I stopped just short of saying they served it to us wearing buckled shoes.

  Amanda then passed the phone to my slightly drunk mother, who was gushy enough that I rushed her off the phone before she slipped up and said something she shouldn’t. As she hung up, I heard another burst of laughter and happy shouting that reverberated in my thoughts throughout the lonely evening that followed.

  Come Friday, it was back to the usual grind. Wake up. Work. Find a way to fill the afternoon. Play poker at night. According to Mitch’s stats, I had gotten on a hot streak.

  Being Pete Goodrich—thinking like him, talking like him, acting like him—was becoming second nature. It was Tommy Jump who didn’t know where he was sometimes.

  Through it all, Mitch and I continued to build our friendship. It sounds funny—given how mercenary my ultimate goals for our interaction were—but I was starting to care for the guy.

  I was particularly struck by his devotion to his kids. He was trying hard as a father, limited though his opportunities were, and he was constantly sharing his hard-won wisdom. About how what kids wanted more than anything was just your attention. About how sometimes you had to shut up and listen, resisting the urge to give them advice. About their constant need for reassurance (“You’ll never find someone on the therapist’s couch, complaining that their dad said ‘I love you’ too often,” was his memorable line).

  None of it quite applied yet. I stored it away all the same.

  Still, nothing we talked about was otherwise noteworthy until the Thursday after Thanksgiving, when the deputy warden—for no apparent reason—canceled morning work duty and ordered us to stay confined to our dorms.

  I certainly didn’t mind missing a day of doing other people’s laundry. A cold fog had settled into the tiny bowl where our prison sat and was refusing to budge. A good morning to stay inside.

  After room inspection, I spied Mitch’s roommate wandering toward the televisions and took that as an opportunity to visit Mitch. I found him in his bunk, reading Time magazine.

  “Hey, what’s up,” I said. It wasn’t exactly difficult to affect a listless tone to my voice.

  “Unbelievable, what they’re letting these banks get away with,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s like they learned nothing from 2008.”

  The moment he said “banks,” I sensed an opening. We had yet to broach the subject of why either of us was incarcerated. It was a threshold we needed to cross—the next step in our relationship, such as it was.

  But, of course, Pete Goodrich wasn’t going to let on that he was any more or less interested in this observation than he was in That Time I Almost Broke 90 at Pinehurst. It was just another thing to pass the time.

  “Oh, that’s right, you worked for a bank, didn’t you?” I said casually.

  “Sure did. Union South Bank. ‘A bank designed around you,’” he said, serving up its longtime advertising slogan with a side of sarcasm. “Or, as we liked to say, ‘A bank designed around fools.’”

  Taking a seat on the top of his desk like I was still properly bored
, I asked, “Would a lowly history teacher even understand what you did there?”

  “I was director of compliance for our Latin American division,” he said, then forced out a grim chuckle. “That means I was responsible for making sure the bank followed the law. Pretty ironic I ended up in here, huh?”

  “What do you mean?”

  He rested the magazine on his chest and stared up at the underside of the top bunk.

  “This may sound like another convict spouting a line of bull, but in a way I was sent here for doing my job too well.”

  “How so?”

  “Aw, it’s not worth going into. It’d just sound like sour grapes.”

  “What’s the point of prison if you can’t take sour grapes and make some whine?”

  “Yeah, I guess,” he said, then glanced over my way. “You sure you want to hear this?”

  “Got nothing better to do,” I said, with just the right degree of nonchalance.

  “All right,” he said, and tilted himself toward me.

  And just like that, it was confession time.

  * * *

  • • •

  I leaned my back against the cold cinder-block wall and put my feet up on the bolted-in chair, as indifferent as could be, so Mitch wouldn’t feel like he was being studied too carefully.

  Isn’t that why the Catholics put up that screen in their confessionals? No one wanted to be scrutinized while unburdening their soul.

  “To begin with, one of the really stupid things about federal banking regulations is that they rely on the banks to regulate themselves,” he said. “They take for granted that a banker is the honest one and that it’s the customer who will commit fraud at the expense of the unwitting bank. If a bank is willfully breaking the law, they’re going to get away with it. It’s only the people who are trying to follow the law who get screwed.”

  He paused. “Told you this would sound bitter.”

  “Sounds like honesty to me,” I said.

  “Well, so, anyway, one of my jobs as compliance director was to fill out what were called suspicious activity reports, known as SARs. If I saw something that didn’t look right, I filled out a SAR and sent it up the food chain at the bank, which then electronically submitted it to FinCEN, which is the Financial Crimes something-something . . . Uhh, Enforcement Network. Lord, how could I forget that? Anyhow, FinCEN was founded to combat money laundering, the financing of terror networks, all that happy stuff. It’s part of the Treasury Department. So is the IRS, if that gives you an idea about who you’re dealing with.”

  “Real sweethearts,” I interjected.

  “Exactly. Now, the first rule of compliance is: Know Your Customer. We like that rule so much we even give it an acronym. KYC. The banking industry talks all the time about KYC guidelines, KYC procedures, KYC checks. You could spend the next month of your life doing nothing but study KYC regulations twenty-four hours a day and you’d probably still only know half of it. Am I boring you yet?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Don’t worry, I will be soon. Anyhow, I started this job about five years ago. I was USB’s director of compliance for Latin America. It was sort of a dream job for me. I had worked in Latin and South America before I got into banking, and I had majored in Spanish and international relations in college. It just felt like this is what I had been building toward all along. And I was getting into it at a pretty exciting time. Coming out of the financial crisis, FinCEN was really tightening up its KYC requirements. There had been some decent-size fines for banks that hadn’t been on the up-and-up with this stuff. This is the kind of thing that keeps a banker up at night, you know what I’m saying?”

  “I hear you,” I said.

  “So there I am, starting a big new job, and I’m all gung-ho. And I immediately trip across this relationship the bank had in Mexico with these casas de cambio, money exchange houses. It was a damn KYC nightmare. My predecessor, the guy who had allowed this, was completely asleep at the wheel. Literally anyone could walk in off the street in Mexico with a big wad of cash or traveler’s checks, deposit it at a casa de cambio, and tell them to route it to a certain account number at USB. There was no check on it. There was no ‘show me your driver’s license.’ There was no automatic reporting of transactions ten thousand dollars or higher, like there would be if you did the same thing in America. And once that money was in an account at USB, it was clean as a whistle. You could do anything with it: transfer it to another bank, buy an airplane, whatever you wanted.”

  “Are you serious?” I said. It sounded way too easy.

  “As a heart attack. I took everything to my boss, the vice president for the Latin American division, this guy named Thad Reiner. I laid this out for him, then told him we either needed to clean it up or shut it down. I thought he would freak out and immediately start fixing it. Instead, he laid out his side for me. There were billions of dollars flowing back and forth through these casas de cambio, and USB was reaping transaction fees on all of it. It was a huge portion of the division’s profits, and he wasn’t going to jeopardize it because of a few transactions that might or might not have been legitimate. He gave me this whole sad song about how it was mostly being used by poor laborers who were sending money to their families, and vice versa, and how if we cracked down by insisting on documentation, we’d be starving them to death, because a lot of them didn’t have paperwork. He said it was up to the casas de cambio to know the customers and that therefore we didn’t have to.”

  Mitch rolled his eyes at this.

  “I was the new guy, so I kind of went along with it. But the closer I got to it, the worse it looked. I’d take trips down to Mexico and I’d ask the casas de cambio to show me the original deposit slips. You couldn’t even read the signatures on the things. It was a total joke. Some of these deposits were a million pesos, two million pesos. Depending on the exchange rate, that was fifty grand, a hundred grand in US dollars. That’s not a huge number in the grand scheme of international money laundering, except if you’re doing it every day, at dozens of locations around Mexico. Some of the deposits were traveler’s checks that were already in American dollars or straight-up US greenbacks. So not only were they doing this with pesos, it looked like they were hauling money down from America and depositing it at these casas de cambio, rather than doing it at a US bank where someone would insist on seeing ID.

  “Basically, USB had created the perfect vehicle for someone to launder money and move it across international borders without any legal friction whatsoever. And it was clear when I looked at the pattern of these large, suspicious deposits that one cartel in particular had figured this out, because a lot of them were coming from the Colima state or nearby. That’s the power base for a cartel called New Colima.”

  He didn’t even flinch as he said the name. And the way he was laying everything out for me, I could tell he didn’t suspect I had any idea what he was talking about.

  “From a compliance standpoint, this was like a bundle of TNT that could explode any second,” he continued. “All it would take was someone from the FBI or DEA poking around a little and deciding to follow the money. Thad Reiner had already told me to shut up about it. So I just said to myself, ‘All right, he’s not shutting this down like he should, I’m just going to SAR this puppy until the feds start banging down the door, then we’ll see how he feels.’ At least I knew my butt would be covered, right? I made it my goal to write at least one SAR a day. I knew what I was looking for: large transactions of cash or traveler’s checks with a casa de cambio in or near the Colima state. When I found one, I’d call up the casa de cambio in question and make them send me the deposit slip, which I would then scan and include in the SAR. The crazy thing is, I started to be able to recognize the different signatures on the deposit slips. Even though the names were changed, the handwriting would be the same. It was clear there were about a dozen guys who were trusted by t
he cartel to handle the money, and they were making all these deposits among a rotating set of casas de cambio. I thought it would make for a great case when the feds finally came knocking.”

  “And when did that happen?”

  “Well, that’s the thing. It didn’t. I hadn’t expected anything immediately. FinCEN gets about a million SARs filed every year. That’s, what, three thousand every business day? And that’s just the banks. Insurance companies file SARs. So do investment companies. Even casinos. Anyone who deals in large amounts of money. I know how slow the government can be. Plus, the regulatory environment had changed with the new administration. It had a bit of a Wild West feel. I just kept sending in my stinky transaction du jour, dotting my i’s and crossing my t’s, thinking maybe they were so backlogged they hadn’t gotten to me yet.

  “After four years of doing this, I finally said, ‘What the hell? Are they really just ignoring this?’ I mentioned FinCEN had this electronic filing system, right? Every financial institution gets an ID and a password, and the rule at USB was that only someone at the vice president level or above had the password. I had been relying on Thad Reiner to submit my SARs for me. And finally I asked him, pointblank, ‘Thad, have you been filing all those SARs I sent?’

  “He starts giving me this stuff about needing to see the bigger picture and thinking about the division as a whole. He kept saying, ‘We’re a family here, Mitch. A family. Let’s not rock the boat.’ Which is what he had said to me four years earlier when I first started talking about the lack of KYC material. And I was like, ‘Thad, did you file the damn SARs or not?’ He said he had, but I knew he was lying. At that point, he reminded me I was being very well compensated and lived a very comfortable life. And without actually coming out and threatening it, he made it clear I would lose my job if I pushed this any further. I still went away from that meeting thinking to myself, ‘I don’t care what he says, this boat is about to get rocked.’”