The Last Act: A Novel

by Brad Parks

  “And did you?” I asked.

  “Not as quickly as I should have. I was no babe in the woods with all this stuff, but I was in Atlanta. FinCEN is in DC or Virginia or wherever. I couldn’t just knock on their door and be like, ‘Hey, so, my boss is committing this massive fraud, want to come investigate?’ I needed to proceed cautiously. I was looking up whistle-blower laws, trying to find an attorney I could trust who wasn’t connected to USB but who still understood the regulations. Just getting my ducks in a row. And that’s when the FBI swooped in with warrants and raided my house, my office, everything. I was like, ‘What the . . . Wait, guys, you got it all wrong.’

  “But when I tried to tell them what had been going on, they didn’t want to hear it. It wasn’t until I got in a room with them and my lawyer that I understood why. There’s something known in legal circles as a Bank of Nova Scotia subpoena and . . . anyway, not worth going into the details. Point is, Thad ‘found’ a piece of paper that I supposedly left in the trash at work, which is so preposterous that . . . sorry, I keep interrupting myself. Anyway, it contained information that led to an account in Jersey—not the state, the island in the English Channel—that had my name and what looked like my signature, which Reiner had obviously lifted off one of my SARs. It also had more than four million bucks in it, thanks to a wire transfer from an account in the Caymans that was known to be linked to New Colima. The Jersey account had been opened the day after I confronted Thad Reiner.”

  “He was setting you up,” I said.

  “Exactly. And I tried to explain this to the feds, but they mostly wanted to know how a guy who had never claimed a net income above two hundred grand on his taxes had managed to amass this huge fortune. Reiner had told the feds he had confronted me at that meeting with what he termed to be my total lack of KYC oversight. And he told them he suspected I was working with New Colima and was taking a kickback on everything I helped them launder. I kept telling them, ‘But that account’s not mine, I don’t know how it got there.’ Which only made me look more guilty. Finally my lawyer told me to stop talking. The feds weren’t listening anyway.”

  Sitting up a little straighter, I said, “So let me get this straight: Reiner made it look like you were taking payouts from the cartel in exchange for setting up the money-laundering scheme, then looking the other way?”

  “That’s about the size of it, yeah.”

  “But where did Reiner get that kind of money?”

  “From the cartel, of course. I can’t prove this, but he was the one who established that relationship with the casas de cambio. And not only was he getting bonuses because his division was making such nice profits, I’m sure he was getting paid by the cartel. He probably just went to the cartel and said, ‘Hey, we have a problem here, but toss a few million bucks at it and I can make it go away.’ Four million bucks is nothing to New Colima.”

  “And just when you were about to blow the whistle on him, he scapegoated you.”

  “That’s right.”

  “So you’re . . . you’re actually innocent,” I said.

  “Sure am.”

  Gilmartin’s warning—everything your fellow inmates tell you will likely be a lie—was now returning to me with a force not found in nature. I knew I shouldn’t have believed a word Mitch was saying.

  Just like I shouldn’t have bought Bobby Harrison’s line about a five-can buy-in. Or Doc’s whopper about a prescription-forging nurse.

  But what if this really was the truth?

  CHAPTER 36

  It speaks to my torpid mental processor, and my genuine lack of a criminal mind, that I spent the rest of the day wandering around in a daze.

  At poker that night, I was still so distracted, I actually folded before the river on a large pot that I would have won because I didn’t recognize the two hearts in my hand plus the three already on the table made for a flush.

  But slowly, after a good night’s sleep and a solid morning folding laundry, I put things together. In some ways, Mitch’s confession changed nothing. I had been sent to prison to cozy up to a felon. That he was possibly innocent didn’t alter my mission.

  All it had really done was provide more information I could use. Once I got over my surprise and played the whole conversation over in my mind enough times, I arrived at the real takeaway:

  I now knew what he was hiding. It was those four years’ worth of suspicious activity reports and deposit slips. Mitch must have kept copies.

  The deposit slips were the smoking gun. Assuming he kept the originals. They had signatures on them, and I was sure a competent handwriting analyst could prove they had come from the same roughly dozen men, no doubt top players in the New Colima cartel. More important, at least a few of those deposit slips had fingerprints on them. Sure, they were a few years old by now, but I once watched a cold case show where fifty-year-old prints had been used to catch a killer. Once you had a print on one deposit slip, you could match it to the signature, which would then allow you to match it to hundreds of others.

  Put it all together—a documented record of hundreds of fraudulent transactions, involving millions of dollars, with the beyond-a-reasonable-doubt certainty of fingerprints—and you had a package that was a game ender for the cartel and a career maker for any FBI agent and US Attorney who put it all together.

  Now that I understood what I was looking for, I still had to decide what to do about it. I had my usual frustrating Friday afternoon conversation with Amanda, where neither of us could say what was really going on in our lives. I ended the call after just a few minutes, because I wasn’t able to concentrate, and for some reason hearing her say she loved me just made my heart hurt more.

  It wasn’t until after the four P.M. standing count that I managed to get my head fully straight, having figured out how I was going to try to turn this into a win-win-win: a win for me, my bank account, and my future family’s prosperity; a win for the FBI and its efforts to fight a nefarious cartel; and even a win for a man who shouldn’t have been in prison after all.

  And I was going to accomplish all this by telling Mitch the truth.

  Sort of.

  “Hey, you got a second?” I said, intercepting him on his way out of his room after the count.

  “What’s up?”

  “I wanted to talk about something. Not here.”

  “Okay,” he said agreeably. “Where?”

  “Let’s take a predinner walk. I hear that’s good for digestion anyway.”

  “Sure, hang on,” he said. He disappeared back into his room and reemerged zipping up his jacket.

  We strolled out of Randolph, into an afternoon that was seasonably brisk, with a fast-sinking sun, and pointed ourselves toward the jogging path.

  “Been thinking about what you said yesterday morning,” I began. “It seems horribly wrong that you’re here and that Reiner guy has gotten away with everything.”

  “You sound like my wife,” he said. “I keep telling her there’s not much I can do about it now.”

  “What if I could?”

  He stopped walking and jerked his head toward me. “How?”

  Here came my half-truth:

  “I have a friend who works for the FBI,” I said. “I grew up with him. His name is Danny Ruiz. The last time I talked with him, he told me he was working in a unit that handles money laundering. And when you said ‘New Colima,’ it sparked a dead brain cell. I’m pretty sure that’s who he’s been trying to nail.”

  “Jesus. He could be one of the guys who showed up at my house with that search warrant. There were a bunch of them.”

  “Danny is a good guy. He really is. I know you might not believe that given what you’ve been through, but he’s got his heart in the right place and he’s really motivated by some personal things that have happened to him,” I said, thinking of those Kris Langetieg photos. “If I told him about your case
, I bet he’d be really interested in talking to you.”

  Mitch started walking again. I followed.

  “Why would he want to do that?” Mitch asked. “I’m just another convict.”

  That’s when I hit him with: “Because you’re a convict who kept copies of all those SARs and the deposit slips that went with them.”

  This stopped him. Under his jacket, I could tell his breathing had changed.

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Because you keep stats on a prison poker game. Because it’s in a banker’s nature to document things,” I said, echoing some of the first words he ever said to me. “You were dotting your i’s, crossing your t’s, covering your butt. In the back of your mind, you knew it was prudent to save everything you could.”

  “And what if I did?” he asked. He was giving me a look that was as hard as any of the hills that surrounded us.

  “If you turn them over to the FBI, they’ll get your sentence reduced. I bet if you played things right, they’d let you out with time served. They’d probably even pay you for it. From what my friend Danny tells me, you’d be surprised at the amount of money the FBI would be willing to throw at you.”

  He shook head. “I’d never live to spend it. These cartels can get you anywhere. Even in prison. Hell, especially in prison. They probably have a man here already, waiting for the order to slit my throat.”

  “Just give me a chance to talk to my friend Danny,” I said. “At the very least, you could see what kind of deal they’d be willing to offer you.”

  “They already offered me a deal,” he said. “In exchange for giving them documents and admitting I was the mastermind of everything, they’d put my family in witness protection, change my identity, and have me serve a mere four years. They said they couldn’t let someone who had played such a central role and had profited so handsomely get away with less time. It was a joke. And the joke was actually on them in at least a couple of ways. One, they wanted me to testify against my quote-unquote ‘contact’ with the cartel, which would have been impossible, because I didn’t have one. Two, they wanted me to surrender the money in the Jersey account, which I couldn’t do, because I didn’t have the code that went with it. I tried to explain this to them, but they had such tunnel vision, they couldn’t see me as anything but a cartel guy. Oh, and I guess I might as well add joke number three: The cartel would have killed me long before I ever got to testify. Those documents are the only thing keeping me alive.”

  “Look, maybe the deal will improve,” I said. “Some time has passed. They’re coming to grips with the fact that they aren’t going to have anything against New Colima unless they get those documents from you. Danny won’t have the same tunnel vision. He can talk some sense into them. I bet once the cartel members were arrested, they would even turn on Thad Reiner. He’d end up taking your place in here.”

  This brought a grim smile to his face.

  “I wouldn’t let him into the poker game if I were you,” he said.

  “Definitely not. Anyhow, let me talk to Danny. He’s been my friend since kindergarten. He can help you. I’ll tell him he has to get you out of here before you hand over those documents. Same with your wife and kids. The cartel wouldn’t be able to touch any of you. What’s the harm of seeing what they come up with? If it all works out, you’d be out of here by Christmas, taking nice long drives with your family again, probably out west somewhere.”

  He looked in that direction and squinted. A weak autumn sun in the final throes of setting lit his face. I studied those sad eyes of his for some hint of what he was thinking. It wasn’t hard to guess his calculus featured more thoughts about his family’s well-being than his own.

  Beyond that, it was difficult to speculate. If Mitchell Dupree was to be believed, he was an honest, ethical man—with enough personal conviction that not only had he tried to do the right thing, he had stood up to others who didn’t. For all his efforts, he still ended up in prison, professionally disgraced and personally ruined. Along the way, he had surely developed a strong skepticism toward the institutions I was now calling on him to trust with his life.

  And yet the call of freedom, of reuniting with family, had to be just as strong.

  Finally, he allowed: “I guess it couldn’t hurt to see what they have to say.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Without further discussion, we went to dinner. As I shoved some overcooked ham steak into my mouth, I thought about my impending phone call with Danny.

  There was no way I could impart all the information I needed to in code. I had too much to say. I needed to be able to talk normally.

  If a CO happened to be listening, it would be pretty clear Inmate Peter Lenfest Goodrich was not what he seemed to be. If that somehow got out, it could have disastrous consequences.

  Then I thought about the odds. Nine hundred and something guys were each bestowed 300 phone minutes a month. Some inmates didn’t use all their minutes, so let’s say the average was 200. That was still 180,000 total minutes, or three thousand hours of “I love you too” and “How’s the weather in Cincinnati?”

  Even if they had one CO whose only job was monitoring phone calls—and I’m pretty sure the budget-strapped administration at FCI Morgantown didn’t dedicate nearly that much time to the task—that was still less than two hundred hours of listening capacity a month to spread out over those three thousand hours. A one-in-fifteen chance of being overheard. Probably far less.

  So it was still a risk.

  But it was one I felt like I could accept.

  I finished dinner even more hurriedly than usual, then went straight to the Randolph phones and dialed Danny’s cell number. When he picked up, I could hear loud music playing in the background.

  “Hey, where are you?” I asked.

  “Just out with some colleagues, having a Friday afternoon beer. What’s up?”

  “I had an interesting conversation with our friend today.”

  “Oh yeah? What about?”

  “About—”

  I realized I was yelling into the phone. I didn’t want Mitch—or any of my other fellow convicts—to be able to overhear this.

  “Actually, can you go outside?” I asked. “You’re making me feel like I have to scream to be heard.”

  “Yeah, sure. Hang on,” he said.

  I looked around. The hallway was still empty. Most of the guys were at the dining hall. That ham steak was a tough chew.

  The music coming through the earpiece actually got louder before it quieted. Then it was replaced by street noise.

  “This better?” Danny asked.

  “A little,” I said. “So I got some stuff to tell you. And I’m not going to bother with the lottery tickets.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “For starters, our friend admitted he has what I came here for.”

  “Really?” Danny said, now yelling himself. “That’s great!”

  “You were right about what he hung on to. You’ll be able to shut down the whole operation.”

  “Fantastic. Did he give you any hint about where?”

  “Well, hang on, it’s more complicated than that.”

  “Complicated how?”

  “What if I told you our friend is innocent? He didn’t do what he was accused of. He was set up to take the fall by his boss. He was actually going to be a whistle-blower.”

  “Yeah? And you believe that?”

  After all my tortured pondering of that question, the answer came to me quickly.

  “I do, actually,” I said. “What he described seems too elaborate to have been made up. And I’ve gotten to know this guy. He’s . . . Look, I know you might think I’m being a sucker here, but he’s a good guy. He’s . . . he’s a good dad. He doesn’t even cheat at cards when given the chance. He’s got this ethical core to him.�
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  “The people who convicted him didn’t agree. You remember that, right?”

  “I do. I just think he got railroaded.”

  “Okay. Fine. Even if that’s true, it doesn’t change anything.”

  “Maybe it does.”

  “How so?”

  “Because if he’s actually innocent, what I’m about to ask you to do should be a little easier for everyone to swallow.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “I want you to negotiate a deal for him,” I said. “The honest-to-goodness best deal you can. Acting like he’s innocent. Acting like he’s gone to prison for something someone else has done, and you ought to be treating him that way. Can you do that?”

  “That depends. What kind of deal are we talking about?”

  “First, you’ve got to get him off with time served. He shouldn’t have to spend one more day in this place. Then I want you to get him out of here and into witness protection. Like, the kind where they change your name and your face and send you and your family somewhere they can’t possibly be found. And you guys can’t tip your hand in any way that this is happening until he is already out of here. Hell, until both of us are out of here. No filing for extraditions, no indictments, nothing the bad guys would see. This is his life we’re talking about, not to mention the lives of his wife and kids.”

  “Right, of course.”

  “Then offer him enough money so he can’t say no.”

  “How much?”

  “I don’t know. But dig deep.”

  “Okay,” Danny said. “And if I can arrange all this, do you have his assurance he’ll take the deal?”

  “Not yet.”

  “But he was interested?”

  “He was. Look, if you want what he has, you’re going to have to think big picture here.”

  “I hear you. Let me run this up the flagpole. Call me back at noon tomorrow.”

  “I will,” I said.

  Then I hung up, hoping we were the only ones who had heard the conversation.