by Steve Levi
Sandusky started to say something, but Swensen waved him quiet again. “The largest part of our vault is for cash being held for banks. It’s simply storage for the banks. The third storage area is for smaller businesses that need cash on an irregular basis. These businesses don’t feel comfortable having, say, thirty thousand dollars in cash in the grocery store. So they have, say, fifty thousand dollars in storage here. When the business wants thirty thousand dollars, we send it thirty thousand dollars in cash. But . . . but . . . but . . .” Swensen held off Sandusky’s question, “but the money is not listed in bundles by the business. It’s just one big pile, so to speak, and we adjust the paperwork in the files.” Again he pointed to the bank of file cabinets.
“The last area is where we keep privately owned valuables that includes cash. We have some packages deposited here, and we don’t know what’s in them. Some of our customers have packages with cash that we count and give them a receipt for the total amount, but we do not mix their money with any other money, and they are not part of our record-keeping system. That’s because they may want cash on a moment’s notice or are saving up to buy something for cash or for a reason they don’t tell us. We don’t care. Valuables in packages we leave alone. Money in packages that the client wants separate is counted, and they get a receipt. But we don’t mix the money.”
Sandusky nodded his head. “Thanks for the bit of education, John. The . . . our immediate concern is, all the money that should be in the vault is in the vault. The actual numbers can be double-checked later. There’s just the concern as a result of the missing armored car, you know . . . you know . . . cash might have disappeared.”
“It never has before, Harry,” he said. “But,” he looked at the three auditors, “I can see you have a concern. Show me the ID cards for the auditors, and I’ll let them into the vault. But, Harry, you can’t go in without a warrant. You’re not a North Carolina auditor.” As the men reached into their jackets, presumably for identification, Swensen continued. “But we have security procedures here as well. It is unusual for anyone to show up and want to count the cash. So, to be on the safe side, I’m going to have some Sandersonville police officers here. To be on the safe side. It’ll take a while for some officers to get here, so, until then, please feel free to sit in the breakroom,” he pointed toward a doorway in the back of his office, “until they get here.”
Chapter 28
Captain Heinz Noonan, the “Bearded Holmes” of the Sandersonville Police Department, knew he was being played. He had an excellent sense of smell. But this was not the sense that detected the difference between pungent and putrid. It was the ability to detect the miasma of the approaching stench of politics long before the main cloud arrived. That smell was as fragrant as a breeze blowing over an outhouse.
Noonan divided the world into two categories: people of sweat and people of show. People of sweat do the work. People of show grab the glory. Noonan was a person of sweat. He worked alone because that is the way of the people of sweat. Yes, they often worked on teams but most often with other people of sweat. People of show were like circling vultures. They would arrive at the most propitious moment to take full credit for the results produced by the people of sweat. At that pivotal moment, the most dangerous square foot in America was between a person of show and a television camera.
Noonan had been ordered to examine money in a vault. Examine? What exactly did examine mean? A physician examines a patient because the physician knows what he is looking for. A biologist examines a specimen for what he or she expects to find. Noonan did not have the slightest idea what he was supposed to look for, much less what to do about what he found—if he knew what he was looking for in the first place. Then there was the reference to sequestering. You can sequester people, as in jury. You just move the sequestered people into a room by themselves. Or a hotel. But how do you sequester money? Money was, well, money. He could see sequestering counterfeit money as evidence in a trial, but he was not an expert on fake money. Exactly how was he going to know good money from bad?
Topping the fruitless cake was the poisonous frosting: these federal agents. The United States Department of Revenue, Financial Division, part of the FinCEN, Financial Crimes Enforcement Network in Revenue. Who? He was to be guided by these guys? The stench of politics was getting stronger.
Then the stink became overpowering. Noonan was to “use his charm” to get into a secure vault without a warrant to look at money he could not identify to report to some federal agents from an agency he had never heard of—(had Commissioner Lizzard checked to make sure there was such an agency and, Lord forbid, actually checked to make sure the men who said they were agents were, indeed, agents?)—to report what? Yes, I saw money, and it was there?
Jezz Louise and her brother Harold!
Then things got more complicated.
Noonan parked his Dodge Dart with 257,965 miles on the speedometer in the parking lot behind the Swensen Armored Car Company and was surprised to see four Sandersonville Police cruisers in the parking lot. It did not bode well when police cruisers were at the scene.
Yes, Noonan thought, it was going to be a fun-filled day here at the circus.
“You’re late,” the guard said as he looked over Noonan’s identification. “Your buddies are already here and waiting for you.”
“Waiting for me?” Just one more surprise for Noonan this morning.
“Said they were. The whole crew is in the president’s office. They’re waiting for you.”
Dodging the mud puddles and oil patches, Noonan crossed the parking area, passed through the garage, and went down the hall to John Swensen’s office.
As the guard had said, the office was packed. It was wall-to-wall blue. Police blue. Noonan recognized all the officers and spotted Harry Sandusky with three pipsqueaks in black suits who had to be accountants. (Who else dresses like that?) There were also the two Cookie-Cutters from the federal government. The stench of politics was so thick here that Noonan needed a machete to clear the air.
The look on John Swensen’s face was one of unrestrained relief. Noonan looked around the room and said, “What is this? Old Home Week?”
Before Swensen could respond, Sandusky cut into the momentary silence. “North Carolina Mutual Indemnity is pleased you are here, Captain Noonan.”
“Really?” Noonan looked around the room. There was an awkward silence for a moment and then Swensen sliced through the cloud of politics.
“Well, Heinz, we have a situation here, and we need your assistance.”
“Ooookkkk,” said Noonan, stretching out the O and K. “I’m almost afraid to ask why.”
Sandusky started to speak, but Swensen cut him off—again. “In a nutshell, Heinz, these three gentlemen,” he said, pointing to the accountants, “are from the North Carolina Banking Regulation Department or Division or whatever. They want to examine the cash, the actual bills, we have in the vault. I have checked out their credentials, and they do represent the State of North Carolina. But I will not allow them into the vault without extra security. The money in the vault is not ours. It belongs to clients who store it here. So, technically, I am authorizing the state of North Carolina to look at other people’s money. That makes me very nervous.”
He paused and then continued. “What also makes me nervous,” Swensen charged right over one of the Cookie-Cutters who was about to speak, cutting him off. “I’m running this operation, sir.”
Looking back at Noonan, Swensen continued. “There is a problem with a client who has money stored here but is not in the audit system. What that means is the only record we have of the client’s money are receipts we have co-signed with them. But as that money is in the vault, it’s insured. The federal government, represented by these two gentlemen,” he pointed at the Cookie-Cutters, “are from some alphabet soup agency in the Department of the Treasury. They want to know the money from one particular company is actually in the vault. They do not have a warrant to see the money,
but I have no objection if a qualified someone verifies whether the money from the company is in the vault. That’s where you come in. I need a neutral third party to look at the money in question and verify it is there. The North Carolina auditors cannot do it because the company in question is not under its jurisdiction. I will not allow the feds into the vault because they do not have a warrant. But if you, a responsible third party, were to examine the cash in question, it would satisfy the feds.”
“So you want me to go into the vault with the North Carolina auditors and look at some money?”
“Basically, yes. You won’t have to count all of it. You just must look at it and describe it to the feds. It will be on a palette in bundles of bills. You may want to take a few of the bundles of bills and thumb your way through to see if all the bills in the bundle are identical—one-hundred-dollar-bills in a bundle and fifty dollars in another. The feds don’t need to know the exact amount; we have those records. They just want to make sure the said money is actually there. In the vault.”
“OK,” Noonan said, still trying to sort through why the mob of blue was there. “So all of us,” he pointed to the men in blue, “are going into the vault at the same time?”
Swensen laughed. “No, not at all. You and the three auditors will be the only ones in the vault. These police officers,” he swept the wall of blue with a wave of his hand, “are here for security. This is a very unusual situation, and since there will be people I do not know in the vault, I require some extra security.”
“So do I,” snapped Sandusky. Then he added, “That is, so does North Carolina Mutual Indemnity.”
Noonan was silent for a moment. “The immediate question I have is, why. This is an unusual gathering, I grant you. But why are we doing this?”
“I’ll take it from here,” Sandusky cut in. “There’s a missing armored. We don’t know anything about the armored truck except it’s missing. We,” he pointed to himself and the auditors, “want to make sure while law enforcement is focused on finding the armored car, someone isn’t snitching from the vault.”
Noonan said nothing for a long moment. Finally, he said, “I am not here to second-guess law enforcement, banking auditors, or the armored-car company. I am here to help, so, yes, I will go into the vault and verify there is money as described. But I want to make it clear I am not responsible for any conclusions other than what I report. I don’t want someone coming back in a week and saying I should have checked every package on the palette or I didn’t know a counterfeit one-hundred-dollar bill when I saw it or anything else. I am just going into the vault to confirm there is a palette of money in paper form, and I opened, say, five or six packets at random and determined that the contents of those packets were bills in certain denominations.”
“Speaking for FinCEN,” one of the Cookie-Cutters said, “that’s all that’s required for us. Our office just wants confirmation the money is there. The amount can be determined through paperwork not in the vault. We just need visual confirmation the money, the cash, in paper form, is there.”
Noonan looked at the auditors waiting for a response. When it finally became clear he was expecting a response, Noonan was given a lukewarm yeah.
“I want the ‘yeah,’ ‘yes,’ or ‘absolutely’ from all three of you. I am being asked to perform a very unusual task, one that law enforcement does not usually do. I am doing this at your request, let me make clear, and I do not want any hesitation on your part. You are basically asking me to confirm the obvious. So I want a good, solid yes from all three of you.”
He got it.
But it was a reluctant yes.
“I guess that’ll be the best I’m going to get.”
There was not a scintilla of camaraderie in the room.
Noonan had been here before.
The men and women in blue were the people of sweat. They were the ones who had to do the heavy lifting. They were the ones who were going to stand around the armored-car garage like cigar store Indians while three midgets in black suits and yellow dogs were going to count money in bundles that have already been counted, recorded, reported, filed, and audited. It was a meaningless task, and Noonan knew exactly what was going to happen. The three auditors would do a Q&D, “Quick and Dirty,” survey of the cash in the vault—which had already been counted, recorded, reported, filed, and audited—and wait for Noonan to do his own Q&D on the palette of cash.
This was all a cover so Noonan could get into the vault and see if the money that was supposed to be there, cash that had already been counted, recorded, reported but not filed and audited was actually there. It was an exercise in futility. Why? It did not take a genius to figure that out. The money was legal but had to be kept in cash form because it could not be filed and audited. Ergo it was marijuana money, the only legal illegal money in America. And Noonan was being whipsawed between the federal government agents and homeland security just to confirm that the money everyone knew was in the vault was actually in the vault—where it had to be because there was no other place else to store it securely.
This was Act One.
Noonan knew Act Two was coming fast.
He was right.
As the men and women in blue received their assignments, the Cookie-Cutters came over to Noonan. In a confidential tone he was told how important his assignment was, and he was the “eyes of the federal government” and that his confirmation was pivotal “in an ongoing investigation by the Department of the Treasury.”
It was a crock.
Noonan knew it was a crock.
But he was in a political swamp to his knees.
“After I confirm the palette is in the vault, and there is money of an undermined amount on the palette, what are you two going to do?” Noonan asked.
“Well,” said one of the Cookie-Cutters, “the Department,” and he spoke the word department as it were holy, “has a variety of means at its disposal to deal with scofflaws and drug dealers. At the present time we are ordering the money held under this warrant.” He picked up the warrant from the table. “The money is now under the control of the federal government. When it comes time for the money to come out of the vault, there will be an administrative hearing regarding its disposition.”
“So this is drug money?” Noonan kept his face blank. He knew the money was drug money; it had to be. But he kept his tone flat. The Cookie-Cutter had made a mistake by mentioning “drug money.” That was not a thing Noonan could do to fight politics, but he could twist the tiger’s tail when he had the opportunity.
“We didn’t say that,” snapped the other Cookie-Cutter.
Cookie-Cutter one chimed in he didn’t say it was drug money.
Noonan was about to say something when Cookie-Cutter two leaned forward in the tried-and-true-and-practiced motion designed to intimidate.
“There’s a lot going on here way above your pay grade,” he said menacingly. “There are national-security issues to be considered. Just do your job and let us do ours.”
Noonan didn’t let so much as a flicker of annoyance cross his face. He waited a moment and then said, “You know, whenever I take a bath, I have to be very careful how I handle my towel.”
The Cookie-Cutters looked at him and kind of shook their head like cartoon characters on TV who were trying to clear their thoughts from an off-center statement. Noonan didn’t stop talking. He just rambled on as if the Cookie-Cutters were listening to him with rapt attention.
“When I’m standing in the tub, I have to be careful I don’t want to let the bottom of the towel touch the water. If I’m not careful, and the bottom of the towel touches the bathwater, the towel will suck up the bathwater pretty quickly. Suddenly I don’t have a whole dry towel anymore, just the very top of the towel. Not enough to dry myself. Has that ever happened to you?”
The two Cookie-Cutters just looked at Noonan in amazement and then at each other. Finally, one of them said. “Was there a message in there?”
Then the other one said, “
Is this some kind of Banacek old Polish proverb that makes no sense?”
“Who knows?” replied Noonan as he smiled. “It’s been my experience, so it’s easy to overplay your cards. Sometimes you shouldn’t even be in the game.”
This did not sit well with the Cookie-Cutters. Cookie-Cutter one lurched forward for a nose-to-nose conversation. “Listen, old man. We know what we’re doing, and what we are doing is far more important than some empty, missing armored car. You’ve got your instructions. Now get with the program.”
If he had expected Noonan to flinch, he was disappointed. Noonan just smiled. “Not a problem. You just remember the story of the towel.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” said Cookie-Cutter two as he turned away.
Cookie-Cutter one followed, and before Noonan could move, John Swensen was advancing.
“When it rains, it pours,” Swensen said. “As if your day could not get worse—”
Noonan did not let him finish. “Let me guess, it just did.”
“Yup. Before you go into the vault, there are two people I am sure you are just dying to meet.”
Chapter 29
Officially it was day off. Steigle didn’t have scheduled days off. His definition of a day off was when he was not working. The security schedule was erratic. He might be told at noon he was working the next day or, more often, he would get a call between 10:00 p.m. and 7:00 a.m. telling him he was working and to be on deck by 9:00 a.m.
This was an odd week because the Jacksons were still missing. Which left the Swensen Armored Car Company down two drivers, so everyone had to do double duty. Steigle would be driving with no escort because Delgado and John Swensen were going to be driving another armored. Schanche would escort Delgado and John Swensen because there were pickups and deposits. Steigle was just doing pickups and returning them to the garage. No one was going to do check-in for the pickups because the check-in personnel were doing the RMD, LLC run to Ocracoke. John Swensen was going to be with the auditors and Sandusky.
