WHAT’S HOLY AND what’s the shit?” Jake asked, putting a hand on Marty’s shoulder as he leaned even closer to the pages.
“Holy shit,” Marty said, looking over his shoulder at the door to the motel room like he expected someone to burst through it.
“You keep saying that,” Casey said.
“These guys are screwed,” Marty said.
“Graham?” Casey said.
Marty shook his head. “His partners.”
“Massimo D’Costa and John Napoli?” Jake asked.
“And all the rest of them,” Marty said.
“How screwed?” Jake asked.
“Like, going to jail for a long time screwed,” Marty said.
“Why?” Casey asked.
Marty looked up and blinked. “They owe the IRS about twenty million dollars.”
“All together?” Casey asked.
“No,” Marty said, “each.”
Jake let out a low whistle.
“Scary thing is,” Marty said, riffling through more of the pages from Casey’s pile, “they might not even know they did anything wrong.”
“Oh, honest crooks,” Jake said, patting Marty and returning to the bag of Chinese, placing it on the table between the piles of papers.
“Kind of,” Marty said.
“I was kidding,” Jake said.
“What do you mean, Marty?” Casey asked.
Marty shrugged and said, “These guys might not have even known. Graham sends the K-1s to their accountants, and active deductions for oil and gas leases are pretty commonplace, but you have be actively involved, actually working at the company to qualify, which these guys aren’t. They’ve just been cashing the checks and not worrying about the taxes. I’m sure their accountants never claimed a dime of income because Graham has been showing them losses equal to the income they’ve received. Everyone’s happy, except the IRS.”
“Why the hell would Graham do it?” Jake asked.
“It’s like a Ponzi scheme,” Marty said. “You get people to invest, start sending them money they think they don’t have to pay taxes on, they tell their friends, and next thing you know, they want in, too. You don’t even have to make money to make the thing work. If people keep investing, you just pay the original partners with the new investment. If no one pays any taxes, there’s a lot left over that you can do all kinds of things with.”
“Like fly around in a Citation X,” Casey said.
“Or give some away to get your face on TV,” Jake said.
“Or buy up other companies for cover,” Marty said. “For all we know, Graham is funding his whole empire on the money these guys are stealing from the IRS. He might be more of a con man than the brilliant businessman you read about in the Wall Street Journal.”
“Why would he keep this?” Casey said, resting her hand on the papers in front of her.
“Blackmail?” Marty said.
“But his partners,” Jake said, “they didn’t really do anything wrong. Graham gave them the statements.”
“Right, but the IRS doesn’t care about that,” Marty said. “I’ve seen it. You don’t pay taxes like this? It’s no one’s fault but your own. It’s your responsibility. These guys would go to jail in a heartbeat.”
“Like Al Capone,” Jake said. “Murder, bootlegging, extortion, but they got him on tax evasion. That’s how they put him away. If the FBI got wind of this gang, they’d be back on them like white on rice, which reminds me, breakthrough or no, I’ve got to eat before I pass out.”
Jake dug into a wax bag of egg rolls and passed them around.
“There’s something else,” Casey said, dipping the end of her roll into a little foam dish of duck sauce.
“Something else, what?” Jake asked.
“This is Graham’s Get Out of Jail Free card,” Casey said.
“How so?”
“You said the FBI is investigating him?” Casey said. “I promise you, whatever they have on him, this would get him out of it.”
“Whatever?”
“This would serve up a dozen or more people with ties to organized crime,” Casey said.
“They’re, like, retired, though, right?” Marty said. “These guys left the dark side.”
“You think the FBI cares?” Casey asked. “These guys dodging them for all those years? FBI agents are like elephants with this stuff. They’d be all over it. If Graham was my client and we offered them John Napoli and his gang? I’d get him total immunity, maybe even a pat on the back from the Justice Department, witness protection, whatever we wanted. Are you kidding? This is Graham’s free pass if anything happens to him.”
“Jake said it’s something worth killing for,” Marty said, “and it is. But if Napoli finds out, Graham won’t be the only one who’d kill for it.”
Jake scowled for a moment before he held his egg roll up in the air as if he were making a toast.
“To blackmail, then,” Jake said, touching his roll to Casey’s and then Marty’s before crunching it in his mouth, “because it works both ways.”