Getting David’s help was the easy part. I had been working for him long enough to know he accepted reasoned arguments and never dug in his heels in a position proven wrong. But people change when they see retirement coming up. And in any case, David would still need to crack some bureaucratic walls. If you spend enough time in Washington, you know that sometimes it’d be easier to get a date with a reigning Miss America than to move things faster between government agencies. For sure, I knew that I had to get a breakthrough before David retired. With his clout and experience, he could back me up on almost anything. But when a new chief comes, things could be different, for better or-more likely-for worse, just because he’d be new on the job.
A week later I went to Washington for a routine staff meeting. After the pep talk, David asked me to stay.
“I thought it over and made some inquiries,” said David. “The bottom line is that the FBI did have a reason to send us these files. But before we go over them, let me call in Bob Holliday. He’s my new deputy.”
“Who is he?”
“He’s a Department of Justice veteran with many years of successful commercial-litigation experience, but with no international exposure. I hope you’ll help him get acquainted with your work.”
Bob Holliday had wide shoulders, smart brown eyes, and a thick mustache, and appeared to be in his early fifties. We shook hands when he walked into the office.
“Dan,” said David, “I concluded that the Bureau has already found common points. All of the names used during the scams were of white American males who one: were born within a few years of one another, but had no apparent connections among them; two: had obtained passports also within a few years of one another; three: left the U.S. and then disappeared; four: resurfaced years later just long enough to scam banks for millions with a reasonably consistent modus operandi-for example, never a bank insider, so never named on a list of persons barred from employment in financial institutions, but gets bank insiders to provide investor victims-and five: disappeared again without a trace.”
“I see,” I said with a mild tone of sarcasm. “What do we have here twenty years later?-millions gone, multiple names, one scam each, consistent MO, no investigative direction.”
David smiled, and turned to Bob. “What do you think?”
Bob Holliday wasted no time in getting to the Bureau’s motives. “At this point the Bureau sensibly concludes that it could spend scads of resources on these dogs and still come up with nothing re terrorist financing or anything else. Wanting at least to improve its statistical picture, and with money plus an international link such as the use of passports, albeit tenuous in the extreme, the Bureau thinks of David and off-loads eleven open cases. David thinks of you. Voila!”
Bob Holliday sounded as if he knew what he was talking about. Normally I didn’t like it when someone came across as too self-assured, but I didn’t mind it with Bob. He managed not to let confidence slide into arrogance the way a lot of people do.
He continued. “The Bureau came up with these cases when trying to look for terrorist financing where they’d never looked before. But it hit a dead end with them domestically.”
“But why just now?” I queried. “And where is the international connection? Just the passports?”
“I know that the international angles are questionable,” conceded David. “All I’m going to tell you is that the dollar amounts in these scams are so high, and it’s so common for proceeds of large scams to leave the U.S., that it seemed worth our taking them on, at least preliminarily. I don’t want to tell you any more about the Bureau’s analysis, because I want you to take a completely fresh look at them. I’m interested in whether you see something in them that others haven’t.”
I returned to my office in New York and sat motionless behind my desk looking at the files, going back over each of the eleven cases. Were there eleven perpetrators, or just one with many aliases? There were conflicting assumptions in the FBI reports. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one confused.
I read each and every bit of testimony of the victims, the bank managers, and the landlords. Their descriptions of each perpetrator were very similar, except for one person who recalled the con man speaking with a slight accent. I was intrigued by this detail and pulled out the FBI FD-302 interview report from the file. Louis B. Romano, of 45-87 West Street, Gary, Indiana, was interviewed at his home by an FBI special agent. I looked up Romano’s number and dialed.
An elderly woman answered. “I’m sorry,” she said when I asked for Romano. “My husband passed away two years ago. Is there something I could help you with?”
I hesitated. “Well, ma’am, I’m sorry for your loss,” I said. “I’m Dan Gordon, an investigative attorney with the Justice Department. Your late husband was interviewed a few years ago about one of your tenants, and I wanted to ask him a few more questions.”
“Who was the tenant? Maybe I could help you. We’ve got only two rental apartments, and I remember most of our tenants.”
“The tenant was Marshall Stuart Lennox. Ring a bell?”
“Of course I remember him.” She paused. “If you don’t mind me saying, I never really liked the guy.”
“Why?”
“He was a real oddball. Never opened his mail.”
“How’d you know?”
“I saw unopened envelopes in the garbage bin a few times. Back then, we were living in an apartment we own in the same building. And I never saw him use his mailbox to leave letters for the mailman to collect.” She let it sink in. “He also installed a telephone line under a different name.”
“And how did you come across that?”
“After he left, a bill came to that address with a strange name on it. I opened it, and the telephone number was the same as Lennox’s. I have no idea why he did it, but he never left a forwarding address-just took off.”
I sat up in my chair. “Do you still have that phone bill?”
“Nope, I threw it out ages ago. The charge was for, like, $6, so I guess the phone company just wrote it off.”
“So what name did he use for the bill?” I asked, trying to keep too much interest out of my voice.
She sighed. “It’s been forever-I really couldn’t tell you. But I think it was just a regular American name, nothing special. You know, Jones, Brown, Evans.”
“Your husband mentioned that Lennox had an accent. Did you notice that too?”
“No, but Louis was always the one who dealt with him. I know he had one, though. Louis used to teach drama and English, so he always did notice accents. I did hear about it. Louis liked to identify people’s origin and background by listening to them talking. After listening to a person’s dialect, Louis could tell where the person grew up, and sometimes how educated he was. He loved doing that.”
“Did he discuss Lennox’s accent with you, or just mention it?”
“Well, he said Lennox definitely didn’t grow up in Wisconsin, which is what he told us.”
“What made him say that?”
“Louis used to go every summer to Wisconsin to teach drama to local kids in a summer camp. He could do that accent really well. So, one day he mentioned to Lennox that he’d been teaching in Oconomowoc, in the lake country. Lennox tried to change the subject, and he mispronounced Oconomowoc. Then Louis made a joke about people from Wisconsin saying ‘cripes’ a lot, but Lennox didn’t seem to get it either. Louis thought it was really weird. But I told him, ‘What do we know? Maybe Lennox left Wisconsin when he was young. Anyway,’ I said, ‘why should we care? He pays rent on time and doesn’t damage our property.’ ”
It wasn’t much, but was at least something. “Did your husband continue to be suspicious of Lennox?”
She thought for a moment. “I don’t know if I’d call it suspicious. He was just a little uneasy about him. He thought maybe Lennox had made it all up-had this crazy idea that maybe he was on the run from the police. Anyway, I don’t know if it’s important, but Louis said something once about how Lennox stretched his a ’s and h ’s.”
“What, like a Southern drawl?”
“No, not like any American accent he knew. He’d taught speech for years, so Louis really knew his accents. Once he said he was sure that Lennox wasn’t even American. But you know, that was before nine eleven. What did we know?” That was an attention-grabbing remark. I picked up on that.
“Why do you mention nine eleven?”
“Well, you know…” She sounded reluctant to pursue the point. “He had sort of dark skin. Not like he was black or Latino. Just a little darker than your typical Wisconsin dairy farmer, I guess, who’s as white as his cows’ milk.”
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, nee 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.