The Chameleon Conspiracy (3 page)

I was startled for a moment. “$311 million? The amounts in the file don’t even come close to that.”

“Do the math again,” said David. “Eleven known cases—he fared nicely.”

“OK, I’ll look again at the numbers. But what makes them think he’s outside the U.S.? There’s nothing in the file to indicate
that. Or the FBI is holding an ace up their sleeve.”

“The Bureau won’t tell us. So I guess it’s intelligence, not facts or evidence, and you know how zealously they protect their
sources.”

“What do you mean they won’t tell us? Last time I checked we work for the same government.”

“No need to be sarcastic,” said David, trying to calm down my mounting temper, which he knew only too well. David himself
could have a bit of a temper too, but he kept a much tighter lid on his than I did mine. “To the extent that any of it is
grand-jury material, they can’t share it with other sections of the government working on the civil side of the case.”

That’s bull,
I thought. “Well, David, as an attorney for the government I can receive certain grand-jury material for use in performing
my duty. Besides, this case appears to involve bank fraud, so there’s an additional specific language allowing the disclosure.
Let’s chew the fat here.”

I could almost hear David’s silent and subtle smile over the phone.

“You’re right,” he finally agreed.

“And?” I asked hoping to get support here. “Why is U.S. law enforcement extra-interested nowadays in high-dollar cases, even
if stale? Have they just remembered it has an international aspect, and the post–September eleventh public outcry made them
resurrect paper cadavers?”

“Go figure,” he said, joining in my despair.

I kept on pressing, “Unless someone at the FBI simply wanted to get rid of these cases to better his or her statistics, hoping
we won’t cry foul, they’d better tell us what they have,
or they’ll find these cases back on their desk in no time, dead and aging bookworms included.”

“Dan,” said David in his calm voice. “Think about how the Bureau handled the S-and-L cases in the eighties.” I remembered
it well. Neither the Bureau nor federal prosecutors went after the money looted in bank and savings-and-loan frauds. We went
only after perpetrators. The statistics we tracked were numbers indicted and numbers convicted. The government wasn’t going
after the money.

“True enough,” I said. “Back then we never went after the money. But I never understood why.”

“One reason, I’d say,” answered David, “was because going after the money would have required separate civil proceedings.
Decision makers concluded that these would be resource-intensive cases, with little likelihood of recovering anything.”

His point was that the U.S. government had been leaving millions of stolen dollars on the table, and U.S. taxpayers of course
picked up much of the tab. Since that time, however, changes in federal criminal law have allowed us to get restitution, in
criminal prosecutions, of ill-gotten gains resulting from crimes for which we got convictions. I’d been involved in many of
these cases myself.

“But that doesn’t explain why the Bureau waited so long,” I said in frustration, David’s compliment notwithstanding. “Maybe
it landed on the table of this year’s recipient of the phlegmatic agent award?”

“Let me make some calls, and I’ll get back to you,” concluded David.

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, née 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.