Two Jakes (18 page)

CHAPTER
21 – NO EXAGGERATION

Scarne
woke early the next morning, stiff from the previous day’s workout and from
falling asleep on the couch reading more newsletters. He changed into shorts
and a sweatshirt and headed to the beach, where he began jogging north near the
waterline to take advantage of the harder sand. After a half hour the stiffness
abated and he cut through a public park and began walking back along Collins
Avenue. He resisted the smells emanating from the many restaurants along the
way as long as he could and then popped into a small Cuban coffee shop for a
delicious breakfast of tostada, ham croquetas and a café con leche. When he got
back to the apartment, his cell phone was beeping. There was a message from Don
Tierney: “Call me.”

“How
bad is it?” he asked the lawyer when he got him on the phone.

“Did
you really kidnap the Lindberg baby?”

It
seemed that the state licensing board was pulling every case Scarne ever worked
and was reexamining every piece of regulatory paperwork he ever filed. Randolph
had probably called Councilman Gruber after the incident on the yacht.

“Can
you stall them?”

“Sure.
And I can probably take the death penalty off the table. But not forever. You
have pissed off a very powerful man. You know what they say about picking a
fight with someone who buys printing ink by the barrel. Can you tell me what
this is all about?”

Scarne
did.

“I
take it back about the death penalty.”

***

Ballantrae’s
Miami headquarters was in a high-rise on the northern end of Brickell Avenue
just short of downtown. It was set among a score of modern buildings that were
redefining Miami as a center of international commerce and finance. Even among
all the glass, aluminum and angular architecture the office tower stood out,
with what appeared to be a large rectangular hole in its middle about a third
of the way up its 40 stories. The gap was three floors high and wide enough for
a helicopter to fly through. Circular red stairways inside the gap led to
floors above, and Scarne could see large palm trees swaying inside the
structure, perhaps an interior courtyard. He assumed that people at the same
level in buildings across the street could see right through to the bay. The
visual effect would be unique. But not a place to be caught in a hurricane,
which would turn the void into a wind tunnel.

After
parking his car in a nearby lot, Scarne walked back to the building, where
workmen were placing a large bronze plaque over a name chiseled in the side of
the building. The old name was “Biscayne Bank & Trust.” The name on the
plaque was “Ballantrae International.” He walked into the lobby.

“Can
I help you?”

The
girl behind the reception desk was another Cuban stunner. He was beginning to
think Miami was just a huge set for a
Stepford Secretary
movie.

“I
would like to see Mr. Ballantrae.”

“Do
you have an appointment?”

“No,
I’m afraid not.”

Scarne
sized up the look he got. Charm was out. He decided on bluster.

“I’m
investigating a possible homicide,” he said, opening his wallet and flashing
his investigator’s license, which he hoped the kid would be too flustered to
scan closely. It worked. She hardly glanced at his “credentials” before the
wallet snapped shut. Eyes widened, she stammered something unintelligible,
dialed an extension and began speaking rapidly in Spanish. There was a moment’s
silence. Then the girl straightened her back. She looked confused, then
chagrined. Scarne guessed that someone else had come on the line and was
reading her the riot act. She turned to him, hand over the receiver.

“I’m
sorry sir. What did you say your name was?”

“I
didn’t. It’s Scarne.” He pointedly looked at his watch.

“Detective
Scarne,” she said into the phone.

She
listened for a moment, then put the phone down gingerly. She tried a brave
smile, which came up a few watts short.

“If
you will take the elevator up to the 18
^th
floor, Miss Loeb will meet
you.”

***

When
the elevator opened, Scarne just stood there. Sheldon and Emma Shields had not
exaggerated Alana Loeb’s beauty. Then the door started to close and she put out
her hand to break the electronic eye.

“This
is the right floor, Mr. Scarne,” she said, “unless you are looking for ladies
lingerie or home furnishings.” Not “Detective” Scarne.

Scarne
stepped out and took her hand. It was warm to his touch, and dry.

“I’m
Alana Loeb, and you are not a police officer. Why the subterfuge? Isn’t it
illegal to impersonate a real law officer?”

She
smiled sadly. It was a look he recalled from grammar school when his excuse for
not doing his homework fell on a nun’s practiced ears.

“I
didn’t have an appointment. Just happened to be in the neighborhood and took a
shot. I never said I was a cop. What the hell? Got me this far, so I guess it
was worth it. Why it got me this far is the question.”

“The
word ‘homicide’ tends to open doors. Even then, when I realized who you were, I
almost told that silly girl to send you away.”

“Why
didn’t you?”

“What
the hell?” Her smile was radiant. “Took a shot.”

“I’m
glad you did. I would have had to try my ‘building inspector’ routine on her.
And that’s usually beneath me.”

“How
does that one work?”

She
gestured for him to walk with her down the hall.

“I
would have said that there is a big hole in the building and it’s unsafe. You
do have several floors missing. I hope you didn’t overpay.”

Alana
Loeb laughed. It was a good laugh, deep and throaty.

“It
would have worked with that one. She’s won’t be there long.”

“Listen,
I didn’t want to get the kid in trouble.”

“Don’t
worry. We won’t fire her. She was hired as an office assistant. We had to plug
her in down there until we recruit more people. Soon as we do, she’ll come back
upstairs. Besides, I was young and dumb once, too.”

“I
doubt that.”

They
came to the end of the hallway and Scarne heard hammering.

“My
office is that way.” She pointed down a corridor where workmen were laying
carpet. “We’ll be better off in one of the smaller conference rooms. Watch your
step. We’re still doing a lot of work.”

He
followed her. Electricians and painters seemed to be everywhere. If the
conference room was meant to impress, it succeeded admirably, with plush
carpeting, heavy, dark wood furniture, deep-backed chair and a wonderful vista
of Biscayne Bay.

“Nice
view.”

“Yes,
isn’t it?” She waved him over to a large leather L-shaped couch in the middle
of the room. She sat down on the shorter part of the “L” and crossed her
wonderful legs and turned to face him when he sat at the other end. Scarne,
concentrating on the beautiful woman sitting near him, didn’t notice the small
red light blink on in the “security camera” recessed in a bookcase on the
opposite wall.

Alana
Loeb was not a classic beauty, not that any man – or woman – noticed. Like many
women with a commanding presence, she gave the impression of being taller than
she was. She was thin without being scrawny and even her conservatively-cut
business suit could not hide her figure. Blonde hair was cut short and framed
her face. It looked natural and Scarne had a thought that would have been
common to any heterosexual male on the planet: he wanted an opportunity to find
out. Her skin tone spoke to a life comfortable with the outdoors. She wore
little makeup and obviously didn’t feel the need to camouflage the few small
freckles that framed her nose and made her look younger than the woman in her
mid-to-late 30’s that Scarne assumed her to be. She had a full mouth. But it
was her grey eyes that made her face. Widely set and almond shape, they had a
slightly oriental cast. She had a habit of ducking her head and looking up at
an angle when she spoke.

“Can
I get you anything,” she said, motioning to a phone on the small table in front
of them. She did everything slowly, without wasted movement. “The lunch room is
still a work in progress, but we have a coffee machine. Miami runs on coffee.
It was the first thing we brought into the building.”

Her
voice had a pleasing, dulcet timber, with almost perfect English diction. There
was the vaguest trace of an accent but Scarne had no clue what it was. She
spoke softly but he had no trouble hearing her. Nor did the microphones that
she knew were hidden strategically throughout the room. Every word of their
conversation would be recorded.

***

“Coffee
would be nice,” Scarne said.

The
volume was too low. In his office Victor Ballantrae adjusted the sound on the
display. Alana had positioned Scarne perfectly on the couch and Ballantrae felt
a twinge of jealousy as he caught him looking at her legs. Too bad this wasn’t
the movies. I could just push a button and the nosy private eye would be
electrocuted where he sat and his corpse would slide down a chute, leaving
behind a puff of smoke and charred upholstery.

Ballantrae
smiled grimly. Given Alana Loeb’s capabilities the poor bastard might be better
off in the long run.

CHAPTER
22 – VICTOR BALLANTRAE

Victor
Ballantrae was a big man, broad across the shoulders. Well-tailored suits hid a
midsection growing paunchier as he got richer. An Aboriginal grandmother
accounted for some darkness of complexion; a passion for golf, the rest. His
thick reddish brown hair tended to curliness. A trim beard framed a roguish
face dominated by a prominent nose laced with early signs of rosacea. A not
unpleasant visage given a piratical cast by the misshapen corner of his right
eye, the result of a bar fight in which a sheepherder used a bottle of Fosters
before Ballantrae beat him to within an inch of his life. He refused plastic
surgery and his eyelid drooped when he was stressed.

Ballantrae’s
family tree could be traced directly back to one of the 19
^th
Century
prison ships that disgorged in Australia the refuse of London when Mother
England decided to solve the problem of its overcrowded gaols and poorhouses.
But no further back than that, as a young Victor discovered in a rare moment of
retrospection when attempting some genealogical research. His antecedents in
England were either so poor or so criminal there was no record of them prior to
the entry of a “George Ballantrae” in the ship’s manifest. The fact that George
was arrested shortly after stepping ashore for picking the pockets of people
who had nothing in them at least had the effect of getting the Ballantrae name
on paper and Victor was able to trace the family’s subsequent misdeeds. For
unlike most of the poor wretches who became solid citizens after being dumped
Down Under the Ballantrae apples never fell from the diseased tree. George was
the primogenitor of a long line of horse thieves, con artists and embezzlers
before he was hanged an overdue 10 years after setting foot on Australian soil.

Victor
was not even sure “Ballantrae” was the man’s real name. The entry for a George
Ballantrae on the manifest was followed by a note that said, “Died at sea.”
Either the record keeping on prison ships left something to be desired or
George appropriated the name of a dead man. And since there were many ways for
someone to have “died at sea” it was possible that he’d had something to do
with the demise of the old “George.”

The
Ballantrae corporate history and personal biography was a mix of half truths
and outright fabrications that the American financial press swallowed whole.
After emigrating to America well-financed by his offshore activities in the
Pacific, Ballantrae made more millions buying and selling Canadian oil and gas
leases, many of dubious provenances. He soon realized that with deregulation of
the American securities markets some of his more worthless holdings could be
cut up into tiny pieces and sold as limited partnerships. The partnerships were
always structured so that a few producing wells could generate enough returns
to lure in subsequent investors and even provide the semblance of an
aftermarket.

This
aftermarket came in handy when, against all odds, drillers actually hit an oil
or gas pocket, or because a spike in energy prices made marginal holes
profitable. Then Ballantrae, through third parties, bought back those
properties, which ended up in his portfolio. Many of his limited partnership
shares were marketed by “respectable” Wall Street firms through sales
departments whose due diligence never went further than their hefty
commissions.

Ballantrae’s
Wall Street contacts proved useful for his next scheme, “La Vuelta,” a Spanish
word meaning “The Return.” It had its origin in a quasi-legitimate arbitrage
business started after Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez refused to pay off
certain creditors of Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) who had backed a crippling
strike against the state-owned oil company in an effort to destabilize his
regime. Some local businessmen arranged to buy up the unpaid debt at 10 cents
on the dollar. Using corrupted PDVSA officials, the business group managed to
get full payment on the debts behind Chavez’s back. The businessmen soon ran
out of their own capital, but loath to lose an investment stream returning 90%
they cast about for new funds. They had little trouble attracting investors
locally, who were promised
monthly
returns of up to 20%. Word of mouth
about this incredible investment opportunity spread throughout families to the
United States, creating a frenzy among South American expatriates in Florida
and Louisiana.

Enter
Victor Ballantrae, who knew a burgeoning Ponzi when he saw one. He created a
financial subsidiary that sold interests in La Vuelta to thousands of South
Americans living in the United States. For a time, this new influx of cash kept
the scheme going and old investors indeed reaped good returns generated both by
the initial 90% arbitrage and dollars provided by new investors. Given the
underlying cash flow from PDVSA it might have worked for years. Then Hugo
Chavez caught on to the duplicity within PDVSA, had the corrupt conspirators
arrested and cut off all dollar payments to the creditors. (“Fucking Communist
bastard,” Victor raged.) Ballantrae continued to sell interests as long as he
could find suckers – he knew that the S.E.C. could care less about South
Americans getting ripped off in Venezuela – but without government petroleum
funds the fraud soon fell of its own weight.

Most
of Ballantrae’s clients lost everything, but since the majority had invested
less than $100,000 (each interest sold for “only” $25,000) there were few
lawsuits. It was just too expensive to take on Ballantrae’s legal legions. But
a few large investors with millions at stake did bring suit. Alana Loeb was
able to clean up the mess with hefty payouts tied to confidentiality
agreements. Only one investor, a former general with ties to right-wing death
squads in Ecuador and a penchant for vengeance, wouldn’t be bought off. He sent
Jesús Garza, who was then making a name for himself as a hired “negotiator” in
Miami, to collect all his money from Ballantrae, with interest.

“The
general doesn’t believe in lawyers,” Garza told Alana Loeb at their first
meeting. “He’s prepared to be very unreasonable.”

She
looked at the swarthy man who relayed this message so calmly and saw the
killer. She knew such men from “before.” He wasn’t going away.

“Let
me see what I can do.”

She
found out all she could about Garza and went to Ballantrae.

“For
Christ sake, Alana, that’s a lot of money.”

“It
will pay dividends down the road, Victor. Trust me on this.”

She
called Garza and met him for mojitos at the bar in the Fontainebleau.

“You
can have $250,000.”

“He
wants his million, plus interest,” Garza said, smiling. “Abróchense los
cinturones, senorita.”
Fasten your
seatbelt.
He started to rise from his chair.

Alana
put her hand on his arm.

“I
said
you
can have $250,000.” She paused “A year. Plus bonuses.”

The
police said the explosion on the general’s yacht was likely caused by a leaky
fuel pump. No bodies were recovered. Many in Miami’s expat community assumed
that a vengeful Ecuadorian family caught up with him.

A
year later, Garza brought Keitel into the firm. There was more than enough for
them to do, as scam begat scam. Victor Ballantrae was at heart a con man.
Nothing intrigued him more than a good Ponzi scheme. Alana Loeb, on the other
hand, was a financial genius. She came up with the idea that there was a lot
more money to be made in Venezuela – this time with Hugo Chavez’s unwitting
help.

In
the early 1980’s, a Venezuelan agricultural development bank, Banco de
Desarollo Agropecuario, better known as Bandagro, went bankrupt, leaving
creditors holding zero-coupon bonds with a face value of $800 million. Few
investors went near the bonds until 2003, when Chavez said that the country
would honor the bonds when they reached maturity. Neither he, nor the investors
who now snapped up the Bandagro bonds, knew that they were sophisticated
forgeries, part of a brilliant scheme engineered by a group of Panamanian con
men. Bandagro had intended to issue the bonds as part of a last-ditch effort at
solvency, but the bank’s scrupulous treasurer, knowing the bank was going under
in any event, refused to sign them. But
someone
signed his name, and
many people bought them in good faith.

Ballantrae,
through his connections from his first Venezuelan scam, knew the bonds were
forged. (Indeed, the forger now worked in one of his companies; good men being
hard to find.) Ballantrae and Alana Loeb created a hedge fund and sold tens of
millions of dollars worth of the Bandagro bonds short. When the time was right,
they provided, through intermediaries, proof of the forgeries to the government
and leaked the news to the press. As expected, Chavez reversed himself and
renounced the obligation, making the bonds worthless. Ballantrae’s hedge fund
closed out its positions for pennies per bond, reaping obscene profits.
(“Always liked that Chavez bastard,” Victor said. “Salt of the earth.”)

The
scheme made so much money that Ballantrae was forced to hide it by expanding
rapidly in investment services and other businesses in the United States, where
decades of deregulation and regulatory shrugs made any sort of financial
enterprise appear to be legitimate. He had discovered that the only thing safer
than breaking the financial laws in third-world countries was doing it in a
country whose citizens naively assumed that their Government was watching out
for them.

But Ballantrae
was always looking for new sources of revenue. The offshore bank in Antigua
proved useful in laundering money for powerful criminal elements on the West
Coast of the United States.

Unfortunately,
against Alana’s advice he had taken some risks and the relationship with those
elements had recently soured, which was why the
South Florida Times
story had to be stopped in its tracks. It might have brought their West Coast
problem to a head. Of course, had they known the reporter’s real identity, they
might have taken a different approach. Of all the rotten luck!

But
that was spilled milk. Now it was even more important that Sheldon Shields and
his annoying private investigator be derailed. Garza’s trip to Seattle had
presumably bought some more time. In a month or two the bank funds would be
replaced and he’d have a powerful minority interest in one of the world’s
largest media empires.

He’d
be untouchable then. Especially since he didn’t plan on being just a minority
owner forever.