Under The Microscope

It wasn’t until the spring of 1989 that it became obvious I was, in fact, a target in the ongoing investigation. After months of delusional wondering and hoping that it wouldn’t happen, the other shoe dropped and the news arrived that I had been named by the rat they caught in Switzerland as one of the distributors and even as something of a principal in the affair. And at that point, the slowest clock of my life began to tick. I’d had some disturbing dreams about what life might be like under the government microscope but nothing in my experience prepared me for the reality.

The smuggler was in a Federal lockup in Rhode Island and wasn’t talking at all. He was held there because they apparently (allegedly) had done a Rhode Island deal in which the rat was a participant. To my best recollection, one of the other players had a heroin habit, got popped and spilled a lot of beans on the operation. The next thing to happen was like a blood-in-the-water shark attack. When the feds seized all the cash at the father-in-law’s house, they knew they had a big thing going. Next, all the ambitious players, (prosecutors, DEA guys, IRS guys, etc.), wanted in on this career-enhancing deal. They really didn’t know exactly what it was they had uncovered, but they knew it was significant and that they had possibly snagged the central player who had put it together. The other set of circling sharks were the quasi-hip criminal defense attorneys and private investigators who had built their fortunes on the misfortunes of the baby boomer underworld.

The ensuing time was like the opposite of your entire life passing before you in the final few moments before death. In this process, the final few moments took years and I had time to reflect on every little nuance and ‘what-if’ a thousand times while the disease crept forward. Denial was still alive and well but it wasn’t based on anything real. I sustained my belief in the certainty that the smuggler would never give me up and most all of the other potential problem witnesses were in the wind. And, from my experience, the investigation would go up the ladder and not down.

After all, we’d paid taxes, declared a lot of income, obeyed all the laws that didn’t relate to the business, and weren’t there a lot of easier targets? Plus, this was, in the end, a financial crime, right? And we paid our taxes... Lots and lots of taxes... Unfortunately, this apparently only served to infuriate one particular investigator. And as the first days, weeks and months passed, I tried to kick back and stay as far out of things as I could. From the summer of 1989 through the winter of 1990, we split time between the mountaintop house, the condo we rented on St. Croix in the Caribbean and our house in Huntington. Paranoia raged and every time I stepped off a plane, I expected to be led away in handcuffs. It was not a very happy time. Except it didn't happen. Again and again, I'd get off a plane and there'd be no welcoming committee. And after a while, I began to wonder if my luck was going to keep me out of the jackpot...

To make matters even more intense, Hurricane Hugo happened in September of 1989, literally blowing the island of St. Croix pretty much off the map. For over 20 years, we vacationed in St. Croix without fail. Some years, we’d spend six weeks there and it became part of who we were. I can’t imagine life without the tropics. We frequently spent weeks at Grapetree Beach Hotel on the east end of the island. It got to the point where we were regarded as locals and it was easy to forget what was going on back in New York when we were there. At this particular juncture, we had rented a condo at Coakley Bay, overlooking Buck Island, a national monument with a spectacular coral reef. It was one sweet place to pass the time and we felt right at home there.

Just A Quick Note...

One of the problems with writing this story is how it might affect the survivors.  Certainly there are scenes in the story that some folks would prefer to forget, or prefer not to remember.  Of course, for those who haven’t survived, it’s less of an issue.

A few years ago, I found a comment on a post asking how I knew ‘Uncle Keith’ and another time someone recalled my friend Scott as a guy ‘who I used to deal grass with’.  Keith is not a survivor and Scott, if he has survived, is in parts unknown.

Recently, I heard from the daughter of someone who, unfortunately, is no longer here, and was deeply moved.  It seems I’ve shined a light into a dark corner that was somewhat kept hidden from her.

It should be no surprise that a lot of what we did back then was done on the low-down and the hush-hush.  However, even those who weren’t participating, clearly knew what we were doing and that we were seriously shattering some laws.

Today, some of the survivors are upstanding civic leaders...  one key player is now a successful lawyer and a young legal assistant even has become a judge.  The prosecutor became a criminal defense attorney.

What began as a way to buy an engagement ring, ended in an entirely different place that noone... absolutely nobody...  could have predicted.  And as I sit here 25 years down the road, my head is filled with stories inside stories about unique adventures in the baby boomer underworld.  And I only hope I have the time to put it all down as best I can remember it.

So to those who would prefer these stories remain untold, I apologize.  In most places, I’ve left names either incomplete or slightly modified.  For those who aren’t in that frame of mind, I hope the stories are entertaining, exciting, and possibly bringing back some fond remembrances.  As for the ghosts, I hope they are all having a big party wherever they are.

The Countdown Continues...

And so it goes...  we successfully complete our mission, and ruminate about how foolish it was to send the stash into space and ultimately into the hands of the feds.  The smuggler is sitting in a federal facility while the investigators investigate and try to put together flowcharts, money-tracking, identity-checking, and all the other ‘connect-the-dot’ items that are necessary before they can file charges.  As the government became aware that the amounts in question were, at the time, unprecedented, the agents all wanted this one chalked up as a win in their personnel files.

They still didn’t know Stu’s real name or much else about him other than what they learned from the original informant.  They quickly realized, however, that they had uncovered a serious smuggling operation and that it had been going on for quite a few years. 

As the events unfolded, though, and the various pieces become known, the case just got juicier and juicier.  Stu’s father-in-law, whose house they raided to seize the bank stash, wasn’t just a civilian.  He was a high-ranking retired naval officer who had won medals of valor and was an outright American military hero from the Korean conflict.  I think he may have won the Medal of Honor but I’m not sure.  One thing I do know is that he was sometimes referred to as the Admiral or the Commander is deference to his rank.  So now the DEA, FBI and the T-guys have to slow down.  They’ve definitely found something illegal, but suddenly, they are in the middle of a process that will end up indicting a celebrated Korean War hero who is pushing 70 years old and never used a drug in his life except alcohol.

Meantime, we’re hunkering down wondering just how bad this situation is for us.  Investigations, while unwanted, don’t necessarily have to end badly for everyone on the flowchart.  Just because you get mentioned doesn’t mean they will have enough evidence to make a case or to even decide you’re worth pursuing.  In fact, as a group, we (the investors), were collectively hanging on to the hope that the government would be engaged in an upward-looking investigation.  After all, why would they want the low level guys like us when they could go after the guys overseas who were doing the exporting...  and the shipping guys...  and the local boaters who were meeting the mother-ships.  Us?  We’re figuring that there are so many of us that it would take a task force to unravel the circle and even then, what would they find?  The deals they were investigating had happened in 1986 and prior.  This was 1988 going into 1989 and they had nothing beyond the rat from overseas and the smuggler...  And they weren’t even sure of who he was. 

Of course, that isn’t to say that we didn’t take measures to obliterate any evidence we could find.  I was an assiduous list-maker and an incorrigibly anal keeper of things.  I kept books in these triple column Chinese ledger books that were bought in Chinatown periodically.  I had dozens of them...  Often using a different one for each deal.

Clearly they had to go.  And while the internet was still just a scientist’s wet dream, there were DOS-based bulletin boards and I did have an IBM PC with floppy drives.  Lotus 123 was a revelation for me.  I could put more information on a single floppy disk than I could put in 20 notebooks...  and the information was sortable, searchable and could be manipulated in a hundred different ways.  You could categorize the product by name, country, quality, price, consistency, color, aroma, and virtually any other element you cared about.  The ledger books had to go.  The lists became digitized and disposed of.  Any possible thing that connected us to the business was identified and made to disappear.  It was a healthy project but one of serious paranoia.  We had pictures of people that had to go.  Our reggae wedding stuff had to be put in deep storage. 

As the weeks turned into months, hope inevitably rose that we were not going to be targeted.  Any business that got done was more of a favor than anything else.  I couldn’t just cut off the income of dozens of friends.  These were working class folks and many of them depended on the supplemental income to live their lives on a day to day basis.  Personally, we were more than comfortable.  Over the course of a few years, we had accumulated a lot of ‘stuff’...  Some of it was definitely from the business, but there were things that weren’t business-related.  There were three houses...  Huntington and Brookville as well as a glorious ski chalet that we built from scratch on a hilltop out in Park City, Utah.  We had bought some vacant land in St. Croix.  Our cars were modest, except for the 1988 white Mustang that rarely left the garage. 

I was driving a Saab 9000 and it was both low key and interesting.  (Never mind that they wanted $800 to replace a dashboard light.)  Also, in some crazy dream, I helped out a buddy and tried to accumulate some abandoned buildings in the Caribbean where we wanted to put together a small tropical shopping mall.  So, by any measure, we were doing just fine, and had built this mini-empire from scratch using PJ’s accountant and an awful lot of cash money. 

The best laid plans...

On Time...

Time.  Time is part of everything we do.  The measurement of it is uniquely human.  A dog may experience time but it’s unlikely to be measured.  Seasons change and behavior runs in cycles but animals are blissfully unaware while people are continually reminded of it.

 

What time is it?  When does my show start?  How old are you?  How fast are you going?  What’s the ETA?  Should I use second day delivery?  When did I get my last haircut?  Is it dinnertime yet?  What time will you be home?  When does the school year end?  When is Happy Hour?  When is that bill due?  What year is that car model?  When does the hockey season begin?  What quarter is this?  Is that the two minute warning?  What was your time in the marathon?  How long does it take to cook a hard-boiled egg and how long before it cools? 

 

Sometimes, it seems ‘like only yesterday’ since we’ve seen someone while years have actually gone by.  When we say ‘slow as molasses’, we’re talking about time, not molasses.  Being consistently late is unacceptable.  But it’s cool when you never appear to be in a hurry.

 

And most working people trade time for money...  What’s the hourly wage?   Is there overtime pay?  How many vacation days per year?  When is the due date?  When is high tide?   When was your last period?  I’m sorry Officer but how fast was I going?  What is my pulse rate?  How long does the music play during Final Jeopardy? 

 

The bottom line of time is that it can only be measured by itself.  You can’t see it or feel it but with altered perception, you can slow it down or speed it up.  You can’t escape it and if you try to, you are just wasting your time.  This is leap year...  but real time will still pass at the same pace.  The first time I smoked pot, time seemed to stand still.  It literally shape-shifted for me and what felt like an hours-long ride home ended when I got in the door and the clock said I was right on time.  This was quite the mystery.  How can time slow down and pass at the same speed simultaneously?  It’s all about perception.  Sanity is being able to distinguish between what we perceive and what we’re expected to perceive. 

 

My first awareness of time was probably when I knew it was dinnertime or time to go to sleep or maybe it was Howdy Doody time.  It took on a different meaning when I started school and discovered the difference between the school year and the summertime.

 

At this point in my life, approaching 70, time seems to be racing like a runaway train on a downhill track, constantly accelerating with no station in sight and with failing brakes that can’t be replaced.  Seasons pass quickly, and today becomes yesterday in the blink of an eye. 

 

So...  where is this going?  Time slows down considerably when you are waiting for the Federal government to decide whether to arrest you or not.  Time becomes the right to a speedy trial if it happens...  and how your charges might fit into the sentencing guidelines...  and, if the worst happens, time served.

A Fair Share...

It immediately becomes clear that I’m going to do this thing...  that it can’t be avoided...  and even if I wanted to, I have no idea how to find Nadamucho.  I’m left with the almighty envelope that has the keys to the kingdom.

This is going to take some planning but whatever happens has to happen quickly.  At the time, my impression was that it was only a matter of time before the Feds got a judge to open these boxes and the vault.  So I get on the horn to Pfeiffer and tell him we have to meet...  that there’s something that needs doing and it’s something only he can do...  And when I tell him it’s something we can’t even talk about from payphones, he’s in his car in Buffalo and driving down to see me within an hour.

About 8 hours later, Pfeiffer shows up and I give him the details.  We figure out that he’ll be driven by my best, most reliable worker in one of the anonymous cars, followed by me in another anonymous car.  That way, if something goes radically wrong, the lawyers are on it immediately instead of Pfeiffer having to beg for his guaranteed phone call while fighting off the DEA, the FBI and God knows who else.  We decide to do it the following day on the presumption that the sooner we do it, the less we think about it...  there’s less of a likelihood we’ll punk out or run into the Feds.

So he spends the night practicing his signatures (there were several names)...  and after a quick discussion at dawn the next morning, we decide to do the closest one first.  It’s the Dime Savings Bank in Melville, NY and it has a huge parking lot that abuts the big local shopping mall.  For me it’s perfect since I can park in the mall lot and monitor the activities outside the bank.  We drive the two anonymous Caprices up to the area...  the plan goes without a hitch.  Pfeiffer, dressed in a sports jacket and business attire, exits his car with his attache, walks to the bank and comes back out 10 gut-wrenching minutes later, gets back in the car and they drive out of the bank lot and we meet at another pre-planned spot at a local diner.  In the lot, Pfeiffer says there was $65k in the box and a few notes.  He’s got it all and we’ve cleared the first step.  Things went so smoothly that they are all for moving on to the next bank before lunch.

The second bank is every bit as easy as the first...  The clerk hardly even looks at him, opens the safety deposit box door, gives him the box and goes back to some paperwork while he empties the box in the small room.  The box had another $60k, an address book and some more notes.  Now it’s not even lunch and we’re sitting on $125k plus a bit of paperwork.

The third spot is the big enchilada...  the ZDC vault and for this one, there is more than a signature required.  There’s a password and a number that must match a record.  We have all the details but paranoia is high...  What if they know Stu?  Will this place look more closely at the signature?  And the location is odd...  The only place to watch from is across a wide boulevard in a store parking lot.  This time, Pfeiffer is in the place for almost a half hour and comes out empty-handed.  He gets into the car and we meet at another pre-selected diner lot.  “I can’t do this place like the others.”  he says.  “This is not a box guys...  It’s a vault and we’re going to need a hand truck to empty it.”  and adds “And the car won’t do.  There’s a lot of gold in there and boxes and boxes of shit.  We need a van!”

So the first thing we realize is that this isn’t going to happen until at least tomorrow.  And we’re all very aware that a bad-ending clock is ticking somewhere.  Naturally, we retire to the stash house du jour, twist up some joints and feed each other’s growing paranoia.  Pfeiffer describes the deal inside the ZDC.  They actually had a very tough-looking guy there who was openly carrying.  They did look at him and he actually fumbled on one of the code elements but in the end, Pfeiffer was Pfeiffer and he demanded access to his vault.  The Pfeiffer lesson there is that brass balls will take you a long way if you are willing to use them.

The next thing I start doing is ticking off who I know that has a van and isn’t afraid to commit felonies.  The list is actually substantial but it doesn’t take long to pick a prime choice.  The keeper of the stash house had an Astro van with a ridiculously heavy duty lock.  It had been broken into several years back and was reinforced to prevent it going forward.  On top of that, the van had a heavy duty suspension and was registered to someone who had died in 1955.  Needless to say, there was also a commercial-grade hand truck that we kept in the back.

Once we settle the van issue, Pfeiffer starts off telling us that there are ‘at least’ a half dozen boxes of cash and that it is way more than anything he’s ever seen in one place.  This in itself was significant because I had personally delivered a half mill to Pfeiffer on a deal and he was no newbie.  Next he talks about a few boxes that he couldn’t lift.  He opened an edge of one and he’s convinced it’s filled with metal.  To boot, there’s another bunch of stuff that seems to be very personal...  family pictures, a high school yearbook, lots and lots of paperwork, a handful of address books...  He thinks it’s going to take more than one trip with the hand truck to get it all out of there.  Next he starts talking about how much he wants for what he’s doing and the conversation starts at 20%.  I’m arguing that it’s way high and the other driver is joining the conversation about what he thinks his role is worth.  We’re all pretty stoned and we’re negotiating something big here.  If the vault has a mill, and we’ve already gotten $125k, 20% is going to be a ton of dough.  If the vault has 2 mill, 20% will be an insane cut.  The driver says he’ll take half of whatever Pfeiffer’s cut becomes.  So now, I’m looking at a 30% attrition and the Astro van isn’t even part of it yet.  He chimes in that he wants the same as the first driver.  It doesn’t take long to convince everyone that we’re all going to make a lot of money here but this was not the time or deal to be greedy on.  We all agreed that if we got hot after the act, we’d keep everything and use it to either hit the road or hire lawyers.  A short while later, Pfeiffer, who is the only one who has actually laid eyes on what’s inside the vault says he’ll make do with 10%.  This means the three of them will clear 20% off the top and the deal is struck.  Amazingly, nobody asks me what I want and I don’t even raise the question.  I know I’m going to be fair but I have no idea what that means.  Fair?  After all, what’s fair when you are robbing banks in order to obstruct justice?

 The next day comes and we set out...  and in the end, it’s just as Pfeiffer predicted...  It takes over an hour, and two trips with the hand truck.  I’m watching from across the boulevard as they load box after box into the back of the van.  I can see at least one box is so heavy it takes both of them to lift and move.  As we pull away, I can only describe the feeling as one of total exhilaration.  We did it...  The boxes and the vault were empty, and nobody was onto us.  My heart was racing as we drove back and I’m trying to get a feel for what I should do now.  Obviously, we have to do an accounting and the guys have to get paid.  But how do I safely get the stuff back into the right hands?  There’s just no way I want to hold the dough.  It takes about five minutes to decide that I need to get it to Stu’s wife.  After all, she’s his family and she’s the one who will be paying his legal bills...  and raising their three children.  I set the thought aside and we set about tallying up the haul.  Personally, I don’t really care how much there is.  I’d rather do a flat sum payout but the guys are adament...  they want the percentage.

So we tote the boxes down the steps to the basement and begin the count.  There’s over 1.5 mill in cash...  plus Maple Leaf coins, American Eagle coins, gold kilo bars, silver...  and incredibly, several thousand tickets to Phantom of the Opera which was a huge hit playing on Broadway.  It turns out, Stu was backing a scalper and holding the tickets as collateral.  He’d release tickets as he was repaid.  We had a good laugh about that, and I actually took a half dozen tickets.  (Great seats!!)  As it turned out, though, and I had no way of knowing it at the time, the real value was in the family pictures, the paperwork, address books, the high school yearbook and the other non-negotiable stuff in the vault.  We actually flipped through about ten address books trying to figure out whether to destroy pages or entire books.  There were long number series that Pfeiffer was sure led to offshore and international bank accounts.  In the end, we left them intact in the belief that they'd be safe.  Once we separated all that stuff out, the boys took their cuts and I went about repatriating the bulk of the cash, metals and show tickets to his wife.  A few days later, I had my top guy deliver the car to her, trunk filled with all the valuables.  Meantime, I put together a few boxes with the paperwork and personal stuff and drove it out to New Jersey.  My long time best friend forever, Gregg, who I went to school with, did the Far Rockaways with, and who got me the opportunity at the Times, wasn’t connected in any way and would never ask a question.  He let me come out, deposit the stuff in his basement and leave without a single question.  He knew I was in deep but never asked for anything in return and never wanted to know what was in those boxes.

You can imagine how I felt a couple days later when I heard the Feds raided her father’s house in Virginia and seized the entire stash.  Oh well...  at least the vault and boxes were empty and the boys had plenty of party money...  We had done the job and the rest was out of our hands.