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...