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.