Bad Luck Black Money (9 page)

That money gets sent around the world like steel balls in a Japanese pachinko machine, getting washed and vanishing off the financial radar. After it's all said and done, I'm left with a little over three million, untraceable dollars sitting in a brokerage account in Switzerland, owned by one of my shell corporations.

Now, here's the core of my scheme. I bet the whole three million on the foreign currency exchange against a small, Central European country that's been playing fast and loose with their printing presses. They've printed, at least, fifty times the amount of currency that they've reported to the International Monetary Fund.... It wasn't even all that hard to figure out.

I send their finance minister an email, threatening to go public with their corruption. The bastard then sends me an email from his own computer inside the government finance office. He tries to buy my silence with a paltry two hundred thousand dollars.

OK, first off, I'm insulted. A couple of hundred thousand dollars bribe on hundreds of billions in corruption is like slapping me in the face. Not only is this guy a moron, he's a cheap, freaking' moron. At this point, I'd rat him out on principle, even if it wouldn't make me a dime.

So, I forward the evidence I've gathered and the finance minister's email to a reporter at a popular, online news company. He's got twenty-four hours to verify and publish it or I do a worldwide release.... It's on his website within three hours.

My three million dollar bet pays off to the tune of forty million. It should have been around sixty-six million if that scum bucket, art dealer would've paid the agreed upon six million instead of only four million for the painting. But like they say, "if you lie down with dogs, you're going to get fleas."

It was probably for the best to keep the total under fifty million, anyway. Anything over that and the I.M.F. (International Monetary Fund) gets nosy. Not that they could catch me, but it's one less bureaucracy trying to stick its nose into my business.

I wire seven and a half million back into the old guy's bank account. By the way, he's still holding onto life to this very day. Like a pit bull on a preschooler, he just won't let go.

The bank manager gets another quarter million bucks that'll help save his legs for a few more days from the mobsters. He sends the suitcases by courier back to Gaston with six million in U.S. dollars, plus one million in Euros.

Gaston buys the forged "Athens’s Bouquet" back from the pawn pirate-pig for six million. He then packages up the painting and ships it back to me through old-fashioned mail. Then Gaston disappears to re-emerge as 'Renu' on the Spanish Coast. He's probably spending his million Euros on wine, women, and song as we speak."

Standing with his arms folded and not taking his eyes off the paintings, Boss asked, "You have thirty-two point five million dollars in an offshore bank account?"

"No, father. I'm not going to leave that much cash floating around in the banking system, waiting for some pencil pusher to get nosey. And I don't trust American dollars to hold their value in the long run, either.

So, I contracted Thai gold merchants to mint twenty-nine million dollars worth of one ounce, twenty-four karat gold, Santa Claus coins. They were brutal with their commission rate... but you have to pay to play.

I wanted to get the coins out of Thailand and into America. As luck would have it, Sarge Cornwall was taking his annual, two week vacation in Bangkok."

Chapter 11

"Wait a second," Boss said, turning to face Emerald. "Are you telling me that my chief of security, aided and abetted you in this caper?"

Sarge Cornwall was one of the first men, Boss hired to protect him when his wealth started to attract a scary kind of attention. Originally from England, Sarge was a short man with a big, barrel chest and a moustache so thick that it could have been kept as a household pet. He was instrumental in assembling Boss's current security team, which acted more like an elite military force than ordinary bodyguards.

"It's not like that, dad. Sarge had no idea how I'd gotten the gold coins. As far as he knew, it had something to do with your and mom's anniversary.

Shortly after he arrived in Thailand, I had a semi trailer load of plastic, golden, Christmas coins delivered to his suite. I arranged for Sarge to have an entire penthouse floor to himself. The hotel staff wasn't too happy about any of it until I authorized a hundred dollar tip for every hotel employee, if they fully cooperated with Sarge. After that, they couldn't have been more helpful.

At my direction, the gold merchants brought plain, brown boxes filled with real gold coins, which they'd minted for me, to Sarge's hotel suite. Thus fulfilling their contractual obligation. Once delivered, Sarge wasn't to leave the hotel under any circumstances.

Also, I had Christmas colored, cardboard tags printed up that read, "Santa's Gold Coins". The printing company was nice enough to include clear plastic bags, empty cardboard boxes, masking tape, labels, markers, staplers, staples, and other supplies at double the price of anywhere else. The price of convenience, I suppose.

The first thing was for Sarge to fill some clear plastic bags with golden, play coins. He then put Christmas decorations on the bags, and sealed it all shut. Then he gave out a bunch to the maids, who made sure every member of the hotel staff got at least one or two bags of toy coins.

Not many rocket scientists in that group. But if anyone got wise, tried to break in and rob the place, they'd have to deal with Sarge. Since he's a human weapon, like every other member of your security team, they'd be in for the fight of their lives. Plus, I'm certain he had access to all kinds of firepower the local authorities knew nothing about.

The plan was to package one real coin in with nineteen plastic coins. A large number of decoy packages would contain all cheap, gold colored coins. Some entire cardboard boxes would be filled with only toy coin packages. And those boxes were to be

strategically placed in the most likely searched positions when loaded into the shipping container at the Laem Chabang port.

In payment for his services and for his lost vacation time, Sarge was to receive one hundred packages of play coins that contained a real, one ounce, gold coin in each of them. Provided, of course, that the shipment reached here intact. If something went haywire and I had to cut all ties with the gold then Sarge would only receive ten grand cash.

To his credit, Sarge did a great job. The gold was safe from the moment he took possession of it, until he loaded the last box into the shipping container at Laem Chabang. Then it was up to the shipping company to transport it to America.

I had already done three trial runs using the Myjang Shipping Company. I arranged for three shipments of prepackaged, Chinese, plastic, Christmas crap to be sent to the Long Beach port complex. Once it cleared customs, an independent trucker would haul it over to the 'out of business' Shiny Christmas World store on the other side of town about ten miles from here.

The owner of the property gave me a de facto lease on the place, for under the table cash. I've been storing all the shipments of fake coins in the warehouse over there. No doubt, a lot of people have dug through those boxes trying to figure out what's going on. But that's fine. By now, they're bound to be bored with it.... I probably need to give all those toys to charity.

Anyway, I figured with the miniscule amount of containers, which actually get scanned and opened by customs, I had an excellent chance of pulling this off. Even if they opened up my container, they'd still have to find a package with a real coin in it.... Good luck with that.

About two weeks ago, the owner/operator of the trucking company calls one of my disposable cell phones and says that he's on his way to Shiny Christmas World with another shipment. That's the Golden Goose coming home to roost. I get on the phone with Sarge and say, "It’s going down, right now. You know where, be there in twenty."

I rush out the door and take the chauffeured Towncar. My bodyguards jump in on either side of me in the backseat. At this stage, my driver and bodyguards are starting to freak out. They're not in on the deal, and they can sense something big is about to go down. My bodyguard, Homer, had taken out his phone and was about to call you when we drove up to Shiny Christmas World. But then he sees Sarge and relaxes.

Sarge had utilized your security team to track the tractor-trailer from the moment it crossed the county line. There were no vehicles following it, and no aircraft shadowing it from the sky. There was no police chatter on their scanners. It seemed like the plan had gone off without a hitch.

The semi arrived at Shiny Christmas World and backed up to the loading dock. The driver gets out of the truck for someone to sign the delivery confirmation, and then Sarge tactfully walks him away from the truck. The security team descends upon the truck to search it. Then the truck driver wants to call the cops until I slip him five hundred dollars. Money solves all kinds of problems.

Once the trailer was swept for tracking devices, the trucker with Sarge riding shotgun, drove the truck here. With everyone working as a team, we unloaded the truck and took all the boxes up to my room in no time at all. Even the maids helped."

Keeping his poker face intact, Boss asked, "Are you telling me that you've got twenty-nine million dollars worth of gold in your room?"

"Well, the spot price of gold went up so technically I've got more than twenty-nine million in gold. And I paid Sarge his one hundred coins, so I have sixteen thousand two hundred eighty-four gold coins left. And I fully intend on giving a thousand coins to Diamond and a thousand to Ruby when she gets old enough. Wouldn't want her giving them to some teen, pop star to sing at her next slumber party."

Boss started laughing, then laughed harder and louder.

"What's so funny, dad?" asked Emerald with genuine concern etched on his young face.

"Your mother was telling me the other day," said Boss in-between laughs. "That she... that she was tired of your room looking like it belonged to a hoarder, and she was going to hire some guys to haul all of those boxes full of cheap, Chinese junk out to the dump!"

Looking like he'd been punched in the stomach, Emerald asked, "Are you serious?"

"Of course, I'm serious. When have I ever joked about money?"

"Can you help me out, dad?" begged Emerald.

Inside, Boss was jumping for joy that his creepiest kid was asking for his help. "Maybe the boy isn't a stone cold psychopath after all," thought Boss. But then the thought crossed his mind that this might be a setup. The kid was smart enough to figure out some way to stash the coins without any help from anybody. But then again, Emerald was throwing out a life preserver into their stormy relationship, and the only thing he could do was grab on to it.

"You don't even need to ask that, son," said Boss as he walked over to Emerald and gave him a hug. "I'm always here for you."

"I know you are dad," said Emerald hugging his father. "It's just good to hear it, every now and then."

"Here's what we're going to do," Boss said as he walked over to the canvas propped up against the wall and picked it up. "I'm going to clear three vaults in the basement for you kids. I'll let each of you choose your own combination and enter the code into the lock on your vaults. You'll have a big secure space to store your gold and so will your brother and sister."

"Thank you, dad."

"I'm not finished," Boss said, still looking at the fake painting. "You should keep the real gold coins mixed in with the packages with the fake ones. It was a stroke of genius hiding them in the open like that. No reason, to undo all that work.

If a safe cracker were to somehow bypass our security and break into your vault, the sight of all that gold colored plastic might disgust him enough to leave empty handed."

"Good advice, father," said Emerald hesitating. "There is something else, I want to talk about with you about."

"Go ahead, Emerald," Boss said, leaning the painting against the wall, once again. "I'm all ears."

"Well, the thing is... I'm kind of broke," Emerald said. "This whole thing with the gold has tapped out my cash reserves. I haven't got twenty thousand dollars cash to my name."

"Ha," laughed Boss. "Isn't that ironic? You're sitting on a pirate chest full of booty and don't have enough cash to buy a decent, new car."

"Looking back on things, I should have kept at least a portion of the twenty-nine million in cash, instead of converting it all into gold. Its kind of hard to buy a cheeseburger with a gold coin."

"Yeah," chuckled Boss. "I can see your point."

"So, would you like to buy some gold at below the spot price, dad?"

"Don't be silly," scolded Boss. "I'm not going to take any of your spoils of war. You took the risk; you keep the reward. And besides, tens of millions might be a lot of money to the sweat monkeys, but I'm in the billionaire league. Twenty-nine million is chump change to me."

"That may be true, Dad, but I'm still broke."

"I hear you. I'll call Judy at the bank and have her armored truck over a couple hundred thousand for you.... What am I saying? It's your birthday. I'll have her send over a half million in cash."

"Thanks, Dad. You're the best."

"Yeah, well, try to make this last for awhile."

"I will. I've learned my lesson.... But let's say, just for the sake of argument that I did need to convert some of my gold into cash. How would you suggest going about it?"

Boss liked Emerald trying to pick his brain for information. It showed the proper level of respect.

"Son, you should have left the gold in Asia. If you try to convert it to cash in America, you're going to lose half of it to taxes. And besides taking half, the I.R.S. will want to know how you acquired the gold, and you'd better have a good answer.

So now, you've not only lost half your gold coins to taxation, but you have to buy or start a physical gold mining operation and back date everything to at least the prior year. Once it’s all said and done, your twenty-nine million drops down to around eleven million."

"Damn!" interjected Emerald. "Ooops, sorry about the language."

"As long as your mom doesn't hear it, I couldn't care less," said Boss. "What I would do personally, is sneak the coins out of the country on a shrimp boat. The Coast Guard checks way more boats coming in than going out. Once you hit international waters, you're in the clear.

We have a few estates spread out in South America. Pick the one with the least amount of hassle, and you're home free.

It seems odd to tell my own son, how to escape from the "Land of the Free", but that's life. Nothing lasts forever, not even the USA."

"If it's so bad here, then why do we stay?"

Boss had to think about it for a minute, and then said, "America is awash in easy money right now. Once that changes, we're gone. Besides, I don't consider myself an American citizen. I'm a citizen of the world. Let the lemmings fight it out amongst themselves. We'll watch it all burn down from the comfort of one of our private islands, while sipping margaritas. Virgin margaritas in your case....

Emerald, I want you to understand that having a pile of gold is great, but that gold doesn't get out in the world and earn you more money. Gold just sits on its lazy ass and doesn't do anything. The twenty-nine million dollars worth of gold coins will buy the same amount of stuff in a hundred years from now that it'll buy today, but it won't buy anymore."

"I totally get that, Dad. I just wanted to get a little nest egg, something to fall back on, if push comes to shove. I won't get complacent like a fat, lazy housecat."

"Good to hear, son. Many a bright future has been dimmed by too much success, too fast. And I see global dominance in your future, IF you stay the course....

Come down to Pluto Technologies next week. I'd like to see what you could do with your own subsidiary company. I see you running... a hedge fund?"

"Oh, wow, I... I don't know what to say."

"You don't have to say anything. And the second your studies suffer, you're out of there, even if you make us a hundred billion dollars. Understand?"

"Absolutely, you won't regret this."

"I'm sure I won't.... Now, come back to the party and have a piece of cake.... And socialize a little bit, it'll make your mother happy."

Emerald picked up the forged copy of 'Athens’s Bouquet' and said, "I'll be right there. First, I want to hang this on the wall in my room."