Face Value (22 page)

Chapter Fifty-five

“Get yourself a Hollywood agent, woman.”

That was Benny's reaction when I filled him in upon his return from Bermuda. He'd already heard the public version, of course. We'd made the front page of the
New York Times
and
USA Today
—or, more precisely, Homeland Security had. There was no mention of the three of us during the initial twenty-four-hour news cycle, which featured a forty-two-second video clip of the SWAT team's arrival at Valley Park Airport, complete with helicopters descending onto the tarmac. Filmed on an iPhone by an astonished air traffic controller, it ran hourly on all the cable news networks.

The video was too dark and grainy to identify anyone, which was just fine with me. But the press soon attached us to that evening's events, and as our roles emerged in follow-up stories, I was contacted by two West Coast agents, one claiming to represent an A-list director and the other a major film actress, both interested in story rights—an interest not shared on our end, as I confirmed with Rebecca, Stanley, and Jerry.

“That cell phone call is the perfect touch,” Benny said. “I'm telling you, Hollywood loves that ironic shit.”

And it did feel ironic even when the call came through, despite the fact that I was, to put it mildly, somewhat stressed at the time. After Len Olsen placed the gun on the ground, Rebecca Hamel stepped out from the darkness behind me, her hunting rifle still aimed at Olsen, the red dot now hovering just above the bridge of his nose. Flustered, I had picked up the handgun and stepped back, pulling Yadi with me. Stanley and Jerry appeared from around the far side of the hangar. Jerry was carrying a flashlight, which he clicked on as he lumbered toward us. He swung the beam of light in an arc, illuminating me and then Olsen and then the hangar, where it was apparent that Olsen had been loading the plane when I arrived.

For what seemed like an eternity, the five of us stood silent—me with the handgun at my side, Rebecca with the rifle cocked, Stanley dwarfed at Jerry's side, Jerry pointing the flashlight at Olsen, and Olsen, hands clasped behind his head, looking down, the red laser dot hovering on the top of his head. More than a month has passed since then, but I still wonder what went through Olsen's mind as he stood there, the sirens growing louder, the fluttering morphing into the thrumming of two descending helicopters.

My cell phone rang just after the SWAT team's ground vehicles—a car and a van—screeched to a halt on the tarmac and the helicopters landed. As the vehicle doors burst open and agents charged out in full battle attire—body armor, night-vision goggles, weapons cocked—I answered the phone.

“Yes?”

“Hey, Rachel, it's Bertie. You can relax, kiddo. We got our man!”

“Really? So did we.”

“Huh?”

***

Looking back, I was not surprised to learn that Stanley Plotkin had been several steps ahead of me from the moment Rebecca Hamel told him of the impending arrest of Donald Warner. His immediate response to Rebecca was that Warner had been set up. When she pressed him for an explanation, he told her that Warner's only secret was “a familial matter involving sexual orientation.”

Although Rebecca was dubious, Stanley came to her office alone that evening—a highly unusual thing for Stanley to do—and implored her to join him and Jerry the following evening at the Valley Park Airport. It would be a pure surveillance mission, he told her. No contact with anyone. Reluctantly, she agreed.

She drove them out to the airport around six that night. As Stanley had requested, she brought her loaded rifle, her night-vision laser site, a flashlight, and the handheld dictation machine the firm provided to all attorneys. Their plan had been to keep the Warner & Olsen hangar under surveillance from a safe distance in the darkness. If Len Olsen showed up, as Stanley predicted he would, Rebecca would move far enough away to be able to safely call her Homeland Security contact, who was her father's hunting buddy and someone she'd known for years.

Olsen showed up after sunset, pulling his Mercedes SUV around behind the hangar. He began unloading enough luggage and other materials to confirm his escape plans. But moments after Rebecca returned from her phone call, I showed up with Yadi.

Fortunately, Stanley had planned for that contingency. By the time Yadi started barking at Olsen, they were all in position—Stanley and Jerry against the left outer edge of the hangar, Stanley with the dictation machine turned to Record and Jerry standing protectively at his side, Rebecca in the darkness behind me, her rifle locked and loaded.

“Feel lucky, punk?” Benny had repeated with amused respect. “That wacky little dude is one awesome motherfucker.”

***

The media's obsession with Olsen's arrest saved the cops and the FBI from what would have been embarrassing fallout from their arrest of Donald Warner. As the FBI would confirm during a grilling that lasted into the wee hours of the night in an airport interrogation room, Warner had only the vaguest awareness of Structured Resolutions, having just started seeking answers to the questions that Beth Dayton, the dead hunter's widow, had asked him about the company. Nor did he know about any flight from Detroit to Casablanca—a claim of ignorance confirmed by his luggage, which consisted of a briefcase and a carry-on bag containing one change of clothing. Missing was a passport or anything incriminating. The subsequent investigation would reveal that Len Olsen had used the law firm credit card to purchase tickets for Warner's “trip” to Casablanca.

The FBI finished their interrogation at three-thirty that morning. Ten minutes later, a distraught and exhausted Donald Warner looked up to see two Internal Revenue agents enter the room.

And then came the surprise.

Six questions into their examination Warner started crying. But his were tears of frustration and fatigue, not guilt. He did indeed visit that private backroom at the Steamhouse Saloon on some Thursday nights, and on other Thursdays he met in the Belleville offices of Condor Investment Advisors. And while those trips were indeed linked to his relationship with the openly gay Richie Condor, there was nothing sexual about them. Their relationship had grown out of Condor's romantic involvement with Warner's son, Donald, Jr. Warner's love and total acceptance of his son had trumped the strictures of his religion and political party. Those secret Thursday night meetings were strategy sessions with representatives of the lesbian and gay communities who occupied positions of power within the largely Republican corporate world and viewed Warner as a viable Senatorial candidate who could help advance their cause. By the time the IRS agents concluded their questioning that morning, Warner and Missouri's New Moral Majority were in the clear.

Not so for Olsen. The federal judge denied his request for bail on the ground that he was an obvious and literal flight risk. The federal investigation into the Ponzi scheme was ongoing. An acquaintance at the Justice Department told me that almost all of the victims identified were from three St. Louis country clubs, each of which had allegedly rejected Olsen's membership application years ago. The total amount at risk appeared to exceed $100 million, although they were still trying to trace the funds through a series of offshore and foreign accounts found on the hard drive of Olsen's computer, which he'd stowed in the plane before our confrontation.

Ironically, Tony Manghini gets credit for the first breakthrough. With his typical sarcasm, he told me the day after Olsen's arrest, “Sounds like Robin Hood forgot the second half of his mission statement.” It took me a moment to figure out what he meant, but it wasn't until I was in the shower the following morning that I grasped its significance. I could understand Olsen's desire to get revenge on the St. Louis elites who'd snubbed him, but you couldn't overlook those Robin Hood posters in his office. Barefoot and wrapped in a towel, I called Bertie from my bedroom. If he was stealing from the rich, I explained, then maybe some of that money found its way to the poor via his Sherwood Forest Fund.

Two days later, Bertie triumphantly announced that he was “the damn Sheriff of Nottingham.” He'd passed my suggestion on to the feds, who'd identified contributions to the Sherwood Forest Fund of approximately one million dollars a year for each of the past three years, all via wire transfer from an anonymous donor. The feds tracked those wire transfers back to funds from a Structured Resolutions bank account in Kenya.

Len Olsen wasn't talking to the feds, although apparently his defense lawyers were, perhaps motivated by the fact that Brian Teever and Rob Brenner were definitely talking, both claiming their involvement in the scheme was the result of extortion. My Justice Department source assured me that when the dust settled, whether by verdict or plea bargain, Len Olsen would finally gain admission to a most exclusive club, namely, one of the minimum-security white-collar prison camps known as Club Fed.

The Oxford County hunting fatality case had been reopened, but the evidence was apparently incomplete and afflicted with chain-of-custody issues. Bertie's verdict on that case: DOA.

But he had hope for Sari Bashir's case, which he'd reopened as a possible homicide. The prior autopsy held no clues, and Sari's family had so far refused a request to disinter the body for a second look. Olsen's semi-admissions to me, which Stanley had recorded on the dictation machine, were damaging, but might not rise above reasonable doubt on their own. However, a re-examination of the personal property retained by the police revealed several fingerprints on Sari's purse that matched Olsen's prints, indicating that Olsen had likely tossed her purse off the garage after shoving her off. Again, Olsen wasn't talking, but his lawyers were.

“I'm feeling good about this one,” Bertie told me.

As for the wealthy victims of the scheme, Barry Kudar had commenced a class action against Olsen and his law firm on behalf of the investors in what he described, at a press conference he staged on the courthouse steps, as “the most heinous and despicable financial fraud in the history of our great nation and, possibly, the world.” It was a typical over-the-top Barracuda blast that might even have offended Charles Ponzi, but it did get him onto
CNN
and
Fox News
that night.

Which left, in my view, the real heroes: Tommy, Tony, Jerry, Rebecca, Benny, and, of course, Stanley. I decided we should have a final dinner in Sari's honor. With me, that would make an odd number. I wanted Malikah Bashir there as well, which would bring us back to an even number—and thus Stanley would be able to join us at the table.

I'm sure Benny would have attended anyway, but his enthusiasm blossomed when I told him that Rebecca would be there. As he explained, “She's tall, she's blond, she's hot, and she can kill and field-dress a fucking elk. That girl is the Uber Shiksa, Rachel—every Jewish boy's fantasy come to life.”

I made the arrangements for a Sunday night dinner in a private room at one of my favorite restaurants and worked out the menu with the chef. Although I'd said nothing about attire for the event, I was touched to see that everyone had dressed up for the occasion. The women wore elegant cocktail dresses. Tony Manghini had the lounge lizard vibe going with his shiny black suit, shiny black shirt, shiny black tie, and jewel-encrusted gold cufflinks. Benny was working the professor look: tweed jacket, blue Oxford-cloth shirt, red-and-blue striped bowtie, and, of course, red Jack Purcell basketball shoes. Tommy Flynn's navy blue sports jacket was frayed at the collar and his bright paisley tie was of a width dating back to the 1970s. Jerry Klunger's massive arms and torso were squeezed into a brown sports jacket that looked two sizes too small, and his skinny black tie was obviously a clip-on. Stanley, God bless him, was in his tuxedo.

The meal was great, and everyone was enjoying the evening. As the servers cleared away the dessert plates and refilled the drinks, I tapped a spoon against my water glass a couple of times. The room grew silent. I looked around the table and smiled.

“This is a special night for me,” I said. “And I hope for you, too. As some of you know, a few years ago my husband died in a plane crash.”

I paused.

“I struggled for a long time to find an answer to his death. In the end, all I could do was accept what I'd always feared, which is that there is no answer. It's the way of the world. Bad things happen to good people for no reason, good things happen to bad people for no reason, and there's nothing you can do about it. But it's different here. When evil things happen to good people, you can try to hold the evil-doer accountable. I know it sounds a corny, but I believe in justice. We can never bring Sari back, but we can seek justice for her. That's what we've done here. All of us, working together. We've helped achieve justice.”

I turned to Malikah, whose eyes were red.

I said, “For Sari and for her family, Malikah.”

I gazed again around the table. “You guys were amazing.”

I tilted my wineglass toward Tony and then Tommy. “Both of you took big career risks to help us get access to key documents and information. Thank you.”

Tommy grimaced sheepishly and nodded.

Tony shrugged, grinned, and gestured toward Jerry and Stanley. “Just doing my part for Master Blaster over here.”

I turned toward Benny. “You, too, Benny. You helped pull off the fake donor routine that lured out Len Olsen, and you kept me company on our trip to the East Side.”

Benny chuckled. “Next time you try to lure me to a strip club with the promise of waiters and dancers in sexy red thongs, I'll be sure to do a little due diligence on the question of gender.”

I smiled. “Fair enough.”

I turned toward Rebecca. “You risked your life for Sari, Rebecca. And you saved my life. Truly. You are a brave woman. You deserve your own Medal of Honor.”