House Justice (6 page)

He and his cousin Gene started Taylor & Taylor in Gene’s basement. They worked twenty-hour days, took speed to keep going, and pot to come back down. Their initial interest was in games and they thought they might be the next Nintendo or Atari, but somehow they vectored from the games themselves into gaming peripherals—mouses, joysticks, virtual-reality gaming gloves—all those computer control devices that let you maneuver the gun-toting, bloodthirsty, animated maniacs in the games. The funny thing was, the military actually approached
them
; it had never occurred to him and Gene that there could be a military application for their work.

The modern soldier was raised playing computer games, and the technologies they were developing could be used for controlling things like Predator drones, mine-detection robots, and the navy’s unmanned, deep-dive recovery vessels. And somehow they beat out the giants like Northrop Grumman and Raytheon and got a lock on a megabucks Pentagon contract, and when they expanded into missile guidance systems they got an even bigger chunk of the military market. They’d been magic back then, and when they took the company public they made a ton of money—an
obscene
amount of money.

They set up Taylor & Taylor similar to Microsoft and the other big outfits, although they were nowhere as big as Microsoft. A board
of directors was formed with a bunch of wise old heads, guys who’d retired from Intel, the military, JPMorgan Chase, places like that. Gene became chairman of the board and CEO of the company. Marty’s title was chief technical officer, which really meant that he could continue to do what he’d always done—dink around with the geeks and develop new gadgets—and he really didn’t have anything to do with running the business.

Things went great for almost ten years—and then Gene goes and kills himself in a freak scuba-diving accident. Following his cousin’s death, Marty, being one of the company’s founders and its largest shareholder, became chairman of the board—a job he knew he was in no way equipped to handle. He didn’t have Gene’s business skills and the last thing he wanted to do was worry about the financial shit, which he didn’t understand and which bored him to tears. So the board hired a CEO away from Coca-Cola, a guy that was a hot-shit in the business world—but the soda guy turned out to be a disaster. He was a control freak who couldn’t relate to the geeks and the free-for-all attitude that existed in cutting-edge technical companies and he drove off half the talent. When the company’s stock started to fall like a wingless jet, the board fired the soda guy and got another CEO: Andrew Bollinger. Bollinger was supposed to be a wizard when it came to breathing life into dying companies—but the wizard turned out to be the worst thing that ever happened to Marty Taylor.

Bollinger was a good manager—or at least in the beginning he was—but Marty could never relate to him on a personal level. He was a big, overweight, bald man almost twice Marty’s age, and there was something soft and effeminate about him; he fit Marty’s image of what a court eunuch would look like. He was a bachelor and he claimed his hobbies were cooking, gardening, and collecting antique Chinese art but it turned out Bollinger’s real hobby was little boys. The guy was a flaming pedophile and it was Bollinger’s “hobby” that opened the door to hell—and in through that door walked the Russian.

Yuri Markelov was a small-time crime boss involved in drugs, pornography, stolen auto parts, and transporting illegal aliens into the country. And though he may have been small-time, he was bright, very ambitious, and extremely ruthless. He got his hooks into Bollinger when Bollinger took a trip to Mexico City and spent a weekend with a ten-year-old boy—a poor slum kid provided by Yuri’s organization. Yuri found out Bollinger was a wealthy man, videotaped his disgusting activities, and then used the video to blackmail him. But it didn’t end there. Yuri then got the idea to use Bollinger to steal money directly from Taylor & Taylor.

Without Bollinger’s expertise it could never have happened. In a six-month period, Bollinger replaced the company’s chief financial officer with a man who wouldn’t question his decisions and changed accounting programs to limit access. Then he set up a small, phantom R&D division that an outside auditor—such as those periodically hired by the board—would never notice just by looking at the company’s books.

A company like Taylor & Taylor was always forming small teams to develop new products so Bollinger created such a team—on paper. And from an accounting standpoint, the nonexistent team looked no different than the company’s other legitimate business divisions. That is, it appeared that money was being spent to pay for salaries, research costs, prototype development, computer equipment, consulting fees, et cetera, when the money was actually going to Yuri’s bank account. And the amount of money that went to Yuri was minuscule in comparison to the total operating costs of Taylor & Taylor—not even half a percent of the company’s total expenses—but it amounted to a few hundred thousand a month.

But Yuri wanted more; Yuri always wanted more. He decided he wanted to mail stolen auto parts overseas in boxes that bore Taylor & Taylor’s logo and claimed to contain the company’s products. He also wanted a place to stash illegal immigrants when he first brought them across the Mexican border. And Bollinger, capitulating to Yuri’s
every demand, turned one of the company’s warehouses over to Yuri and even hired one of Yuri’s guys into T&T’s shipping division.

The day Marty’s whole world came crashing down he was on a private beach in Sumatra with his latest girlfriend, a Brazilian swimsuit model with emerald green eyes. She was topless, lying next to him on the sand, and he was thinking he didn’t care if her tits were fake, when his cell phone rang. The caller was an accountant who had worked closely with Gene before his death.

“I was gonna call the cops,” the accountant said, “but I decided to call you first. I figured I owed you that.”

“The cops! What the hell are you talking about?”

Marty’s girlfriend looked over at him and let out a tortured sigh to let him know he was talking too loud and disturbing her karma.

The accountant explained. He had been looking for a place to store a bunch of old paper files and he found a warehouse in Chula Vista that the company leased but didn’t appear to be using. He visited the warehouse and instead of finding it abandoned as he had expected, he found two company vans parked outside the place and four guys playing cards inside. The card players told the accountant in heavily accented English that the warehouse was being used for a special project—and to beat it and not come back.

Being a curious guy, the accountant started pulling the string. He discovered shipments leaving the warehouse and going to places like Latvia, the Ukraine, and Albania—countries where the company had no business. Then he started looking at the financials and he was sharp enough to determine that in an eighteen-month period more than two million dollars had been siphoned from the company and the money had disappeared into a Mexican bank account.

“A Mexican bank account!” Marty shrieked.

“Marty!” the girlfriend said.

“Bollinger,” the accountant said, “is stealing money from your company and he’s hooked in with some people that are doing things that are probably illegal.”

“What in the fuck are you talking about!” Marty screamed, still unable to believe what he was hearing.

The girlfriend got up and flounced away.

“I like you, Marty,” the accountant said. “I always have. And you’re a genius when it comes to writing code. But since Gene died you’ve become a complete fuckup and you have no idea what’s happening inside your own company. Gene would have been ashamed of you. So I’d suggest you drop whatever you’re doing—or whoever you’re screwing—and get back here before you end up in jail.”

And Marty did. He flew home that very day. He called Bollinger when his plane landed in San Diego, told him what the accountant had said, and insisted that he wanted Bollinger’s fat ass parked in his office in an hour. But Bollinger refused to see him until the next day and told Marty to meet him at the same warehouse in Chula Vista that the accountant had visited. Then he hung up before Marty could object. Marty drove from the airport to Bollinger’s office, cursing the whole way, but when he arrived he was informed that Bollinger had left for the day and when Marty called him he wouldn’t answer his cell phone.

When Marty walked into the warehouse the following day, Bollinger was there but three guys were with him. Two of them looked like thugs: stocky, hard-looking men wearing cheap leather jackets and pointy shoes. One of the thugs had a tattoo of a snake winding around his neck.

The third guy was different. In fact, he looked a lot like Marty Taylor: tall, good-looking, well built, with longish blond hair, and wearing a beautifully tailored English suit. Marty opened his mouth to ask Bollinger who the hell these guys were but then heard a sound off to his right—like someone trying to scream through a towel— and when he turned toward the noise, he saw the accountant who had called him in Sumatra. The guy was tied to a chair, gagged, and his face had been pounded into hamburger. Then Marty noticed the accountant’s fingers were bleeding—and he almost puked when he saw that three of his fingernails had been yanked out.

“What… what the hell’s going on?” he asked Bollinger, unable to keep the fear out of his voice.

The guy in the suit stepped forward and said, quite pleasantly, “Marty, my name is Yuri Markelov. I’m your new business partner.”

The man spoke English well but he had an accent of some sort— Marty later learned it was Russian.

“You’re what?” Marty said, still overwhelmed by the sight of the bleeding accountant. He looked over his shoulder at the door he had come through and saw the guy with the snake tattoo standing in front of it.

“I said…”

But the accountant distracted Yuri; he was making more strangled noises through his gag and bouncing his chair up and down. “Excuse me,” Yuri said, and pulled a gun out of a shoulder holster that had been hidden by his beautiful suit, walked over to the accountant, and shot him in the head.

“Jesus Christ!” Marty yelled. He turned, intending to run out of the warehouse—he was going to run right over the guy with the snake tattoo—and then saw the guy was also holding a gun, and it was pointed at his chest.

“Now, as I was saying,” Yuri said, reholstering his weapon in the same nonchalant way a carpenter would put a hammer back into his tool belt, “I’m your new business partner.”

Yuri then explained to a wide-eyed Marty Taylor what Bollinger was doing—giving Yuri a small portion of the company’s money— and why Bollinger was doing this. He also explained, quite calmly, how the company was being used to aid Yuri’s other business interests. He actually said “business interests,” like he was Warren Buffett and not a gangster who had just blown a man’s brains out right in front of Marty’s eyes.

“I know you’re in a state of shock right now,” Yuri said, “but later— assuming there is a later for you—you’ll start thinking about going to the police. But let me tell you what will happen if you do that and if I’m arrested. First, Mr. Bollinger won’t testify against me because he knows if he does, I’ll kill him. And he doesn’t want the world to know about his, ah, proclivities. Is that how you pronounce it?
Proclivities? Yes, I think so. At any rate, Mr. Bollinger will say it was you, Mr. Chairman of the Board, who ordered him to cooperate with me. He’ll explain how your company has been doing so poorly that you decided to explore other markets. Do you understand what I’m saying, Marty? Bollinger will testify against you and make you my accomplice. So, if I go down, you go down.

“But that’s not all. If I go to jail, my associates”—he nodded toward the thugs—“will kill your sister in Palo Alto. And they’ll all rape her before they kill her. And your niece, that lovely ten-year-old girl who attends the Bowman School, will disappear and be sold to a man I know that likes to use young girls in his films. And you, of course, will be killed in as painful a way as I can devise—and I have a good imagination when it comes to things like that. So, before you run to the police, I’d suggest you think about everything I’ve said.”

After that day in the warehouse, nothing was the same. Marty rubber-stamped every decision Bollinger made with regard to Yuri. Yuri began to “ask” Marty for small favors: the use of one of his houses and several of his cars, loans he had no intention of repaying. And Yuri ensured that Marty was directly implicated in his activities. For example, Yuri decided to start making his own porno films rather than selling those made by others. He obtained a Hollywood “director” and had Marty sign a company check for forty thousand dollars to allow the director to procure the cameras and other equipment he needed. The forty thousand showed up on T&T’s books as marketing expenses.

One day, Marty drove up to LA and met with a guy he’d gone to Stanford with, a lawyer who now worked for the Los Angeles district attorney. They met at a restaurant and Marty told his friend what Yuri was doing and asked if he could be held criminally liable for Yuri’s illegal activities. The short answer was: maybe. The problem, the lawyer explained, was that Marty had failed to act immediately when he witnessed Yuri murder the accountant. And although Yuri may have threatened Marty’s family, Marty continued to do nothing while Bollinger was stealing money from the company and giving it to Yuri.
And because the company was publicly held, that had even more onerous implications. So maybe Marty would get immunity if he testified against Yuri but his failure to act in a timely manner was bound to have some negative repercussions.

Marty swore his lawyer friend to silence until he could decide what to do but when he returned to San Diego, Yuri and two of his goons were waiting inside his house. Yuri informed him that since that day at the warehouse, his people had been following him and he was aware that he’d spoken to the lawyer. Yuri then took off his suit coat, rolled up the sleeves of his silk dress shirt, and beat the hell out of him—he beat him until Marty told him what he had discussed with the lawyer. Then, as he lay on the floor bleeding from his nose and his mouth and wondering how many of his ribs were cracked, Yuri told him if he tried something like that again, both his kneecaps would be smashed and surfing would become a thing of the past. The next day, he read in the paper the lawyer had fallen down a flight of steps and broken his neck.