Chapter 14
Chapter
Telling the truth is easy. Lying means shifting stories like a runway model speed-changing outfits. The most successful scams are often simple. Darren Alberts had been a master of simplicity.
Years ago, the story had been big so I knew the basics. I logged on to fill in the details.
After working as a short-order cook, a landscaper, a commercial fisherman, and the proprietor of several failed restaurants, Alberts enrolled in a non-accredited San Francisco law school at age fifty, graduated at the bottom of his class, and took four attempts to pass the state bar.
Unable to find a job at a firm, he moved down to L.A.
and started a practice as a slip-and-fall attorney, specializing in indigent, often uninsured clients.
That had earned him a comfortable income, but L.A. is a third-world nation with huge gaps between the haves and the have-nots and Alberts yearned to be at the top of the haves column.
It didn’t take a math major to figure out that forty percent of mega-payouts would kick him up to a whole new level.
The key was to choose your target.
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The defendants Alberts focused on were large corporations. His clients were the working poor, often unaware they were parties to class-action suits.
After several false starts, Alberts’s first big victory occurred when an Illinois-based manufacturer of chemical fertilizer forked over tens of millions of dollars in reparation for soil contamination in California’s Central Valley that had allegedly led to cancer, birth defects, and other misfortunes.
Allegedly because the case had never seen the inside of a courtroom.
That victory turbocharged Alberts’s status on multiple levels.
Professional advancement as a major courtroom player earned him membership in something called the Trial Lawyer Hall of Fame. The money allowed him to distribute political campaign funds and gain access to the corridors of power.
Most gratifying in a town that trucks in fantasy and appearance, he achieved red-carpet status when Dark Clouds, a movie based on the plodding work of one of Alberts’s investigators in the fertilizer case—a nondescript paralegal named Alice Pryzcik who’d since died—was supersized into a heroine-in-jeopardy action flick.
In the film, Alberts’s character came across rumpled, avuncular, and altruistic. In reality, he’d switched long ago to contact lenses, Hermès shoes, Bijan suits, and a head shaved weekly to distract from pattern baldness.
The actress who played Alice Pryzcik—anything but nondescript—won a Golden Globe, was nominated for an Oscar, and developed a six-month penchant for eco-lectures. Darren Alberts got to go to all the parties.
Meanwhile, he’d traded his first wife for a newer model and his comfortable home in Encino for an estate in San Marino. The Playboy Mansion became a familiar haunt. There, Alberts had been known to cavort in Hefner’s lagoon.
Subsequent legal triumphs included suing for a host of other toxic events and manufacturing defects. Ten years after the fertilizer case, Alberts had won well past a hundred million dollars in damages and an even newer third wife.
Tiana Crown, a former Playboy model thirty years Alberts’s junior, had met him at the lagoon.
Her association with a “legal rock-star” husband snagged her a screen agent.
The agent snagged her an audition for a proposed “reality” show featuring women with similar backgrounds, tentatively titled Centerfold Contessas.
Part of the pitch was the promise that hubby Darren would show up from time to time and, despite behaving “dignified and lawyerly,” be outsmarted by Tiana.
Prospects for the show and everything else in the Albertses’ life screeched to a halt seven years ago when a federal prosecutor named Kevin Van Osler revealed that after a joint investigation by his office, the D.A.
, LAPD, and the IRS, the attorney faced multiple felony charges, including, but not limited to, grand theft, perjury, fraud, and money laundering.
Once that story hit, the media “discovered” that over the past ten years Alberts had been sued a hundred sixty-eight times for ripping off clients but had avoided disciplinary action because of his chummy relations with the state bar.
Including sitting on several committees. Among them ethics and oversight.
The legal documents ran to thousands of pages but Alberts’s technique could be summed up in a sentence.
He’d systematically shortchanged or stiffed hundreds of clients, holding on to far more than the promised forty percent contingency. Borrowing from Ponzi-type schemes, he’d mollified some complainants by paying them from the proceeds of other people’s lawsuits.
When that logjammed, attempts to collect were met with stalls, legalistic filings to delay, or outright silence.
It might’ve gone on unchecked but Kevin Van Osler had come across a filing by a Fresno attorney suing Alberts and gotten curious.
The son of two judges and a cousin of the governor, Van Osler viewed his job as the anteroom to a political career, and nothing primes a political career better than a high-level case with heroic overtones.
Faced with the charges, Darren Alberts took the obvious route: declaring bankruptcy.
Van Osler’s army of federal agents and LAPD detectives set about searching for Alberts’s assets and discovered that the San Marino estate, a house on Carbon Beach in Malibu, and a chalet in Aspen were mortgaged to the hilt.
A fleet of luxury cars turned out to be leased with payments due. Including a three-million-dollar Bugatti whose total mileage of one hundred thirty-five came from filmed drives to and from the offices of the Contessa producers.
Designer clothing reaped chump change at resale, furniture in all three houses consisted of cheap copies of signature pieces, and the Albertses’ art collection heralded in the show’s pilot episode was all cheesy reproduction.
No bank accounts or Wall Street investments surfaced. Tiana’s jewelry was confiscated, revealing a few serious pieces but mostly costume junk. That was reputed to enrage the Contessa, who framed herself as another of Darren Alberts’s victims and filed for divorce.
Van Osler, chastened by failure to produce headline fodder, continued to press the criminal case against Alberts. Years of delaying motions were no longer necessary when Alberts was judged mentally unfit to stand trial.
Just as he’d avoided the courtroom as a plaintiff, the master thief had slipped by as a defendant.
Sole defendant. I searched for other indictees but no charges seemed to have been leveled against anyone but the boss. Meaning either that Alberts had concealed the thefts from his employees or that they’d been incentivized by the government to turn against the boss.
Ratting on a grade-A psychopath could be dangerous, so maybe Michael Heck had been onto something.
I jotted down a timetable.
Kevin Van Osler had filed charges seven years ago, meaning he’d begun investigating earlier. Eight or more years ago.
Michael Heck had left Alberts’s firm five years ago. Sticking around for two years during the initial prosecution.
Heck had claimed ignorance of the scam but his position—managing expenses—made me wonder. Perhaps he’d been vulnerable because he was dirty and had stayed on as Van Osler’s plant.
During some of that time, Darren Alberts had been cognitively intact, not showing signs of dementia until a year after Heck quit.
More than able to plot revenge.
What better way to discredit a potential witness than by setting up a phony murder scenario?
But the timeline didn’t work.
If Alberts had tried to silence Heck, he’d have done it years ago. Sometimes revenge is a dish best eaten cold but Alberts was well past the point of cooking up anything.
I ran an image search on him.
Smallish, inevitably smiling man nearing seventy. Spray-tanned, shaved pate as shiny as his yellow Bijan tie.
In every shot, he was flanked by movie stars, producers, directors, and elected officials. In most of them, he stood dwarfed by Tiana, tall, blond, busty, skin ironed smooth as a hotel bedsheet.
In every shot, Alberts came across looking his age but energetic and vital.
Now he was “vegetative.”
The legal system had failed to stem Alberts’s felonies but his own brain had finally voiced an opinion.
I don’t believe in karma but in this case it’s hard to escape.