Chapter 15
15
M arco watched Theresa as Mitch explained his plan. Her eyes rounded and he could see her chest rise and fall in rapid succession. He held her hand for comfort, but when Mitch was finished explaining what they planned to do, Marco changed the conversation.
"Mitch, I'm watching some businesses today to see what I can find out about their activities."
"That's a good idea. What are you focusing on?"
He grinned at Theresa. "Rents that are too high. Bank deposits that are abnormally large for a small town."
"How are you going to figure out large bank deposits?"
"Usually when someone is laundering money, they take a lot of cash at the business they're laundering from, but they also make more than one bank deposit in a day - to several different banks. And, if they're using a mule to transfer the money from the place of business to another location for laundering, there will be a mule coming and going. My thought is to specifically watch the new brokerage and the attorney's business. If I sit and watch the comings and goings of people in a new business, a smurf should show themselves in short order."
Theresa cocked her head. "What's a smurf?"
He grinned as he responded. "It's someone who is helping in the laundering process. He or she breaks up large transactions into sets of smaller transactions that are each below the reporting threshold. Then they pretend to invest them or take them to various banks."
"In what way?"
He turned in his chair to face her. "A smurf might pretend to be a landlord. He'll take in far too much money for rent on a building. It may be a residential rental like an apartment or Airbnb. He actually only collects the regular rent, say a place is worth a thousand dollars a month. But on the books, he writes in three thousand a month. In many cases, there are only a couple of tenants in a building so there's activity, and they are instructed to tell anyone who asks that they pay three thousand dollars a month for rent. So if authorities come around and ask, it seems legit. If anyone questions how this person can afford that kind of rent, they're instructed to say they have a trust fund or something. The other units are usually empty, so they don't have too many people on the books. But fake leases and names are used. The money comes from other sources, say drug deals or illegal smuggling, etc. But it's laundered through the apartment building."
Theresa nodded slowly. "I guess I never heard that term. I did see transactions on the ledgers I found that didn't add up and that's why. That's how I started investigating in the first place. They were also using laundromats, pizza places, and dress shops. Basically, any business. But even though I'd investigated for so long, I didn't look outside the state of Maine. I should have. So now I'm going to go back through my information and figure out a few more things."
He grinned. "There you go."
She cocked her head, "Why an attorney's office?"
"An attorney, a bad one, is easy to bribe into working for a syndicate. They need the money, and they like the power. So, they'll launder money through their law office using fake names as clients, creating fake documents, etc. The smurf will bring money to the attorney. The attorney counts it, then doles it out into files. Those files need to have billable hours associated with them to justify the costs, so said attorney is usually very busy creating fake documents to go with the money. They make deposits to their bank for the fake clients. Many times, these clients are also the landlord, who has so many legal problems, they pay their attorney a ton of money to fix their issues."
Theresa nodded. Her pretty lips turned down into a frown. "That makes sense, doesn't it?"
"How did you channel your research?"
She shook her head. "I started looking at the money laundering, but it was clear there was something bigger at stake. I then became more focused on the millions, actually billions of dollars, being floated to the presidential and senate campaigns. I couldn't believe how much money was going to television and radio stations for ads for this candidate. I started following that trail and didn't even have the chance to look at the laundering aspect. I was more worried about the threat to democracy. If the Celtics were paying for a president and Congress, it had to be for their benefit. I wanted to know what that benefit was. That's the direction I was going. And I found some leads. A couple of them led to what I thought was human trafficking."
Mitch’s voice softened. "You be careful. As you're aware, they don't want this information out."
"I'm aware, it's why I'm basically on the run. My boss began getting threats. At first, they were idle threats. She ran my story anyway. It was a beginning piece of what I had planned to be a five-part series."
Marco watched her as she spoke. Her fingers shook slightly as she began talking about her boss. He softly encouraged her to continue.
"What happened?"
Theresa's eyes stared into his for a while. Finally, her lips thinned and she bit her bottom lip. "The threats after the first story grew in urgency. They went from we'll shut your paper down to we'll burn your house down."
She swallowed and sat up straighter. "They did. Burned her house down. No one was injured and that's when she told me to get out of town. Don't contact her. Lay as low as I could and when it was safe to come back, she'd let me know."
Marco's brows furrowed. "How would she do that?"
"I check the paper once a quarter on the first day of the month. If it's safe to come back, there will be an ad in the classified section for an investigative reporter. It would say, only TM need apply."
"Have you been checking?"
"Yes." She took a deep breath. "No ad so far."
Mitch was quiet for a moment. "What's the name of the paper and your boss’s name?"
"The Daily Reporter and her name is Carolyn Sutton."
“Hang on a moment, I need to check something.”
They could hear the tones on his phone as he typed something in. He read on his phone for a few moments, then looked up at her and said, “I’m afraid I have some bad news.”
Marco felt her hold her breath and stiffen. She sat stone still.
Mitch inhaled deeply then swallowed. "She was killed in a car accident last month."