by Dave Butler
The surprises were piling up for Austin. “Why me?”
“Because we’ve checked into you, your project, and your investment fund,” said Cummings, “and we think you’re the right person to make this happen.”
“Interesting. But what’s the revenue model for investors? That’s a hell of a lot of money for someone to invest in a public transportation corridor.”
Cummings smiled. “It’s all about the tolls, Stafford, all about the tolls. In a public-private partnership or in the private sector model, investors would see revenues from vehicle tolls on the highway. And they would see revenues from per-unit charges on material flowing through the pipelines. Every day of the year, year after year, essentially forever.”
Austin’s mind was a blur of possibilities and questions, options and opportunities. Much of what Thomas and Cummings had said made little business sense, and he could see more problems than solutions. But what they didn’t know was that this discussion had opened new avenues for his investment fund that hadn’t been on the map mere hours before. Over the course of a single discussion in a dark restaurant in Red Deer, Alberta, his world had suddenly changed.
CHAPTER 13
FEBRUARY 2
With coffee cups clinking and latte machines hissing in the background, Willson and Berland sat in a corner of the District Coffee House in downtown Boise, their backs to a quilt-covered wall.
On the far side of the room, Willson’s mother perched on a stool facing a ceiling-to-floor window, a book in one hand, a cup of tea in the other. While her mother had happily browsed alone in the thrift store the day before, a nameless visitor in a place that supported anonymity, Willson sensed that a day later, she was feeling less confident about being alone in a strange city. As a result, Willson was keeping her close.
“My apologies for ending our conversation so abruptly yesterday,” Berland said, a line of foam on his upper lip. “My boss thought he had something urgent for me. It was far from it, in fact — but that’s my world. Anyway, it gives us a chance to take our time. Tell me again why you’re down here, Jenny.”
By asking the same question he’d asked the day before, Berland, like any good investigator, was testing to see if her story remained consistent.
“You already know I’m a park warden in Yoho National Park,” Willson said, her mouth curled in a slight smile, “and that my mum and I are here skiing. Beyond that, it looks like I’m going to have to trust you … so that you’ll trust me.”
“That’s how my business works,” Berland said.
Willson paused. The moment of truth was here. But she still wasn’t ready to divulge everything to the reporter. Not yet. With her boss’s warnings echoing in her head, Willson considered Berland an unknown quantity, not worthy of her full confidence. She had no doubt he thought the same about her.
“I’m conducting an informal and low-key investigation into Stafford Austin’s background, on behalf of my agency. It’s part of the due diligence on his ski area proposal. Because Austin’s the proponent, we — I — want to know everything there is to know about the man, his background, and his capacity to make a project like that happen. When I found out he was from Boise, this was an obvious place to start my digging. I found your name through archived Statesman articles, as I said.”
“Have you met the guy?”
“I have, at an open house two months ago.”
“What’s your read on him?”
Willson sipped her Americano. “As I told my colleagues, he’s big, overconfident, and, in my humble opinion, a snake-oil salesman flogging a remedy for an ailment we don’t have.”
Berland laughed. “From what I know of him, you’re not far off.”
“Okay, tell me what you know, Mike.”
“Where to begin? Well, I first heard his name from a source in the Boise Police Department. He’d been implicated in a fraud at Sawtooth Development Corp. — he and a female colleague had allegedly conspired to defraud the government out of a big chunk of money. Without much effort and in record time, the assistant DA persuaded a grand jury to indict both of them on two counts of wire fraud. The crime had been accomplished via the internet and, because there was a clear digital trail, it looked like an open-and-shut case. There were whispers of something more, but neither the FBI nor the city police could find evidence to support additional charges.”
“What changed?”
“What changed is that Austin’s name suddenly disappeared from court documents.”
“I noticed that when I was at the library. What happened?”
“I can only guess, but as far as I know, there are two possibilities. One: there was a confidential plea bargain in which the charges against Austin were dropped in return for information. Or two: there was insufficient evidence to move ahead. I couldn’t get confirmation from my sources on which it was, but there were rumours that a key witness had disappeared.”
“Disappeared? Does Austin have a record of violence?” asked Willson, thinking of his threats against Stoffel and the body in the firebombed office.
“I didn’t pick up anything like that, not in any of my research. Why do you ask?”
“He was accused of threatening a wildlife researcher who opposes his project. And that same researcher’s office burned down a few weeks later. A research assistant was killed in the fire. The researcher is sure it was Austin.”
“Jesus,” said Berland, his eyes staring blankly out the window. “That would be a dramatic escalation, even for him. How big is the project?”
“It could involve hundreds of millions of dollars. So perhaps there’s more at stake this time. When his name disappeared from the court documents, was that the end of it?”
“No. I kept hearing whispers from trusted insiders hinting there was more below the surface, that all was not what it seemed. I decided to dig into Austin’s background myself. My gut told me there was something worth pursuing. I tried to interview him a couple of times, but he went underground. The receptionist at Sawtooth told me he’d left town for an indefinite period. So, I did what you’re doing now. I drove to Salt Lake City, his previous base. It was an illuminating trip. Turns out it wasn’t the first time Austin had been involved — or allegedly involved — in something like this.”
Willson’s right hand moved quickly as she scribbled in her notebook. “Tell me more,” she said, her eyes eager.
“No matter who I talked to or where I looked, I heard the same things. First, Austin doesn’t stay in one place for long. I think he was in Salt Lake City for only three years. Before that, he was in Texas. I also uncovered documents that hinted he’d been involved with something in South America prior to that.”
“Bit of a vagabond, is he?”
“He is. And when people move around a lot like that, it makes me more curious. I found that most of his business dealings involved some kind of investment scheme — some legitimate, others less so. With that sort of thing, there’s always a paper trail if one knows where to look. And when I dug deeper, I saw that Austin did leave a trail behind him, albeit a faint one. In most cases, by the time people figured out that something was wrong, he’d already left town.”
“Seems like we’re both on his trail now, although you’re well ahead of me.”
“It’s always better to have two sets of eyes looking for clues.”
An optimist, albeit a cautious one, Willson sensed Berland was starting to see her as an ally. “I agree completely,” she said, “particularly if we share what we find.”
“We seem to be on the same wavelength,” said Berland. “As an investigative journalist, I don’t normally work with anyone else. Few do in this business. Exclusives are our reason for living. But I think we might be able to help each other out.”
“I agree. You seem to have picked up on a pattern in his behaviour; I can’t help but wonder if he’s continuing it in Canada.”
“I wouldn’t put it past him.”
Willson turned to check on her mother. She
was buried in her novel, oblivious to the busy coffee shop around her. “You didn’t say what you found when you dug into Austin’s dealings in Salt Lake City,” she said, her attention back on Berland.
The reporter slid a small stack of documents out of a file folder and pushed them across the table toward her. “It was a whole different ball game. Seems that Austin and his business associates there were into gold mining.”
“Gold mining? That is different.” The fingers of Willson’s right hand stroked the edges of the documents. They were tempting her, calling her name. Read me. Study me. But she kept her attention on Berland.
“And just like what happened here in Boise, it appears that Austin wasn’t the main player in the project. From what I could uncover, he was more of a supporting actor.”
“Where was the mine?”
“In Iron County, southern Utah.”
“And the controversy?” asked Willson.
“It turned out to be a classic stock market play. Not a first for the mining sector. There was a mine, there’s no doubt about that: the Silver Queen Mine. It seems that company officials from the Silver Queen Mining Corporation significantly over-reported the mine’s potential production by a few orders of magnitude, including claiming that it would produce copper, silver, and gold for far longer than was actually the case.”
“Which made the stock more attractive to investors.”
“That it did. And not only that, they also sold more shares than they were legally allowed to by the Securities Exchange Commission. One family invested more than two million dollars in the company.”
“Where did Austin come into the picture?”
“He was alleged to have been one of the people selling the stock, mostly to Mormon families. And he took a cut of those sales, although I never could find out how much.”
Willson recalled her one and only conversation with Austin. He’d talked about initial investors and said more would be coming in later. Did he have the same kind of scheme planned? “Was he convicted of anything in that one?”
“No,” said Berland. “It seemed that when the noose started to tighten, when the SEC investigators began putting pressure on him, he turned on his co-conspirators and acted as a witness for the prosecution.”
“No honour amongst thieves?”
“Not this bunch. Once things got hot, they were like rats jumping from a sinking ship. It was an easy conviction for the feds because of the number of accused willing to spill the beans. The company president finally took the big fall. He was the last rat standing. When all was done, it was obvious the thing had been a scam. The president was permanently barred from participating in future offerings of penny stocks and was ordered to pay back two point six million dollars, the amount he made from the shares he’d sold plus interest. He and the company are still tied up in bankruptcy court.”
“I assume Austin made big money on that deal? Did he have to pay any back?”
“I could never find that out. I bet he did … but the details were buried in a plea bargain.”
“A plea bargain. Where have I heard that before?”
“Exactly. There’s that pattern again.”
“And then he moved to Boise.”
“He disappeared for a few months … but then, yes, he showed up here.”
Willson flipped through the stack of documents in front of her — most were court documents and some were news stories from the Salt Lake Tribune. But her mind was racing. If Austin had been involved in questionable schemes like the ones Berland had described, what did that mean for the proposal? Was it legitimate, or another swindle? In the other frauds, Austin had always been in the background, not the main player or the frontman. Was there someone else, a mystery man or woman, behind the resort proposal? Or did Austin think he’d learned enough from his past brushes with the law that he no longer needed to work with or for someone else, but could successfully pull it off himself … whatever it was? He certainly had the ego.
“As I mentioned,” said Willson, “Austin’s submission to our governments implies that he has a background in building ski areas. In your research, did you find anything to confirm that?”
“I didn’t. But to be honest, I didn’t go any further back than what I’ve told you about. I’d heard rumours about South America, maybe Chile or Argentina. But my bosses wouldn’t let me pursue it. I dug up a few newspaper articles, but they were in Spanish, so that was the end of it.”
“Jesus,” Willson said, “I came here for answers … and I feel like I’ve come away with more questions. One thing I’m sure of is that I’m more concerned than ever about Austin.”
“You have a right to be. He’s a guy I’ve had my eye on, but he’s tough to track as he moves from one project to another. It was frustrating as hell for me to leave the trail when I did. I have no doubt he’s still out there, moving from project to project. And now, it seems, from one country to another.”
Willson studied Berland. He reminded her of an archer’s taut bowstring, pulled back to the limit, fully loaded, ready to release. He was sitting with hands clenched, his eyes bright and brimming with the passion of an ambitious journalist. “On the surface, he’s just another shyster who takes money from people crazy enough, or greedy enough, to give it to him,” she said. “Why do you care so much about this guy, Mike?”
Berland raised his eyebrows, then smiled, visibly relaxing. “Is it that obvious?”
“You look like you might spontaneously combust right in front of me.” said Willson. “I’ve spent the last five minutes wondering where the fire extinguisher is.”
Berland chuckled and sat back in his chair. Willson’s question had forced him to take a breath and relax.
“It doesn’t take an investigator to figure out I’m passionate about this subject,” he said. “When I came out of J-school at Boise State, I started as a junior reporter on the crime beat at the local paper. I was covering small-town stuff — assaults, thefts, domestic disputes. We all knew about Woodward and Bernstein and their role in uncovering Watergate, and I was fascinated by the investigative journalists telling the stories no one else was telling. I wanted to be one of those guys. I wanted to dig in the shadows, shine a light on the stuff that the politicians and business people didn’t want revealed. When the global economy declined, all because of the despicable actions of the top guys at the Enrons and Goldman Sachses and WorldComs, I began to specialize in financial crimes because I saw that more people were being hurt by those than by so-called regular crime. At least it seemed that way.”
Willson saw a look of melancholy pass over his face. “But there’s more to this than that, isn’t there, Mike? This is personal.” It was more a statement than a question. She felt a pinch of compassion for Berland. It was a new sensation and it made her a little nauseated.
“My grandparents were taken for almost all their life savings by a guy just like Austin,” Berland said. “As a result, their last years before they both passed away were very tough.”
“But there’s so much of this kind of thing going on all across North America — why Austin?”
“No, I know, there’s nothing special about him per se; he’s one of hundreds of people who make a living off the greed and ignorance of others. But Austin’s trail has so many links to so many places that it seemed like a trail worth pursuing. Once I was on it, it was tough to quit.” He looked past Willson toward the window, tapping his fingernail on his empty mug. “I hadn’t thought about him in a few years, but with this new link north of the border that you’ve brought me, Jenny, that’s changed. Quite frankly, this kind of story could be my ticket to a bigger paper in a bigger city, even if it isn’t Watergate or Enron.” He slid his chair back from the table and stretched his long legs out into the aisle beside them. The bow was now fully relaxed, the pressure on the string released.
“And what about you?” he asked. “Why do you care so much about this guy?”
“Fair question,” said Willson. “I thoug
ht a lot about that driving down here. There are two reasons. The first is that the ski area, if approved, could have devastating effects on the park where I work and on the surrounding area, which is massive and wild and currently still free of human impact. Yes, a formal environmental assessment needs to be done, but I don’t need to wait for the results to know a ski resort is the wrong thing for the area. It’s a stupid idea. The thought of it going ahead sickens me. For me, this is about standing up for what’s right, for what I believe in. ‘The idea of wilderness needs no defense. It only needs more defenders.’”
“That sounds like Edward Abbey.”
“That’s right,” Willson said in surprise. “It is. How’d you know that?”
“We studied him in journalism school. He’s where I got the idea that our profession shines a light into the darkness.”
“I like his reasoning on most topics,” said Willson. “And I think I’m becoming more jaded, perhaps more of an anarchist, like Abbey was, than I ever used to be. That may come from working for government.”
“I get you there,” said Berland. “And your second reason for caring so much about Austin?”
“That might surprise you. In my short career, I’ve seen too many economic development projects come forward and, almost overnight, polarize communities, pitting neighbours against each other. Don’t get me wrong, I’m no bleeding-heart liberal. I hate government bullshit and I hate useless process. But it seems like our system forces people to pick sides, what with every new development presented as a black or white, win or lose scenario. It’s always destructive. It’s always yes or no. Whether Austin’s proposal is legitimate or not, I can already see this happening in my hometown, and it pisses me off. And after all that, if it’s not a legitimate project and if it falls on its face, then the community— the people I care about — will be left to pick up the pieces.”