The US Coast Guard located the ship XiXiCom about twenty miles offshore. It was boarded by a combined DHS/DEA SWAT team. One member of the SWAT team was injured in a firefight with the crew. Three crew members were killed, and ten were taken into custody. All were Chinese nationals. General Kangxi was not on that ship, but below deck, there were ninety cases of fentanyl with dangerous ricin security devices attached, and two hundred blocks of cocaine. The ship was impounded as part of the crime. The after-action report contained a statement by one of the SWAT team members that he thought he saw bubbles leading away from the ship.
The Cathy McAvoy Minority Scholarship Fund was legally established and based at Prime Mortgage after Derek returned from his work in New Orleans. He provided a check for five hundred thousand dollars to start the fund. Jerry Rodriguez and Lauren Berger were the initial co-trustees. Derek, Jerry, and Lauren reached out to other potential donors in the Miami area, including Pablo and Ed and Marty, and, during its first year of operations, the fund attracted a total of five million dollars. Candidates from low-income backgrounds were sought, identified, and then funded through high school, college, and professional educations. When he became Mayor of Miami, Paul Bustamonte served as a trustee of the fund. One of the many beneficiaries of the fund was Carlos, the Lyft driver, who attended the University of Miami School of Law with the assistance of the fund. His letter of recommendation from Derek Randall no doubt helped.
Katarina Truska served six months in an Israeli prison. During that time, she was inculcated in the history, culture, and opportunities inherent in Israel. Upon release, she was offered a flight back to Kiev, or conversely, an opportunity to use her skills for the State. She chose the latter. She was already a skilled operative; her training was minimal, and once a sufficient level of trust was established by her and with her, she was inducted into the Mossad covert ops group. After three years of various ops in different foreign countries, she met and married an Israeli colonel, attained Israeli citizenship, and had a son. The State of Israel granted her a pension. She lived with her husband and son in a suburb of Tel Aviv… and never looked back. During one of her ops in America, she made it a point to contact Ziv and again apologized for her hack on him, which he accepted like a mensch.
Ed Sapperstein was a broken man after the murder of his young grandson Arthur. He returned from Israel after the funeral and had no willpower to continue the business. He made arrangements with his top employees for them to buy him out and become the owners of Sabra Security LLC. Ronnie, Avram, Ziv, Charlie, and others became owners and ran Sabra in the same style and at the same professional level as Ed had for thirty years. Ed kept his house in Coral Gables but became a kind of snowbird. He also had a house in the Haifa area, where he spent more and more time.
Santo Garcia walked out of his arraignment, thanks to attorney Earl Blackstone. Several of Santo’s associates had been arrested, and they remained jailed until bail was subsequently agreed upon by the court and posted for their release. Santo’s money laundering operations were severely curtailed, at least at Cayman National Bank and Trust. In his last telephone conversation with Lev Lavorosky, directly after Derek’s hack at the bank, Lev gave Santo the identity of Derek Randall. Each resolved to “deal with him” in their own ways… except Lev was killed the next day in the SWAT raid at the hotel. Santo remained free on his own recognizance, thanks to Blackstone, while the government conducted further investigation and prepared for trial. After two years, a trial date was set. Santo entered into a plea agreement wherein he confessed to misdemeanor tax evasion and paid a fine of ten thousand dollars. He continued to be active in money laundering operations using bitcoin and blockchain channels through Internet banks.
Horatio Gonzalez knew his banking career was finished when Daryl Chapman walked out of his office. His conversation with Santo and with Lev confirmed with chilling lethality that he had been the victim of theft—and it wasn’t his money that had been stolen. People from their dark criminal world did not let something like that just slide. It was an inflection point in his life; he had a family to think about. He approached the US Consulate in Cayman and, in essence, turned himself in. He offered to cooperate with US authorities in return for protection. He proffered information not just about Santo and Lev, but about three other criminal organizations that used him and his bank for money laundering. His offer was accepted immediately. He and his family were transported from Cayman to Miami two days after Daryl Chapman met with him, and he was placed under a US Marshal’s custody while different investigations were conducted by the Department of Justice. After ten months, he and his family were accepted into the Witness Protection Program and resettled under new identities in a southern US city, the name of which cannot be revealed.
Earl Blackstone and Esther Cohen faced very different futures after the affaire Siroco. FBI Miami Field Office SAC Joe Danvere and Agent Howard Ross were totally offended by what Blackstone and Cohen had pulled to get Lev out of custody. They found it highly improper—and probably illegal—that Blackstone had control over a sitting federal judge so as to be able to produce release documents signed in blank. They had never experienced such a thing. They initiated an investigation that revealed that Blackstone had leverage over Federal Judge John Randolph. The investigation was not able to uncover the source of that leverage, so they pursued it through tried and proven investigative techniques: they approached Esther Cohen with the evidence they had and threatened her that she, too, would be indicted if she did not cooperate. She saw the writing on the wall and agreed. With her critical testimony, Earl Blackstone and John Randolph were indicted by a grand jury for various felonies including obstruction of justice. Randolph resigned from the bench; both forfeited their law licenses and resigned from the various state bar associations in which they were members. Both entered into guilty pleas, but neither went to prison. Esther Cohen continued to practice white-collar criminal law as a solo practitioner, but added personal injury, worker’s compensation, and social security disability to shore up her cash flow. She revealed to the FBI that Randolph had two children out of wedlock with two women not his current wife of twenty years. It was through Blackstone that he made payments to them and kept these secrets away from his professional career as a federal judge.
Jefferson Pike was voted out of the Pike, Oberdorfer, and Schein partnership shortly after his embarrassing day in court representing the two Siroco defendants. The partnership dissolved itself and was rechartered as Oberdorfer and Schein PLLC. Out of respect for his late father, Jefferson Pike was given office space in the new law firm so that he could open his own private practice. He went through a major reassessment of himself after the affaire Siroco and came out the better for it. His practice grew to a sustainable level.
Olivia Morales did win a Pulitzer Prize for her journalism work on the affaire Siroco. The Miami Herald promoted her to Chief Business Reporter and gave her a bigger office and a budget for major investigations. Her committed relationship blossomed into marriage. Olivia and Dr. Jane Ramsey were married in a ceremony held at the Biltmore Hotel. Both families were ecstatic that the two Type A personalities had found a comfortable union. The only issues between them were which one would bear their first child and who would be the lucky guy to serve as biological father.
Lenny flew back to San Francisco, where he lived with Julia Jorgenson, Esq., and where he had his business office. He agreed to help his friend Derek Randall with a case in New Orleans the week after the affaire Siroco. After the New Orleans case, Lenny and Julia were married in a ceremony held at the Esalen Institute at Big Sur. Derek and Lauren attended, as well as the bride and groom’s families and their friends, including several well-known celebrities. The event took place over a long weekend so that many could stay at the retreat and spend two days with the newly married couple. Julia gave birth to twin boys seven months after the wedding. Lenny and Derek continue to be best friends and to help each other with their respective
cases—and problems. Friends help each other.
Derek Randall flew to New Orleans after the affaire Siroco, where he handled a cyber security case for the new client, Chef Thomas Fine Foods. He gave a weeklong series of yoga classes at the World Yoga Organization’s New Orleans center. He considered both endeavors successful. The voice message from Santo Garcia, or one of his associates, was troubling. Derek put James on it when he arrived in New Orleans. James traced the caller and did the usual work-up of connected phones and associated persons. It was revealed that Santo had outsourced the job to some friends in the Miami area. Instructions: get Derek Randall, get the money. Derek called Pablo, who gladly undertook the case. Seven individuals, all residents in the City of Miami, for just twenty thousand dollars… cash, of course. And as usual, Pablo agreed to remove the individuals from the possibility of any further aggression—”a separate business,” he mentioned.
On his return from New Orleans, Derek took possession of the two apartments in his Coral Gables building, refurbished them into a nice large one, and established his presence there. He and Lauren grew closer as a couple, and eventually—well, that will be the subject of the next episode. Derek also resolved to devote more of his time to health and wellness. His first book, The Binary Yogi, was a semi-bestseller and gave him yoga-community celebrity. He set about writing a second book and offered to teach more classes and seminars in Miami and around the country. He decided to keep his office in Palo Alto for the time being. The affaire Siroco changed his life in several ways: his brushes with death and vicious criminals impacted him on several levels, and his relationship with Lauren Berger was a major inflection point in his life.
What happened in New Orleans? It’s an extremely interesting story involving characters who only exist in that iconic American city. Fortunately, the reader can share it in Cobra in New Orleans. Don’t miss it!
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
A great saying I use often is: “success is a team sport.” I could not be more thankful for the team which came to me during the preparation of this book. I want to thank them here as deeply and profusely as I can, and I do that in the chronological order in which they came into the project.
My wife Marie-Laurence Allman encouraged and supported me every day during this project, from the gestation of an idea, through publication. We are a team in every sense of that word.
I was fortunate to have highly intelligent friends who accepted to read the manuscript once it was completed, and to make meaningful comments and suggestions. Those special friends (alphabetically) are:
David Bardsley, Patricia Bardsley, George Fortmuller, Carol Gotsens, Jeffrey S. Leiter, Art Levin, Carol McGuire, and Skip Monsein.
Every manuscript needs an exceptional editor. I found mine in Emma at [email protected].
Sometimes you can tell a book by its cover. I am proud of mine, and I owe it all to David Prendergast at ebookscoversdesigns.com.
Can I just say again how blessed I have been to have these fine people help me.
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