Lenny’s numbers were at least as good as mine, and look what happened to him.
Lenny and I had gotten sore butts pulling all-nighters getting Reliable connected to the special claims databases, ChoicePoint, Equifax, the Fraud Defense Network, and the state and federal insurance-fraud databases. Lenny was the first guy to go in and index all fields in the company’s life insurance databases. Then we wrote a program that isolated all of those claims coming out of the viatical-fraud outfits in Florida, Texas, and Philadelphia. It wasn’t hard or particularly noble work, but we were both good at outwitting fraudsters.
I wanted to walk around Norton’s desk, assume control of his desktop, and pull up that PowerPoint presentation that Lenny and I put together on viaticals. Seven and a half million dollars in claims that Reliable didn’t have to pay because Lenny’s program flagged dozens of viatical policies before they came due. What’s a viatical? That’s exactly what the rest of the industry was asking when Lenny and a few other computer-use wizards at other life insurance companies uncovered mass fraud in the secondary market, where terminally ill patients bought and sold life insurance policies on themselves called viaticals.
The industry was born at the height of the AIDS epidemic, before the disease could be treated with any success. Back then viaticals were called “life benefits”; they were and still are legal, and they work this way: Suppose you are dying from AIDS, too sick to work, and desperate for money to pay your medical bills. All you have left is your life insurance policy, which will be worth, say, one hundred thousand dollars when you die in two years. So you sell the policy to a viatical company for sixty thousand and get money you can spend right now, before you die, on medicine or on taking your lover to Tahiti while you’re still alive. The viatical company resells your policy to its investors, and together they will earn forty thousand dollars—a 40 percent return—on their investment in your life insurance policy when it “matures,” meaning when you die.
“Man,” I said, “Lenny is the main viatical-fraud guy. If you let him go—”
“Nothing wrong with viaticals, per se,” said Norton, “only the fraudulent ones. You can find those as well as Lenny.”
A two-man job, at least. Look at the setup: an unregulated industry where investors bet on how fast AIDS victims will die. It’s an engraved invitation to start a fraud farm. For instance, suppose you have AIDS, but you don’t have a life insurance policy to sell. No problem. If you don’t look too sick yet, just go in and apply for a life insurance policy. Don’t call attention to yourself by asking for too much money. Just make it for forty thousand or so, what the companies call a “jet-issue” policy, meaning the salesperson, whose commission is at stake, does an eyeball medical assessment of you, because the death benefit is so low it’s hardly worth the cost of a medical work-up. On the application where it asks, “Have you tested positive, been diagnosed, or treated for acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS), AIDS-related complex (ARC), human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) or any other immune system disorder?” check the box that says “NO” and hope they don’t make you take a blood test. If the insurance company issues the policy, you get a piece of paper in the mail that will be worth forty thousand dollars when you die. All you have to do is pay the premiums. Forty grand isn’t much money, but don’t worry, you can do it to ten or twelve different insurance companies, then sell all of those policies for fifty cents on the dollar to your local viatical company. That’s not perfectly legal; that’s insurance fraud.
“We found hundreds of AIDS victims—some of whom owned ten or twenty life insurance policies apiece, at twenty or thirty different life insurance companies—who had applied for so-called jet-issue low-dollar life insurance policies, lied from top to bottom on the applications, then sold the policies and irrevocably assigned their death benefits to Miami Viatical or Philadelphia Partners.”
Norton had heard enough of my stealth defense of Lenny Stillmach and cut me off.
“Two salary bumps last year and a bonus,” said Norton. “That’s how we show our appreciation for him saving us money. Lenny’s great with machines, but you heard what happens on the phone with a human being. This Nigerian nonsense was just the straw that broke his back. He has plenty of other problems.”
I could feel Norton taking a read on how much Lenny had told me about any other problems. Then he smiled at me, his eyes twinkling with conspiratorial greed.
“My only concern is that if we don’t pay you more, somebody will steal you.”
I was still carrying my screaming new Dell home machine on a credit card, so I let that one hang there, in case it turned into something more valuable than a compliment.
“Found yourself a gal yet?” he asked.
Not again! I shook my head. “Gals find me, sir.”
“I’ll bet they do,” said Norton. “I mean a wife. Family. I don’t like single investigators on a steady diet of special claims for too long. It changes the way you look at the human race.”
As if that would bother anybody in Special Investigations?
“Pretty soon,” he said, “you don’t trust anybody except your family, if you’re lucky enough to get one before—”
Before I get fired for discriminating against dead Nigerians?
“You know what I’m talking about,” he continued, oblivious to my internal repartee. “Before you think that every human being on the planet is a liar and a con and a cheat who will tie his own children in bed and burn down the house just to collect the insurance money.”
Or before I think that my boss would stomp a harmless idiot savant and genius from Mars like Lenny for telling the truth?
“A young man unmarried is a menace to society,” said Norton, wagging his finger at me and nodding at the flat panel video. “That’s what my dad always said. He believed in family, too. God. Family. Cornhusker football.”
Go Big Red. And we all grew up with shrines to coach Bob Devaney or Tom Osborne in our partially finished basements. Amen. Hallelujah.
Speaking of not being able to tell a decent lie! Norton can’t admit that he doesn’t like his male Special Investigations men to be single for the same reason that J. Edgar Hoover didn’t like homosexual FBI agents: because they supposedly were security risks, susceptible to being bought off with sexual favors. It was a hangover from the old days, when insurance investigators actually had travel budgets and conducted field investigations in Swindleville, Louisiana, or Scab Hill, Pennsylvania, Deadfish, Idaho, or Nub City, Arkansas, where whole towns ran fraud rings. When the adjusters and investigators came to town trying to find out how a community of 350 souls could file 275 slip-and-fall claims a year, they were usually met by a chamber of commerce representative, a blonde in a tight black dress who wanted to discuss the problem claims over dinner and drinks. After highballs and pork steaks and a couple of shots of Wild Turkey or Rebel Yell whiskey, she would start thinking out loud about losing control of herself and doing something impulsive to get the claims paid.
To old-schoolers like Norton, a married man had a powerful incentive not to get caught in a badger game or blackmailed over a statutory rape charge in Mingo County, West Virginia, where the sheriff, the town doctor, the coroner, and the local insurance agent all had a nice Appalachian health-and-accident fraud racket in place.
Norton opened a folder. A real, paper one, which told me it was more than just any old Special Claims file.
“This was one of Lenny’s files,” he said, passing it across the graphite expanse of the workstation and into my cone of light. “Why don’t you look it over and then close it out for me. Heartland Viatical. Heard of it?”
“Sure,” I said. “Operated by a South Omaha lawyer—Hector Something?—who ran a lot of ads looking for investors to buy term life policies owned by terminally ill patients who needed their death-benefits paid here, instead of hereafter. Hector’s outfit promised viatical investors twenty-five-percent returns on ‘insurance-grade’ investments, and the state attorney general beg
an an investigation to see if old Hector was keeping his promises.”
Norton looked a little chilly and annoyed. “Did Lenny tell you all of that?”
My theory is that old lushers like Norton just stop reading at some point, or more likely they instantly forget whatever they’ve read; text passes before their eyes without leaving a trace anywhere in the shrinking ventricles of their pickled brains.
“I didn’t know Lenny had a file on it,” I said. “I read about Heartland Viatical in the paper.”
“The Omaha World-Herald?” asked Norton.
To an insurance executive with a one-acre spread and a Dan Witt home out in Linden Estates, “the paper” means the Omaha World-Herald. To a working Special Claims man, “the paper” means the John Cooke Fraud Report, the scandal sheet of everybody in the fraud defense industry.
“John Cooke,” I said. “Front page, on the money the viatical companies are making.”
“Legitimate companies, then?” asked Norton, looking curiously relieved. “I’m sure Heartland Viatical paid at least one investor twenty-five percent returns. It’s a plain nothingburger with a side of fried goose eggs to me unless they’re running viatical fraud on us.”
The folder contained some docs and a few printouts from Lenny’s machine detailing the web research he’d done on Heartland Viatical.
“The CEO is a lawyer named Hector Crogan,” said Norton. “His brother-in-law is Heartland’s president, a doctor—Raymond Guttman, M.D.—from one of those med schools down in the Caribbean.”
I spotted a yellow sticky containing Lenny’s tiny, left-handed, backward-slanted printing, probably written weeks ago, before he could imagine that one day soon I would be in Norton’s office casting lots for the garments and the files he’d left behind.
Norton kept yammering.
“Lenny did his web thing and found out that Hector Crogan, J.D., was disciplined by the state bar of California in 1995 for getting a little too intimately involved in his client’s auto accident fraud enterprise in Orange County.”
Right, I remembered Lenny saying how Crogan had defended a capper, the middle manager on swoop-and-squats. The capper rounds up the rusty old sedans, fills them with personnel, then heads out on the freeway to box in a Lexus or a Mercedes and make sure the well-insured target rear-ends the Pinto in front of it filled with hired Mexicans and Indians. The capper fills out the claim forms for back, neck, soft tissue—four to six grand apiece, easy—and the money goes to the lawyer, the capper, the runners, and forty bucks a head for the meat riding in the car.
“But Crogan wasn’t running the ring,” said Norton. “He just defended the capper, who was in the usual tight crack between the crime boss and the FBI.”
Norton stabbed a prematurely wrinkled and age-spotted finger at the Heartland folder.
“Run Heartland’s policies in your spreadsheets, and you’ll see there are no viatical-fraud flags. Heartland buys life policies, but most of them aren’t low-dollar, jet issue. They’re legitimate, big-dollar policies with routine medical, blood, urine, and the rest, and nobody lied about their health to get them, so it’s not viatical fraud, and I doubt they’d bother with swoop-and-squats in Omaha, Nebraska.”
Whatever. Norton knew a lot about the file already, so why did he need me to close it out for him?
“Hector and his brother-in-law both kept their licenses,” added Norton, “professionals in good standing, et cetera. Could be nothing more than two guys who went astray in L.A., then came to the insurance capital of Mid-America to make a fresh start with Heartland Viatical.”
I get it. It’s a TV-movie pitch.
“Finish up where Lenny left off,” said Norton. “If you smell something, let me know. Otherwise, just close it for me.”
He got up and beamed me one of his grandest smiles, followed by a reliable handshake.
“You want me to set you up with a nice girl from a good family?”
3
RAVE
MIRANDA WAS RIGHT—LENNY needed commiseration. It was Friday, less than ten shopping days till Christmas. A flatland winter grinding down to the shortest day of the year, but it would be nothing but a long cold one for poor Lenny.
Miranda and I left Reliable at five sharp and shoe-skated on salt-and-gravel-dusted snowpack down to Lenny’s favorite haunt, the Upstream, a brew pub and restaurant installed in a renovated, old-time fire station. Lenny was at the bar chasing Bushmills with microbrews that smelled like fermented bran muffins. He looked like he’d just been toaded from his favorite multiuser dungeon. Nothing excessive, just the usual too much of everything. The lithium was medication for his manic depression, and I knew about that because I’d seen him toxic before. Doctors drew his blood once a month to monitor him. But I’d also seen him chop up Ritalin with a razor blade and snort it, pop amyls, do meth—anything to leaven his daily bread of smoking pot. Even the better classes in town can’t escape crank out here in the Midwest, where the fields along the highways are dotted with trailer labs manned by brain-dead meth merchants cooking vats of white-cross paste for fuel and profit. One look into their eyes and you believe the time-honored maxim that addicts treat themselves. But Lenny was no speed freak; his tastes ran to pharmaceuticals and designer pot strains, sometimes Ecstasy or mushrooms. In a dark room after too much wine, he’d admit to experimenting with a sterile needle or two in his college days. Moderation was a distant memory, an adolescent phase Lenny had crashed through like the sound barrier over fifteen years ago, and he had no intention of regressing.
Miranda bought a round, and Lenny gave us the blow-by-blow on how the Dag had posted security outside Norton’s door. Fake cops had escorted him back to his cube, where they powered down his machine, gave him two cardboard boxes, and told him to clean out his space. He’d gone straight home, where he tried to log on to the network and found all of his user and admin profiles had been deleted. In two hours he’d gone from a guy with root privileges on the servers to a stranded J. Random Hacker with revoked network privileges, the cyber equivalent of the detective in a bad movie surrendering his gold badge to the chief.
Finding another job wouldn’t be too tough. Omaha has trouble holding on to young talent, and the brains tend to drain to the coasts or to Denver, Chicago, Minneapolis, or St. Louis. In the nineties, shortly after Level 3 Communications chose Denver for its headquarters instead of Omaha, Reliable Allied Trust and a lot of other local businesses hired headhunters to conduct nationwide dragnets searching for technology workers. People like Lenny and Miranda were prime targets because they had grown up in or around Omaha and so had at least one reason to come back and live in the middle of a moonscape the local paper called “the Midlands,” the TV stations called “the Heartland,” and Lenny called “the Mid-Heartland.”
In Lenny’s case, the headhunters had found him working at a San Jose electronic-gaming company called City of Dis Entertainment, where he had once made good money as a senior software engineer. His depressive phases had interrupted a few key projects, and soon the talented Lenny wasn’t quite cutting it when it came to competing for stock options and cash bonuses. He drifted downward at Dis until he was assigned to corporate investigations, better known around Silicon Valley as “Dumpster diving”—he was the guy paid to grab documents from the trash bins of his company’s competitors and paw through them in search of carelessly discarded proprietary information. His bosses kept telling him commercial espionage was perfectly legal, right up to the night Lenny had off and the cops arrested the guy working his shift.
Lenny had been a good find for Reliable. He was already an investigator of sorts, he had lots of technology experience, and his many personality defects rendered him “not quite right” on the West Coast, which meant his talents could be had for half price here in the Mid-Heartland.
Lenny drained his glass of microbrew and was ready to brain dump on the subject of Norton’s sphincterish behavior, but it was hard to concentrate when every stray male in the place was watchi
ng Miranda and sensing that she didn’t belong to me or Lenny. Lenny knew about a rave supposedly taking place in a barn on the Omaha Indian Reservation up north, reportedly safe and bustproof because it was not on state or federal land, or some other insane excuse to believe in a frontier hell’s half acre where the government couldn’t arrest you for rampant polydrug use.
Miranda got up to use the little girls’ room, while all the little boys watched.
Lenny waited till she was out of earshot.
“Did you bring my vitamins?” he asked.
I had a friend of a friend who carried Lenny’s favorite brand of Ecstasy, and sometimes I picked some up for him. I didn’t like doing it, but he gave me unremitting shit about it if he asked for some and didn’t get any. He also laughed at me when I wouldn’t take money from him for the pills. He didn’t want to hear my careful, rabbinical distinctions between using (sharing drugs with somebody) and dealing (selling drugs to somebody), even though the laws made the same distinctions.
So every now and again, I’d pick him up some. I had five of them in an envelope and pressed them into his hand.
“Don’t tell our hall monitor,” he said, nodding where Miranda had been. He fished one out and popped it in his mouth like a breath mint. “I plan on raving whether we make it to the reservation or not.”
I shook my head when he offered one because I favor a fuel mix of sinsemilla and the best scotch I can afford, and I wasn’t in the mood for uncharted waters. Miranda could be talked into smoking pot on special occasions, but unlike Lenny, who was an expert in all forms of alcohol, Miranda was mainly a wine snob.
She slithered back onto her stool and sipped a pinot noir.
“I’ll buy you a glass of this Saintsbury,” she said. “That’ll cheer you up.”
Bet Your Life Page 3