by Glen Tate
“But let’s be honest,” another banker said. “We’re doing this because we want to have some security and economic growth in our town. If we make any money, it won’t be for years from now.” All the bankers would deposit their own wealth into the bank and use that as seed money for the bank’s expenses. It was an investment for them.
This plan to start an honest bank made sense. Joe realized he had quite a business opportunity here. “So,” he asked, “you would pay my company from the safe deposit charges now and maybe interest later?”
“Yep,” one of them said. “Directly from the safe deposits, as in you physically keep a portion of whatever items a person gives the bank as the safe deposit fee.” They started to talk about what percentage Joe’s company would keep. That discussion lasted several minutes, and ended with Joe keeping 50% of the safe deposit fees for the first year because the bank’s major expense, at this early point, was for security. It would take many of Joe’s guys and equipment to secure the bank. It would be a fortress.
Joe was beaming inside. All of his hard work and preparations had put him in a position to essentially be a 50% partner in a bank without investing a dime, just giving his guys some work. Before the Collapse, he had worked so hard at a traditional business, only to have the government shut him down. Now, no government could shut him down, and he didn’t have to pay any taxes. He would have never thought people could do quite well after a society collapses, and that they could do it honestly, without having to rob and kill for it. But it made sense: in every human situation, some people do well and others don’t. Most of the population was doing horribly. It was inevitable that some people, the prepared and smart people, would actually prosper from the Collapse.
He extended his hand to Bruce. “Deal,” Joe said. That was how business was done now; a group of local people who knew each other, a handshake. In so many ways, the Collapse was like pressing a giant reset button to the way America originally was, and to the way the country became so prosperous before it went insane.
One of the bankers came up to Joe with three cigar boxes. “Hey, Joe, I know you like cigars. Consider them a signing bonus.”
Joe smiled. “I got about seventy guys who would love a cigar. It’s a pleasure doing business with you, ladies and gentlemen.” That’s how Joe Tantori got into the banking business.
Chapter 185
Commissioner Winters
(July 9)
Ed Winters couldn’t sleep. Again. He was sleeping in a bed in a spare conference room in the courthouse. This is weird, he kept thinking. He couldn’t get past the oddness of a bed in a conference room. Or sleeping at his office. It just wasn’t right.
He felt like he was in a jail, but he was glad to be there, given the alternative, which was getting killed “outside the wire,” the area outside the fortified courthouse. Outside the wire is where all those pathetic animals—the townspeople—lived.
Winters tossed and turned some more. It was no use. It was 3:45 a.m. and he wasn’t going to get any sleep, which was amazing because he was so tired. He got up and walked down the hall to his office. It was just so weird getting up from bed and already being in his office. It made time blur together. There was no “work day” and “home.” It was just one big, run-together blur of working.
County Commissioner Ed Winters was in his early sixties and had a full head of silver hair. He was short and thin and looked like a CEO. He was a typical politician-looking guy.
Winters was the boss of Frederickson. The undisputed boss. He liked that part. It made him smile every time he thought it because he had come out on top, just like he knew he would from the day he moved to this piss-ant town.
He arrived in the early 1970s when he was fresh out of college. He had a job in the office of the local wood products plant and rose up the ladder quickly. He was active in civic affairs until the plant closed in 1989, when the spotted owl going on the endangered species list shut down logging in western Washington. By that time, he was the assistant manager out there and “Mr. Frederickson,” serving on every board and charity. He was the Grand Marshal of the Timber Days Parade for so long that people had forgotten who else had ever done that.
With the plant closing and Winters being “Mr. Frederickson,” it was only natural that he would run for office. He ran unopposed for mayor of Frederickson in 1990.
As mayor, when the spotted owl crisis hit, Winters got to dole out all the state and federal money for the closed plant. All the worker retraining money, all the displaced worker grants; all that money. Gobs and gobs of it just showed up from Washington DC and Olympia.
It was largely up to Winters to decide who got the money and who didn’t. He settled a lot of old scores that way. He had a very long memory. One minor comment that could be taken either as a joke or an insult ten or twenty years before was all it took for Winters to use his “discretion” to steer favors away from one person and toward another. He loved it. It was like there was a giant scoreboard in his head. The scoreboard showed who acknowledged that he was the boss and who crossed him.
Winters did a magnificent job of handing out the state and federal cash during the rough times of the early 90s. He easily won a spot on the county commission, which consisted of the three elected officials who ran the county. Now, with more territory, his reach was wider than just Frederickson. There were more permits that needed his approval, which came at a price. Not cash in brown paper bags. He was more sophisticated than that. Getting a subdivision or commercial building approved by him, or getting a county contract, or getting a cousin out of jail meant that you owed Ed Winters for the rest of your life. And he would call in the favor. At a minimum, if Winters helped someone then they would vote for whomever Winters said. They would donate to causes he told them to, most of which weren’t really charities but hired Winters and his friends as “consultants.” Winters might ask someone to invest in one of his real estate ventures. And they did.
Winters spent the next twenty plus years building up an empire. Nothing happened in Frederickson or the county without him. Nothing. He viewed Frederickson as his town. He owned it. The people living there were like the little plastic human figures in a toy train set. The “townspeople” as he derisively called them. They were little people playing a part, and he ran the show. He loved that.
In the early 2000s, a threat to his empire emerged: Mexicans. They started to move in, and they didn’t understand how things worked. They actually ran independent little businesses, without cutting him in. What were they thinking? This was giving others in town the idea that it was possible to do things without him. That had to stop.
Winters started a campaign to shut down “unlicensed businesses.” The townspeople, who were not keen on these new brown-skinned people who talked funny, were happy to rally behind their leader…and make the town “safe” by having only licensed businesses. New ordinances were passed, imposing fines and even jail time for the heinous crime of operating a little grocery or used tire business without several licenses and approvals. The city attorney—a pathetic bootlicker who did whatever Winters said—started suing the Mexican businesses for licensing violations. The Mexicans thought they had left this kind of thing in Mexico, but quickly concluded they needed to play ball. Just like in Mexico.
Soon the Mexicans came to Winters asking for relief. He told them how his “charities” and investment opportunities worked. He also told them how to register to vote. Washington State had a very strong “Motor Voter” law that allowed anyone applying for a driver’s license to register to vote. No proof of citizenship was required. Hell, no identification of any kind was required. Anyone could vote — several times in each election, for whomever they were told.
Washington State went to an all vote-by-mail system instead of requiring people to physically go to the polls. This was to save voters the “extreme inconvenience” of going to a school or church every few years and taking ten minutes to vote in person. Of course, the politicians had a bigger
reason to impose vote-by-mail. The county would mail a ballot to each name appearing on the voter registration list. It was not uncommon for one household to get two or more ballots per “person” because signing up with at least two names was encouraged. Multiple voter registrations was “how we do it” in Frederickson, the Mexicans were told.
All this voter fraud was actually considered humanitarian and enlightened. Winters even got a grant from the state election office to register “underserved” voters in his county. The easier they made it for anyone to vote (several times), the more they were doing to encourage minority voting. And voting was always good; politicians would ask, “You’re not against voting, are you?”
To “help minorities,” Winters ran a Mexican on the city council to show everyone how “diverse” Frederickson was. Everyone—white and Mexican—thanked Winters for his “leadership” on bringing the two communities together. Of course, the Mexican city council member did whatever Winters said. He got more and more Mexicans elected, and they stayed elected as long as they did exactly what they were told. All the while, everyone lauded Winters for fighting “racism” by bossing around brown-skinned people and taking advantage of them. He laughed at that.
Now that he was firmly in control of everything, Winters was glad to have the Mexicans in town. He was very happy to have all the new Mexican “customers” for his much-needed services, like permit approvals. He was happy to have all those votes—not just for him, but for other candidates. He could make deals with state legislators and even the area’s U.S. Congressman to deliver votes in exchange for grants and government programs, that Winters got to administer. It was beautiful.
The stupid townspeople, Winters marveled, never said anything. They never demanded clean government. They never questioned what he was doing. They did what they were told. They wanted free stuff. They had been convinced their whole lives, starting in elementary school, that the solution to a problem was more government. They were so used to corruption that they just assumed that was how it was. One time, when a new editor for the newspaper came in and started asking questions, the townspeople pretty much ran him out of town. It warmed Winters’ heart to see that. His townspeople loved him.
As the economy started to tank, it became harder and harder to run the city and county. Businesses shut down in record numbers. A few years later, D2—or the “Second Great Depression”—as some called it, really got rolling. Frederickson looked like a ghost town with all the boarded up buildings.
Tax money, Winters said to himself. That’s what was wrong. Boarded up buildings didn’t produce any tax money. At first, the “recession,” as it was initially called, was a blessing to Winters.
That’s right: a blessing. There was all that stimulus money to dole out—and Winters was the guy who everyone came to for all that big, fat federal money. He made sure the number of city and county employees didn’t decrease during that time. He actually hired more government workers as a “local stimulus” project. It was all federal money, so who cared?
Then, the federal money ran out. So did the state money. Winters was faced with deciding what to do. Increase fees for everything? There was no one left to pay the fees. Winters had to start firing government workers, which was hard at first. So many of those people had helped him get where he was, but he was where he wanted to be so who cared? The townspeople, after all, were just little plastic figures playing a part in the train set Winters was running. It was actually much easier to fire them than he’d thought.
He had to fire about half the police and essentially empty the jail, which had a predictable effect. He needed to have a volunteer security force. He had plenty of volunteers; they were all the people Winters had helped over the years and their sons. (Winters didn’t allow any Mexicans to volunteer for security. It was just understood that white people ran things.)
The volunteers were very eager to help, and maybe get a cut of what was going on. They later became the “Blue Ribbon Boys” due to the blue cloth strip they wore on their left arms to signify who they were.
As things were getting worse and worse with the economy, the state and Feds wanted to control everything. All that federal and state money came with strings attached. Winters constantly had to deal with all the officials in Olympia and DC; at least at first. But pretty soon, he noticed, Olympia, and especially DC, couldn’t keep track of it all. There weren’t enough bureaucrats to keep tabs on all the money flowing into even little Frederickson. Winters quickly realized he could essentially do what he wanted. He would just send in “everything’s fine here” reports to Olympia and DC. They were reports that probably went unread.
When the “Crisis” hit on May Day, things got even better for Winters. There were plenty of government resources coming in during the “emergency.” And the little townspeople needed Winters even more.
But, the best part about the Crisis was that this made Winters truly untouchable. No one from Olympia or DC would possibly have the time or resources to crack down on corruption like his. Even if they caught him, he’d just call a few of the many favors government officials owed him and he’d get a slap on the wrist. He decided to quit trying to hide what he was doing and figured that being out in the open about it reinforced that he was the boss. He was so powerful that he didn’t even need to hide it.
Winters decided he would directly profit from the Mexicans instead of just indirectly. He had the police (what was left of the police) arrest the leader of the Mexican gang in town. He told the leader that the gangs had a new business partner: Commissioner Winters. They would get protection from the police in exchange for various cuts of different enterprises. The gang leader, Señor Hernandez, wondered what took Winters so long to make this deal. He was happy to have the government as his new business partner. It made everything so much easier.
The benefits to Señor Hernandez of his formal relationship with the police became clear when a rival Mexican gang tried to come in. The police dutifully arrested them, and the townspeople were so happy that Commissioner Winters was taking bold action to combat crime. Winters viewed it more as getting rid of a business competitor, but if the little townspeople wanted to think he was protecting them from crime, all the better. However, rival gangs kept coming. The Mexican refugees from the collapse down in Mexico continued to flood northward. Winters was getting dragged into gang wars and even family feuds that had started back in Mexico.
He proposed a deal with all the gangs. Protection for all of them; same price for all of them. They couldn’t agree with each other and rejected his offer. They even started to kill his cops, which was the last straw.
Winters and Señor Hernandez’s gang went after the other gangs. It got bloody. That’s when Winters had to move from his house into the security of the courthouse. It didn’t take long until a barbed wire fence went up all around it, which was where the term “outside the wire” came from. Winters was essentially under siege in his own courthouse. Heavily armed convoys of cops, Blue Ribbon Boys, and Señor Hernandez’s men could move outside the wire, but that was about it.
After much in-fighting, the Mexican gangs finally came to an agreement: They would split up the Frederickson action. Gasoline, food, guns, drugs, and girls.
Girls. Winters really liked the young Mexican girls. He liked that he could do whatever he wanted to them. He got to be the boss. He got paid in “product” as often as he could. His wife had known this side of him for decades. She didn’t care anymore. She stayed in a separate room somewhere in the basement of the courthouse. Winters never really liked her, anyway.
Soon after the Crisis started, there was a Mexican sector in town run totally by the gangs. Cops were not allowed in, except to collect money. Not “money” as in cash, but gas, food, ammo, gold and silver, medicine, FCards, and whatever else was valuable.
Winters was glad there was a truce—a very profitable one—for now, but he knew that the Mexicans’ deal with each other could break down at any moment, which was what kep
t him awake at night. He never fully believed that he could keep control over the whole town like he had been doing so far. He knew this racket was too good to be true.
Another thing keeping him awake at night was the reports that his own Blue Ribbon Boys were going into business for themselves. He didn’t like that. He let some of it happen; that’s how he paid those guys, but he was starting to wonder if they wouldn’t try to get rid of him and keep all the money for themselves.
Winters maintained the barbed wire around the courthouse even during the gang truce. By then, there were too many militia whacko “Patriots” out there. Winters assumed the Patriots were a gang, too. He was waiting for them to come to him and ask for a piece of the action.
Winters, after he heard about the armament at Pierce Point, assumed Pierce Point might be the first Patriot gang he needed to make a deal with. Before the Crisis, he didn’t spend much time thinking about Pierce Point. They had always kind of been on their own, but now they were coming into town and using their FCards. That was money in Winters’ pocket, and he got to tell Olympia how many more people he was helping with the “Recovery.” He needed Pierce Point to be good little customers. He needed them to play ball.
And then, one night, someone faxed Winters a disturbing picture from Pierce Point.
Chapter 186
Co-Opting Pierce Point
(July 9)
Fax machines, long forgotten as a communication device, were much more popular during the Collapse. The internet would go off and on. The phone lines still worked, most of the time. But old 1990s era phone-line faxes didn’t require the internet. People were actually using them again.