Passing Semis in the Rain: A Tina Johnson Adventure

by Karen Goldner

  "Let's come back to that," I said. "I'm also curious about when Kevin turned off my bank accounts—at least, assuming that he was the one who did it. But the main thing is to figure out whether the money is still there."

  "It seems unlikely that we can find out either of those answers without an inside source.”

  Teresa was looking beyond my shoulder when she said that, thinking through something. Her eyes quickly looked at me when she appeared to change the subject: "Tell me more about this investigation of the bank."

  "The security people didn't know, so I don't have any details. It's something to do with criminal activity, so I am pretty sure it's more than just a few bad loans." I was about to make a political comment about bankers and bad loans and destroying the economy, but then I realized that Teresa was a banker herself and I didn’t want to step on toes.

  She may have read my mind, because she laughed and said, "Oh, you mean the normal bank investigation stuff." I must have looked uncomfortable. "Don't worry about offending me. Honestly, I am so offended by my job that it's a wonder I can sleep at night anymore." She sipped her water and stared at the table. I waited, flattening the paper napkin in front of me.

  "I used to love where I work. It was a little community bank. I started out in a branch and opened up savings accounts for kids and helped people get car loans. Then I moved into mortgages, and did that for ten years, until my bank sold to a national bank. And for a few years after that, it was still a good job. They made me a manager—their employment policies were a lot less good ol' boy than my old bank had been. Eventually I handled all the home mortgages for our region, which meant a lot of marketing, with realtors and community groups. It was fun, and I would travel a little bit for meetings. Then they started buying up small mortgage origination companies. You know, the brokers and storefronts that would give you a mortgage using someone else's money. This was when the home finance business was booming. They had me handle the integration work to get the companies we purchased into our system. When I went into some of these places I couldn't believe how sloppy their underwriting was. There would be all sorts of basic documentation missing from the files, and sometimes mortgage documents weren't even signed." She paused and took a sip of water.

  "Like what you heard about in the news," I said.

  She nodded. "Exactly like what was in the news. At first my job was to get them cleaned up. We would get documentation whenever we could. I wrote a lot of memos to my boss, which I think he probably just threw away. Then when the financial crisis hit, he and all the vice presidents at his level were fired, and I started reporting directly to corporate. At least, until they eliminated my job and moved me back to supervising mortgage origination. After having been Vice President of Mortgage Integration." Her eyes misted up.

  "I thought you said the vice presidents had been fired." This confused me, but it made her smile.

  "Nearly everyone at a bank is a vice president. The low-level people are assistant vice presidents and the high-level ones are executive vice presidents, and in between are a ton of plain old vice presidents. It's because you have to be a bank officer to sign documents like mortgages, so they just make everyone a vice president."

  "But you weren't a vice president anymore?"

  "They let me keep the title Vice President because I was supervising several lenders, but I took a big pay cut. What choice did I have? It was 2009 and I needed the job."

  I nodded sympathetically. Omaha had not been hit by the Great Recession as badly as a lot of cities, but a couple of my old neighbors had worked for banks and were laid off.

  "Anyway, I don't know why I'm telling you this," she said. "I am so sick of the bank, and when you told me what was going on it was just one more reason to tell my boss I was leaving for a few days. I could have asked him for a personal day simply because I have a bunch to use, but he's been such a dick lately I wasn't sure that he would approve it. So I made up about my Aunt…" she paused, trying to remember who was supposedly having surgery.

  "…Sandra?"

  "Yes, dear Aunt Sandra. Gosh, I hope she's okay." We laughed.

  The waitress had begun hovering near the table and I noticed a small group of customers waiting at the door. We grabbed our purses and left, discussing where we might be able to find a safe Wi-Fi connection.

  20

  We also needed to find a place to stay. Teresa more than earned her place in what was quickly becoming a partnership when she made two calls and found us a condo in a part of Miami Beach called Surfside. Our building was a block from the beach and the view was of other condos, not the ocean. Still, it was clean and reasonably priced and a lot nicer than the motel I had been in the night before.

  "There are a lot of condos on the market," she explained. "You just have to know who to call."

  It was a two-bedroom with two baths. There was a large living room on one end and a dining area on the other, with a small kitchen. Since Teresa had found the place and was paying for it, I insisted that she take the master bedroom that had the private bath.

  On the way over we had had not figured out how to jump through the wire transfer hoops, so we started discussing another plan. It was after two o'clock and if we were going to contact the bank today we needed to do it soon.

  Teresa had checked online and the first number on Kevin Andrews' business card did turn out to be the routing number for National Bank and Trust. She opened their online banking website as if she were a customer and entered the second number. It fit the number of spaces in the form, so we were ready to see an "enter password" message pop up. We were dismayed to see something else.

  "Account Closed," the computer screen read. My heart sank.

  "Okay," Teresa said. "Let me call the bank and find out when this account was closed. Do we have any idea in whose name it might be under?"

  That stumped me for a minute. It would have been something controlled by Christine or perhaps Frank. Or maybe Kevin Andrews himself. Of course they would not have used their real names. What name would they use? I remembered the slow boy with the cookies, but that seemed like a stretch and although I could see him I didn't remember his name, anyway.

  "Can you play dumb and see if they let something slip?" I asked, not expecting an affirmative response.

  "I don't see what else we could do, actually," said Teresa. "If we guess at a name and we're wrong, we won't get a second chance. Let's hope that I can intimidate someone who knows that they're being investigated by the feds."

  She spent a few minutes searching the web, then I heard her say "yes" and start punching numbers into her cell phone. Apparently someone answered.

  "Ms. Tate? This is Wilma McCaffrey from OCC. I've been asked by people at the FBI to check on an account number. I was supposed to do this yesterday and it slipped to the bottom of the stack, so they're really breathing down my neck now, especially after, well, you know. Would you be able to help me?" She waited for a response and I stared at her, impressed. She grinned at me, then read the account number to Ms. Tate. Her grin faded.

  "Really? Are you certain? I mean, should I re-read you the number to make sure I didn't give it to you incorrectly?" This woman was a master. Her tone was friendly and just desperate enough to evoke sympathy from another cog in the system. "And the borrower's name? And the balance?"

  The master was shaking her head when she thanked Ms. Tate and hung up.

  "It was never a deposit account," Teresa said. "She said that the number sequence indicated a special loan account. In other words, it is money that is owed to the bank, not money that the bank has on hand. It is a loan for forty-five million dollars."

  "Forty-five million?" I whistled. "Who's the borrower? And what is the OCC?"

  "Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. The bank regulators. Cleveland Enterprises LLC is the borrower. It's most likely one of those limited liability companies made up of a bunch of other LLCs. They're really difficult to trace down, but it can be done."

  "W
hy would it be a loan rather than a deposit account? How could Christine have gotten the money when it was actually loaned to someone else?" I asked.

  "The short answer is that she couldn't." Teresa had made the call from the desk. Now she stood up and walked around an overstuffed chair, as if moving helped her to think.

  "Two possibilities," she said. "Well, really, three. One possibility is that the number is meaningless gibberish, that it was written down only to confuse someone. If that's the case, it's a dead end. Another possibility is that it was written incorrectly by mistake. Again, if that's true, we're screwed." She paused and looked at me.

  "And?"

  "The third possibility is that this is a lot bigger than we had thought. Look, a loan is an asset of a bank. Although you think of a deposit as being money in the bank, it really isn't a bank asset. It's a liability, because at any time you can come claim the money and take it out. So the bank has to have enough funds available to cover that possibility. And that is money that they can't do anything else with. However, a loan is an asset because it is what is owed to the bank."

  I was following what she said, but I did not get her point. I waited.

  "One of the ways that a bank can make itself look better than it really is, is to have a lot of fake loans on the books. That is to say, a lot of fake assets."

  "But doesn't someone have to repay the loans? Otherwise wouldn't the bad loans make things even worse? That's what happened during the financial meltdown, right?"

  Teresa looked at me as if I had said something brilliant. "Tina, of course you're right! What a perfect way to launder money! I had just been thinking about having the fake loans hidden so that it's hard for bank examiners to see that they are in default. That's the more common thing: a bank that is in trouble is tempted to make their bad loans look better than they really are. But think about this: if you have a lot of drug money to launder, you work with a bank that pretends to loan you money. Then you make your loan payments every month, which is really a way to launder dirty cash because from the official bank point of view it is repayment of the loan…." She stared off a minute, trying to figure out the end of the story.

  For a change, I was the one who figured it out first." And then the banker—someone like Kevin Andrews—funnels the money back to the cartel. They could say that it was overpayments or escrows or just put it in offshore accounts and it would simply disappear. Could that happen?" I asked.

  Teresa applauded until it sank in that our theory meant the money was gone.

  "Something is missing from this," she said, back to staring at the light blue wall beyond me. She didn't mean the money. "This is not something that one guy at a bank could pull off. It is too likely that he would be caught in a normal bank audit, even in an internal one, which banks are always doing. No, for this to work it would have to go beyond our Mr. Andrews."

  "Which is why the FBI is investigating, probably?"

  Teresa nodded at my question. "Yes, but there is more to it. I get why a banker would do this: he could make a bunch of money. But for an entire bank to be involved, or at least most of its top management, it has to go beyond a few million dollars. The president of a bank isn't going to risk federal prison for that, not when he could just bonus nearly the same amount of money to himself without breaking the law, and with the number of people who had to be involved in this for it to work, the money would end up getting spread around pretty thin."

  She began to stare at the blue wall again but then her eyes quickly came back to me.

  "If they needed the capital to stay afloat during the financial crisis, and they were essentially bought by drug money, then they would have to keep playing the game. They wouldn't be able to get out."

  I tilted my head at her in a question.

  "See, back during the meltdown, banks were short on capital," she explained. "And if they didn't have enough cash, there was tremendous pressure to sell to a larger bank that would be more stable. Remember all those mergers in 2008 and 2009? And in Florida, there were a ton of failures—I think more than in any other state. A bunch of Florida banks were bought by larger banks, but the economy down here was all real estate, and frankly most of the small banks weren't worth saving. So if you're in that situation, and the only way you're going to stay open is if you show a lot more assets than you actually have and get a lot more capital…" Teresa was nice enough to let me finish the sentence.

  "…you'll take money from anyone you can." It felt great to be able to keep up with her.

  "But I do have a question," I said. "Isn't anyone paying attention to where the money comes from? In the government, I mean? Wouldn't they have to approve all that money going into the bank, and wouldn't they figure out it was from a drug cartel?"

  "Sort of but not really," Teresa answered. "If you did this in, say, late 2008 or early 2009, when the sky was falling, and you were a small bank in a region where banks were closing at the rate of several every month, and you could find a plausible cover for the money, then I think that the OCC would have been thrilled just to get you off their trouble list."

  That made sense.

  "So I wonder who the plausible cover was?" I asked. "And I wonder whether they have the money. Our money."

  When I said that, Teresa smiled and her teeth were as bright as the sunshine on the beach.

  21

  We puzzled over who the cover was, because that seemed to be the key to getting our money. After having been shot at by drug dealers and attacked by the woman who had stolen my identity and my savings, I felt like I had as much right to the money as anybody else.

  As we talked, I realized that Teresa and I had a lot in common about how we looked at the world. I had initially thought of her as someone so successful that we could never be equals. Once she started describing her career at the bank, however, I realized that she felt the same way I did. Maybe there was something about being the same age that helped. In any event, we had agreed without even having to discuss it that we were equal partners on this adventure. She knew a lot, but I was starting to realize that I was smart, too. She seemed to have confidence in my opinions, and that was beginning to rub off on me.

  Unfortunately, Teresa did not have a good idea how to get my own accounts turned back on. Neither one of us knew how they had been turned off, and besides, the person most likely to have done so had been run down on a Miami street.

  "If we're going to spend a lot of time figuring out how to get money, I'd rather figure out how to get twenty million dollars than a few thousand," I finally said.

  Teresa smiled in agreement. "And you know, it might be easier. It reminds me of this story my uncle told about being in World War II. He was in the Pacific, and they would bring beer up the river for the officers' club. The way he described it, the cases were stacked seven or eight high, and were plastic-wrapped to a raft. There were usually four or five rafts, and it was my uncle's job to bring them in. One day some of the enlisted guys asked him to give them a couple cases of beer. Of course, that would have meant breaking open the plastic and it would have been obvious that something had been taken. So he just gave them an entire raft. From the Navy's point of view, it simply never existed."

  I laughed. It sounded like a scene from Operation Petticoat.

  "True story!" Teresa protested with a grin. "My uncle said that for months, whenever he was back at that base, he'd go to the tent where the guys lived and have a warm beer."

  "That actually sounds pretty awful," I laughed.

  "Yes, but it does make me think a cold drink would taste pretty good about now. It might even help us come up with a plan."

  Teresa and I were natural partners.

  First I wanted to check my voicemail, and I was able to use Teresa's phone to do so without turning my phone on. Mark had called, so I texted him from Teresa's phone to let him know I was fine. There was also a message from Susan, my security friend. She had called earlier in the afternoon.

  "Tina, call me. We've gotten more
information and I am concerned."

  That killed any buzz I had from the prospect of early cocktails. Plus Mark was texting back so I had a short conversation with him. I didn't want to tell him anything significant in a text, and I was now too preoccupied with Susan's concerns to want to talk with him on the phone. Finally I did the "gotta go" thing and stopped responding.

  I used Teresa's phone to call Susan. She picked up on the first ring.

  "Susan, it's me, Tina. I just got your message, since my phone was off. I'm calling from a friend's cell." That made her suspicious, and there was little I could do to convince her that Teresa was a friend.

  "Where are you? I’d like to talk in person," she finally said.

  I offered to meet her at a coffee shop, but she said she would rather come to us without our going outside. I gave her the address of the condo.

  While we waited, Teresa and I were puzzled about what the problem might be. Was she concerned that I was in danger? That was the logical explanation for why she didn't want to meet us somewhere. The more I thought about it, and of course I could not think of anything else, the more nervous I became.

  Finally there was a knock at the door. I squinted through the peephole and saw Susan, flanked by two men I didn't recognize. All were dressed in black suits, as the security people had been the night before. None of them were smiling.

  When I opened the door, the taller of the men looked at Teresa and moved toward her. The shorter man, whose black suit was more than a little snug, stepped next to me. Susan closed the door and stood in front of it.

  "What's going on?" I asked, since no one said anything. "What's wrong?"

  Susan nodded and the men grabbed us. Before I even knew what happened, we were both handcuffed. The goons held each of us by the upper arm. Chubby was holding me tight, and I assumed Teresa's was doing the same when I saw her wince. Then my eyes moved back to Susan, who had quietly drawn a gun on us.