An Unexplained Death

by Mikita Brottman

  Those who knew Mrs. Frick assumed that she had never truly recovered from her divorce, but in fact, she had an even darker secret in her past. Frick told the police his wife had suffered from “a nervous disorder” ever since something that had occurred in 1931, many years before they had met. He had learned about it both from his wife and from her sister, Elizabeth. The incident happened just after May returned from Labrador while she was staying with Elizabeth, Elizabeth’s attorney husband, N. Stephen A. Van Ness, and their two children in Putnam Country, New York.

  The family had planned a family hunting trip to Maine. On the morning of their departure, May had appeared at the top of the stairs with her shotgun in her hand. She had cleaned it herself, she said, and as she came downstairs, she had called gaily on her brother-in-law to “admire its perfection of balance.” To show it off, she had swung the shotgun around. It fired—either by the inadvertent touch of May’s finger, or by being knocked against the banister as it was swung. Either way, the result was the same: Stephen’s right shoulder, chest, and lung were peppered with buckshot.

  Just as Elizabeth appeared at the top of the stairs, Stephen, losing consciousness, managed to rasp that the shooting had been “an accident.” He died from his wounds nine hours later.

  * * *

  In time, I begin to realize that if Rey Rivera was murdered, he must have been taken up to the roof of the Belvedere at gunpoint. However, it is difficult to imagine anyone being led up the fourteen long double flights of fire stairs against his will. Even if he was in great shape, the gunman could not have climbed all those stairs without stopping for breath, thus taking the risk that Rivera would shout for help, run through the fire doors into a residential hallway, or, given the likelihood that he was far larger than his assailant, turn around to push him back downstairs.

  If Rey was taken up in the elevator, however—and assuming the elevator was locked, as it should have been—the perpetrator would have needed an access card. I begin to wonder: Does Rey’s murderer live in the Belvedere? Is one of our neighbors responsible for his death? I begin to watch everyone more closely, paying careful attention to their comings and goings. And while sometimes I begin to wonder whether I have crossed the line into obsession, most of the time I know this is a game I am playing in order to convince myself that my life is more mysterious and exciting than it really is.

  Other people fascinate me, but I enjoy them most from a distance—through binoculars or, metaphorically speaking, under a microscope. I suppose that, like many writers, I am something of a voyeur, eager to know all I can about others without putting myself at risk or exposing myself to judgment. I observe while remaining hidden, like a stranger who, on a dark night, looks through the lit window of a neighbor’s house. While I can happily lecture to a large group, I am increasingly uncomfortable talking about myself to a person I do not know well; as a result, it is difficult for me to open myself up to new relationships. If, then, I have become invisible, perhaps I have only myself to blame. On the other hand, being unseen has its advantages. As every detective story reader knows, the alienated outsider makes the best investigator. Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin also prefers to remain invisible. He is, he says, “enamored of the night for her own sake,” and never leaves home until the “advent of the true Darkness,” when he can go “seeking, amid the wild lights and shadows of the populous city, that infinity of mental excitement which quiet observation can afford.” He is also something of a voyeur, boasting, “with a low chuckling laugh, that most men, in respect to himself, wore windows in their bosoms.”

  Like Dupin, I tend to look at things from an oblique perspective. In Rey’s case, I am unwilling to accept the official narrative. If anything, it makes me even more curious and confused. I keep wondering how I would feel if someone I loved suddenly went missing, out of the blue; if their body was found in mysterious circumstances; if the cause of death was registered as undetermined; if the police seemed unwilling to investigate. How long would I spend trying to understand what had happened? Could I really put the loss behind me and go on with my life?

  Then again, what choice would I have?

  I notice that Mr. Holloway has also gone missing. To tell the truth, I have not minded his absence. He is a person both D. and I go out of our way to avoid—a short, loud, moody man who lives down the hall. He has a low brow, puffy eyes, and a chin cleft like a hoof. When either of us meets him in the hallway or the laundry room, we cannot escape his loud, angry tirades against the condominium board. He is also obsessively, madly in love with my dog, whom he grabs at every opportunity, lifting up the poor animal and trying to kiss him on the mouth, calling him “sweetie” and “darling.” Once, when I was going to the laundry room, I left our apartment door open, and my dog followed me into the hall. Unfortunately, Mr. Holloway happened to be on his way to the elevator at the same time. The moment he saw the dog, he chased it straight through the door of our apartment and into our living room, where he grabbed it and began to fondle it mercilessly.

  He was clearly in need of someone—or something—to love. Once, a young man with blond hair stayed over in his apartment. Mr. Holloway introduced this boy to D. as his son, but we never saw this young person again.

  I ask after Mr. Holloway the next time I see the elderly sisters in 505, Miss Helen and Miss Teresa. They are walking down the hall slowly on their way to the elevator, Miss Teresa leaning against her walking frame.

  “He passed,” says Miss Helen.

  “God is good,” says Miss Teresa.

  The death of a near stranger can still leave a vague discomfort in our daily life. It is odd how little we know about our neighbors. Yet in life, as in the crime scene, according to forensic scientist Dr. Edmond Locard’s principle of exchange, every contact leaves a trace.

  Mr. Holloway’s obituary states that “he was unmarried and left no children. He had an interest in antiques.”

  “So much for his ‘son,’” says D.

  * * *

  I ask Gary Shivers what happened to Mr. Holloway. Gary gives me a hangdog look.

  “He was real sick,” he says. “At the end, I was carrying him in and out, to the hospital and back. He had nobody else to take care of him. He had all kinds of diseases. And when you’re mean, it don’t help none.”

  Gary also tells me that Miss Helen and Miss Teresa, who share the same last name, are not sisters, as D. and I have always assumed, but mother and daughter, though which is the mother and which the daughter is anyone’s guess.

  * * *

  At the age of twenty-seven, Rey Rivera decides to teach while he works on breaking into the movie business as a screenwriter. In 2000, he is hired by John Burroughs High School, in Burbank, to teach Spanish as a second language and to coach the school’s water polo and swim teams. He is a huge hit with the kids, but even working two part-time jobs, he has trouble covering the bills. Eventually, he takes a third part-time job in admissions at the Los Angeles Film School. As a perk of his job, he starts taking screenwriting classes. Since his college days, Rey has always kept notes, journals, drafts, and outlines of potential novels and plays. He barely has time to write, but he is ambitious and a hard worker, and before long has managed to turn out his first screenplay, which he calls “Virtuoso.” It is a surreal horror story about a Puerto Rican piano player. Rey commissions storyboards for the script. The production designer loves it, and thinks it will be a fantastic movie.

  The film is something like a Puerto Rican version of Tommy, only rather than playing pinball, the protagonist plays the piano. Like Tommy, he is autistic; unlike Tommy, he turns violent whenever he sees blood. His manager, a man in a white suit who smokes a cigar, is also his antagonist, who deliberately instigates Tommy’s acts of violence and directs them toward particular goals. The whole project has a bizarre undertone. “Sometime after I got done with the storyboards and illustrations, the Director was murdered or something in the Belvedere Hotel in Baltimore and the ‘Virtuoso’ movie never got done,
” wrote the production designer on his website. “Unfortunate and tragic, I say. Rest in Peace, Rey Rivera.”

  * * *

  Rey meets Allison Jones through a mutual friend in Los Angeles in 2000. She is a tall, athletic brunette, a sales executive and volleyball player. In 2004, two years after they move in together, Rey proposes, and Allison says yes. But they both know it is too soon. Rey is virtually broke. He can barely even afford a ring, let alone support a family. If he really wants to settle down, Rey knows he is going to have to do something radical.

  And this is where Porter Stansberry comes in.

  VII

  PORTER STANSBERRY WAS a goalkeeper on the Winter Park water polo team and a longtime friend of Rey Rivera’s. They grew up together. Those who knew the pair describe Stansberry’s childhood relationship with Rivera as one of “idol worship.” Rey was big, striking, a model of athletic prowess. Stansberry, although he played sports and hung out at the beach, was, by his own admission, not especially distinguished as either sportsman or scholar.

  After high school, Stansberry attended the University of Florida, graduating with a degree in political science (“It’s completely worthless,” he said in a later interview. “I learned all about how to drink beer and hit on girls”). At college, he demonstrated no special talents and was not especially ambitious; after college, he worked as a lifeguard for a while, then delivered pizza. None of his classmates would have voted him most likely to succeed. And yet somehow, by the age of thirty, Porter Stansberry had become rich. How this happened is difficult for those who knew him at college to explain, but it is important to understand the kind of business Stansberry was involved in when Rey Rivera went to work for him, how the company was established, and the people Stansberry was affiliated with.

  In 2015, as a guest on a business podcast called The Self Made Man, Stansberry tells the host, Mike Dillard, his life story, in brief. First, though, he sums up where he is today.

  I’m not trying to be falsely modest, but if you’d told me fifteen years ago that the business that I’d started on a borrowed laptop computer, on my kitchen table, when I was living in a third-floor walk-up apartment in Baltimore’s most notorious slum, would end up being a hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar-a-year-plus-revenue company with two hundred employees and customers in a hundred and fifty countries, I would have thought that you were completely insane.

  Stansberry’s biological father, he reveals, was killed in Vietnam, and his mother married a man named Frank Porter Stansberry, “a man of impeachable [sic] ethics and character.” Frank Porter Stansberry adopted and rechristened Stansberry and his brother when they were small, naming the older boy after himself (Porter Stansberry’s first name is also Frank, but he goes by Porter to distinguish himself from his father).

  On the podcast, Stansberry explains that, after leaving college, he worked as a “very poorly paid junior analyst” at what he describes as “a very poorly run research company down in Florida”; then, in 1996, “one of our very few clients, William Bonner, bought the business, fired everybody except myself and [my friend] Steve Sjuggerud, brought us to his company in Baltimore, and gave us the chance to write large-circulation newsletters.” Bonner’s company was Agora, Inc., a quietly complicated affair. And this is where the story starts to get tangled.

  Agora was founded in 1978 by William Bonner, who began his career working for the National Taxpayers Union; the company’s early stable of products included three financial newsletters. One of these, Strategic Investment, was co-edited by Bonner, his friend James Dale Davidson, and their British colleague Lord William Rees-Mogg, a former editor of the London Times and a member of the BBC’s board of governors and, of course, the House of Lords.

  The marketing of Strategic Investment pushed the assumption, always tacit, that Rees-Mogg was in bed with MI5, which is just one of the many purported connections between Agora and government intelligence operations. (In fact, followers of the conspiracy theorist Lyndon LaRouche picketed the company’s headquarters because of these alleged MI5 links.) Although Davidson and Rees-Mogg (until his death in 2012) remained loosely affiliated with Agora through various business concerns, Bill Bonner has for many years been the company’s CEO. Strategic Investment briefly rose to national attention during the Clinton administration when its subscribers were sent copies of a small paperback “bookalog”—a marketing pitch in the form of a free book—titled Who Killed Vince Foster?

  Another of Agora’s original publications was a newsletter called International Living. An ardent Francophile, Bill Bonner owns two châteaux in France as well as a ranch in Argentina. In the late 1980s, during the craze for offshore investing and retirement abroad, International Living did so well that Agora launched a second, similar newsletter, Passport Club, which sold investment seminars on how to set up bank accounts in places like Switzerland and Hong Kong. A main aim of these two newsletters was tax avoidance via the international diversification of assets (Agora even had an early newsletter called Tax Avoidance Digest, which, for legal reasons, was later renamed Tax-Wise Money).

  After two years at Agora, Stansberry, who admits he has always had problems with authority, was fired by his supervisor for general insubordination; through a Florida colleague named Mark Ford, he got a job as a junior editor at one of Agora’s subsidiaries, the Oxford Club. Here, Stansberry did well enough that in 1999 he was given permission to launch his own Agora subsidiary, which he called Pirate Investor, LLC. This eventually became the company he still runs; it is now known as Stansberry Research LLC (formerly Stansberry & Associates Investment Research), and describes itself as “a subscription-based publisher of financial information and software, serving millions of investors around the world.”

  Most of us have a particular narrative that we tell ourselves (and others) about how we came to be who we are. Perhaps because he has told it so often, Porter Stansberry’s story has been honed over the years, its outcrops and protuberances smoothed away until it has become almost a fairy tale, with an archetypal setting and characters: The true father killed in battle; the poor but honest stepfather; the borrowed laptop; “Baltimore’s most notorious slum”; and, at the heart of it all, the orphan boy who, even after his rags-to-riches transformation, stays down-to-earth and never forgets his childhood friends. In fact, the more I listen to Stansberry’s interview on The Self Made Man, the more I get the sense that he is the kind of person who lives by such stories—he not only believes them but also finds them stirring and romantic. Indeed, it is by crafting such tales that Stansberry has become rich.

  “I was good at writing stories,” he tells Mike Dillard. “I’d always been a writer, even since I was a little kid.” The second secret to his success, reveals Stansberry, is that he only hires people with “great character,” even if they have “very little or no experience.” Yet when he describes his test of “character,” it becomes clear that he is confusing it with something else—charisma, perhaps. His test is to ask himself, “If you were stuck in an airport for five hours with this person, would you be happy about that, or would you be miserable about that?”

  In other words, rather than hiring uninteresting but experienced advisors or investment experts, Stansberry called on his old high school friends, as well as the guys he admired and modeled himself on. Most of us take it for granted that our old friends, simply by virtue of being our old friends, are people of value and integrity. Hercule Poirot offers a worldlier picture: “Every murderer,” he points out, “is probably somebody’s old friend.”

  Stansberry set out to teach himself how to sell financial products by writing persuasively, and he soon found he had a talent for convincing people to buy. In fact, he was a little too persuasive. On May 14, 2002, using the pseudonym Jay McDaniel, he sent out to PirateInvestor.com, his company’s email newsletter, what he referred to as a “Super Insider Tip Email,” letting subscribers know that a certain company’s stock was about to rise on a particular date. In return for an extra $1,000,
subscribers were offered a “Special Report” that, “McDaniel” promised, would give them the company’s name and the precise date of the price spike.

  “See how this works? It’s a total insider deal,” wrote “McDaniel” in the email. “Hey, I know it’s dirty. But I don’t make the rules.…” The email went out to around 800,000 people, and 1,217 copies of the “Special Report” were sold. In short, this one email netted $1,217,000, of which $200,000 went directly to Stansberry. As he noted in an internal memo to his copywriters, “If we’re able to sell this to 250 people and it works, we’ll be able to charge almost whatever we want next time.” But “McDaniel”’s tip did not pan out. Many subscribers were angry. About two hundred of them demanded their money back. Some complained to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

  On April 18, 2003, the SEC filed a civil complaint charging Agora, Pirate Investor LLC, and Porter Stansberry with securities fraud. A bench trial was set for March 2004. The complaint was based not only on the “Super Insider Tip Email” but also on a venture known as the “Oxford Club—Chairman’s Circle,” which, according to a direct-mail advertisement, offered “lifetime access” to annual “private teleconferences,” at which “the world’s most knowledgeable experts” would give advice about “important strategies.” Members could also consult a “Chairman’s Circle private researcher” and would be given the “private [telephone] numbers” of “The Oxford Club’s Executive Director, Research Director, and members of its Investment Advisory Panel.” The price to join the “Chairman’s Circle” was $5,000, and additional sums were due annually.