Essentially critics of the investment letters have argued that the advisors are ignorant, they may have no formal experience or education in investment … their investment record can be bad, dishonest, they can lie about their records.… Investors newsletters accurate as a coin flip.… Their advice was no better than throwing a dart at the stock quotes page of the Wall Street Journal and buying whatever it hits.
If Rivera feels uneasy at his new job, he also feels increasingly out of place in Baltimore, where he and Allison know almost nobody. They are used to being part of a large circle of friends, and suddenly the only people they know, besides Cynthia and Allison’s aunt, are Stansberry, Stansberry’s fiancée, Brad Hoppmann, and a couple of other guys from Florida. Porter tries to introduce them to people at Agora, but Rey and Allison have nothing in common with the Stansberry set, who are mostly capitalist libertarians. Rey and Allison both lean to the left.
Rey’s friend B. remembers visiting him in Baltimore and being shocked that he would even be friends with someone like Stansberry. B. thought the two men had absolutely nothing in common. “Porter and his friends were like these businessmen in suits, with their Stepford Wives,” B. recalls. “All they wanted to do was to eat at expensive restaurants, talk about politics, drink expensive wine, and throw their money around.”
Rey never comes to feel better about his job. In fact, he only feels worse. While he makes decent money working for Stansberry, he also starts to dread writing The Rebound Report every week. He feels completely out of his depth. He signs his newsletters “Good Investing,” but few of the stocks he recommends, which included Krispy Kreme and Independence Air, perform as he predicts. Every day, he is plagued by the guilt that his bad advice may be causing people to lose their life’s savings. For a while, Allison is seriously worried about the complex mess Rey seems to have got himself into and the toll it is taking on him. He starts to suffer from insomnia. Every evening, when he gets back from a long, fretful day at the office, he stays up into the early hours of the morning playing video games to wind down. It is not like the normally laid-back Rey, thinks Allison, to be so uptight.
* * *
One of my greatest pleasures is taking my dog to Druid Hill Park, a couple of miles from the Belvedere.
We go every Friday, if weather permits. I prefer the older and more secluded areas at the northern end of the park behind the zoo; there, the roads are closed to traffic, my dog can run off leash, and some days we can hear the echoing bellows of the big cats. In these parts of the zoo, ancient undergrowth covers a series of crumbling man-made ponds, including the former sea lion pool, its wrought-iron fences and stone steps barely discernible through tangles of vines. There’s a small family burial ground here, dating back to the 1700s, with two broad flat tombs lying beside each other, one about twice as high as the other. The taller of the two contains the remains of Eleanor Rogers, who “died suddenly on January 1, 1812,” the shorter one those of “her consort Nicholas,” who died in 1822. If I sit on Nicholas and rest my laptop on Eleanor, I have a perfect outdoor desk, and can sit and write happily for as long as my battery lasts.
The Belvedere Hotel c. 1906, looking north from Baltimore’s Washington Monument
The tall spruces at the bottom of the park are home to what I always assumed were ravens but have since learned are crows. I learned they were crows when, one day, a gigantic black bird swept down and perched on a gravestone directly in front of me. He was almost the size of a vulture, as heavy-looking as my dog and almost as muscular, with a straggly mane of feathers around his neck and chest, and a huge black beak that looked as though it had been strapped on to the head as an afterthought, like the mask of a medieval plague doctor. He looked at me for a moment, then cocked his head. “I am a raven,” he seemed to be telling me. “We are marvelous and unmistakable.”
Iron railings circle the burial ground, so my dog can never stray too far, although most of the time while I write he digs happily in the shade nearby. He’s unearthed the spinal column of a deer and the skull of a young fox, its teeth perfectly white and intact. I have always admired the teeth of animals. They are clean and proud, unlike our own teeth, those odd pieces of skull that show when we grin. The sight of a pulled human tooth gives me a queer sensation, its thick roots reaching down into the jawbone farther than the enamel protrudes above. In many cultures, extracted teeth are believed to be magical and dangerous. They should not fall into the hands of enemies. They should be buried in a secret place.
I used to enjoy visiting the old reptile house, which was separate from the zoo, and cost one dollar to enter. Then one summer, a large cardboard sign appeared announcing its closure. The zoo, I learned, could no longer afford to keep it open, and the reptiles had been sent to other zoos. The sign remained long after the building stood locked and empty, filled with the ghosts of geckos and iguanas. One day, I noticed it had fallen off and was lying on the ground. On impulse, I picked it up, put it in my car, took it home, and mounted it on the wall in our half-bathroom. In large green letters, it says, “Sorry, the Reptile House Is Closed.”
Another place I like to go is the city courthouse. I will select a trial at random and sit in the spectator’s gallery, where I am usually the only observer. One day I find myself watching a medical malpractice trial. It is endless, yet I cannot tear myself away. Surgeons, it seems, have removed the wrong part of Mr. S.’s anatomy, thus leaving him in need of round-the-clock care at a cost of $250,000 a month. Mr. S. is a skeleton in a suit. He sits slumped in a wheelchair, breathing into a tube, while his wife, stoical in high heels and a flowery blouse, holds up his head and from time to time wipes the drool off his chin.
“Now, I know it’s uncomfortable,” the plaintiff’s attorney tells the jury, “but I have to discuss Mr. S.’s anticipated life expectancy.”
The lights are dimmed. At the front of the room, a projected slide shows a diagram of Mr. S.’s bowels, colon, and intestines. The next slide contains a chart full of tables and mathematical calculations. I wonder whether the injury that has been thoughtlessly inflicted upon Mr. S. by the surgeons has affected his mind as well as his body, or whether he is able to understand every word as well as anyone else in the room. I wonder whether we should hope his anticipated life span will be short or long.
We soon learn. He is expected to live another twenty-five years, at least.
The pause that follows this sobering news is broken only by the gurgling noises from Mr. S.’s breathing tube and the snoring of an overweight woman on the jury bench.
IX
ON THURSDAY, DECEMBER 30, 2004, Rey Rivera and Allison Jones take possession of a handsome old Tudor-style townhouse in Original Northwood, a tree-lined family neighborhood of quiet residential streets about a twenty-minute drive from the city center.
Their combined salaries allow the couple to take out a mortgage on the $280,000 property; their monthly payments are less than the rent they were paying in LA for a nine-hundred-square-foot house with one bedroom. Buying a home sounds like a commitment, but to Allison and Rey, it is an investment. Of course, at over two thousand square feet, the Northwood house is far too big for them—it has four bedrooms and a landscaped yard, which they rarely get the time to use—but there is plenty of space for friends from out of town to come and stay.
Buying the house is one of the ways Rey and Allison make life in Baltimore more tenable. True, Rey still feels uneasy writing The Rebound Report every week. True, Allison’s job involves a lot of travel, and at first, when she is gone, she worries about leaving Rey alone in Baltimore, where there is nothing for him to do except go out drinking with Stansberry. But Porter is deeply involved in Agora, and Rey has no interest in the crowd he mixes with. Plus, Porter and his wife, recently married, are busy house-hunting themselves.
Rey and Allison’s Baltimore townhouse
Rey settles down in another way, too. He joins the informal water polo games held every week at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis. On one occ
asion, the Naval Academy team plays against the Johns Hopkins team, the Blue Jays, and Rey gets talking to Ted Bresnahan, the Blue Jays’ coach. Bresnahan, a tough, fatherly figure with a gray mustache, realizes at once that Rey, with his experience, insight, and charisma, may well be the secret to turning things around for the Blue Jays, who, while full of promise, have never been a standout team. When Rey asks Ted whether he needs any coaching help, Ted invites him to be the assistant men’s coach, and Rey accepts on the spot. The players are thrilled to have an ex-pro on board, and so is Bresnahan. It soon becomes clear that hiring Rey is one of the best decisions he has ever made. Of the thirty tournament games played by the Division III Blue Jays in 2005, they lose only six, and those are all to top-20, Division I schools. The team ends up with a first-place national ranking in the season’s final poll, and Bresnahan is voted coach of the year. The team’s magical turnaround is attributed to the ideal combination of Ted’s knowledge and experience and Rey’s approach and tactics. Rey “made a big difference in our strategies and our conditioning,” says the team captain, Jim Singleton.
Coaching at Hopkins also gives Rey a place to swim; in the pool, he can escape from his anxieties about work. Says Allison, “He was like an otter in the water. It was his natural element. Rey was much more settled when he was coaching. And the boys loved him.” Around the same time, Rey begins working seriously on a new screenplay: the story of a young Latina water polo player who makes it to the Olympics. He calls it “Midnight Polo.”
The couple also join a church, which helps tie their life in Baltimore more closely to the community. Both Rey and Allison were raised as Catholics and remain affiliated to the faith, albeit loosely. Rey’s mother is deeply religious, and Allison’s parents are closely involved with a church at their home in Windsor, Colorado. While Rey and Allison would both describe themselves as “spiritual rather than religious,” both are interested in the humanitarian causes that the Catholic church traditionally supports, and both feel that finding a welcoming, preferably youthful Catholic community might be a good way of forming a social network outside the insular and money-oriented world of Agora. It does not take them long to find the Church of St. Mary of the Assumption, on nearby York Road. It is only two miles from their new home, and they both warm to the Cuban deacon and his wife.
Lisa O’Reilly came to St. Mary’s from Dublin to work as a youth minister and religious educator. She has been living in Baltimore for about a year when she meets Rey and Allison, in February 2005, when they arrive at St. Mary’s for the annual Mardi Gras pancake breakfast. They are a striking couple, thinks Lisa, both tall and good-looking, and she can’t help noticing how out of place they look at the suburban gathering. “As soon as I saw them, I thought, ‘Oh great, new people, young people.’ And they looked really different. Interesting, too. I couldn’t wait to meet them,” Lisa O’Reilly recalls. “Rey towered over you. He had this huge magnetism.”
As transplants to the city, the couple have a kinship with O’Reilly, and although Rey and Allison do not attend church every week, they do so often enough for a bond to form. “My relationship with them was a ministerial thing,” says Lisa, “but it was also a friendship thing.”
* * *
Over the weekend of June 11–12, 2005, Rey attends Agora’s annual conference in Vancouver. Here, perhaps because he has already decided to quit, everybody remembers him being especially fun to be around. The following month, he leaves his job at Pirate Investor. According to Allison, Stansberry is not surprised; he knows Rey dislikes writing The Rebound Report and is uncomfortable in a corporate environment. Rey loves to write, but he wants to write screenplays, not investment advice he knows nothing about. He has been making solid progress on “Midnight Polo,” and that summer, after leaving Agora, he takes out a fifteen-thousand-dollar cash advance on Allison’s credit card to buy video equipment and set up his own company, Ceiba Productions. While he hopes eventually to attract freelance work, in the short term he works on promotional videos for Stansberry, whose Agora subsidiary, in October of that year, acquires the rather more dignified name of Stansberry & Associates Investment Research.
This may have been an attempt to distance the company from the SEC fraud charges, which Stansberry is still battling. In May 2005, five months before Rivera leaves the company, a bench trial in Maryland Federal District Court concludes that Pirate Investor is guilty of securities fraud by “falsely claiming that a company insider provided the information in the ‘Super Insider Tip Email.’” Stansberry is held liable for disgorgement of the profits of the scheme, and is fined prejudgment interest. Civil penalties are also imposed, and the court enters a permanent injunction banning Stansberry from similar activities. Still, Stansberry won’t concede.
The case continues in litigation.
* * *
On November 5, 2005, Rey and Allison are married on the beach in Puerto Rico. It is the wedding they have been dreaming of. Rey’s mother, Maria, somehow manages to convince Pedro Guzmán, Puerto Rico’s most famous cuatro musician, to play for the newlyweds. Rey and Allison have the first dance, but pretty soon everyone joins in. “It was a perfect afternoon,” recalls Maria. The only false note, people say, is struck by Porter Stansberry’s absurd, tycoonlike entrance—stepping out of a private helicopter, chomping on a huge cigar.
On the following day, November 6, there is a church ceremony to make things official, but Allison considers November 5 to be her true wedding date.
Four months after they get back from Puerto Rico, Rey and Allison start making plans to leave Baltimore. They are ready to start a family and eager to get back to their friends in LA. More immediately, Rey has finished “Midnight Polo.” He is proud of the script, and can’t wait to start pitching it to agents. With a sense of relief obvious to everybody who knows them, Rey and Allison announce their decision to put their house, which they have owned for just over a year, on the market and leave Baltimore as soon as they find a buyer. They assume it will not take long. It is 2006, and the real estate market is booming. They hope to make a decent profit.
That spring, Rey, who has always been politically active, is fired up by the immigration reform protests happening all over the country in response to proposed legislation to classify undocumented immigrants (and anyone who helps them remain in the United States) as felons. Rey finds the proposal outrageous and offensive. He sets up a blog to share his thoughts and ideas on this and other subjects. These are the early days of blogging, and Rey’s site attracts few readers, but in the comments, he enjoys sparring with his friend from St. Mary’s, Lisa O’Reilly. They disagree about what kind of problem the immigration issue is. Rey maintains it is an economic problem, but Lisa believes the essential question is one of racism. “We used to have these great conversations about what we need to do for the country and what needs to happen,” Lisa recalls. She wants me to know that their conversations were not critical of the United States, not doom-laden and cynical, but just the opposite: full of hope for the future.
On March 14, 2006, Rey travels to Delray Beach for the weekend to film the Oxford Club’s “8th Annual Investment University Conference” at the Delray Beach Marriott Hotel. By this time, the Oxford Club has more than 100,000 members, and the video will be sent to all those who can’t attend the conference in person.
The conference organizer for the Oxford Club is Steven King, who still does not know Rey very well. At the Vancouver convention in June, he gets to know Rey a little better, and, while he likes him a lot, he still regards him as an old friend of Porter’s rather than someone he knows on his own terms. But Porter is not involved in the conference in Delray Beach. Rey works closely with Steven King all weekend.
King has the job of introducing Rey to the guest speakers so that he can wire them up with microphones. After each day’s events are over, the two men go out drinking, often with a crowd, and always have a great time. “A lot of socializing went on there, and Rey was the type of guy who never let you feel as th
ough you were by yourself. He was very engaging. He had the best smile, and he knew how to make people feel special,” says King.
I ask Steven for his favorite memories of Rey. “He was the sort of person that would immediately come up to you and give you a hug,” he says. “I wish I’d got to know him better.”
One thing, at least, King can say with no hesitation or regret: Rey loved his new job.
* * *
Widely described as reliable and predictable, Rivera clearly has an impulsive moment on the morning of Monday, April 10, 2006, when he leaves home on extremely short notice. Lisa O’Reilly calls him early in the morning. She tells him about a big immigration rally taking place that day in Washington, D.C. Lisa is going with some friends. Does Rey want to join them?
“He must have jumped up and left the house spontaneously,” Lisa recalls, “because he met me within half an hour of my call.” Then, about halfway through the march, Lisa found herself in trouble. “I’d brought an Irish flag to the rally, and it didn’t go down very well,” she told me. “At one point, this old Hispanic lady started shouting at me, and Rey defended me. They were arguing in Spanish. I don’t know what he said, but he charmed the old lady. That’s what Rey was like. He could charm anybody.”
* * *
In the days leading up to Rey’s death, a number of strange events occur. Allison notices that her husband is unusually anxious. Normally, he is completely self-assured, but for some reason he does not explain, Rey insists on being with her wherever she goes. He even brings a book and sits in the bleachers when she goes for her usual daily jog around an athletic track a few blocks east of their house on Westview Road.
One morning, Allison is doing her usual sprints when she notices a man beginning to come toward her. Since it is pouring rain, Ray is waiting for her in the car. As the stranger gets closer, Rey suddenly comes flying out of the car and runs toward Allison, only stopping when he gets to the track to watch the situation more closely. The man changes direction and leaves without incident. When she gets back to the car, Allison asks Rey whether he is okay and he says he’s fine; but, for some reason, the stranger has terrified him. Allison cannot understand why her husband has suddenly become so edgy. When she asks him about it, he insists there’s nothing wrong.
An Unexplained Death Page 11