Sun, Sand, Murder

by John Keyse-Walker

  I felt the hairs rise on the back of my neck on hearing that name.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  The mention of Nigel Brooks always draws a strong reaction from any Anegadian, even those born long after his departure. He was part charismatic preacher, part flimflam man, and Brooks’s reputation is second only to Mephistopheles’s in the minds of the good people of the BVI. But that was not always the case.

  The story is well-known in our tiny country. It began when Brooks materialized from out of nowhere in 1966. One fall day he simply appeared at the customs house in Road Town, bringing with him an affected aristocratic accent; a statuesque blonde whom he introduced to all as his wife, Cybil; and a banker’s draft on the Bank of England for two hundred thousand pounds. Only after scandal reared its ugly head would it be learned that the accent covered a Cockney burr, and that the dazzling Cybil had enjoyed a prior life as a high-priced escort catering to a clientele with an affinity for whips, rubber, and leather.

  The Bank of England draft, as it turned out, was real, although the source of the funds was never ascertained. But in midsixties Road Town, the deposit of the draft into the newly opened branch of Barclays bank was a secret the branch employees were unable to keep. And Brooks himself was less than discreet about the what-was-then-huge sum of money he had brought into the colony. Soon everyone in the BVI knew of Nigel Brooks’s vast wealth and took the opportunity to embellish on what they knew when describing it to others.

  Nigel and Cybil took up residence in the honeymoon suite of the venerable Fort Burt Hotel. A month after their arrival, a freighter originating in Southampton offloaded two crates consigned to Brooks at Road Harbour. The smaller contained the latest London fashions for Cybil and Savile Row’s tropical equivalent for Nigel. The larger crate held a steel-blue 1966 Bentley convertible. For the next six months, the couple could be seen on Sunday afternoons tooling sedately along the low road by the waterfront, he immaculate in seersucker and red paisley bow tie, she in the latest Mary Quant, fair hair tossing gently in the breeze set up by the automobile’s smooth progress.

  The small expatriate community of colonial officials and the striving local politicians of the Legislative Council welcomed Mr. and Mrs. Brooks with few questions and open arms. They were immediately included on the invitation list for all social events at the governor’s residence and were equally at home at a local beach barbecue where they were the only white attendees. The statuesque Cybil and the debonair Nigel succeeded in charming all whom they encountered.

  At all these social events, Nigel dropped subtle hints about his financial acumen and business connections, and before long the bureaucrats had dutifully spun them up to the point where he acquired a stature equivalent to that of the founders of the East India Company. When asked, Nigel suggested tourism as an antidote to the colony’s anemic farming and fishing economy. He envisioned and described a future where the BVI would be the next Jamaica, the next Bahamas, and the crown jewel of Her Majesty’s colonies in the Caribbean. The rising tide of tourism would lift all boats, with jobs, money, and entrepreneurial opportunity for every belonger.

  The Legislative Council delegates had stars in their eyes. The colonial officials smelled a career boost, a ticket to a better posting, and maybe even a position at home in the Commonwealth Office, if the colony could be made to prosper on their watch. They all turned to Brooks for guidance and expertise.

  Nigel played his marks coyly, temporizing until the tourism mania in the governing class reached a fever pitch. Finally, after months of entreaties from Government House, he and Cybil embarked on an all-islands tour of the colony for the purpose of evaluating its tourism and development potential.

  At every stop, the couple was met with an enthusiasm that matched, if not exceeded, that shown for the visit of HRH Queen Elizabeth earlier in the year. Crowds of schoolchildren, waving small flags left over from the royal visit, awaited the Brookses as they disembarked at each island. Local dignitaries gave rambling recitations of their specific island’s virtues as a potential destination for the tourist throngs sure to come. Nigel and Cybil modestly accepted it all as their due.

  On completion of the tour, Nigel closeted himself in the suite at the Fort Burt Hotel for a month of deliberation and study of his notes. The Legislative Council and the Commonwealth Office functionaries waited in agitated anticipation. After the New Year holiday, Brooks addressed a packed session of the Legislative Council with his findings and recommendations.

  The topography and population patterns of the BVI were a hindrance to large-scale development of tourism potential on most islands in the colony, Brooks declaimed. As volcanic islands, they had insufficient flat land to construct an airport large enough to accommodate the jet aircraft required for international flights from Europe and North America. Further, the clusters of small farming plots around suitable beaches and bays made land acquisition for resort development cost prohibitive and disruptive to the population.

  Fortunately, one island did not suffer these impediments—Anegada. Its land was flat, and its interior could easily accommodate the eleven-thousand-foot runway needed to land the massive new Boeing 747 airliner. The population was small and concentrated in The Settlement, which would remain untouched by any resort development. The grand resort complexes would be built on the pristine beaches of the north shore, at Cow Wreck Bay, Bones Bight, Windlass Bight, and Jack Bay.

  A hubbub began among the delegates to the Legislative Council and in the packed gallery. The thought of placing all the BVI’s tourism eggs in the single remote basket of Anegada did not sit well with the representatives from Tortola, Virgin Gorda, and Jost Van Dyke, who had come to hear Nigel Brooks proclaim their respective home islands to be the centerpiece of a BVI tourism nascence.

  Brooks had anticipated this reaction and was ready. A dignified request from him caused the speaker of the council to vigorously gavel the chamber to order. Brooks waited until the song of an ovenbird in the garden outside was the only sound to be heard. He then began a two-hour monologue, mixing hard facts with emotional appeals to patriotism, and paternalistic explanation with humor, hope, and tears. He ended by vowing to risk his entire fortune on the development of Anegada, as evidence of his faith in the plan he had formulated and the future of the people of the BVI. Despite the dry nature of the topic, the room erupted in shouts and cheers. Brooks, and Brooks’s plan, had carried the day.

  Lambs to the slaughter, the Legislative Council adopted the plan by acclamation. The Anegada Development Corporation was chartered by a special act of the council, with Nigel Brooks as its president and chief executive officer. The company was given a ninety-nine-year lease on all land west of The Settlement and along the entire north shore and east shore to the East End.

  In the weeks that followed, the matter of financing was taken up in a series of legislative sessions. The Commonwealth Office bureaucrats, eager to assist, suggested an issue of development bonds backed by Her Majesty’s Treasury. Benefited by a desultory regret the mother country was experiencing over its treatment of the colonies in the prior years, the proposal found sufficient support to land it on the desk of the chancellor of the Exchequer. At ten million pounds, the chancellor deemed the matter unworthy of more than cursory scrutiny. By mid-1967, HM Treasury consented to stand behind the bond issue.

  Barclays bank provided the marketing horsepower, selling out the issue with lightning speed. Special provisions were made for the sale of small-denomination bonds in the BVI. In a rush of patriotism tinged with a hint of avarice, local sales approached one million pounds. Everyone in the colony invested. Those with savings too modest to purchase the lowest-denomination bonds on their own pooled their funds with neighbors and friends to buy a single bond together.

  By Christmas 1967, the treasury of the BVI contained ten million pounds from the bond sales. Converted to US dollars, recently adopted as the currency for the BVI, this amounted to slightly more than $27 million.

  The proximi
ty of all that money in the same branch of Barclays bank that held the remains of his initial two-hundred-thousand-pound deposit must have set the black heart of Nigel Brooks a-pounding.

  A lesser con man might have pushed for access to the money, then and there, and probably could have made away with hundreds of thousands in quick order. Brooks, however, cemented his reputation as a prince among grifters by the patience he displayed when the prize of the Anegada con was so near. Brooks did not inquire about or attempt to get at the money. Instead, he set about doing exactly what he had promised to do.

  First, Brooks spent his own funds to buy a used concrete batch plant in Puerto Rico. Two barges dropped the plant machinery and a Caterpillar D4 bulldozer at Setting Point on Commonwealth Day 1968. The bulldozer cut the first real road on Anegada, a gash through the scrub thorn from Setting Point to The Settlement. The road’s purpose was to allow men from The Settlement to reach jobs at the batch plant.

  Brooks hired every able-bodied man on Anegada who would work for him. None of the men had ever worked for hourly wages before. The concept of a regular starting and quitting time was alien to them. Most could not read or write. Despite these conditions, the batch plant was up and working in a month, using only one engineer from San Juan and local labor for the construction.

  The bulldozer was then turned to the task of cutting a runway and airport grounds out of the bush in the center of the island. At the same time, concrete from the batch plant was used to build the ten-room Reef Hotel to house the first tourists and foreign investors. Once-sleepy Anegada fairly bustled with construction and promise.

  Nigel and Cybil quit the Fort Burt Hotel, moving to Anegada to supervise the construction. Their original accommodation was a sailboat on loan from the governor himself, anchored in the shallow bay at Setting Point. After the completion of the Reef Hotel, Brooks set his construction crew to work building a permanent home for him and Cybil. Known simply as the Villa, it was sited on a low rise just east of Pomato Point. A broad lawn of Bermuda grass, the first lawn on the island, flowed grandly from the shaded veranda of the Villa to the alabaster sand of the bay. Cybil passed the afternoons sunning on a chaise on the new grass, a chilled martini in hand.

  Nigel spent his days in a flurry of activity. Morning might find him meeting with his construction foreman at the future Captain Auguste George Airport, followed by a midday boat trip to Road Town to make a progress report to the Legislative Council, and a session at the post office to send cables to materials suppliers and prospective operators for the resort. Every visit to Road Town ended in a meeting with the Barclays bank manager, with whom Nigel formed a warm and collegial relationship.

  Working closely with his friend at Barclays, Nigel placed orders for millions of dollars of materials and furnishings for the planned resorts. Each cable confirmation of an order was immediately followed by a payment draft issued by the bank. The money was sprinkled to companies throughout the Caribbean, the US, and even South America. Twenty million dollars migrated from the Barclays bond account in a matter of months, with all disbursements approved over the willing signature of the branch manager.

  The assembly of the many pieces needed to develop a world-class resort on remote Anegada occasionally required Nigel to venture outside the BVI. He would travel from Anegada to San Juan, and from there continue on to Mustique to meet with executives from Club Med or to Bogotá to confab with catering managers from Spain. He returned from these junkets with optimistic reports of impending proposals for partner relationships from those with whom he had met. The tourist boom, Nigel assured all who would listen, was just over the horizon.

  As dollars flowed out of Barclays bank, precious little in the way of materials and furnishings found its way to Anegada. After the arrival of the batch plant and bulldozer, nothing came by barge at all. Some supplies were brought in from San Juan by air. But most of the items making the trip were not for the planned resort. Instead, only furniture for the Villa, tins of caviar, boxes of frozen steaks, and cases of Greenall’s Special London Dry Gin, the latter being the principal ingredient in Cybil’s favorite libation, made their way to Anegada.

  After six months with no deliveries of building materials, polite inquiries were made by the chairman of the Legislative Council’s Committee on Tourism and Development. Nigel provided prompt and plausible explanations for all the undelivered items. A strike in Pittsburgh had delayed the structural steel. An unfortunate fire at a furniture factory in North Carolina meant no beds or chairs for months. Kitchen equipment was back-ordered. There was a lumber shortage caused by labor problems in the southeastern United States.

  The inquiries satisfied, Brooks returned to the business at hand. More orders were placed, and more drafts were issued by the Barclays branch manager. The good fellow had become so accommodating that on several occasions he bent the rules requiring paperwork in hand before sending payment, on the assertion from Nigel that a substantial discount would be lost if payment was not immediately made.

  By the spring of 1970, Anegada had an unoccupied ten-room hotel, an airport with a gravel runway not yet approved for flight operations, and a new Italianate villa standing majestically on its south shore. The employees of the Anegada Development Corporation, though new to the world of wage-earning employment, began to question why their days were spent pushing piles of coral rock to and fro along the boundary of the airport property.

  The development bond account at Barclays bank had been depleted to the tune of twenty-two million dollars. The loyal opposition in the Legislative Council demanded answers. The Committee on Tourism and Development scheduled a hearing, with a request that Nigel Brooks attend, for a day in late March.

  The hearing time came and went, and Brooks did not appear. A check of the Villa and the Reef Hotel later that day failed to produce Nigel or Cybil. The beds in the Villa were neatly made, and champagne was still chilled in the refrigerator, but Mr. and Mrs. Brooks and their passports were gone. Rumors of a night flight from the untested runway at the airport circulated.

  A stormy session of the Legislative Council followed. Accusations and counter-accusations of laxity, neglect, and corruption were made and rebutted. In the end, the council ordered an accounting and referred the matter to the fledgling Royal Virgin Islands Police Force. Five million dollars remained on deposit at Barclays, and several hundred thousand dollars were known to have been expended for materials actually received. The balance of the bond issue proceeds, slightly more than twenty-one million dollars, had vanished along with Nigel and Cybil.

  After six months, Cybil was traced to Fez, Morocco, where she had opened a gentlemen’s club featuring a stable of blond entertainers, male and female, from Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. Possible extradition was considered and then abandoned by the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions. There was no evidence that Cybil had committed any crime while in the BVI.

  Nigel Brooks was charged with almost every fraud crime available under English common law. He proved more elusive than Cybil but ultimately surfaced in Brazil after two years. With no extradition treaty between Brazil and the United Kingdom, the colony’s law enforcement community stood helplessly by while Nigel engaged in a decade-long public party on the beaches and in the nightclubs of Rio de Janeiro. In 1980, his seventeen-year-old mistress stabbed him to death in a fit of pique after Nigel announced that he was leaving her for a younger woman.

  While Nigel Brooks had been a hard partier, living in Brazil, even living very well, was cheap in the seventies. Brooks’s lifestyle was such that it was clear he had squandered no more than a few million dollars during his decade in Rio. The unspent millions had never been found.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  I took a breath and plunged in. The waters would be deep and dangerous, but it had to be done. “Dada, how do you know Nigel Brooks used helicopters?”

  “I saw them. Saw them with my own eyes. And heard about them from some of the boys in town who worked for Brooks. They used t
he steel matting at the old tracking station as a landing platform. Once a week a helicopter would come in with supplies for Brooks and that woman of his. All the supplies were luxury items. I remember Rot Faulkner telling me about unloading five whole cases of gin for that woman’s martini habit.”

  Rot Faulkner. My own father-in-law, dead these two years past. I thought to myself that some helpful information probably died with him.

  Dada continued. “I didn’t see any of the gin myself, since I never worked for Brooks.”

  “Did you ever meet the helicopter pilots?”

  “No. I only saw them at a distance. A black man and a white man.”

  “Do you remember the name of the helicopter charter company?”

  “I don’t think I ever knew it.” Dada squinted, seemed to look back in time. “The helicopter was green, a military green, kind of drab. It was old and beat-up; maybe it was bought as surplus. There was no company name written on it but it did have this weird emblem painted on the door, really odd, a hamburger with wings on it. Like a flying hamburger. It’s funny how something like that will stick in your mind, even after all these years.”

  Just like “Hamburger 5,” the call sign of John Ippolito and Neville Wells’s helicopter, was now stuck in my mind. The flying-hamburger emblem on the helicopter shuttling caviar and gin to Nigel Brooks on Anegada couldn’t be a coincidence. Like the poor policeman I am, I felt the connection in my bones with no real evidence, intuition without a shred of substantiation.

  Dada let his attention drift, his thoughts probably lost somewhere in 1970s Anegada. His eyes had a faraway look. I could see we were done.

  “Give Madda my best, Dada,” I said.

  “I will, Teddy.” His eyes snapped back into focus. “And then I’ll give her my best!” A lecherous leer spread slowly across his face.