He spent the days alone, flitting about unseen, and he avoided places like bars and restaurants where anyone might try to strike up a conversation or where the exchange of words would be necessary. He wanted no one to remember his face.
He bought an Amtrak pass after two weeks in Fresno.
He rode the train mindlessly, sitting at the windows, staring at everything and seeing nothing.
He tried to change trains every eight hours, always heading in some unexpected direction.
In Phoenix he dyed his hair blonde.
In Dubuque he purchased cosmetic contacts and changed his eye color.
Through it all, he paid cash, never once used his real name on any piece of paper, application, or ticket, and spoke to no one.
He was very practiced at this kind of thing.
He had to be.
After this one there would be no other job for a man like him.
A man who got hired because he had no limits with children.
11
Mickey Herkemier had all the tools necessary to manage a Las Vegas super casino.
He was thoughtful but bold, forward-thinking yet a student of economic history, a politician yet beholden to no man, and a calloused supervisor who deep down had a heart of gold.
The only problem was, the gold wasn’t his.
It belonged to Thaddeus, but larger and larger chunks were missing, thanks to Mickey.
Mickey was involved in the time-honored Las Vegas tradition called skimming. For an experienced CPA the setup was simple.
Skimming wasn’t a financial mystery. It didn’t require a specialized knowledge of computer software, and a close circle of cheats was never recruited. Skimming required only a briefcase and a couple of minutes alone in the count room, where the money was taken from the cashiers and counted before it rode off on the Brink’s truck.
At shift change, 11 p.m., Mickey hustled those two minutes alone.
In the room.
With the uncounted money.
A quick flip of the wrist—once, twice, three times—and $30,000 went home with him.
Three nights a week and Mickey was a golden boy.
Skimming meant that Mickey took a share of the winnings out of the casino before the IRS knew it was there.
And before Thaddeus knew it was there.
Mickey had been hired by Thaddeus soon after Thaddeus came into ownership of the casino. Mickey snagged the job thanks to his twenty years in casino management and casino accounting and casino compliance audits.
Thaddeus had immediately clothed Mickey with authority to do just about any job that would arise around the property.
In part this was because Thaddeus was a practicing attorney and away quite often, but it was also because Thaddeus made the greatest mistake anyone involved in a cash business can make.
He trusted.
Thaddeus had trusted Mickey to keep one and only one set of books.
Thaddeus had trusted Mickey to record and report all income, to keep things on the up and up, and to make sure the net profits went to the owner.
Which was Thaddeus.
Mickey at first responded like a saint.
The funds were tracked and traced and recorded in the $700,000 accounting system as only a CPA could do, and that was fine. The IRS stayed away. Thaddeus made a profit, and Mickey took home a sizable paycheck every two weeks.
Slowly a change came about. The American economy took its horrendous nosedive and people started losing their jobs and homes. Panic-stricken, they flooded Las Vegas for a final go at accumulating a large nest egg so they might ride out the worldwide calamity of real estate values down by 80 percent, unemployment hovering at 10 percent, and layoffs of hundreds of thousands of workers every week. But rather than winning a nest egg, they lost it in Las Vegas. Which meant the casinos boomed. During the recession, the Desert Riviera Casino and Hotel saw its income actually double and then triple. Weekly nets surpassed $3 million.
And it was all cash.
Mickey sized up the new boss. Mickey saw a young guy who didn’t know up from down, and Mickey’s inner angel lost its way. The skim took hold, slowly at first and then snowballed.
Soon he was skimming $100,000 a week and nobody was the wiser.
He opened an offshore account in St. Lucia and began flying down there every two weeks with huge gobs of cash strapped around his waist and legs. Deposits were made in three different safe deposit boxes inside the vault, as one wouldn’t hold all the $100s and two soon filled up and three would soon be stuffed as well.
Still, nobody was the wiser.
Except for the one federal agency that referred to itself—lamely—as a service. The Internal Revenue Service immediately knew the skim was in at the Desert Riviera when net profits fell off by one percent against adjusted gross.
The IRS computers operated off an algorithm known as DIF—a way of comparing baseline values across entire industries. Brother, when 99 percent of the industry was earning an 11 percent profit, you better not be reporting a mere 10 percent because if you do, the IRS is coming for you. So Mickey knew better.
But still he kept at it.
That one percent was all it took to launch a massive IRS audit.
Soon the feds were backing up semi-trailers to the casino’s loading dock and hauling away millions of pages of financial records. This massive garbage mound was fed to the IRS Crays where it was canned, analyzed, matched, and cross-matched. Projections were drawn and compared against actuals. Finally the numbers were reported to revenue agents who met in windowless offices and created strategies based on what the algorithms told them.
The Desert Riviera tell was simple. Money was being diverted and tax was going unpaid.
That was all it took for Mickey’s betrayal of Thaddeus to take the worst kind of turn. Not only was Thaddeus losing money—thanks to Mickey—but his very freedom was about to be taken away. The IRS bullies were on it.
A grand jury was convened at the Lloyd D. George Federal Courthouse in downtown Las Vegas.
An Assistant U.S. Attorney named David Fisher walked the jurors through a labyrinth of slick accounting practices implemented by Mickey Herkemier and attributed to Thaddeus Murfee. Fisher wrongly claimed that Thaddeus used those slick practices to funnel off revenues before the IRS got its juice.
After ten solid days of whiteboards and complex CID testimony, the grand jury returned a true bill.
Thaddeus Murfee was indicted on twenty-two counts of tax evasion, perjury, and filing false tax returns.
The indictment was kept secret because Thaddeus was known to have access to huge sums of money and it was feared around the halls of justice that the casino owner would flee the country if he became aware of the indictment before an arrest was made and bail was posted.
The key condition to bail in these cases was always the passport.
They knew he had a jet. They wanted his passport.
Without a passport he could only fly to the fifty states.
And the IRS and the FBI and the U.S. Marshal’s Service had offices in all of them.
Two special agents from the Criminal Investigation Division of the IRS were assigned the task of making the arrest and working in concert with the U.S. Attorney to guide the case along to a guilty plea.
Little did the IRS know it had indicted the wrong person.
What’s more, it wouldn’t have cared even if it had known.
The point with these cases was to stand up a corpse where a businessman had once stood and point at it for all the other business folk to see and to have the living daylights scared out of them. Cash businesses reported cash—most of it—for this very reason. Thaddeus Murfee was to become an IRS poster child for what happens to business proprietors who cheat on their taxes.
They expected he would eventually plead guilty on three or four counts, rot in a federal prison for eight years day-for-day, and emerge a broken man, penniless, with even his law license pruned away by the state bar associat
ion.
The casino would be sold to pay the tax, interest, and penalty on the civil side, where interest would be accumulating almost as fast as the billions owed to the Chinese by this same government.
A perfect result for a tax cheat.
Hollywood personalities and TV hosts had trod this path before him and now it was Thaddeus Murfee’s turn.
The press releases were written, AP was given a heads-up, and CNN assigned an investigator to track the case even before it was officially announced.
The IRS was calling in all the publicity it could drum up.
It was time for Thaddeus to go down, down, down.
Or so they thought.
12
Ragman traveled Greyhound to Palo Alto.
He watched the condo where Thaddeus Murfee’s daughter lived.
After the mother drove off to school, he entered the condo. Her routine coming and going was known by now. She lived on the clock and was totally predictable, which made her an easy mark.
The kid’s name was Sarai. There were photos of her everywhere: refrigerator, living room (seven above the couch, horizontal, the baby in various poses for the photographer while lying on her stomach with a blanket covering part of her head, and again, another with her sitting up, reaching for a bright red ball, and on and on in the typical poses preferred by the photographers commissioned to photograph two-year-olds).
There were signs of Thaddeus Murfee himself everywhere.
Ragman had established that Murfee visited the condo every other week, and, when not there, mama and the kid would go out to the airport and board Murfee’s jet for Vegas, where they would spend the weekend. It was obvious the little girl was adored—even idolized—and Ragman knew it would require very little persuasion for Murfee to turn over his net worth when the kid went missing.
He walked around the neighborhood where the mother and child lived, considering whether he might want to take the child from the Palo Alto area, or whether he would grab her in Las Vegas. So much of the plan depended on how close by there were escape routes and hiding places where you could hole up with a screaming kid and not be noticed.
More and more he was leaning in favor of Las Vegas, as the desert was close by and there were huge empty places where no amount of screaming would be noticed.
Places where only the coyotes would give a damn.
13
Aldous Kroc—Badge No. 344536—was middle-aged, paunchy, hated all TV sports, loved Storage Wars, and was legally blind, corrected to 20/20 by eyeglasses that made his eyes loom large as hen’s eggs.
His skin was like tissue paper, with a bluish tint that turned navy blue at the tip of his lemon-sized nose.
He was exact, he was precise, he thought the Internal Revenue Code one of the books of the Bible, and he studied esoteric topics such as “hobby loss rules” and “net operating loss carryovers” and “like-kind exchanges” at night in bed before falling asleep. It wasn’t the best idea for before-sleep reading because the study left him enervated, full of pep, and ready to arrest someone.
Kroc was, by job description, a tax cop, officially known as a Special Agent with the Criminal Investigation Division of the Internal Revenue Service, Treasury Department, United States of America.
He loved his job, he lived for his job, and at age forty-five he was personally responsible for the jailing of over 650 white collar criminals whose key crime was the failure to report income on their income tax returns.
He carried a gun and a badge and rated “expert” every month when he qualified on the ATF shooting range.
Kroc’s partner was Mathilde Magence, whom everyone knew as “MM” around the halls of the criminal investigation division in Las Vegas.
Magence hailed from Puerto Rico. She was blessed with dark-skin, which in the blazing sun of Nevada was some protection from the UV rays. Her eyes were hazel and full of good humor—a nice counter-punch to partner Kroc’s plodding, dull manner that irritated taxpayers.
Magence was thirty-two years old, a graduate of Princeton on an S.I. Howerton Scholarship, and she had scored the top score on the 2002 CPA exam, Maryland. Which earned her a juicy job with the Service.
She had a warm smile, tiny white teeth, and wore bifocal contacts that caused her blink rate to exceed 175 percent, which was off-putting to some taxpayers. Still, of the team, she was always the first to initiate contact with any subject, since her sweet manner and happy tone were disarming and MM could be counted on to get admissions out of the unwary before Kroc jumped in for the kill.
In short, she was the human being, he was the robot.
They were gathered in his cubicle, pawing over Thaddeus Murfee’s personal tax return for the fifteenth time.
The studied grumblings of the IRS computer had flagged Murfee’s 1040 return for reasons known only to the computer, as the algorithm that flagged some returns and ignored others was always a secret, like the formula for Coke, and no one, not even the criminal investigators, knew how it worked.
They only knew that when a number came up it was very much worthy of more investigation.
These two confidants worshiped the IRS computers like the Egyptians worshipped the pyramid, the Incas worshipped gold, and the Chinese worshiped petaflops. The fastest American supercomputer in the latest top ten was Titan, the only Opteron-based system to make the top tier. Titan used about half a million main cores and a quarter-million NVIDIA-provided accelerators to produce 17.5 petaflops of computing power to its users at Internal Revenue Service Centers, where terminals were available to a select few, 24/7.
Special Agent Kroc held a passkey and he used it.
He knew more about Thaddeus Murfee than Murfee himself. He told Magence what he had learned.
“This guy owns a casino and he’s only twenty-nine?” she said, frustrated and impressed at the same time. “I mean, what the hell!”
Kroc scowled. “He took it away from Bang Bang Moltinari and his son-in-law. I’ve already reviewed the court records. It was all above-board.”
“What’s his basis in the casino?”
“Basis” was a term of art in the tax code. It meant, simply, how much the casino cost him. Or how much did he give for the casino—two very different concepts among the Internal Revenue Code enthusiasts.
Kroc hunched his shoulders and flipped through the 1120 corporate return for the Desert Riviera Casino and Hotel, Inc. He thumped the three-inch-thick filing with a pale finger. “Difficult to say. It was valued at one point by a team of experts and it looks like that’s the figure used by the corporation’s CPAs to formulate the schedules on the 1120 forms.”
“Well, casinos are cash businesses. That right there is a red flag. Titan says there’s a 99.8899 percent certainty he’s skimming cash and there’s huge amounts going unreported.”
Kroc pursed his lips. “We have the indictments. Let’s reconstruct his lifestyle expenses and see if they exceed what he’s reporting as income.”
“Starting with an inspection of his home, his cars, his bank accounts, his assets—hell, Kroc, I might even let you take a peek up his ass.”
He ignored her humor. “And ending with his expenditures. It’s going to be a huge job. His personal return is a hundred twenty-five pages long.”
“Let’s crank out the notice for interview and send it off to him.”
Kroc scowled again. “Nix. Let’s show up unannounced and flash a badge in his face. Put him back on his heels. Let’s arrest him and bring him in for questioning.”
“You’re the senior officer. Let’s do it then.”
“Tell you what. We’ll bring him in late Friday. That way he can’t get bail set until Monday and he’ll have to spend the weekend in jail.”
“That’s brilliant,” said Magence. “It’ll give him time to think about cheating Uncle Sam out of taxes he damn well owes.”
“Friday it is, then.”
Kroc felt a chill run down his spine. He totally enjoyed intimidating taxpayers. Sure they
paid his salary, ultimately, but, to Aldous Kroc, the truth ran deep. Which was, taxpayers were all guilty of falsifying tax returns, even if the fudge was as minuscule as phony deductions for clothing donations to Catholic Charities.
They were all cheats.
At least that was Kroc’s worldview.
Now if he could only nudge Magence further toward that same viewpoint.
She had proved to be a difficult agent to manipulate, he thought, and was all too willing to give the taxpayer the benefit of the doubt.
One day he would permanently disabuse her of that notion.
Then they would make the perfect team.
14
The morning after the shooting dawned hot and clear in Las Vegas, with a chance of intermittent sunshine broken only by sunshine. According to Channel 4 News at Ten.
Thaddeus accompanied PX to the initial appearance of Kiki Murphy.
It was his idea to tag along, as he had realized there might be an issue with bailing her out and he wanted to be there.
As it turned out, the District Attorney had decided to charge the case out as a first-degree murder case and argued violently against bail.
PX argued back just as spiritedly, pointed out the family’s (Thaddeus’) strong ties to the community, and the judge—who was reminded of his own daughter by Kiki—set bail at $10 million.
Thaddeus called Mickey at the casino. They presented Goodfellas Bail Bond with a check for $1.5 million for the 15 percent fee.
They waited around while Kiki was discharged from custody and then they gave her a ride back to the Desert Riviera. Her Bug was in the Desert Riviera’s valet lot, where it was left the night before.
It was one o’clock by the time they made it back. “Let’s get lunch,” Thaddeus said to PX. “You too, Kiki, if you have another hour, please.”
“Sure.”
He had a temporary solution for Kiki. The most important thing was to have her where he could keep an eye on her. He realized at that point that he was thinking like a big brother. Then he realized that maybe it was about time, that her situation was presenting an incredible opportunity to have his sister back in his life. Like him, she had grown up with two strikes against her. Now she was facing a third, and he swore inside that he would do whatever it took to prevent her striking out.
Attorney at Large (Thaddeus Murfee Legal Thriller Series Book 3) Page 6