Auto Biography

by Earl Swift

  Not long after, Skinhead finds himself on the witness stand before a federal grand jury in Norfolk, being quizzed by prosecutors about Arney’s past and present business dealings, his habits, his proclivities. He tells me later that he’s asked whether he has any knowledge of Arney having made money in the drug trade. No, he replies. He is asked whether Arney has a safe containing a million dollars in drug money. No, he says. He is asked whether Arney has sex with his employees. What on earth, he wonders, does any of this have to do with a bank failure?

  As Skinhead’s testimony winds down, he says, a prosecutor—Assistant U.S. Attorney Uzo E. Asonye, out of Alexandria, Virginia—reminds him that the proceedings are secret. So when we’re finished here, Asonye says, are you going to talk to Mr. Arney?

  Yes, Skinhead replies. I am.

  Asonye asks: Are you going to tell Mr. Arney what we asked you and what you answered?

  Yes, Skinhead tells him.

  Asonye asks: Why would you do that? It’s secret.

  If somebody’s trying to do harm to your friend, Skinhead says, wouldn’t you tell him about it?

  Asonye asks: Is that what you think we’re doing—trying to harm Mr. Arney?

  To which Skinhead says: It sure looks that way to me.

  The grand jury laughs.

  “They laughed?” I ask Skinhead when he relates this story.

  Skinhead nods. “They laughed like I’d said something hilarious.”

  WE NOW RETURN to the wagon, June 2012 upon us. The month opens with Arney and Skinhead fitting the restored frame with pieces of the front end—overhauled control arms and ball joints, which have just had their fifty-five-year-old rubber bushings removed and new ones pressed into place at a local machine shop.

  Later that day, the crew moseys outside, strips the donor car frame of its rims and tires, and bolts them to the wagon’s chassis. “We’re going to have this motherfucker sitting on the floor for the first time in a long time,” Arney crows as he lowers the lift. The tires come to rest on the showroom floor, and everyone takes a moment to savor the sight.

  But only a moment. They wheel the engine, dangling from its hoist since late March, over the frame and slowly lower it into place. I’m struck again by the degree to which the strength of the Chevy relies on skinny bolts. A single bolt connects the engine to each rear engine mount, which is in turn attached to the frame with two more bolts. Two long, fragile-looking bolts keep the engine’s front end in place. No wonder, I reflect, that in a head-on wreck, the engine of a fifties car was known to plop into the driver’s lap like a red-hot medicine ball.

  Skinhead examines the long front bolts, which are supposed to have a series of washers and bushings arranged along their shafts. The arrangement is crucial, and while he’s familiar with the 283 and engines in general, Skinhead wonders aloud: “How the fuck do these go?” Arney proposes that they consult the readiest authority. He leads the way outside and across the lot to a cluster of rusting Chevys parked among the weeds. One is the shell of a ’56 Nomad, minus its doors, its back glass and most of its paint, its trademark scored roof sagging around a clumsy sunroof installation. It’s missing its engine, but the front mounts are in place, and the men study how the bolts are arranged. In the name of thoroughness, they study a ’56 wagon and a ’57, too. “You got the knowledge you need, Skin?” Arney asks.

  “I do,” Skinhead says.

  “Then let’s get the fuck out of here.”

  They return to the showroom and bolt down the engine. “The neatest thing is that now we’ve got a rolling chassis,” Arney says as they finish. “We’re rocking and rolling. Next week we’ll get to work on some of the precision shit we need to do.” He nods at the chassis. “You won’t even recognize that motherfucker.”

  For once, Arney’s not alone in his optimism. “Didn’t think you’d see it get to this point, did you?” Skinhead asks me when Arney heads to the bathroom. “If we can keep the boss focused, we can have this bitch done in a week or two.”

  18

  TRUE TO HIS word, Arney devotes considerable attention to the wagon over the next several days. He and Skinhead rebuild and install the front suspension; lacking a compressor to squeeze the coil springs, they rig a floor jack to some nylon webbing and somehow manage to compress the springs and bolt them in place without maiming themselves. They install the cleaned and repainted rear axle and differential. Skinhead undertakes the tedious business of hand-scrubbing the engine and transmission housing. With two or three days’ labor, Arney figures, they’ll have the chassis ready for the body drop. They have only to run the brake and fuel lines, install a new radiator, and swap out the leaf springs.

  But he decides not to rush into those tasks. It makes no sense to get too far ahead of Painter Paul, who’s still mired in the El Camino project; even when that’s finished, he still faces a day or two of sanding and painting the wagon before he’ll have the car’s top ready to mate with its bottom. If he and Skinhead wait, Arney says, everyone will be working on the Chevy at the same time, which he views as the right way to tackle the job. He’s confident that Paul will complete the El Camino within the week.

  Early one morning a week later, a fellow in an SUV stops in front of Arney’s house, raps on the door, and receiving no answer, hollers over to Paul, who is fiddling with a lawn mower in his yard: Do you know if Tommy’s up? Paul detects something in the man’s appearance and manner that advertises cop. He answers that he has no idea. After the stranger leaves, he describes him to Skinhead, who recognizes in the description the same fed who served his subpoena to the grand jury—Andrew C. Bowers, a criminal investigator with the Internal Revenue Service. Skinhead calls Bowers to ask whether he’s looking for Tommy. Bowers confirms that he is, and later in the day hands Arney a letter signed by Assistant U.S. Attorney Melissa E. O’Boyle.

  It is what lawyers call a “target letter,” and amounts to a declaration of war in any federal criminal case; it’s in such documents that the “subject” of a federal probe is notified that he’s about to become a “defendant.” O’Boyle wastes few words: “As a result of information gathered by the Federal Bureau of Investigation” and others, her letter opens, “this office has sufficient evidence to present a multi-count indictment to a grand jury charging you with violations of federal criminal law including, but not limited to conspiracy to commit bank fraud in violation of 18 U.S.C. 1349 and bank fraud in violation of 18 U.S.C. 1344.”

  O’Boyle then offers to discuss a plea deal with Arney, should a “pre-indictment resolution of these charges” interest him. He has a few days to think it over; if she doesn’t hear from him, “we will assume that you have no interest,” she writes, “and will proceed accordingly.”

  Arney has no interest, as he makes plain when he gets a call from a fed a couple of days later. Arney’s recollection of the exchange: “He says, ‘Mr. Arney, this is Special Agent Whatever-the-fuck-his-name-was, and I saw that you gave Agent Bowers your business card. I viewed that as maybe you reaching out to us.’ And I said: ‘No, I don’t think so.’ So he says, ‘Well, we wanted to reach out to you. It would be good for you to talk with us.’ And I told him: ‘I don’t have anything to say.’ And when I hung up I said: ‘Thank you. Have a great day.’ ”

  He’s somewhat more emphatic than that in his conversations with me. “I wouldn’t talk to those motherfuckers if they called my lawyer and promised that every one of them was going to give me a blow job and a million dollars,” he says a few days after the deadline has passed. “I would rather die than speak to those motherfuckers.” Receiving a target letter isn’t the same as actually being indicted, he points out. Why on earth would he want to plead guilty to something with which he hasn’t even been charged? And an indictment isn’t the same as a conviction. “I’ll take my chance with a jury,” he says.

  Later that same afternoon he haggles with a customer over the price of a 1963 Pontiac Catalina,* loses the sale, then strolls north across the lot. An apocalyptic storm is sw
eeping our way from across the state line, bolts of ice-white strobing against a mountainous black thunderhead, but for the moment, Moyock is sunny, hot, and still; I join him in the lot’s one dab of shade, on the rusty back bumper of a 1957 Chevy Suburban.

  He’ll do nothing to help the feds, he vows again. They’re immoral. They’re willing to twist the truth and bend the facts until they’re about to break in pursuit of what they have the nerve to call justice. “They’re the lowest form of human beings on earth, simply because they manipulate,” he says. “They take what people say and turn it around so they make the jury think whatever they want it to think.”

  He will offer variations on this complaint any number of times in the coming weeks. And on this one: “A grand jury is set up so they eat with the prosecutors, hang around with the prosecutors, talk and joke with the prosecutors,” he says. “If I could go in there and eat lunch with the jurors and shoot the shit with them, they’d fucking fall in love with me.”

  I watch, uneasy, as the storm swallows the sun. The lot plunges into twilight with a low snarl of thunder. Wind materializes, its gusts strong and surprisingly cold. Arney seems oblivious. He makes a final point to which he’ll often return. He can’t see how he’s done anything wrong—or, rather, he certainly didn’t know he was doing wrong, if he did.

  Now dust devils whirl in the lot. Nylon tarps draped over open engine compartments snap like bullwhips. At last Arney stands, and we make a slow retreat across the lot toward the Quonset. The waiting, the wondering about what happens next—that’s a new experience, he says; typically, he’s confronted trouble before it arrived, preempted any attack he sensed was imminent. He tells me a story, by way of illustration: Back when he was barely out of his teens, he was gassing up his wrecker when he was approached by a panhandler. Arney told the man he couldn’t help him. The fellow remained a couple of feet away.

  Partner, Arney told him, I said I can’t help you. You can move along now.

  Still, the man didn’t move. Instead, he looked Arney in the eye and smiled.

  Arney whipped the pump nozzle from the wrecker and doused him head to foot with gasoline. The man bolted, shrieking.

  “I was going to set him on fire,” he tells me. “I mean it. If he hadn’t run off screaming, I was going to set the motherfucker on fire. I thought he had a gun. When he smiled, I really thought he was going to pull a gun on me.

  “I was going to set him on fire. Does that make me crazy?”

  The morning after this conversation—June 26, 2012—Skinhead is alone at Moyock Muscle, moving cars around the lot with the wrecker, when a Crown Vic pulls onto the property. A bald fellow in sunglasses steps out and strides toward him. Damn, Skinhead mutters. It’s the sheriff.

  The lawman is not entirely unexpected. Despite Arney’s growing unease over the disposition of his fine, he has failed to write a five-thousand-dollar check to Currituck County; he’s opted, instead, to wait until someone in officialdom explicitly grants or refuses his request, now more than five months old, that the fine be forgiven.

  Here comes his answer. The sheriff carries a paper holding him accountable not for $5,000, but for the original fine of $78,800, plus $120 in court costs—and placing a levy against certain of his real estate until the debt is paid, to wit: 373 and 383 Caratoke Highway, the southernmost two of the four tracts that make up Moyock Muscle, and including the Quonset. If he fails to produce the cash, the sheriff could be back to padlock the gate.

  When word of the levy reaches Arney, he is spurred, at long last, to confront all he must do to satisfy the county. His deadline for making the improvements is Friday, July 13, less than three weeks away—and those improvements include rearranging hundreds of cars, removing the Jersey barrier from most of the lot’s Route 168 frontage, erecting several hundred feet of chain-link fence, and excavating a large drainage pond on the property’s eastern edge, back by the railroad track. In that he’s made few friends at the courthouse, it’s safe to assume that he’ll get no breaks if he blows the deadline.

  So within hours of the sheriff’s visit, all other business at the lot is dropped. Skinhead races around the property in a wrecker, moving the inoperable cars away from the highway. Paul leaves the El Camino to build fences, which will shield the inoperable inventory from view. Arney recruits his brother Billy and Bobby Tippit’s teenage sons, Bob Jr. and Anthony, as additional muscle, and hires a fellow with a dump truck to help create the thirty-by-120-foot lagoon.

  Stifling, triple-digit temperatures settle over the borderlands. Thunderstorms rake the lot several afternoons straight but offer no relief; they only provoke an explosion in the mosquito population. The new hole out back fills with muddy water; the ground around it turns to stinking, slippery bog. The crew works through whatever discomfort the days bring, from early mornings to well after the late midsummer sunsets; its members take few breaks, even for water; working shirtless, they turn deep and salt-caked brown.

  Arney spends an increasing amount of his time elsewhere, talking to lawyers and accountants about his situation with the feds, and with another lawyer about Currituck County. The meetings seem to pay off: The county softens its position. If he meets the deadline, he’ll have to pay only the five thousand dollars, after all. He’s pretty confident he can make it.

  Then, early on Thursday, July 12, Skinhead steps out his back door and into the yard, just in time to see a caravan of late-model sedans and SUVs speed up the street and stop in front of Painter Paul’s house. A phalanx of men approaches the front door. Several wear guns.

  Oh shit, Skinhead mutters. Here it comes.

  ACROSS TOWN LATER that morning, reporters gather on the steps of the Walter E. Hoffman U.S. Courthouse to hear federal investigators announce that four Bank of the Commonwealth officers and two “friends of the bank” are in custody and will be prosecuted for their roles in a massive fraud that toppled the bank and contributed to the lingering U.S. economic crisis.

  Arney’s part in the scheme, according to the fifty-one-page indictment, was to repeatedly take loans from the bank that he used to pay down earlier loans on which he’d fallen behind; in so doing, he helped the bank hide the fact that it was carrying millions of dollars in bad debt—and helped keep the secret until the debt grew so big and heavy that it pulled the whole operation under. He also obtained loans to buy bank-owned properties, which enabled the bank to convert inert real estate into interest income, at least in theory; the purchases further obscured the bank’s shaky health, and Arney took out additional loans to cover his resulting payments.

  The feds also charge that when he no longer qualified for loans himself, Arney asked others to borrow money in his place—then used the proceeds to make good on his other debts. These “nominee borrowers” include two whom the indictment identifies only by their initials—“R.A.” and “A.A.”

  While the lawmen host their news conference, agents are going room by room through each of the Arney Compound’s four houses, cataloging their contents—because should Arney be convicted, said houses and contents are likely to become the property of the United States. Agents descend on Moyock Muscle, too: By the time Skinhead arrives, fresh from showing investigators through the compound, a dozen or more of them are on the lot. They eyeball the stock. They throw ladders against the buildings and climb to their roofs to take photographs of the cars. They shoot video.

  They choose, from among the 308 vehicles on the property, thirty-three that will be forfeited to the government, no question about it, if Arney is convicted. They hand Skinhead a restraining order informing him and other employees that they are “RESTRAINED, ENJOINED AND PROHIBITED” from any action that would affect the availability or value of the vehicles.

  The implication is that they judge these thirty-three the most valuable on the premises. If that’s the case, the feds don’t know much about cars. How else to explain the presence on that list of an electrically crippled ’98 Trans Am, a worn Cadillac limousine, or a Chrysler PT Cruiser? A
wrecked ’02 Thunderbird? A Ford Focus? “Just random,” Skinhead says as he shows me the roster. “Trucks with blown head gaskets and bad transmissions.” He shakes his head.

  They make some choices that are impossible to miss—e.g., the unfinished ’69 Camaro convertible that remains under a tarp in Painter Paul’s body shop. It lacks an engine, interior, and top, but its body is flawless, its paint fresh. A fifth grader would recognize its worth. But a fifth grader might be more savvy in assigning a value to the car. The feds lowball the Camaro at $10,000. It’s worth twice, if not three times, as much. They do the same with a 1981 Excalibur, a big, fast, faux-thirties roadster that’s modern under its hand-built fiberglass skin; the agents judge the car worth $8,000 to $10,000, which Skinhead reckons is something like twenty cents on the dollar. You fellows might want to do some research, he tells them.

  That afternoon, Arney and his five codefendants make their first appearance in court. One at a time, they’re asked to stand with their lawyers while Magistrate Judge Tommy Miller instructs them on the conditions of their bond: They’re to restrict their travel to Virginia, open no new lines of credit, commit no criminal acts, and so on.

  When Arney’s turn comes, the lead prosecutor—slim, dark-haired, and pretty, her manner crisp—notes that he stands apart from the other defendants: He has a “substantial criminal history, including a history of violence,” Katherine Lee Martin tells the judge, noting that he also works across the state line. “We have no objection, your honor, to his going to his business,” she says. “That’s his means of employment. But we’d ask that electronic monitoring be imposed.” Judge Miller waves off the suggestion. “Moyock is a lot closer to here than Richmond” and most of Virginia, he observes. He won’t make Arney wear an ankle bracelet.