Perfectly Good Crime

by Dete Meserve

  “None of that makes the interview any less newsworthy.”

  He lobbed an arrow at me. “Unless you consider that it makes you look like a mouthpiece for your father’s rich friends.”

  I stared at him in disbelief. My father had begged me not to cover the story. How could Russ accuse me of doing my father’s bidding?

  My cheeks grew hot, but where it hit me—where it really hurt—was in the gut.

  “Enough,” David said. “We’re losing sight of what’s important here. And that is: who is Robin Hood? Channel Four has an entire series of segments airing with theories about possible suspects. CNN has a similar series. What have we got, Kate? Anything?”

  I fumed. We might have nothing on who Robin Hood was, but everyone seemed to have forgotten that I had broken the story with the only exclusive interview with Robin Hood. And I’d brought in the only interview with a billionaire whose estate had been robbed. That’s the problem with the hungry beast called television news. No matter what success you have today, tomorrow the beast will be asking, “What have you done for me lately?”

  Chapter Nineteen

  My pulse was hammering so hard I could hear it in my ears as I watched a fast-moving brush fire consume a stand of massive California oaks and dry vegetation, turning the skies orange and gray. Josh and I had set up across the eight-lane freeway from the firestorm that had already burned two thousand acres on the mountain pass that cut through the San Bernardino and San Gabriel mountains—what’s called the Cajon Pass. We had a clear shot of the firefighters battling the blaze, upwind from the smoke that was quickly blackening the skies. When the flames rose up the hillside it sounded like thunder, drowning out the rescue helicopter buzzing overhead and the whine of cars hurtling by on the freeway.

  My cell phone vibrated in my back pocket. I pulled out the phone and Eric’s photo flashed up on the screen. I slipped inside the news van and pulled the door shut.

  “Hey, sorry I missed your call yesterday.” His voice sounded tired and hoarse. “We were on back-to-backs all day.”

  “I’m at the Cajon Pass fire. You here?”

  “No. Just got back from an apartment complex blaze in Covina. Our crew pulled out a family of five. Haven’t been called to the Cajon Pass fire yet.” Like me, he was trying too hard to sound casual.

  “Why didn’t you tell me about Carrie?” There, I said it.

  There was a long pause on the line. “Maybe we should talk about this when you’re not in the middle of covering a wildfire?”

  Through the window, I watched a six-winged rescue tanker plane roar overhead, dumping bright red slurry, a mixture of water and fertilizer, on the flaming ridge.

  “It’s a simple question,” I said. “Maybe there’s a simple answer?”

  “You and I are trying to figure out some pretty big stuff, Kate. I mean, you’re leaving for New York and I can’t go with you. The last thing you needed to hear was that an old girlfriend was in town.”

  “I didn’t know she was an old girlfriend,” I said, feeling my stomach knot up.

  “She was. A long time ago.”

  “If it was a long time ago, why didn’t you just tell me?”

  “It’s not what it looked like.”

  Josh waved his arms, trying to get my attention. “The fire has jumped the southbound lanes,” he shouted, then started running to capture the shot.

  I glanced at the monitor showing Chopper 4’s view of the scene and was stunned to see two semis and several cars engulfed in flames on the freeway. “This fire is out of control. I got to run.”

  He sounded worried. “Be careful out there—”

  “Can we get together when I’m done here?.”

  “Can’t, sorry. We’re all about to leave town for some training exercises in Bear Canyon. Will be gone a couple of days.”

  “We’re live in one minute!” Josh shouted, pointing at the fiery scene.

  “Call me when you get there?” I asked Eric.

  “I will. Miss you, Kate.”

  The phone on my desk was ringing when I headed into the newsroom late that afternoon after five hours covering the Cajon Pass fire. The station receptionist doesn’t put many calls through, because otherwise, I’d spend my day talking to viewers with axes to grind and every LA resident with an event or product to promote.

  The hot desert winds and thick smoke had left my skin and lungs parched and even a bottle of water couldn’t quench my thirst. I took another gulp before answering the phone.

  “Kate Bradley.” I sounded exhausted, because that’s exactly how I felt.

  There was a lot of street noise, then a woman’s voice came on the line. “Kate?”

  “Yes,” I said wearily.

  “This is Blanca Rivera. You gave me your card when I met you after the drive-by shooting of Michael Gutierrez. Do you remember me?”

  “Yes, of course.” She was the woman who had said we were focusing too much attention on stories about the wealthy.

  “There is something here you must see,” she said. “You won’t believe it unless you see it with your own eyes.”

  I didn’t hide my cynicism. “What might that be?”

  She paused. “Perhaps you could just come?”

  “Can you give me an idea of what I’d be seeing…if I came?”

  “The Star Apartments has been planning to build fifty new apartments for homeless families with young children. And for families whose homes are embargada…foreclosed. They’ve been trying to raise money for many years but the project could never get off the ground. Today there’s a line of cars at the construction site. People are driving in and giving money.”

  “What people?”

  “I don’t know exactly. But hundreds of them.”

  “When you say they’re giving money, how much money?”

  “I talked to the lady who’s in charge, and she said they’d already raised a million dollars. In one day. From people dropping by and giving them checks and cash. Now there’s a man here bringing a truckload of…how do you say it…drywall.”

  “Can you put the man on the phone?”

  “I don’t know. He might not want me to bother him.”

  I smiled. “Interview subjects never do. But let’s give it a try.”

  There was a lot of street and crowd noise on her end, and for the next minute, I heard her walking, then her muffled voice telling the man that a “reporter from Channel Eleven was on the phone.” It was so loud on their end that he asked her to repeat herself twice. The next thing I knew, a full, round voice came on the phone. “Hello, this is Ron.”

  “Ron, Kate Bradley from Channel Eleven,” I said. “Forgive the unusual way we’re speaking today. I understand you’re donating a truckload of drywall. Why?”

  He cleared his throat. “It seemed like the right thing to do. Seeing as I work in construction and all.”

  “But why today? Why are there so many of you giving today?”

  “My wife got a text telling us about this project for homeless families. From Robin Hood.”

  “A text from Robin Hood?”

  “He said a lot of Americans are working full-time but are still in poverty and can’t afford a home. He said he’d give five dollars for every dollar others gave to the project.”

  “Have you done this before?”

  “No. We kind of figured that, you know, the government or people with more money than we had were taking care of things. But Robin Hood, well, he got us to realizing how we had to do something. We thought we’d join him. Not in robbing people or anything. In helping out.”

  I was scribbling notes as fast as I could. “So Robin Hood inspired you to contribute today?”

  “It’s not only us. There are a whole lot of people here today. We all can have a hand in changing the world.”

  The Channel Eleven pundits estimated that millions of people had received a text from Robin Hood. We sent a photographer to shoot a report
about the thousands who responded to that text and donated to the housing project. The story had legs, as Channel Eleven and other stations started airing reports about the growing groups of people donating groceries to food banks, donating cash to emergency shelters, and bringing meals to homebound seniors and people living with disabilities—all sparked by the texts from Robin Hood.

  Despite the story being played late in the newscast—as the feel-good story before sports—the report drew a huge viewer response. The number of comments on the station’s website post was rising by over a thousand an hour. The report had gone viral and the number of hits online quickly climbed from a few hundred to nearly 750,000 in a few hours. Our social media producer, Amy, was so happy with the response, she left a box of chocolate-covered strawberries on my desk.

  In the next morning’s assignment meeting, Hannah rattled off the growing list of Robin Hood’s giving. “He’s paid off the utility bills of every single resident in a poverty-stricken ten-block area of Baldwin Hills. He’s given five hundred thousand each to a cluster of schools in Inglewood to complete repairs and upgrades. He’s donated ten thousand backpacks full of school supplies to the areas of the city with the highest concentration of children in poverty—Bell Gardens, Huntington Park, and South El Monte. He’s given four million dollars to begin construction of a hundred apartments on Skid Row. And Associated Press reports that Robin Hood recently purchased a hundred and forty thousand acres of land in the Sierra Nevada Mountains area from a logging company for the sole purpose of its preservation.”

  “Starting Sherwood Forest perhaps?” Conan said, evoking a few laughs.

  “Can we trace his identity through the real estate transaction?” I asked.

  Hannah shook her head. “We’re trying that. But it looks like a dead end. He purchased it through a land trust that shields his identity behind multiple, complicated layers.” She glanced at her computer. “And there’s more. A viewer called in this morning to say that at the bus stop at Crescent and Santa Monica Boulevard in Beverly Hills, a man dressed in a tuxedo asks every woman getting off the bus at six in the morning if she’s a cleaning woman. If they say yes, he hands them an envelope from Robin Hood. With twenty-five hundred dollars cash.”

  “A rich Beverly Hills socialite could claim to be a cleaning woman and get twenty-five hundred dollars cash for a shopping spree at Barney’s,” Conan suggested.

  “A Beverly Hills socialite isn’t getting off a bus at six in the morning,” I said wryly. “And she certainly isn’t going to pretend to be a cleaning woman.”

  “Could the guy who’s handing out the dough be Robin Hood?” Conan asked.

  Hannah shook her head. “He’s an out-of-work actor hired to do this gig.”

  “All this is great,” David interrupted. “But let’s not lose sight of what’s important. True, our viewers want to hear these stories about Robin Hood’s escapades. But if we want to score the story of the year, we’ve got to find out who is Robin Hood. Channel Eleven has got to break that story.”

  After that he launched into a pep talk about how he was adding two associate producers to the Robin Hood team. One was going to chase down theories that had been floated by other news organizations, scouring the flotsam for anything that might be a meaningful lead. The other producer was working FBI and police sources for information on suspects they were investigating.

  Later in the morning, Hannah and I sat across from each other in the bullpen, trying to write a story that would pull all the theories together. It was making my head hurt. And from the pale look on Hannah’s face, it looked like it was having a similar effect on her, which even two cups of coffee wouldn’t heal.

  I threw my pen on the desk. “What are we missing?”

  Hannah stretched her arms above her head and yawned. “Look, the FBI is investigating. LAPD. The State Department is involved because of the possible ties to the Russian government. This Russian group has such sophisticated tech that they can bypass security systems in billionaires’ homes and send out anonymous texts to millions of people. What makes Channel Eleven think we even have a remote shot at figuring out who Robin Hood is?”

  I took a swig of my now-cold coffee and grimaced. “Because unlike every other reporter on the planet, we actually talked to Robin Hood. We have to figure out how to do that again.”

  “Bonnie is working with the FBI to force the League of Legends owners to give us information on Locksley’s account. All they’ll confirm is that the account was set up in Russia.”

  “No way someone with that kind of tech smarts would allow himself be found easily.” I leaned back in my chair. “Do you ever wonder why he agreed to talk with us in the first place?”

  Hannah considered that for a moment. “I assume because he wanted to set the record straight about why he was doing it. To do damage control after injuring the housekeeper.”

  “Sure. And to make his case that this was a victimless crime and to raise awareness for the plight of the poor. Got all that. But was that why?” I wondered aloud. “Or did he see an opportunity to throw all of us reporters off track? To mislead us.”

  Hannah pushed the hair from her face and held it there for a long moment. “I’m…not following, Kate. What are you getting at?”

  I didn’t know. But something about that interview still nagged at me. It was too easy. Planned. Safe. I stared off into the newsroom, letting my eyes settle briefly on the newscast that was currently underway. “What if we’re looking in the wrong places?”

  “Meaning?”

  “What if the answer isn’t in what organization is capable of such sophisticated heists but why these specific people were targeted?”

  “Robin Hood said he was targeting the hundred richest Americans. These guys are all on the Forbes 100 list. The poorest of them is worth over five billion.”

  “So we know they’re all uber-rich. But what else do we know about them? The first house robbed was Stephen Bening’s Chateau de Soleil. He’s the CEO of SalesInsight, but what else do we know about him?”

  Hannah typed on her computer. “Thirty-two million in compensation and bonuses last year.”

  I was dizzy at the number. Thirty-two million. “And El Mirasol in Malibu? Who owns that?”

  “Richard Ingram. Owner of Enterprise Products, an oil pipeline company. Earned sixteen point seven million plus a bonus of six million last year.”

  “Didn’t their stock tank last year?”

  She nodded. “Yep, it fell forty-four percent.”

  “We’re in the wrong business,” I said. “If our ratings dropped by forty-four percent, you can bet we wouldn’t be pulling home twenty-two million dollars a year. We’d be looking for jobs in Nebraska. Who owns La Villa de la Paz?”

  “Don Chase. CEO of McMillan Pharmaceutical. Last year he earned seventeen point nine million. Laid off sixteen thousand staffers this year and just announced another twenty-eight thousand. Stock fell twenty-two percent.”

  “I don’t get how someone earns that kind of money while their stock tanks. Guess I should’ve gone to business school. Okay, next. The Holmby Hills estate is owned by Wall Street CEO Thomas Speyer. Which firm?”

  Hannah took a moment to reply. “Sterling Blair Investments. Speyer earned twenty-two point nine million dollars last year while the stock fell twenty percent and thirty thousand employees were laid off.” She took a slug of coffee. “It looks to me like Robin Hood’s targeting the one hundred wealthiest Americans who have stratospheric compensation even if their companies performed poorly.”

  “It’s a good theory but, again, too easy. Let’s do a deep dive on the owners of the estates. See what you can dig up and why someone would target them.”

  She stood. “I get where you might be going with this, Kate. Russians are heavily invested in our stock market. Maybe Robin Hood and his group lost money when these companies’ stock prices fell.”

  I had a hard time imagining Robin Hood as a stock bar
on out for revenge because of poor price-earnings performance. But that wasn’t what was bothering me most. “What if Robin Hood isn’t Russian?”

  I found Curtis Seifrid, an expert in Russian linguistics, at USC’s Department of Slavic Languages. Seifrid taught a class on the structure of modern Russian and was a native speaker of Russian along with four other languages. His research involved something called “formal modeling and cross-linguistic comparison from a synchronic and diachronic perspective.” I had no idea what that meant, but a journalist friend of mine at the New York Times said Seifrid had been a lifesaver on a story she had written about the crisis in Ukraine.

  I interviewed Seifrid by Skype from his office on the USC campus near downtown LA. He was dressed in an off-white tweed sport coat and a black T-shirt—a look that only a college professor could pull off without looking like a throwback to 1990. I played the recording of the interview with Robin Hood for him three times and asked him to identify clues to his Russian identity.

  “Well, it is difficult,” he said, his own accent readily identifiable as Russian. “In part because of processing. His accent, even through processing, is very convincing. But if he is from Russia, no doubt he was raised in an English-speaking household.”

  “How can you tell?” I asked.

  “He pronounces the ng sound as in ‘nothing’ and ‘talking’ perfectly. That can be difficult for Russians to say correctly because we don’t have that sound in our language. He also uses articles like ‘a’ and ‘the,’ which we don’t have. And his grammar is good. Someone who learned English as a second or third language might say ‘He is good man’ but this speaker has none of that syntax.”

  “So it’s possible he learned Russian and English at the same time? That’s why he speaks English so well?”

  “I don’t hear any proof he speaks Russian. He even pronounces Robin Hood like an English speaker. There is no h sound in Russian, so we would pronounce it ‘Robin Good.’”