Purely by Accident

by Jim Beegle

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  Mark looked once again into the safety deposit box and, just like the first envelope, the second was labeled with Cecil’s flowing hand. He ripped it open and dumped its contents onto the polished table. He sifted through them with a quick movement of his hand. He could see it was a series of old yellowing articles cut out of a newspaper. Each was labeled in blue ink from a ballpoint pen with the date and a number in the upper left-hand corner to indicate the sequence of the articles. He took the one labeled as number one, dated Saturday, September 3, 1983, and leaned back in his chair. It was a small article and did not rate more than a few paragraphs and a one-column headline.

  BANK’S COMPUTER GLITCH CAUSES SHUTDOWN

  Houston—Shortly after noon yesterday, the main computer of the Southwest Bank of Houston experienced a loss of its entire system. Just as most bank workers were coming back from lunch, Southwest’s data processing system, the main one for the corporate offices as well as all of Southwest’s branches, shut itself down and refused to restart. Southwest’s usually busy end-of-the-month Friday afternoon was further compounded by the fact that Monday is a legal holiday for most workers and more people than usual were cashing checks and withdrawing money for the long weekend.

  Bank spokesperson, Arthur McKracken, was confident that the troubles would be found quickly and the system restored. “We will have people working throughout the night and into the weekend if need be to get this thing working again,” McKracken told the Post when asked for a comment. In the meantime, local branches had to resort to a manual system of posting deposits and withdrawals that had not been used since Southwest began converting most of those processes over to its data processing computers in the mid-sixties.

  Southwest Bank of Houston is one of the largest in south Texas. It employees over 12,000 people in 83 branches stretching from as far west as San Antonio, east to Port Arthur and north to Austin. The bank boasted over $5,000,000,000 in assets and is a major financial hub for the world oil trade.

  The article ended and Mark put it down and took up the next in the stack. This one was labeled number two and was dated Wednesday, September 6, 1983, by the same hand using the same colored ink as before. This article was now larger and the headline seemed to scream at him as he glanced at the newsprint.

  SOUTHWEST BANK’S COMPUTER PROBLEMS TRACED TO DELIBERATE ACT, COMPUTER DEPARTMENT MANAGER MISSING

  Houston—In what now appears to be a willful act, the Southwest Bank of Houston was thrown into chaos Friday afternoon with the failure of its IBM data processing system. The computer, located in the bank’s headquarters at 401 S. Montrose Blvd., in downtown Houston, shut itself down shortly after 12:00 noon, August 30. It appears, after bank employees and outside consultants have examined the system and worked on it throughout the weekend, that someone fed the computer a series of commands loaded onto magnetic tape. Magnetic tape, similar to that used in reel-to-reel tape decks, is used to store the programming commands for the huge machines as well as to store information the bank may need later.

  Southwest’s problems with its main computer system were further complicated by what appears to be the disappearance of the man responsible for the day-to-day operations of the data processing center, Mr. David Cameron of Houston. No one at the bank would speculate on whether the two instances are related. Southwest Bank of Houston has asked the Houston Police, the Department of Public Safety, and the Texas Rangers to locate Mr. Cameron. Foul play either relating to the computer system’s failure or the disappearance of its chief programmer has not yet been ruled out.

  Most of the computer’s operating system had to be reprogrammed over the long Labor Day weekend in order to have it back up and running yesterday when Houston returned to work. Southwest Bank of Houston, with over $5,000,000,000 in assets on deposit, is one of the region’s largest financial institutes. It is one of the main banks of trade for the global oil business operating out of Houston.

  This time Mark did not hesitate and he grabbed the last article in the box. Something inside of him was bracing itself, though, as if he knew what was contained in the next item from the newspaper. In fact, this was not just an article clipped from the paper, but now the whole front page of the Houston Post. It was carefully marked with a number three. The date on the paper was Friday, September 8, 1983.

  WARRANTS ISSUED FOR THE ARREST OF BANK EMPLOYEE

  IN THEFT OF $15,000,000

  Houston—FBI agents have issued arrest warrants for one David Albert Cameron, of 1456 E. Washington Drive, Houston, Texas. The warrants are for grand theft, embezzlement, and flight to avoid arrest. Other charges are said to be pending. Mr. Cameron was the manager of the data processing center for the Southwest Bank of Houston and has been accused, not only in the theft of $15,000,000 from the bank, but of causing the shutdown of bank’s computer system in order to cover up his acts.

  Mr. Cameron was discovered missing Friday afternoon, August 30, when, just after lunch, the entire data processing system for the bank shut itself down and refused to run until extensive reprogramming work was done. Bank employees went looking for Mr. Cameron in order to get his help in restarting the computer. When he could not be found, other data processing experts from the bank and from outside were called in to fix the computer system. The computer controls every aspect of Southwest Bank of Houston’s operations including account balances and other transactions.

  Attention shifted from looking for Mr. Cameron as a missing person to a suspect in a crime when it was reported Tuesday morning that the system had been crashed on purpose. The bank had been closed for three days in observance of the Labor Day Weekend. Federal bank examiners were called in on Tuesday afternoon and, by late yesterday, the FBI had issued warrants for Mr. Cameron’s arrest.

  David Cameron, a 44-year-old white male, had worked at the Southwest Bank of Houston for over nine years. He came to the bank in 1979 after being honorably discharged from the Army, where he received his computer training.

  Mr. Walter Allen, President of Southwest Bank of Houston, told reporters at a news conference following the announcement of the issuing of arrest warrants for Mr. Cameron that, at this time, the bank was unable to ascertain exactly how the money was stolen and where it went. He expressed confidence that the FBI would find and arrest Mr. Cameron before he had time to spend much of the $15,000,000. He went on to assure the public that, while $15,000,000 is a large sum of money, the bank was solvent and able to absorb the theft.

  In addition to saying that the money was stolen, Mr. Allen also indicated that no one had yet determined exactly how Mr. Cameron brought the massive computer system to a halt on that busy Friday afternoon.

  Southwest Bank of Houston is the largest bank in the region. It has over $5,000,000,000 in deposits. OPEC and Texas oil production operations use it as a major part of the complex financial system of the buying, selling, and finding of oil.

  There was more to the article, but Mark put the paper down. He did not go immediately back to reading the computer screen. He deliberately took a small tool out of his pocket and cleaned his pipe. When he was satisfied with this operation, he refilled it with tobacco from his pouch, lit it and leaned back in his chair, savoring the aroma of the Black Cavendish tobacco. He had suspected something like this way back in Winston Lawton’s office just a week earlier, but now faced with the facts of the missing forty-odd years of Cecil’s life, Mark was still in a state of shock. He continued to smoke his pipe and drink absentmindedly of the tepid tea that had turned even colder in the cup. When he had finally worked away a good deal of the tobacco that he had packed into the pipe, he shook his head as if trying to wake up, and turned once more back to the computer screen and Cecil’s words.

  I am sure that, at this point, a good many things are running through your mind. I can tell you that a good many things are going through mine as I write this to you. And a good many things went through my mind then. But regardless of what you may think, I
am, indeed, the David Cameron mentioned in the article and I did, indeed, steal the money, but not all $15,000,000. In fact, I only stole $10,966,903. I say only, even though it is, after all, still a lot of money. But, I have a feeling that some of the bank’s more shaky loans got paid off that week of September in 1983.

  I will not bore you with the technical aspects of how I came to steal all that money. I will tell you that I did not start out to commit a crime. All I was really trying to do was solve a software problem, which I am sure you can appreciate. When I began programming the bank’s new computer system, it was riddled with problems. Not the least of which is how to balance the ledger each and every day. To complicate this, Southwest did some unusual things with the calculated account balances. It seems that they had a habit going back to the days when most of their loans were repaid in livestock, to balancing to five places after the decimal point but only posting to two places. In other words, because of interest and charges and the like, your daily checking account balance would come up showing $1,200.08957. The bank would round your account down to the nearest penny, or in other words $1,200.08. And that is what your ledger balance was posted as. The computer did not understand all this and, every day when I asked it to total up all the transactions, its numbers came up different than those of the posted balances. I spent two weeks digging around in it before I found out why this was happening. In order to fix this problem and make the books jibe, I created a separate account where I would put the .009587 cents the bank rounded off the account. This happened for each and every transaction that went through each and every branch of the bank. I never considered it real money. I just thought it was a place to park a problem until I could find a solution to it. The bank and, more to the point, the computer, had other ideas.

  I noticed one day that the system was treating my “parking” account as a real account and began to pay me interest on it. What really caught my attention was how much money there was and how fast it grew. I soon realized that at least 1/2 a cent on each and every transaction that went through the bank was being deposited into the account. There are tens of thousands of transactions every day. I discovered I was having the same problem when, a few years later, we began to do large wire transfers from Europe and especially the Middle East. Differences in exchange rates, and the interest earned on such vast sums of cash, even sitting in the bank overnight, soon found their way into this account. Similar problem, similar solution, but now instead of several hundred dollars a day being deposited into the account, it started to run into the thousands. And just like the ads tell you, the money grew and grew. No one ever noticed the money was missing. The money rarely, if ever, left the account. It was all there, just not where it was probably supposed to be. Then one day, more as a challenge than anything else, I moved some of the money, by wire, to Hong Kong and into their stock market, the Hang Sang, for about six hours. I did it on a Sunday night, which would be a Monday morning in Hong Kong. When it came back a few hours after I had invested it, the account was several thousand dollars larger. I was so pleased with the results that I began to move the money around on a regular basis. Never for more than a day or so, and never long enough to cause its loss from the balance sheet to be noticed. Occasionally I would lose money in one of the investments, but it was never a problem because my earnings far exceeded my losses.

  Once I almost got caught. I had sent about five million dollars out into currency futures, called FOREX, that changed hands and countries very fast. Just before I had to have the money back on deposit in Houston, a typhoon in the Pacific interrupted the lines I needed to wire the money back into the account. They did finally come back up, but not until about fifteen minutes before my deadline. I was so rattled that I began to leave some of the profits in accounts scattered overseas as a hedge against disasters like that one. Once again, it was never a problem because I would always list the accounts as assets, just not in-house at the time of posting.

  But like most men learn, usually too late, that kind of access to that kind of money will soon cause you to think things and plan on doing things that most people would never do. When Wanda left me and the demons of Vera and Little David came to haunt me, I decided that the money and all the freedom it would buy me was my ticket out of the hell I was living in. I can tell you now that I was wrong.

  Those hot Houston nights after Wanda left me, I would lie out on the patio trying to sleep. It was then that I began toying with the idea of how to move the money and not get caught. To be honest, I was doing it as a way to tire my mind out so I could sleep. I should have counted sheep. Within a week or two I had it pretty well planned out. All I had to do was tell the computers where to send the money.

  So, on Friday, September 2, 1983, I stole the money. All $10,966,903 of it. I moved everything that was in deposit in the “parking” account in Houston, a little over seven million dollars, out in one transaction. I had consolidated the interest accounts from different banks around the world into the same account I was wiring the Houston money to. As soon as I completed the transfers, I crashed the computer system, knowing it would take them all three days of the long weekend to find what I had done and get it back up. Even then I expected it to take them another 24 to 48 hours to find out where the “parking” account was and that it was empty. It actually took them longer than I thought, although I think some of that time may have been used to turn $10,966,903 into $15,000,000. Just a guess. I followed the money out of the country in less than two hours, boarding a plane for Germany out of Houston Intercontinental. I have stayed out of the United States until the last year or so.

  Even after having gotten away with stealing over ten million dollars, I was never really free of the things that chased me. I discovered, far too late, that all the demons I thought were on the outside trying to tear me apart were really on the inside trying to get out. I carried them with me wherever I went. I can also tell you that none of my ill-gotten millions could buy me health. I am dying much earlier and much younger than I had ever wanted to. Death is the ultimate unbiased entity. It takes from the rich and poor alike.

  So, Mark, I have told you this story so I can tell you this. Of all the people I have met in my life, I have never met anyone quite like you. From our first encounter, I could tell that you were a different and unique man. There is a lot of good in you, Mark, and everybody who knows you knows that about you. I suspect the only people who don’t see it are Amy … and you. I have thought several times that, had he lived, Little David might have grown up to be like you. I would have been a proud father if that had been the case. The bottom line, Mark, is that I trust you in a way I am not sure I can really express to you. I love you like I loved Little David. Because of that fact, and because you took time from your life to play chess with me and make sure the beer never got warm, I have one more thing I would like to leave you upon my departure from this life.

  THE MONEY IS NOW ALL YOURS.

  DO WITH IT WHATEVER YOU WANT TO.

  I am sure now as you read this that I will have no more use for it. I will not bother giving you advice on how to spend it or where. But you have my permission to do with it anything you like. I must warn you now that I may not have done you a real favor. First and foremost, I have no idea what the statute of limitations is concerning international theft and flight. Because bank robbery is a federal offense and not a state offense, and because I fled the United States, I do not know if the seven-year rule applies. I am also concerned that, because I moved, with the money, out of the United States, Interpol is also involved in investigating the crimes that I committed. The bottom line, Mark, is that you are now, by virtue of the fact that you are sitting here reading this, an accomplice. That could be a non-issue or it might mean real trouble for you. I am sorry.

  The other thing I will warn you about is to be very careful whom you reveal this too. Millions of dollars will buy you a lot of friends. It will also buy you a lot of people who would just as soon cut your throat as to give
you the time of day. If I had to tell you anything it would be this: TRUST NO ONE. I have gone out of my way to reveal any information about the money to the people I know. This is why Mr. Lawton did not know what was in the envelope. That is why Mr. Roddy did not know who my heir was or how they would claim my funds until the last minute. Money, and especially this much of it, will do strange things to people. I know firsthand how true this is.

  To make it easier for you, the remainder of this drive contains a very detailed record as to the locations of the money and information on how to access it. The money is in several different deposits or investment accounts scattered around the globe. In the third and last envelope is the document transferring ownership of the accounts and its contents over to you. I would advise you to leave the money where it is until you decide what you are going to do with it or where you are going to go. I will plead with you once again to be very careful about whom you share this with. You have a good head on your shoulders; use it now. This much money can turn into poison very fast. I have discovered that the hard way.

  I am tired now and must stop and rest. It is early Sunday morning. I cannot tell you the relief I feel now, after over twenty years, finally telling someone this whole story. Mark, I am really glad it was you.