The Chameleon Conspiracy Read Online Free PDF Page B

Bob Holliday. He’s my new deputy.”
    “Who is he?”
    “He’s a Department of Justice veteran with many years of successful commercial-litigation experience, but with no international
     exposure. I hope you’ll help him get acquainted with your work.”
    Bob Holliday had wide shoulders, smart brown eyes, and a thick mustache, and appeared to be in his early fifties. We shook
     hands when he walked into the office.
    “Dan,” said David, “I concluded that the Bureau has alreadyfound common points. All of the names used during the scams were of white American males who one: were born within a few years
     of one another, but had no apparent connections among them; two: had obtained passports also within a few years of one another;
     three: left the U.S. and then disappeared; four: resurfaced years later just long enough to scam banks for millions with a
     reasonably consistent modus operandi—for example, never a bank insider, so never named on a list of persons barred from employment
     in financial institutions, but gets bank insiders to provide investor victims—and five: disappeared again without a trace.”
    “I see,” I said with a mild tone of sarcasm. “What do we have here twenty years later?—millions gone, multiple names, one
     scam each, consistent MO, no investigative direction.”
    David smiled, and turned to Bob. “What do you think?”
    Bob Holliday wasted no time in getting to the Bureau’s motives. “At this point the Bureau sensibly concludes that it could
     spend scads of resources on these dogs and still come up with nothing re terrorist financing or anything else. Wanting at
     least to improve its statistical picture, and with money plus an international link such as the use of passports, albeit tenuous
     in the extreme, the Bureau thinks of David and off-loads eleven open cases. David thinks of you. Voila!”
    Bob Holliday sounded as if he knew what he was talking about. Normally I didn’t like it when someone came across as too self-assured,
     but I didn’t mind it with Bob. He managed not to let confidence slide into arrogance the way a lot of people do.
    He continued. “The Bureau came up with these cases when trying to look for terrorist financing where they’d never looked before.
     But it hit a dead end with them domestically.”
    “But why just now?” I queried. “And where is the international connection? Just the passports?”
    “I know that the international angles are questionable,” conceded David. “All I’m going to tell you is that the dollar amounts
     in these scams are so high, and it’s so common for proceeds of large scams to leave the U.S., that it seemed worthour taking them on, at least preliminarily. I don’t want to tell you any more about the Bureau’s analysis, because I want
     you to take a completely fresh look at them. I’m interested in whether you see something in them that others haven’t.”
    I returned to my office in New York and sat motionless behind my desk looking at the files, going back over each of the eleven
     cases. Were there eleven perpetrators, or just one with many aliases? There were conflicting assumptions in the FBI reports.
     Apparently, I wasn’t the only one confused.
    I read each and every bit of testimony of the victims, the bank managers, and the landlords. Their descriptions of each perpetrator
     were very similar, except for one person who recalled the con man speaking with a slight accent. I was intrigued by this detail
     and pulled out the FBI FD-302 interview report from the file. Louis B. Romano, of 45–87 West Street, Gary, Indiana, was interviewed
     at his home by an FBI special agent. I looked up Romano’s number and dialed.
    An elderly woman answered. “I’m sorry,” she said when I asked for Romano. “My husband passed away two years ago. Is there
     something I could help you with?”
    I hesitated. “Well, ma’am, I’m sorry for your loss,” I said. “I’m Dan Gordon, an investigative attorney