Fraudulent Transfers Page 10

  “We’re also trying to catch up with a man we think is named Tomas Padilla but he might go by other names,” Albert said. He then went on to describe Padilla—mid to late forties, slight Hispanic accent, Vancouver Canucks hockey fan, educated at UCLA, scar on cheek, etc. “We haven’t been able to connect with him. Do you by any chance know this man?”

  “Hmm, I don’t know anyone named Tomas Padilla but there is a man named Pedro Alvarado that somewhat matches the description you have given me. If it’s the same man, we have known him to be working in the Bay Area from time to time as, shall we say, an independent broker. In other words, he does not have a long term affiliation with a particular organization as a sales representative, as I do and as Roland Kwan does. As we understand it, he claims to have clients he can deliver to an organization such as ours in exchange for a finders fee. We tried him once, a few months ago, and we were not satisfied with the experience, so we terminated the relationship. Frankly, we did not consider him trustworthy. I’ve heard nothing about him since.”

  “My sources have told me he could be found at a restaurant and bar on Pier 39 called the Blue Swan. Does that ring a bell?”

  “No, not really. When he was dealing with us, his location of choice was the ferry terminal along the Embarcadero, where the commuter ferry from Tiburon docks. Tiburon and surrounding towns, as you no doubt know, are very affluent communities on the north side of the Bay. For people who live there, taking the hydrofoil between Tiburon and the City is a pleasant way to commute, although it can get a little scary when the fog sets in on the Bay and large commercial vessels are out there at the same time you are, chugging along at twenty knots. Anyway, Mr. Alvarado, as we knew him to be, always arranged for our meetings to take place at this location. That’s all I can tell you about him. If you do find him and speak with him, I’d be cautious.”

  “I appreciate that. Thank you. Just a last question. If I decide to proceed with your organization, how do we get started?”

  Bordeaux reached into his inside coat pocket and gave Albert a card. “This card has an email address. Just send me a short email saying you would like to be contacted. I will be back in touch with you and we will go from there. This may take a couple of days since emails sent to this address go through several stops along the way and those stops are constantly changing. And, once an email is delivered, the path it took is immediately and permanently erased. The email will also be encrypted using a different encryption system at each stop. This, I might add, is a good example of the care we take in our organization to achieve totally secure communications.”

  It was now nearly 5:00 p.m. and we were at the base of Telegraph Hill, on schedule for our next appointment.

  “Thank you for your time,” Albert said to Bordeaux, shaking his hand.

  “Likewise,” Bordeaux said.

  I gave Bordeaux a nod and tried to frown, as I had been instructed to do.

  After Bordeaux was out of sight, I said to Ed: “That was certainly educational about money laundering in general. Do you think we learned anything useful about Padilla?”

  “I think so. We have further confirmation that he’s been in the Bay Area. We know he’s been hanging around with money launderers. We know, as I’d expected, that he positions himself as an independent broker type and not someone tied exclusively to a particular organization. We know where he’s been hanging out. What we don’t know is who he’s been working with. But let’s go see what Roland Kwan can add to our knowledge. We’re due to meet him at 5:45 at a place in China Town called Café Mimi. Mimi, by the way, is the Mandarin Chinese word for secrets.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Jack, I’m in the business of knowing things. And besides, I had a crash course in Mandarin Chinese a few years ago in connection with an engagement where I thought being able to converse in that language would be useful.”

  “Was it?”

  “Yes. But I can’t tell you the details. We’re into trade secrets again. Are you OK to walk over to China Town? It will take us maybe twenty-five minutes to get to where we’re going.”

  “Of course. I like walking around this city, as long as we stay away from dark allies.”

  Chapter 20

  Walking the streets of San Francisco was certainly different from walking the streets of Colorado Springs. Here, there are people of every color and nationality, speaking dozens of different languages. There are drunks, beggars, ladies of the night, dot.com billionaires and all other slices of humanity mingled together and seemingly able to co-exist. China Town, as I had remembered it to be, was a fascinating mix of sights, sounds and smells.

  We arrived at Café Mimi at 5:30, fifteen minutes prior to our appointment time. We told the hostess, as Ed dba Albert had been instructed to do, that we were there to meet with Roland Kwan. The hostess, a young Oriental woman wearing a dress intended to be noticed by men (and succeeding in this effort), nodded, said nothing, and led us to a booth toward the back of the restaurant where the lights were low and, at the moment at least, there were no other patrons. It was also quieter here, so a conversation could be held without needing to raise one’s voice.

  When the hostess asked if we wanted anything to drink, I had my heart set on a chardonnay but Ed dba Albert took charge of the situation and ordered, for both of us, green tea. I was at least able to order a small bowl of fortune cookies as a chardonnay substitute. The tea was actually good and helped to perk me up after a long day of travel and espionage. The fortune cookies, like many lawyers I know, offered little useful advice. However, a couple of them did seem on point for the occasion. One said: “To fight fire, you must sometimes use fire.” Another said: “To find the truth you are searching for, you must dig deep. Do not settle for the superficial.” A third was interesting only because the message appeared to have been written by a modern-day philosopher not well trained in the traditional style of fortune cookies. “Life is short. Don’t screw it up.”

  Roland Kwan arrived on schedule at 5:45. He was more in keeping with my pre-conceived notion of what criminals should look like. He was maybe five foot eight, with a slight but muscular build. He had a tattoo of a dragon on his neck. He was wearing dark wool pants, black boots, a white silk shirt unbuttoned to the middle of his chest, a gold chain around his neck and a leather jacket. He looked to be in his early forties although it was hard to tell in the dim light of Café Mimi. The hostess brought Kwan to our booth and we stood, shook hands and introduced ourselves. He then joined us, sitting on my side of the table.

  Ed dba Albert began the conversation. “Mr. Kwan, thanks for meeting with us. I know this must be a busy time for you.”

  “Not a problem Mr. Campbell. Meeting with people like you is my job. I am pleased that you sought me out.”

  The conversation with Kwan went very much like the conversation with Bordeaux. The vocabulary used again made no mention of money or money laundering. The words used were “property,” “inventory,” “goods,” “network,” “destinations,” etc. Anyone else listening in would have thought we were talking about a wholesale transaction involving, say, toasters.

  As expected, Kwan disparaged Bordeaux’s organization, telling us it suffered from management problems and regular attrition of key personnel. Two people involved in the organization, he told us, had recently been named as “persons of interest” by the San Francisco police in connection with an investigation into prostitution. The organization was, he said, beginning to stray into the activities that generated “property” rather than limiting its business to moving the property of others along to a prescribed destination. Kwan also told us his organization, unlike Bordeaux’s, was willing to negotiate pricing in order to win the business of a new client.

  Kwan informed us that the business organizations Ed dba Albert was interested in all had nicknames, coming, appropriately, from the world of laundry-related products. His organization was known in the industry as “Tide.” Bordeaux’s organization was known as “All.�
� Another competitor we wouldn’t be contacting was known as A and H, short for Arm and Hammer.

  Our conversation with Kwan became more interesting when Ed dba Albert asked about Tomas Padilla, possibly known in the industry as Pedro Alvarado. Kwan told us Alvarado had tried to establish a client finder relationship with Tide but this effort was rejected. The people running Tide didn’t trust Alvarado and declined to have anything to do with him. The latest information Kwan had about Alvarado was that he was now working for, or with, an organization recently appearing in the San Francisco area, known to others in the industry as Bounce. This organization was marketing itself as having a cross-border capability with Canada. More specifically, it claimed to be able to move forbidden fruit (U.S. dollars generated in Canada from gambling, drugs and prostitution) from the Vancouver area across the U.S. border into Seattle and Portland and San Francisco, where it could then be routed to off shore destinations. Kwan said Tide considered Bounce to be high risk because of its cross border activity and because it had only limited experience with U.S. regulatory agencies. Kwan told Ed dba Albert that, whatever he decided to do, he should stay clear of Bounce. Confirming what Bordeaux had told us, Kwan said Alvarado was known to hang out at the Embarcadero ferry terminal, meeting with clients or prospective clients commuting into the City from Tiburon and other affluent communities on the north side of San Francisco Bay.

  When asked how he might be contacted if Albert Campbell decided to do business with Tide, Kwan produced a card with his name and an area code 888, toll free, number. Kwan said that Ed dba Albert should call this number on a land line and leave a short message requesting a call back. Calls to the number on the card would not be answered but messages left would make their way to Kwan by means of a series of encrypted call forwarding transfers. He would then return the call using a secure connection.

  After our meeting with Kwan, which had lasted maybe twenty-five minutes, Ed and I decided that, since we were in China Town, we should have dinner at a Chinese restaurant. Without benefit of research on our cell phones or a recommendation from Siri, we chose one on Kearney Street near its intersection with Sacramento called the Emerald Palace. Ed tried to order dinner for us in Mandarin Chinese. However, the waiter only spoke Cantonese, so he had no idea what Ed was saying. Ed then resorted to English, and pointing at the menu, which worked just fine. We both chose cashew chicken with snow peas and it was good. Ed let me have a chardonnay but limited me to a single glass. I put the cost of dinner on my office MasterCard, hoping Mike Lawrence would approve the charge as a legitimate business expense made necessary by his assignment to me to save his bank from closure by the FDIC. Further in that regard, when signing the MasterCard charge slip, I noted we were now twenty-one days into our standstill agreement, with twenty-two days to go before the expiration date.

  Over dinner, Ed told me the next step in his plan was for us to be at the Tiburon ferry terminal by 8:00 a.m. tomorrow morning. Although it was a long shot, his hope was that Tomas Padilla might show up there and we could possibly learn something more about who he was working for.

  After dinner, Ed and I headed down Columbus Avenue to the Market Street BART terminal. The train took us back to Millbrae and from there we walked the short distance to our hotel. Ed and I agreed we would be up and about, and ready to head back into San Francisco, by 7:15 a.m. I was instructed to dress this time like a tourist, and not a lawyer representing a client selling illegal pharmacological products. Ed would be out of his Albert Campbell disguise and into one suggesting he was just another San Francisco businessman needing to take a ferry across San Francisco Bay to Tiburon.

  Chapter 21

  Friday morning, Ed and I were back on a BART train by 7:30. As expected, the train was packed with commuters. I had put away the Jonathan Swisher glasses and was wearing jeans, workout shoes, a University of Colorado sweatshirt featuring a large snorting buffalo, and a Colorado Rockies baseball hat. I was also wearing a mid-thigh length REI raincoat because, overnight, a Pacific weather front had moved into the area producing a light but steady rain. Ed had ditched the mustache, had brown rather than blond hair, was no longer padded to simulate extra weight and was wearing a casual businessman’s uniform consisting of tan colored chinos, a light blue shirt with a dark blue tie, a navy blazer and a knee length raincoat. He was also wearing a waterproof hat that looked like something from my fishing gear closet back home.

  We exited the train at the Embarcadero station at around 7:50 and walked over to the ferry terminal. Before we arrived at the terminal, we separated, since the game plan was for us to not be together during this adventure. My assignment, if we spotted Padilla, was to nonchalantly take pictures with my cell phone in the manner of a tourist, but hopefully capturing an image or two of Padilla and anyone he might be talking to. Ed wouldn’t tell me what he was going to be doing other than to say he would not be engaging Padilla in conversation.

  “We don’t want him to have any idea he is under surveillance,” Ed said. “But if he does show up, I have some business to attend to.”

  When we arrived at the ferry terminal, a ferry had just come in from Oakland, across the Bay to the east. The next ferry from Tiburon wasn’t due until 8:45, so I milled around trying to look like a tourist and Ed sat in the waiting room reading the San Francisco Chronicle. When there was no sign of Padilla by 8:40, I spoke briefly to Ed to see if he still wanted to wait. He said yes, most definitely we should continue to wait.

  “Is this what you guys call a stakeout?” I asked.

  “Correct.”

  “Well, it’s kind of boring, don’t you think?”

  “You get used to it. But it’s always a good idea to bring along something to read. I’ve been rereading all of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novels. I just finished The Great Gatsby. I didn’t enjoy it much. All the characters in the book were unlikeable soulless hedonists.”

  “Wasn’t that the point of the story?”

  “I suppose. Get back to work. Check with me again in thirty minutes if Padilla hasn’t shown up.”

  I then went back to milling about and, suddenly, there he was, walking into the entrance of the terminal. The giveaway was the Vancouver Canucks baseball hat. I also caught a brief glimpse of the scar on his right cheek. There wasn’t much else to see since Padilla was wearing a below the knee black raincoat with the collar pulled up around his neck. I glanced at Ed to be sure he had seen Padilla, and he had.

  The Tiburon ferry was just pulling into its dock when Padilla arrived. He positioned himself facing the location where travelers getting off the boat would come into the terminal, meaning he initially had his back to me. I moved into a position thirty feet or so to his right and started taking pictures with my phone. I hoped it looked like I was taking pictures of the terminal and the boat and not Padilla, but I wasn’t sure of that. At the same time, Ed walked up beside Padilla as though he, too, was waiting to meet someone getting off the ferry.

  Padilla in fact did meet someone coming off the ferry. I didn’t realize this was happening until it was too late to get a front view picture. I’m not sure a picture would have shown this man’s face in any event since he was carrying an open umbrella pulled low over his head. As soon as the man was into the terminal, Padilla fell into step with him. There was no handshake or greeting of any other kind that I could see. The man seemed to be in a hurry and was moving quickly toward the exit. Obviously failing in my first ever stakeout assignment, all I could do was take a couple of pictures of their backsides.

  As soon as they were out of the terminal, Padilla and the man he had been waiting for parted ways, with Padilla heading north up the Embarcadero and the other man continuing in a westerly direction toward the San Francisco business district. I caught up with Ed and asked him if we should try to follow either of them. He said no. There was too much risk of being detected. (What he was probably really thinking was that there was too much risk of being detected with me along.)

  Instead, we retreated to a
Starbucks down the street a block from the ferry terminal, ordered the darkest and boldest coffee on the menu short of espresso, and sat down at a table at the back of the store to compare notes.

  “So, did we accomplish anything, other than getting cold and wet?” I asked.

  “Yes, Jack. I think we accomplished quite a bit but let’s first take a look at the pictures on your phone.”

  I had in fact managed to take one picture showing some of Padilla’s face. This was not great photographic art since Padilla was far off to the left side of the frame and the center of the photo showed nothing but an empty walkway leading to where the ferry was tying up. I decided these defects could be remedied with a little help from Photoshop.

  One of the photos of Padilla’s and the other man’s backsides, however, contained an interesting surprise, not seen by me when I took the photo and not seen by Ed when he was watching the two men exit the terminal. Although the photo was out of focus and overly dark, it nonetheless showed the two men exchanging a business letter size envelope. Because the envelope was white, it stood out clearly in the photo. Unfortunately, we couldn’t tell from the photo whether Padilla was giving the envelope to the man he had been waiting to meet or the man was giving the envelope to Padilla. Either way, some exchange of likely importance had just taken place.

  “Good job,” Ed said. “Maybe you have some aptitude for this line of work after all. But back to what we have accomplished. We have confirmed that Padilla is in San Francisco, doing something we can assume is criminal and which, in all likelihood, relates to money laundering or at least relates to an organization in that business. We know he is dealing with someone in connection with some kind of transaction and the person he is dealing with looks like a regular going-to-work-in-the-morning sort of businessman. In that regard, I was able to see enough of this guy to know he’s roughly the same height and weight as Padilla. Your backsides photos show that as well. We know he’s Caucasian. We know he lives in Tiburon or some other North Bay community and commutes into the City by ferry at the start of the business day. And we’ve accomplished one other thing.”