Fraudulent Transfers Page 19

  Wheeler began the conversation. “Mr. Swisher, I’m afraid our time together today will have to be short. I have an important transaction I must attend to at 2:00 p.m. Let me begin by asking you to tell me again the purpose of your trip to George Town. I know we talked briefly about this on the telephone yesterday, but I’d like to know a bit more.”

  “Of course. I work for a man named Albert Campbell who has a growing business that is becoming international in scope. This business has a need from time to time to move funds into and out of the United States. I’m on a scouting trip for Mr. Campbell, interviewing several banks here in the Cayman Islands and at other Caribbean locations. Bayfield Bank, and you in particular, have been recommended to Mr. Campbell as being highly skilled in regard to the services he is looking for, so you’re at the top of my list of people to interview. Mr. Campbell wishes to establish a deposit account relationship with a bank in this area that can meet his needs for international banking and funds transfer services.”

  “And the source of your referral?”

  “I’m sorry. I’m not at liberty to disclose that information. I can tell you, however, that our referral sources—and there were several--generally operate in the San Francisco area where I believe you worked for several years.”

  “Yes, you’re correct about that. I did work for Bank of America in San Francisco for a few years after graduate school. My next question: what more can you tell me about the nature of Mr. Campbell’s business? We now have very specific know-your-customer rules here in the Cayman Islands, thanks to pressure brought on our primary regulatory agency, the Cayman Islands Monetary Authority, by your government.”

  “Mr. Campbell is in the pharmaceutical business. Again I’m not at liberty to give you details or name names at this time, but if I could name names, and if you are at all interested in sports or movies, you would recognize the names of many of Mr. Campbell’s customers.”

  “As you probably know, Mr. Swisher, Bayfield Bank does not serve a large customer base. It is a private bank designed for high net worth individuals who demand an extraordinary level of personalized service, and absolute confidentiality. What would you estimate Mr. Campbell’s net worth to be?”

  “Giving a reasonable value to his business, I believe you could place his net worth at the moment in the $70 million to $90 million range, and growing quickly.”

  “And what amount of compensating balances could we expect him to maintain in an account with Bayfield Bank if he wished us to be his bank in this area--and we accepted that assignment?”

  “His account balance would fluctuate, of course, but I believe the average daily balance in the account would work out to be at least $500,000 over the course of a year.”

  “Before you leave, Mr. Swisher, I’ll give you a list of the new account information we will need to satisfy our regulator’s know-your-customer requirements. Among other things, this will include a letter of reference from another financial institution confirming a satisfactory banking relationship and information showing average balances in deposit accounts over a three year period.”

  “That won’t be a problem,” I replied.

  At this point, my cell phone gave me a text message ring.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Wheeler. I’m expecting some important information from Mr. Campbell’s office affecting my interview schedule for the remainder of this trip.”

  The message, from Veronica, said: “Into the system. Can’t find the account. Keep talking.”

  I then said to Wheeler, “Perhaps you could tell me a bit more about the services Bayfield Bank can provide to Mr. Campbell.”

  “Certainly. We offer a customary range of deposit account services. We also have close working relationships with banks all over the world. Because of these relationships, we are able to accomplish funds transfers that other banks in this area are not able to do. As you might expect, there are additional fees associated with these services. Some of these fees compensate us for the service we provide. Some of the fees compensate the bank receiving a transfer.”

  “What can you tell me about the amount of those fees?”

  “This depends on the amount of the transfer, where the transfer is going and the frequency of transfers. What amounts are we talking about here and how frequently will transfers occur, and where will they be directed?”

  “Again this varies but, for purposes of today’s discussion, you can think in terms of transfers ranging from $10 million to $20 million four to six times a year and with destinations in Africa, South America and the Cook Islands.”

  “Using those assumptions, fees for our part in the transaction are likely to be from 8% to 12% of the transferred amount. That includes what is paid to the recipient bank. After a twelve month satisfactory relationship, I might be able to offer a somewhat lower rate. As you may know, it’s important that Mr. Campbell works directly with me on these transfers. No one else at the bank provides the services we are talking about. The fees in question need to be deposited in advance in an account set up for this purpose at another bank. Instructions in that regard will be given prior to each transfer. This helps to assure, shall we say, confidentiality.”

  My phone again gave me a text message signal.

  “Excuse me again, Mr. Wheeler. I apologize for these interruptions but my interview itinerary keeps changing.”

  The message read: “Found the account. Incoming wire not here yet. Keep talking.”

  Seeing a need now to seriously stall for time, I continued the conversation with a question I hoped would require a somewhat lengthy answer. “I’m curious, Mr. Wheeler, how you got into this line of work and how you ended up in the Cayman Islands. I noticed on the Bayfield Bank website that you received at least a part of your education in the U.S.”

  “Right. Well I received my undergraduate degree in finance and economics in England, from Cambridge University, but then I applied to Harvard Law School and was accepted there and completed my first year. However, I’m afraid I found the study of law to be—pardon me for saying this—boring. It seems that all lawyers do in your country is fight over the meaning of words. In any event, after the first year at Harvard Law School, I transferred to the MBA program at Wharton Business School, at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. I found that school’s curriculum much more suited to my interests and aptitude. I concentrated on commercial and investment banking at Wharton. After Wharton, I obtained employment with Bank of America in San Francisco, as previously noted, and I worked there, in the funds transfer department, for seven years. But I found the Bank of America bureaucracy to be frustrating. I also saw a growing need for international banking services that Bank of America couldn’t provide. That, plus the fact that I don’t like cold, foggy weather, led me to look for employment in the Cayman Islands. Bayfield Bank, which is owned by the fifth generation of a wealthy family living in England, offered me a job and I took it. That was fourteen years ago and I’ve been here ever since. But tell me a little about your background, Mr. Swisher. We did a bit of checking before your arrival today and it seems that you ran into some, shall I say, regulatory issues back in Arizona, is that right?”

  “Yes, your information is correct. I had a client in Phoenix who, in an effort to mitigate the consequences of an arrest alleging a white collar crime, made up a story that I was a participant in his business activities. That was totally false but it was enough to get me before a disciplinary tribunal run by the Arizona Supreme Court that cares more about the public image of the legal profession than due process and fairness. I ended up surrendering my law license as part of a negotiated resolution of the charges against me. But by then, I had had enough of the practice of law anyway and I was ready for a change. You’re right that what lawyers do for a living is to fight about the meaning of words. And words are inherently ambiguous and outcomes in the legal system are inherently unpredictable. I have found it much better to work with former clients, such as Mr. Campbell, as a business consultant, and sometime
s a business partner, rather than a lawyer.”

  Again my cell phone signaled the arrival of a text message and, as I reached for the phone, Wheeler took out his watch to check the time. It was apparent from his expression that our meeting was about to come to an end.

  “My apologies one more time, Mr. Swisher. I hope this is a final instruction as to my itinerary.”

  The message read: “Horse heading back to barn. Let’s go.”

  “Good,” I said to Wheeler, after reading the message on my phone. “I now seem to have a firm itinerary. I believe you have answered all of my questions and I appreciate your taking time to meet with me today. I will certainly inform Mr. Campbell that Bayfield Bank, under your personal guidance, is in a position to meet his funds transfer and other international banking needs. If he elects to proceed with Bayfield Bank, he will be in touch with you directly and he can obtain for you the new account information you will need. But please do give me a copy of the new account information list you mentioned and I will pass that on to him. Here’s my business card. If you need anything further from me, or have other thoughts coming out of our conservation today, please let me know. Based on what I now see as my itinerary, I should be back in the States by the middle of next week.”

  We stood and shook hands. Wheeler gave me the new account information list I had requested and his business card. His card had a hand-written cell phone number on the back. Wheeler pointed this out to me and said Mr. Campbell should use this number and this number only for any follow-up conversation. He thanked me for stopping by and escorted me back out to the receptionist’s desk. I then went to where Veronica was sitting in the lobby area, pretending to read a magazine, and we headed out the front door of Bayfield Bank, luggage in tow, into what was looking more and more like a stormy afternoon on Grand Cayman Island.

  Chapter 31

  Once outside the bank, Veronica and I started walking quickly, perhaps too quickly, along the main street of George Town in an easterly direction toward the airport, looking for a taxi. Our escape plan, devised by Ed, involved Veronica dba Sarah Hollister and me dba Jonathan Swisher holding reservations on a Cayman Airways flight from Grand Cayman Island to Jamaica scheduled to leave at 2:55 p.m. However, since we were now of the belief we had successfully accomplished our business, we would not be using these reservations. They, and the taxi ride to the airport, were intended as decoys. We would have used the reservations only if our mission had failed. Instead, once we arrived at the airport, the plan was for us to go through security so there would be a record indicating we were intending to board a commercial flight to somewhere and then leave the security area and go back down to the arriving passengers/baggage claim level of the terminal, where we would find another cab. That cab would take us to Governor’s Creek Yacht Harbor, on the east side of the Seven Mile Beach peninsula. At the yacht harbor, we were to look for someone named Gus who would be next to a seaplane with no commercial lettering or logos--only a faded and hard to read identification number on the fuselage. Gus would take us to Belize.

  “Mission accomplished?” I asked Veronica as we walked along the sidewalk.

  “I hope so.”

  “What took you so long?”

  “Jack, it isn’t easy hacking into the computer system of a bank in the middle of the Caribbean that uses software totally different from what U.S. banks normally use. I had to try three different RAT applications before I found one that worked. And then, the name on the account that was to receive the wire transfer from the Miami bank wasn’t what we were told it would be. So I had to call Ed and Pollard in San Francisco and Pollard had to track down the wire out from the Miami Bank to see what name was being used on the recipient end of the transfer. And, when I finally found the account, the wire transfer into that account from Miami hadn’t been posted, meaning I had to wait for the deposit in that account to show up. It finally did show up and I was then finally able to originate the transfer out of the account, as planned, back to an account at the Federal Reserve Bank in San Francisco.”

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean to be critical. But I was running out of things to talk to Wheeler about and he was getting anxious to shut down our meeting. He told be at the beginning that we needed to be done by 2:00 p.m. because he had an important transaction to attend to. He started looking at his watch—a pocket watch in keeping with his British heritage—as our conversation began to stray into chit chat. I imagine the transaction he needed to attend to had to do with the account you just depleted.”

  “I didn’t deplete the account. I left $10. I didn’t want to trigger an automatic closure of the account caused by a zero balance. But, I’m sure you’re correct that the transaction Wheeler needed to attend to was the transfer out of the funds coming in from Miami. And this means right about now he knows that a career altering event has just occurred and he is going to be in some kind of state of mind combining confusion, fear, panic and anger. And it probably won’t take him long to figure out that your and my visit and the sudden disappearance of $22 million out of his customer’s account is more than mere coincidence.”

  At this point—we were now three blocks east of Bayfield Bank--a taxi finally drove by and we flagged it down. As we were getting into the taxi, I looked behind me and saw Wheeler and someone I recognized as one of the bank’s security guards jump into a black Mercedes sedan parked in front of the bank. The Mercedes then did a U-turn and started to come in our direction.

  “To the airport, please,” I told the taxi driver. “And hurry. We’re late for a flight check in, and also I believe we’re being followed. The people in the black Mercedes behind you are Mafia and they think we have something of theirs, which we don’t, but they might have guns.”

  The cab driver gave me a wide-eyed look, and stomped on the accelerator of his aging Ford Grand Victoria. He sped through the next intersection just as the light turned red, forcing the Mercedes to slow down, and two blocks later he made a sharp right turn, causing the rear tires of the Grand Vic to break loose with a loud squeal. He nicely controlled the skid, kept the revs up and hustled us down the side street we were on going in a southerly direction. (We’d picked the right guy for the job, I thought.) A block and a half later, he made a fast ninety degree left turn into an alley, found an open and empty garage bay and pulled the cab into the garage. We waited there for maybe forty-five seconds, and then backed up into the alley and continued on in an easterly direction until we came to the next intersection between the alley and a street, where our driver turned left and took us back to the main road leading to the airport.

  As we approached the airport, I could see the Mercedes parked in front of the departing passengers entrance on the upper level of the terminal. The car appeared to be empty and its emergency flashers were on. I told our driver to take us to the arriving passengers entrance on the lower level of the terminal. As soon as we stopped, Veronica and I quickly exited the cab and I gave the driver a crisp new U.S. $100 bill, thanked him for his good work and asked him to please remember as little as possible if anyone spoke to him about this trip. He smiled, nodded, said nothing, and drove briskly away toward the airport exit.

  “OK Veronica, here’s the drill. Wait here for thirty seconds to give me a head start. Then go upstairs and get in the security line. It shouldn’t be long this time of day on a Wednesday. Go through security as Sarah Hollister, as we originally intended, and then get yourself to a ladies room. Stay there until 2:40—that’s twelve minutes from now--and then head back out to the sidewalk where we’re now standing. Find a cab and wait for me. I’ll try to somehow divert the attention of our friends and meet you here. If I’m not back by 2:45, have the cab take you to Governors Creek Yacht Harbor as planned and look for Gus. I’ll try to catch up with you there.”

  “Got it. Be careful Jack. Do they really have guns?”

  “I know the security guard does. I saw him with it at the bank. I don’t know about Wheeler.”

  I gave Veronica a quick kiss and
took the escalator up to the departing passenger level of the terminal. I saw Wheeler and the security guard at the far end of the terminal, moving quickly in a presumed effort to find Veronica and me. I made sure they saw me and then I hustled out the door of the terminal onto the sidewalk near where the Mercedes was parked. I turned right and went into a walk/run, handicapped by my roller bag, in the direction of a policeman standing on the sidewalk thirty yards to the west of me.

  “Officer, that Mercedes back there has been illegally parked with no one inside it since I got here, fifteen minutes ago. It’s getting in the way of people trying to get into the terminal. I think you need to give it a ticket.”

  The policeman looked back at the Mercedes, thanked me for being observant, and walked off in the direction of the car, ticket book in hand. I then saw Wheeler and the bank security guard come out of the terminal onto the sidewalk and head toward me. They got to where the Mercedes was parked at the exact same moment as the policeman. They tried to walk past him but he stopped them. There was then a great deal of shouting, accompanied by finger pointing at the Mercedes by the policeman and finger pointing in my direction by Wheeler and the bank security guard. I ducked back into the terminal and entered the security line which, fortunately, was empty when I arrived. As soon as I was through security, I headed for the gate to which the Cayman Airways flight to Jamaica was assigned. I looked back over my shoulder and saw the Mercedes being driven away by Wheeler. The bank guard, however, was now at the security line and was arguing with the woman in charge of checking credentials. She refused to let him past and, when he tried to go around her, she gave him a good shove in the opposite direction and called for help from one of her colleagues, who pulled out his gun, ordered the bank guard to lie face down on the floor, hands behind his back, and handcuffed him in that position. This gave me a chance to turn around, exit the security area and go downstairs to the arriving passenger level of the terminal where Veronica was waiting with a cab. It was 2:46 p.m.