Page 12 of Go First
CHAPTER FIVE
The Portland FBI field office was never going to be a lakeside palace modelled on Versailles, Kate reflected, but it had its own gritty charm.The worn brick façade, the low hum of the industrial ventilation system, the faint aroma of stale coffee and desperation – it was a far cry from the almost toxic grandeur of Whitfield’s compound, but it was home.Or at least, it was the closest thing she had to one right now.
She found Marcus hunched over his computer, the screen glowing with a complex web of numbers, lines, and corporate logos that looked more like an abstract painting than a money trail.He didn't look up as she approached, his focus absolute.
"So," she said, dropping into the chair beside him, "what fresh hell have you unearthed?"
Marcus finally looked up, his eyes alight with a manic energy that was both contagious and slightly unsettling."You arenotgoing to believe this.Turns out Whitfield wasn’t just lining his pockets, he’s been running a full-blown criminal empire."
"An empire?Seriously?"Kate felt a familiar surge of adrenaline, the hunter scenting prey."Walk me through it."
"It's all smoke and mirrors, Vee," Marcus began, his fingers flying across the keyboard as he called up a series of documents."Shell companies owned by ghost corporations, owned in turn by more shells and ghosts, a money trail leading through every country that ever raised an eyebrow at an airline check-in – Caymans, Gibraltar, Panama, Luxembourg, Isle of Man...the whole shebang.Tax evasionandmoney laundering on top of the central fraud.”
“The Ponzi scheme.”
“The very same.You get people to invest their hard-earned, on the promise of massive dividends, and you keep ‘em hooked by giving them a few modest pay-outs.”
“Which are funded, not by successes in investment or divine blessing…”
“Both, in Whitfield’s case.He’s feeding his victims some hokum about using AI to make trades, but underpinning that, his global network of churches is allegedly boosting that tech power with round-the-clock prayer.”
“But none of that money is really being invested, right?”Kate checked.“He’s just using the funds of the people he’s duped most recently to pay a few modest amounts to the people who’ve sent him their cash previously.”
“Exactly.”
“But I seem to remember reading somewhere that Ponzi schemes always fail.”
“They do, because they rely on a constant supply of new cash.If it slows down, or stops, or a large number of so-called investors decides they want their dollars back at the same time, then it collapses.”
“So why didn’t that happen?”Kate asked.
“It did.At least once.About three thousand investors lost their savings back in 2021.But Whitfield structured things so cleverly that he was able to convince the authorities thathe’dbeen a victim along with his investors.”
“How the hell did he manage that?”
“His fund managers took the rap.They claimed that they’d made some profoundly bad trades, and gone Ponzi to hide their mistake.They got three and a half years jail-time. Not coincidentally, two of them now live in very big houses: one in Panama, one in the British Virgin Islands.The third sails around the world in his pretty little Sunseeker 134.”
“Paid off by Whitfield?”
“Just don’t put that in print or he’ll sue you like he did aPostjournalist last year.”
“But surely that trick with the fund managers could only work once.And all the evidence suggests Whitfield was continuing to operate the same scam, right?”
“Yes and no.Whitfield found a way to ensure a steady stream of cash, and thus keep on duping investors.”
“Drugs?”
“Nah.Like the Ponzi scheme, it’s something kinda quaint. An old-fashioned number called the ‘long firm fraud’.Ever heard of it?”
Kate shook her head.
"The Sicilian Mob introduced it to the States at the end of the 19thcentury, and it’s called ‘long’ because it’s like wine, takes quite a while before it pays off. It goes like this: over time, maybe a year or two, a business entity of some kind builds up a strong relationship with wholesale suppliers.In the Pastor’s case, it was an educational foundation connected to his churches.Buying high end, portable assets, like home electronics, sound systems, jewellery, electric bikes, phones...“
“Wait up.What’s an educational foundation attached to a bunch of churches need with all these electric bikes and jewellery and i-phones?”
“Incentives for staff and students, raffle prizes, rewards for missionary work… plenty of reasons.Anyway, 99% of wholesalers don’t care.Remember that laboratory network last year.”
He was referring to a case in which a Swiss gang had flooded two cities with pharma-grade crank, buying the chemicals and equipment from the same manufacturers used by the FBI’s scientists.The judge had thrown the case out of court.