Mule (8 page)

I couldn't sleep that night I came home from Eric's; the stress had already begun. It would get worse and worse until reaching its crescendo the night before the run in the panicked racing of my heart. Was I going to get stopped at the interdiction choke point at Flagstaff? Were they going to nail me in Sulphur, Louisiana? On the Internet it said that the cops in Sulphur paid gas station attendants who reported suspicious activity a cash percentage of any takedown. Wasn't that cheating? But I also knew, as I held my wife in bed that night, that I now had money that belonged to a former combat Marine who kept an assault rifle in his kitchen. And if everything went right, I'd make $25,000.

At dawn, I was up and pacing the room. First I had to call Darren, then I'd know what to do next. But I couldn't call him yet because of the time zones; it was still the middle of the night in California. When Romana cried out, I fed her a bottle. Soon Kate was awake, and she asked, "What was it like up there?"

"Big place, expensive wheels. His last name is Deveny."

We Googled his name together on the laptop. There was a William Deveny at an address in Miami. Eric's father? There was a Norman Deveny in Jacksonville who had an automotive repair business. We tried Ric Deveny, Rick Deveny, and Ricky Deveny. No hits. We tried "US Marines heroin trafficking" and "US Marines implicated in heroin trafficking." These only returned articles about Marines rounding up poppy growers in Afghanistan.

Then we tried Facebook. Deveny, Eric. There he was. Kate and I both sat up in bed. In his profile picture he was holding his chin, a glamour shot, his hair the way he wore it, looking like a young Tom Cruise. The few other pictures he had were of him partying with attractive college-age women: a toothy blonde, a pair of Italian-looking girls who could have been twins, all at bars and holding drinks, the women wasted and draped over him. There were a couple of him with guys from his unit when he was fighting in Iraq. He hadn't logged on to Facebook in over six months. The posts on his Wall were from people asking him, "Where are you, Superstar? Where have you been?"

"Could he be a narc?" Kate said.

I said, "This guy isn't a narc."

"What else happened up there?"

"Nothing else happened. We talked, had a cigarette, figured things out."

"Did he seem dangerous?"

I thought about the assault rifle. I shook my head and said, "I kind of liked him."

"What was there to like about him?"

"He knows what he's doing."

I called Darren from Siesta Beach.

Darren picked up, yawned. He said, "You get it squared away with your guy?"

"He wants to do ten."

"Did you get the money?"

"He wouldn't give it to me."

Darren said, "You can't play if you can't pay. That's the way life works."

"I do have the money, Darren. It's in this account. I'm going to have to write you a check off it."

"No checks this time, James."

"Wire transfer?"

"Cash, or it doesn't go."

I thought about it. I said, "How am I supposed to take that much cash out of the bank?"

"I wish I could come and explain it all to you," Darren said, "but I have to go to Thailand. I'll e-mail you a bunch of phone numbers before I go. Get up on Skype, you'll be able to contact me. My guy Billy will finish up everything on this end and meet you when you get here. Billy's worked for me forever. If you have any questions, he'll sit down and walk you through them. It'll be a lot better when you're here, because then you can just talk, you know?

"As far as getting cash out of the bank, it's your money, right? You can withdraw as much as you want. But the thing here is planning for the future, laying a good foundation to protect yourself and your business. You have to manage the paper trail, and you have to start now. Like I say, I wish I could come out there and explain it all to you. But you don't want to do anything they can follow up on. You don't want to do anything that will connect you to anyone else. So no checks, no money transfers, even money orders are a hassle. If you buy three grand in money orders at a single place, you cross a threshold and they have to file a report on you. If you buy two grand in a single go, you cross a different kind of threshold and they have to file something else. So don't do money orders, and if you do, keep it under two Gs and drive to different places. You don't want to trigger those thresholds and give the bad guys any reason to look at you."

I'd Google it all as soon as I got home, learn about money laundering, the Bank Secrecy Act, Monetary Instrument Logs, and everything else.

Darren said, "Let's say you want to buy a car and the seller wants cash. The bank's going to tell you that you shouldn't deal in cash, that it's probably a scam. You tell them you know the guy, you're not worried about dealing in cash with him. Everybody knows he wants to do it to hide something, but that's his concern, you don't care. But here's the thing. When you deal with a bank, you leave a paper trail, and when you move ten grand or more, you leave behind a special paper trail. They are going to file a Currency Transaction Report on you. They have to: ten thousand is the trigger for the bank. At casinos, it's a smaller amount, five thousand. At money order places, two thousand. You have to remember that. Now, you could take out the money little by little so you'd never reach the ten thousand trigger, but you don't have the time for that. And anyway, you'd need six months or more, because if you kept going to the bank and taking out two grand here, three grand there, it would be even worse, because it's something called structuring. It's a huge trigger, and the bad guys can build a money-laundering case against you. So you have to stay in cash once this is done, find a safe place to keep it. Especially if anyone around you figures out you're in the business, they're going to know you have a lot of cash. That's why there're as many robberies as there are. Don't worry about that for now."

There were people on the beach around me, teenagers playing volleyball, a guy running along the surf with his black Lab. I was sitting in the sand listening to this.

"So this one time you're going to take out a big amount and they'll file the CTR on you. They'll always have that on file, there's nothing you can do about it. But you can't do anything else to draw attention to yourself. You're taking out the money to buy a car, you know they have to file a report. It's going to be the only time you'll register on their system. You have to concede them that one thing.

"Get a receipt, keep it. Because if you get pulled over when you are bringing the money out here to buy your car, the bad guys are going to take that money away from you and hold it until you can prove it's legally yours. You know the bad guys are out there on the roads trying to get the money, don't you? The whole thing is about the money, that's all they really want. Half the time they just steal it from us, and the rest of the time they're allowed to keep eighty percent of whatever they take—it's how they buy their equipment. It's a bitch to get the money back if they seize it. Most people don't even try. It's a civil case, no arrest, people are glad to just walk away and let the money go. Usually, nobody has a way to prove it's theirs in the first place. But you will, James. You'll have that receipt from the bank."

"I don't have time to drive out there, Darren. I'm planning on getting on a plane, coming back in a rental car."

Darren was quiet for a moment. He said, "That's not a good idea. The one thing's driven out, the money's driven back. It's a continuous loop, and that's the way it's done. Building that loop is everyone's goal. Think about everything being moved out there on the roads. Now think about how much money is coming back. That's what you have to do. Two parts to the drive. Four days across, four days back. You celebrate a day or two at the end, and then you do it again."

"I'm not doing it that way. I don't have time for that."

"You'd better not let them see the money at the airport. They can ‘civil forfeiture' it from you there, too."

"Civil forfeiture?"

"They figure anyone with that kind of cash is up to something. They wrote the forfeiture laws to let them take large amounts. If they take your money, you'll spend months in court trying to get it back. So figure out a way to get it on the plane without letting them see it. Otherwise, you're done.

"Another thing about the money you're going to take out of the bank: most banks don't have that kind of money on hand, people never make withdrawals like that. You have to call ahead and arrange a pickup time. The banks get their cash deliveries once or twice a week and have to put in special orders for large amounts. So with the schedule you're on, you have to call them today, get it sorted out. Because it could take them three or four days to have it. Then they are going to want you to come in at a certain time to pick it up. You'll have to sign some documents, a waiver saying you know it's not safe to have such a large amount, that you don't hold the bank responsible if you get ripped off on the way home. And there's one last thing you need to know. If they are suspicious of you, if the teller or manager you deal with has any kind of hunch, they're supposed to file an SAR, a Suspicious Activity Report. That's definitely something you don't want. So you have to have your story straight and you have to be cool once you're in there. They're not looking for someone like you, they're looking for hoods and terrorists. But it only takes one cowboy minimum-wage motherfucker, and he'll file the SAR. Then who knows? They don't even tell you they're filing it.

"One more thing before you get out here and Billy will sit down with you and tell you more. A paper trail is more than just money. It's phone records, receipts, credit card activity, e-mails, even the sites you visit on your computer. Try to use stuff that's not connected to your name whenever you can. If you're using your own gear, wipe it every chance you get. Go to Wal-Mart and pay cash for a TracFone, they only cost thirty bucks. And when you use it, drive away from your house and get up on it through a cell tower that's not easily connected to you. It seems like a hassle, but it's not. Then you want to dump the phone after a while. Don't pass out the number over the phone, send it in the mail to the people who need it. Use the post office for everything—it's one of the safest things we have—because postal inspectors need a warrant to open first class mail. Use a fake return address, but make sure it's an actual address or they'll check it. Don't put anything in the letter to tie it to you. If the letter gets lost or takes too long to get there, ditch that phone and start over."

"Do I have to do all that this one time?"

"You're pristine for now, James. But the thing is, you don't know what they know about the people you're dealing with. If they figure out one person, it spreads through the system and contaminates everyone. Another thing is, you don't know where this might go. You want to establish a good business model, be disciplined, lay a foundation for a long and lucrative future."

"That's not my plan," I told him.

"That's what they all say."

The last thing I asked Darren was, "Do you think this is going to work?"

"Of course it's going to work," Darren said. "Because everybody needs it to. People like you, people like me. Even the bad guys. They wouldn't have jobs if it weren't for us. And if it weren't for them, our product would have no value."

 

I had the MetLife checks with me. That money had given me some peace of mind throughout my life. Now it was giving me the chance to do this. How was I going to explain that part to Kate?

I did the math again as I drove from the beach into town. We had $3,000 from Eric and a little more than $5,000 left from the first trip. So I had to get $17,000 more. I drove to the WaMu branch in the strip mall near my mother's, sat in the car outside. I couldn't get the cash directly from MetLife; they weren't a bank and didn't work like that. Instead I'd have to write a check to myself, deposit it into my WaMu account, and then withdraw the cash.

I called Mason from the car before I went in.

"How's Florida?" Mason said when he picked up.

"I'm outside my bank. I've got a trip put together. I would have called you sooner, but it all went down yesterday. Now I have to get everything together and jump on a plane. I'm calling to ask how much you want."

"Are you kidding me? I want one. No, two. Let me make a couple phone calls and call you right back."

Five minutes went by. Then five minutes more. It was the same as when I'd waited for him in Austin. I listened to the Killers, Damian Marley, drummed my fingers on the steering wheel. Then I had another idea, called Rita in Sacramento. When she picked up, she said in a whisper, "James? Are you here again?"

"I will be in a few days."

"I'm at work. Can I call you tonight?"

"I have to know right now."

"I'll take a break and call Henry," she said, still whispering.

There was a coffee shop a few doors down from the WaMu. I went in and ordered a drip. I bought a copy of the
Herald-Tribune,
scanned it with my phone out on the table as I waited. The front page above the fold was about the Sarasota real estate implosion: the massive condo project was indeed about to go bust. I couldn't care about any of that. In a minute, my phone rang.

Rita said, "How much if we get a pound this time?"

"Five grand."

"Then we'll have the money ready."

I hung up and did the math on my phone. Now I needed the rest of the baby's college money. A minute later, Mason was calling. I held the phone to my ear, glanced at the other people sitting at their tables. They had no idea what I was doing. Mason said, "I want two this time."

"Can you really handle that much?"

"I met new people because of what we did."

"You have to send me half the money."

"No problem, James."

"It has to be cash."

"How am I supposed to do that?"

I remembered what Darren had said. I said to Mason, "Money orders. I'll explain it later, but do it just like I say. Go to three different places and get an order at each place for one and a half. Then go to one more place and get a final one for five hundred, and mail them all to me. You have to get them in the mail today to give me enough time."