Westlake, Donald E - NF 01 (15 page)

But with Mafiosi as common in the
Caribbean as sand fleas, why would Lord Shepherd go out of his way to warn that
a poverty-stricken little speck in the ocean with no electricity, no roads, no
telephones, no hotels, damn little water and not one limbo dancer was about to
be overrun by gangsters?

In any case, by the time he'd
returned to
Great Britain
he'd eased back the throttle a bit and had something more vague and less
ominous to say: "The island is wide open to strong-arm influences. There
is no political organization and there are interested bodies, whose names I
shall not mention now, who definitely feel that there is money to be made from
these little islands."

Never mind skipping ahead; he never
did mention their names.

Get money by fair
means if you can; if not, get money.

—Horace,
Epistles

But enough of real life! What about
the San Francisco Group?

After Peter Adams departed for
Barbados
,
the San Francisco Group was l
eft with Jerry Gumbs, who
was then calling himself Ambassador-at-Large. Scott Newhall and Howard Gossage
and Dr. Gerald Feigen all sat down with Jerry Gumbs and gave him the Liberty
Dollar pitch. He signed an agreement they'd drawn up, and they told him they'd
be seeing him on
Anguilla
with the thousand silver
coins. As Scott Newhall described it later, "Using these coins as a starter,
Anguilla
could get $80,000 without investing a penny.
The risk would be ours. What we were getting out of it at the moment was the
excitement of planning."

In the meantime, however, they
didn't have ten thousand silver coins, they had fifteen hundred silver coins.
They also didn't seem to have eighty thousand dollars. So they invented a
company, the Anguilla Charter Company, and set about raising some cash for it.
Newhall: "Gerry Feigen pledged to put up securities behind the company. He
told the bank we would like to have $15,000—preferably in British West Indian
currency." This, of course, is a bank in
San
Francisco
, which incredibly enough didn't have fifteen
thousand dollars in British West Indian currency. So they took the money—watch
this, now—they took the money in one-dollar bills.

Why did they take the money in
one-dollar bills? Think of it as though it were a movie, try to visualize it.
Which would
play
better, a check for fifteen thousand dollars or a
suitcase full of one-dollar bills?

Now the fourth San Franciscan in
the San Francisco Group enters the picture. Newhall: "I called Larry Wade,
a former promotion manager on the
Chronicle
, and asked him to help out
... So on Friday morning Larry went over to the bank and picked up this great
canvas sack with 150 packages of $1 bills, 100 to the package. He came
staggering in, looking as though he had a body in the sack."

Actually, the bills were divided
into thousands. Each thousand was packed between wooden slats and wrapped
around with iron straps, none of which made it any lighter. The Group removed
the wood and iron, packed the paper in a case that had once held Eagle shirt
samples, stowed the silver in six small canvas money sacks they'd had printed
with a mermaid and the words "250 Anguilla Liberty Dollars"—God knows
why; maybe to attract muggers—gave it all to Larry Wade, and headed for the
airport.

At the airport Gossage bought two
maroon Qantas canvas bags and put three of the moneybags in each. Gossage:
"The redcap had to wheel the hand baggage—130 pounds of coins in two bags
and the flat case with $15,000 in currency—onto the plane. At that moment, we
turned and walked out of the place. The tension was over, and it was all so
ridiculous, we began to laugh. We laughed all the way back to the fire-house."
(Don't ask.)

Larry Wade and all the money had to
change planes in
New York
, where
people are less fun-loving than in
San Francisco
,
and nobody would help him carry the money off the plane. So he found a
wheelchair and wheeled it all to Pan Am.

Eventually, Wade and the money
reached
Anguilla
, where he discovered he was supposed to
go through customs. Rather than open the shirt case and display the fifteen
thousand one-dollar bills, he opened his suitcase instead and distracted
everybody by showing them Newhall's flag with the mermaids. Like bewitched
mariners, the customs men gaped at the mermaids while Wade quickly scooted off
to the only local bank, the Mid-Atlantic, and stowed the cash in the vault.
Then he went looking for Peter Adams, to get him to sign the agreement Jerry
Gumbs had already signed, but
Adams
was still on
Barbados
,
at the first Barbados Conference.

The next day Adams came back to
Anguilla to get reinforcements—Ronald Webster and John Rogers were now added to
the delegation at Barbados—and Larry Wade tried to talk to him about the money,
"but," as he later wrote, "they were so preoccupied with their
political concerns, understandably, that they hardly heard me."

Preoccupied they might be, but Wade
had all that money to think about, so the next day he followed Adams and the
rest back to
Barbados
.

Wade bearded
Adams
in his hotel room. Wade: "I gave him a letter from Scott and the
presentation coin set, and he said 'Thank you rather abstractedly. He could
talk about nothing but the great pressure he'd been under. He said he felt as
if he were on top of a mountain with guns pointing at him from every side. He
seemed exhausted and defeated. I left him the flag, as a memento of his visit
to
San Francisco
, and was about to
turn to the coinage agreement when the phone rang."

Wade left the coin agreement and
came back the next day to ask if he'd signed it. He hadn't, but he
had
signed the Conference report. Wade: "I was stunned. I decided that my
principal mission now was to get the money off
Anguilla
before the St. Kitts government could seize it."

Wade hitched a ride with Jerry
Gumbs in one of his own Anguilla Airways planes. Back on Anguilla Wade and
Gumbs headed together for the bank. (Gumbs had no intention of being anyplace
where that money wasn't.) Wade: "Jerry Gumbs tried very hard to get me to
deposit the money in his account so he could give it to the government of
Anguilla
.
Mr. Rogers went to the vault, and there were the coins and the suitcase full of
cash, just as I had left them. Gumbs wanted the money so badly that finally, as
a last flourish, I opened the bag of dollar bills and gave him $100 for his
expenses."

Wade is not only magnificent at
distracting the opposition, he also knows precisely what to use in every
situation. The customs men he mesmerized with mermaids, and now he clouds Jerry
Gumbs's mind with one hundred dollars in one-dollar bills.

Leaving Jerry Gumbs struck to
stone, Wade next carted his cash to the airport. Here he met Ronald Webster,
who had just taken over the island leadership. Wade: "I told him I was
going to leave with him a bag of 250 coins, if he wanted to put them in
circulation, and $2,000 to cover their redemption."

(Now, I don t understand that.
Either Wade
left
the coins or he
redeemed
them, but he couldn't
very well do both. And if he redeemed them, he was supposed to pay twenty-five
hundred dollars—ten dollars per coin—not two thousand. So what he says he did,
he says he gave Webster one of his six bags of coins, paid him the wrong amount
of money to get them back, and didn't ask for them back. Did the master
mesmerist meet an even
more
master mesmerist?)

Now Wade went from the airport to
Lloyd's Hotel, where he'd been staying, and, he says, "I paid my bill to
[Mrs. Lloyd] in Anguilla Liberty Dollars, which pleased her." (Now, since
this is the Mrs. Lloyd who was one of the five no votes at the referendum three
weeks earlier, and since the hotel—in which she lived—had been shot up by the
rebels at least twice, I truly doubt that the Anguilla Liberty Dollars pleased
her. But the relationship between
Anguilla
and
San
Francisco
is one long unrelieved saga of
misunderstanding anyway.)

At last Wade left Anguilla,
carrying with him 1,250 silver coins (less his hotel bill) and 12,900
one-dollar bills, all of which he stuffed in a hotel safe as soon as he reached
St. Thomas, about two hundred miles away.

Wade stayed in
St.
Thomas
two days, until Jerry Gumbs came to see him.
His mind apparently had cleared, and he was back for more money. Wade: "He
carried a letter from Ronald Webster—a plea to send back the rest of the money,
since they now had a new government."

(A mark of their desperation for
money by this point can be seen in the fact that they had just broken into the
Warden s safe. For two months after the rebellion they didn't touch that safe.
It was the Queen's property and not theirs. But at last they were in such
desperate straits they were forced to do it, despite their qualms. Rebellion
had been one thing; breaking into the Queen's safe was something else again.)

So Wade phoned Newhall, back home
in
San Francisco
, and Newhall said
sure, go ahead, give them the money. Wade promptly turned over all the dollar
bills to Jerry Gumbs and went home to
San Francisco
with the five moneybags full of coins. He had just made a ten-thousand-mile
journey, carrying 108 pounds of silver coins, and at last delivered them to the
spot where he'd picked them up.
Mission
accomplished.

Colonel Bradshaw