Kicking at the beach sand in frustration, Badde shouted, “Goddammit!”
His voice caused heads to turn—just in time to witness him make a fist with his free hand and punch the thick trunk of a tall palm tree.
“Damn it, that hurt!” Badde blurted, frantically waving the hand.
A young mother, holding the hands of children as they walked nearby, said, “Come on, kids, hurry this way!”
She tugged them toward the beach as the children stared wide-eyed over their shoulders at the madman who had hit a tree after yelling into his phone.
Badde, a half hour earlier, watching large yachts moving off in the distance, had already been imagining himself counting his soon-to-be new wealth on his own luxury vessel.
Now I can forget that—I’m on a sinking Titanic.
It’s about to all go to hell . . .
—
They had all gathered near the resort’s seaside tiki bar in one of the twenty private cabanas. Each cabana had a frame fashioned of rough-hewn palm tree trunk, a roof of fronds, and walls of heavy white cotton duck fabric that undulated with the breeze.
Above the doorway, which had its two panels of white cotton duck tied back, was a hand-carved sign with brightly painted letters that read JOLLY MON CABANA. Inside, the cabana held six chaise lounges topped with thick royal blue cushions, a low bamboo table, and four armchairs arranged around a table topped with a soaring birds-of-paradise floral centerpiece. Broad fan blades made of woven palms hung from the raised ceiling and undulated, adding to the cool ocean breeze.
Janelle Harper sat at the table across from Rapp Badde. Each had a tall, icy glass filled with locally crafted Governor’s Reserve dark rum, tonic water, and a lime wedge.
Sitting between them was Miguel Santos, a beefy Hispanic in his late twenties who had his big hand wrapped around a dripping wet bottle of Red Stripe beer that he had just pulled from a cooler of ice.
“Mike” Santos, the chief executive officer of OneWorld Private Equity Partners, had a chubby face with dark eyes and thick wavy black hair, combed back and reaching his collar. He wore a tight-fitting black T-shirt with faded blue jeans and, despite it being a tropical island, black pointed-toe Western boots, which now had a dusting of white sand.
“I’m glad you two could get away on such short notice,” Santos said. “In addition to executing the contracts here, this gives me a chance to share with you both a detailed tour of what we hope to do with the casinos.”
“We’re quite happy we could make it,” Jan said politely. “And thank you for sending the jet.”
“The view here is a helluva lot better than back home,” Badde said, flashing his toothy politician’s smile. “Do you have any idea how miserable the snow and cold have been in Philly?”
Santos chuckled.
“Yeah, Rapp, it’s already damn cold in Dallas, too,” he said, and turned to Harper. “Which is partly why my partner is unhappy he couldn’t make the trip. And Bobby was looking forward to meeting you, Jan. He speaks highly of your skill in reviewing the contracts.”
Janelle Harper had graduated from Temple University’s Beasley School of Law two years earlier.
“That’s very kind,” Jan said. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” Santos said, and smiled warmly at her.
Badde’s eyes darted between the two as he tried to discern if there was something he was missing in their exchange.
Badde had met Santos, along with his partner, a lawyer by the name of Robert Garza, a month earlier in their offices in Uptown Dallas. OneWorld Private Equity Partners occupied the penthouse, on the twenty-fourth floor of its building. The partners had explained that they had arranged the financing for the entire complex, which was owned by the same clients who owned luxury resorts worldwide, including Queens Club, for which they had also arranged the financing.
Badde remembered them saying that China Global Investments owned Yellowrose, one of the foreign conglomerate’s four significant companies in the hospitality market.
“We packaged Yellowrose, then sold it to them, and continue to help them expand it,” Garza had told him.
Robert “Bobby” Garza, thirty years old, was a tall, light-brown-skinned man with a neatly trimmed goatee and a smoothly shaven scalp. In contrast to Santos’s jeans and boots, he wore crisp slacks and a white dress shirt. He was a Tejano—a Texan of criollo Spanish descent—his family having lived near San Antonio when the area was still Mexican territory and called Tejas.
Santos’s family, meanwhile, was from Colombia, and had cattle ranches there, as well as in Argentina and Brazil. His father had sent him to boarding school in San Antonio at age thirteen—where he and Garza first met—then he went on to graduate from the Ranch Management program—“with an MBA in Cow Shit,” he said—at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth.
“Rapp said you started out as a cattle rancher,” Jan Harper said to Santos. “How did you wind up . . . well, here?”
“Jan, where one finds cattle, one also finds cow pies—”