CHAPTER
56
THE NEXT MORNING DEVINE CALLED in sick and then met Montgomery at the train station. She was wearing jeans and a long-sleeved shirt and black ankle boots. He passed her his spare helmet, she climbed on, and they set off for Connecticut.
When they arrived at the address, they saw that Elaine Nestor’s cottage was small but quaint, with gray cedar shake siding, white trim, and beds filled with colorful summer flowers. Hers was the only house on the macadam rural road.
When they knocked on the door a woman answered. She was in her late forties with graying hair cut short on the sides with one long bang in the front and black-rimmed glasses on a chain around her neck. She looked more like a caricature of a librarian than a hard-charging financial journalist digging up dirt on the wealthy and powerful. But her features were alert and her eyes bright and probing.
“Elaine Nestor?”
“Yes. Who are you?” she said. He saw a phone in one hand and a wooden mallet in the other. But when she saw Montgomery standing next to him, she relaxed just a bit.
“My name is Travis Devine. This is my friend, Michelle. I work at Cowl and Co—”
That got the door slammed right in his face.
Should’ve seen that coming, idiot.
He glanced at Montgomery, whose expression said pretty much the same thing.
He called out, “I read your article on Brad Cowl. The one that got your career torpedoed. I just wanted to tell you that you were right.”
The door slowly opened, but Nestor’s look remained suspicious. “Why are you here? What do you want?”
“Have you read about the murders?”
“Of course I have. And what do you mean I was right?”
Devine had prepared what he was about to say on the ride up. “I think Cowl is running the biggest money-laundering scheme in the history of the world. And would you like your career back?”
Nestor stared at him for an uncomfortably long moment.
“Would you both like some coffee?” she said brightly.
Three cups of coffee later Nestor was still shaking her head. “ ‘Area 51’? Really?”
“Really,” said Devine. “As crazy as it sounds.”
“It doesn’t sound crazy. People will do anything to make money. But you took a huge risk doing what you did.”
He looked at Montgomery, who was fingering her coffee cup and looking pensively out the window into the rear garden. “I had incentive enough,” Devine said.
Nestor said, “You asked me about Brad Cowl, and I told you what I thought. He’s a slick operator and can talk a good game, but if he knows the difference between an LBO and HBO, I’ll run naked down the street. And he did inherit a lot of money and he blew it on coke and women, and shady investment types who took him to the cleaners, and I have the receipts to prove it. He’s a front man, plain and simple, and I wrote all about that in my article. And then I got my ass handed to me and basically run out of town on a rail. It’s just history repeating itself. Anyone who had the temerity to question Bernie Madoff’s guaranteed returns got the same treatment for decades.”
“Nobody wanted to pop the illusion,” interjected Montgomery. “It’s the Emperor’s New Clothes syndrome.”
Nestor eyed her. “Nobody likes to admit they were suckered. It’s easier on the psyche to keep living the lie.”
“But not easier on the wallet,” said Devine. “It has to come to a head. Although Cowl is not running a Ponzi scheme. I think what he’s doing is actually a lot worse. It goes right to this country’s national security interests.”
Nestor nodded. “I’m sure you read about the Panama Papers and, more recently, the Pandora Papers. It’s no secret to those in the industry that rich people from all over the world have been stashing trillions in opaque trusts that run from generation to generation, in perpetuity, and they don’t pay a dime of tax on any of it, ever. A lot of it is illegal money from cartels, terrorist organizations, deposed dictators who have emptied treasuries, ransomware players. Creditors can’t touch it, and the people whose money it really is can never recover it.”
“I read that South Dakota is sitting on over six hundred billion dollars of that trust money,” said Devine. “It creates a few hundred jobs in the state, but it sucked the lifeblood out of the places where that money originated. And Wyoming has something called the ‘Cowboy Cocktail’ that has even more privacy layers.”
Nestor nodded. “You can be the trust’s grantor and the beneficiary, and the people running the trust have no clue who the real owners are. They just see account numbers. You’ve got do-nothing descendants who haven’t worked a day in their lives and they have their own jets courtesy of these tax-robbing schemes.”
Devine added, “And you have some high-and-mighty politicians screaming about working-class joes pulling three jobs getting a few hundred extra bucks a month in government benefits, because they think it’ll make them lazy.”