Simply Lies

Chapter 50

It was the next day and the kids were with Silva downstairs. Gibson had her cup of tea and oatmeal almond cookie. She hurried to her office, ceremoniously cracked her knuckles in front of her computer screens, and got to work.

While Zeb Brown had been the one to suggest that she take time off, she knew this hiatus would have to come to an end at some point, which lent urgency to her mission. And she could not step away from this case until it was solved.

She started hitting keys and typing in web addresses. There were myriad ways to hide money, and just as many ways to look for it. It was a game of cat and mouse played out every second of every day across the world. And it wasn’t just about rich debtors trying to hide their fortunes from creditors, but also law enforcement trying to pierce the walls hiding money that dictators had stolen from their national treasuries, as well as secret organizations funneling dark money into a hot commodity that was now being termed “weaponized capital.”

It was a way for the rich’s assets to be deployed not in buying one more superyacht or luxurious private jet, but in silencing critics, buying off politicians and making sure they won their elections by hook or crook. And destroying legitimate business competition and making an already uneven playing field tilt even more unfairly in their favor.

Gibson used an asset locator search to build a list of everything ever recorded in Pottinger’s name in a public records database. This also included any entity in which Pottinger had any connection whatsoever, whether as an officer, director, investor, or other affiliation. She should have done this before, but hindsight was 20/20.

Within an hour, and using ProEye software and access to internet platforms unavailable to the trolling public, she had compiled a list of forty-four companies, myriad investment platforms, alliances, and bank accounts. They were located all over the world. But they all had one thing in common: They had been closed down within the last six months or so and all assets transferred out.

She knew he had to pay bills from somewhere, including the salaries of the staff he had at the estate. She performed search after search and kept running into dead ends. These accounts had also been terminated and any funds in them were gone.

As she sipped her tea Gibson continued the arduous task of following the money. It was not as easy as depicted on TV, where the computer screen would show arrows bouncing off satellites and dipping into bank accounts until the current location was identified seconds later.

Yeah, right.

She next did a LexisNexis search of plaintiffs’ and defendants’ names to see if Pottinger had been involved in any lawsuits.

There were a dozen, all settled with no financial amounts disclosed. But it still provided her with some useful information, which she wrote down.

She did a search of Stormfield and found the real estate transaction she had noted before. Cash deal coming from an account that had since been closed. But it was drawn on Deutsche Bank. Okay, that was a red flag, Gibson thought. The German financial institution just couldn’t seem to get out of its own way when it came to unscrupulous associations.

She tried to trace any funds left over from the purchase but lost the digital trail somewhere around the Caribbean. Gibson next checked his credit history but found nothing much there, not so odd if the man paid cash for everything. She went on LinkedIn and ran a search on both him and the companies that she had previously uncovered. Unfortunately, there was nothing helpful.

She went on another site to see if any liens had been filed against Pottinger, any of his companies, or any other property he and his entities might own. There were none. So the guy never tried to stiff anyone, good former mafia bean counter that he was.

She pulled out her iPad and went through the inventory of the house she had collected on her first visit there. There had been two suits of armor. She had gotten serial numbers off them both. She had next tracked them to an antiquities dealer in London.

She checked her watch; it would be evening now in England. She sent off an email to the business. Gibson posed as a motivated potential buyer. She knew from past experience this would get her a far quicker reply. She went through the rest of the inventory. Wherever she could run down where any piece had been purchased from, she emailed the source and left a message.

And then there was the Formula cabin cruiser. She learned that Pottinger had purchased it new from a dealer in Yorktown. However, when she checked the website, Gibson found that the company had gone out of business.

Undeterred by this, she decided to try a different tack.

It was the mundane if esoteric world of the registered agents. A corporation was legally required to have a registered agent physically in the state for service of process and other issues. There were really no exceptions to this rule. However, it wasn’t an arduous requirement. You just needed a human being/company with a PO box or street address.

Gibson knew that around $40 trillion worth of dark and criminal money was floating around the world, entirely hidden from everyone, including governments. Over a trillion dollars of this money was sitting just in South Dakota, Wyoming, Delaware, and Nevada. She was pretty sure Nathan Trask would have huge amounts of his illicit fortune socked away in such schemes that were totally legal, even if they were funded with illicit money.

On one case she had tracked down a woman who was a registered agent in Wyoming. The records showed that the lady had a portfolio of roughly eight thousand companies for which she was the registered agent. The woman had no idea who was behind any of them. Gibson wasn’t speculating about that. She had found a video deposition taken of the woman that had been posted to a database to which Gibson, with her ProEye credentials, had access. In the deposition the elderly lady had said, “It’s none of my concern who’s behind them. I just do what the law says I need to do and that’s it. Lot better than living just off my Social Security. And thing is, I apparently live in a fraud-happy state. If the law says it’s okay, then it’s okay by me.”

She charged $50 a year to be the agent and a onetime $150 fee for formation of the company. She made about forty thousand a year serving as a registered agent, which, along with her Social Security, allowed her to live quite comfortably in retirement.

“I’ve got all my kids and grandkids doing it, too,” she had volunteered. “Best job in the world because you basically don’t have to do nothing except maintain the records and file what’s needed and you get paid like clockwork. And if they don’t pay, I just cut ’em off. Wish I’d known about it when I was younger.”

Gibson learned that the lawsuit in which the woman had been deposed had emanated from her unknowingly having been the agent for two billionaire Russian oligarchs, and a cartel boss from Venezuela. The latter, upon his arrest, had said he had never even heard of Wyoming until one of his associates had seen an ad that the woman had placed on LinkedIn looking for new clients.

When informed of her clients’ infamous identities during the deposition, the elderly woman seemed to be proud that she was representing such wealthy, if criminal, people.

“Little old me. Who would’a thunk it?” she said.

Yeah, lady, who would’a thunk it.

Gibson seized on one filing in Colorado that Pottinger had done under a d/b/a, or “doing business as.” He had left one thread of his real identity attached to it. That was probably the mistake of a county clerk or junior attorney somewhere along the paper trail. That happened a lot and was one of Gibson’s prime methods for breaking through the elaborate shields the rich and/or criminal threw up to protect their assets.

She then followed that to what turned out to be four layers of corporate shields that she had to break through one after another. Until she finally struck — hopefully — gold. She clicked on a registered agent for a company that Pottinger had set up only a year back and then buried under the shell companies’ myriad corporate identities. It was called DPE, clearly after the man’s initials, with “Enterprises” probably representing the final letter in the acronym.

The registered agent for DPE was located in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The man’s name was Dexter Tremayne. His was an actual street address and not the more typical PO box. There was also an email address. She wrote out an email informing Mr. Tremayne that she needed to urgently speak with him about DPE.

She sent it off not expecting to hear anything back, at least not for a while.

But it was only seconds later when the email dropped into her inbox.

Can we talk?

He had left a phone number. She immediately called it.

The man confirmed he was Dexter Tremayne.

“I started doing this registered agent crap about two years ago,” he said. “Used to be a truck driver. Unhealthiest job there is except maybe for coal mining. Anyway, I live on disability and Social Security and what I earn as an agent. My cousin got me onto it. I’ve only got fifteen hundred companies right now. He’s got nearly thirty thousand. He has spreadsheets and state filing software and credit cards on file for autopay so he doesn’t get stiffed. Runs smooth as silk. And he’s printing money. That’s my goal. To beat him. Got a lot of catching up to do.”

“I understand. But why did you want to talk?” asked Gibson.

“I never met anyone from none of the companies I’m an agent for. Not a single one. I remember I got an email from a lawyer once, but he didn’t say much. Have no idea who owns any of this shit. My cousin thinks he’s got one of them Mexican cartel boys on his roster. Maybe I got me one, too,” he added eagerly.

“Okay. But—”

“Wouldn’t that be something? Me representing him, so to speak.”

“Yeah, really something to tell the grandkids,” noted Gibson, trying hard to keep the sarcasm out of her voice.

“Now let me get to the point. Like I said, I never met or heard from any of the owners, until this fellow Daniel Pottinger called me up one day. Out of the blue. Could’a knocked me over with a stick.”

“How do you know it was him?”

“He said it was. And why else would he be calling me?”

Gibson could think of a few reasons but said, “What did he want?”

“He wanted to tell me something. And I’m going to tell you.”

“Why tell me?” said an instantly suspicious Gibson.

“He’s dead, right? I saw that on the news. Pottinger was killed in, was it West Virginia?”

“Close enough. But he’s dead, yes. Someone killed him.”

“Well, he said, if anyone contacted me after he was dead, I was to tell them what he told me to tell them.”

Gibson sat up straighter and took up a pen. “And what was that, exactly?”

“He told me to tell the person, ‘Now you see it, but then you don’t.’ Seemed kinda stupid to me, but there you go.”

“Did he say anything else?”

“Yeah, as a matter of fact, he did.”

“What?”

“He said, ‘Then tell ’em to take away the eight.’ ”

“ ‘Take away the eight’?”

“That’s right. The eight. Those were his exact words. He had me write them down.”

“What’s the eight? And take it away from what?”

“I don’t know what to tell you, ma’am. That’s what he said.”

“Anything else?”

“Yep, then he said for whoever to ‘use the leftovers for Sesame Street.’ ”

“ ‘The leftovers for Sesame Street’?”

“Those were his exact words. God’s honest truth.”

“Is that it?”

“Yep. Ain’t that enough?” he added, with a chuckle.

Gibson thanked him and clicked off.

What in the hell?