Down the Road to Operation Senior Sentinel

Down the Road to Operation Senior Sentinel is based on a true story about one of the biggest and most successful undercover operations in the history of the FBI, as seen through the eyes of the criminal. It is my story of growing up in South Florida, learning the telemarketing game from some of the best, building a boiler-room empire on the telephone and finally watching the FBI drag me across the evening news when Operation Senior Sentinel came down.

I dedicate this novel to my beautiful wife Nadine and my amazing daughter Colleen, both of whom make this planet a better place to visit. Further dedication goes to my mother-in-law, Rennie, for all of her support writing this book.

Chapter 1

So there I was, all these years later just driving down the road when it came on the radio. It was so unexpected to hear out of nowhere, my past life flash before my mind's eye coming out of the speakers in my car. I felt frozen in time when I heard the weekly FBI radio update. I might have driven another ten miles on autopilot before I even remembered where I was and that I was driving down Hwy 441 in Gainesville, Florida. Hearing the FBI spokesperson bragging on the radio as he talked about an FBI operation that went down twenty years ago and hit my life like a tornado was so surreal.

I was swirling with emotion listening to this FBI spokesperson explain to the public some details about one of the biggest and most successful undercover FBI operations in the history of the agency. How I became the face of that operation I will never know. All I knew was that I did not think people watched the news anymore. However, just my luck, everyone I knew from family and friends, down to my priest just happened to see the FBI drag me across the streets of downtown Tampa that day. I was being paraded in handcuffs across all of the major television networks on the evening news.

There I was in cuffs while they did their perp walk in front of the press. Even my drunken cousin in New York looked up from the bar and caught the vision of me on TV being arrested by the FBI. He screamed at the bartender to turn the TV up. “That’s my cousin!” he yelled. All I remembered thinking was, “That fucking bitch got me.” The bitch I was referring to at the time was the Attorney General of the United States, Janet Reno.

I remember calmly thinking how I warned everyone I knew this was going to happen years before it did. Every network covered it and there I was on the television as the face of this crime.

Most people do not know but one of the biggest and most successful undercover operations in the FBI’s torrid history was called "Operation Senior Sentinel." No other operation before or after it has ever made such an impact on a particular crime.

The crime was white-collar in nature, so they say. However, telemarketing was much more than some white-collar enterprise at the time. It was the central gathering place for all of the Jewish, Italian and Irish mobsters. All of the kinds of people everyone has seen in any mafia movie you can think of were just characters in and out of my life. It was a way of life. Telemarketing was a criminal trade that one could learn and I learned it from some of the best. To think that I was involved up to my neck in something that got the attention of Congress and the Attorney General’s Office, still blows my mind to this day. When Janet Reno sat in front of that Senate Subcommittee and asked for a billion dollars to combat illegal telemarketing, I knew the difference between a million and a billion with a B. I understood at the time that this kind of money being given to the Justice Department would have dire consequences for my world. What I did not know was how what I was doing, would actually change the laws in the United States and affect every household in the entire country.

Telling the story all these years later is a bit strange, because our technical world today bears no resemblance to the world I grew up in. There are entire generations alive today who never knew what it was like to have a rotary phone. Millions of young people run around the world today with their smart phones with no understanding of a world before the mobile age or that most homes just had one rotary phone in the kitchen with an extra-long twisted cord that we used to walk to other rooms so we could have a private conversation.

Hell, when the last group of my family left New York for Florida to complete our family's migration, somewhere halfway down Interstate 95 they lost cell signal and a cousin of mine suggested pulling off the highway and looking for a pay phone. Another younger cousin in the car asked aloud what a pay phone was. Her face turned to complete consternation when they tried to explain to her there were public phones everywhere that people put coins into to talk to one another.

It is in that world that a young Irish criminal rose straight out of poverty to run a multimillion-dollar criminal enterprise that spanned from one coast to another. It was the world that came about shortly after the breakup of Ma Bell and the phone company's monopoly on all communications that spawned an entire category of crime. When the birthplace of technology just started to crawl its way out of the primordial soup, criminals were born.

This is how and when I was touched by history. This is how and when I touched history right back.

Chapter 2

In a distant world and time, the telephone was the one thing in each house that connected us to the world around us. Telephones were changing from rotary dialed phones to push button. The push button phone was a blazing new thing. Anyone who ever had to dial a long-distance phone number on a rotary phone knows what a revolution just pushing a button was at the time. The time alone that was saved by this innovative instrument, especially when you got the number wrong and needed to start over, was priceless.

Back then, it was impossible to trace anyone’s call. If someone called your house and said that they wanted to fuck your mother up her ass, if you dialed zero for the operator and asked who on Earth was that, they could not tell you. This anonymity gave birth to an entire generation of prank callers. Anyone could just pick up the phone, call anyone, and say anything without any repercussions. This environment even sparked professional pranksters who would make millions of dollars selling albums with nothing but prank calls. We would sit around the ball field with our boom boxes playing cassette tapes of these pranksters like The Jerky Boys and laugh our asses off. Each and every one of us would become our own professional prankster of the phone lines. I personally took this to such a level, that later on in life I was able to use these phone skills to extract money from people’s wallets just by using the phone. I mean who needed a gun to rob anyone when we had telephones. I would love to call stores and ask them if they had Dr. Pep in the bottle. When they would say yes, I would scream at them telling them to let him out so he could breathe. I would call up private residences, ask if there was a John there, and when they said no, I’d ask them, what did they do, piss out the window?

Over and over again, I would spend hours calling up God knows who saying God knows what. I mean after all no one could find me. It was the training grounds for my future crimes in telemarketing. It was the killing fields of any sense of decency my church or anyone tried to instill in me. I was completely out of control with this new push button phone. The speed alone of my deviance was vast and unstoppable. I was learning how to use a phone like a weapon. I was learning how to manipulate people on the other end. The communication grid was my playground and soon to be my servant. I was to master this weapon and build an empire. I was a criminal in waiting.

Chapter 3

For me, things were changing at home. My mother met a guy and got married and I was no longer needed as the man of the house. The new guy who called himself my stepfather was looking for me to act like a typical teenager and act like a boy. Too many years had passed for me to go back to that. Life and the cards I was dealt long ago, murdered any resemblance of a child in me. I remember having a hard time with it all back then. A friend of mine named Robert was 16 like me and he also had divorce issues in his family. His mother took off and just left him the house while she frolicked about somewhere up north. He was living all alone in the house at his age going to school and working on the side. He decided to rent out a couple of bedrooms in his house for some extra money. I rented one of those rooms from him. The house was in Miramar and it had a pool so it was a perfect fit for me at the time.

So now, I was on my own with my own transportation living in a house that became every bachelor’s dream.

I was still going to high school, but I found an ad in the paper for a telemarketing job close by in Miramar. My high school sweetheart Ann and I answered that ad to go work on the phones. I can remember the first day we walked in. We were standing outside this glass door and I pressed a button for us to be buzzed in. As we entered the place, the first room we came into was the secretary’s room and she handed us applications. After filling those out, we went for interviews further inside the building.

We walked right into an open phone room and there I was standing in the middle of the space. It was magical to me. Cigarette smoke filled the room. The sound of everyone at their desks on the phone created a buzz and an energy in the air that was electric. I could hear everyone giving their pitches over the phone and trying to get their next sale. The room was filled with all sorts of people from all walks of life. There were hot chicks from wall to wall. You could say I felt right at home standing in the middle of that room. You can say my adult life began that day.

I worked the night shift after school and as time went by, slowly but surely, I was no longer interested in the immature world of high school. Each day I could not wait to go to work at night picking up the phone and selling people our product from coast to coast. I loved to be surrounded by older people and I loved my job because I was not only good at it, I was excellent.

The company that I worked for was called C.C. Delco Inc. and in time, I found out that factions of the Jewish Mafia supposedly ran it. The product we sold was lock pick sets to unlock car doors. However, we never really told the person on the other end of the phone that was all that it was. We used a play on words that danced around facts and made it sound like it was something more. The misleading nature of the pitch was identified by me almost immediately, but it never really hit me how misleading it was until months later when I was able to see what the picks looked like.

It really hit me like a ton of bricks when I was able to see the product in another section of the building that was used for shipping. The lock picks had plastic handles and were made of a very thin metal-like substance that bent with the slightest touch. The picks were encased in a plastic pouch. The whole thing was a laughable sham and we were charging three hundred dollars for it. That day I knew what we were doing was not right. Whether it was legal or not, I was not sure, because of the way we worded the pitch to the potential clients.

There was a chain of command among the Jews that ran the company. In the big office was Ross Botstein and everyone in the building answered to him. The second in command was a man named Webster and he was the other owner of the phone room. Bob clearly had more money, but Webster was no slouch and he was the muscle. Webster answered to Bob, but Webster was Bob’s connection to the Italians. Webster’s right hand man and almost always by his side was the scariest man I have ever met in my life and his name was Little Benny. Benny was an alleged contract killer and a stone cold psychopath. One eye went its own way. The man was evil incarnate. Mobsters all over the country from multiple nationalities and families used him for their contract hits.

Of course, I was to learn all of this later and over time that these were the rumors of this group of guys. Whether it was true or not, at the time I did not care; I wanted to make money. Webster took me under his wing and taught me the tradecraft of white-collar crime.

After I saw what the lock picks looked like, I went to see Webster in his office and I closed the door and asked him about the picks. I told him that I saw them and he laughed a deep belly laugh. He explained to me that the picks did work and what we were saying about them over the phone was part of our tradecraft. We were to paint a picture without saying certain things about whatever we were selling at the time. He laid out for me the truth of the matter. He taught me that it did not matter what the product was, that we could plug in this one or that one, but “the sell” or “the close” was always the same.

He sat there for an hour telling me about the good ole days when they were selling diamonds and land over the phone and educated me on who were the legend closers in our craft. I sat there mesmerized for that entire hour. After he explained all this to me he came around his desk stood there with his cane and told me all the plans that he had for me and what he had seen in me. He told me I was a natural and I was going to make millions in white-collar crime. Of course, he did not call it that, he just called it “the trade.”

He explained to me how I must start to dress like a million bucks so I could look and feel like a million bucks. From that day forward, I completely changed my attire. When he was done, I started to walk out of his office and I asked him whether or not the picks opened any car doors at all. He laughed that deep laugh again and said, “Theoretically!” Then he walked me out and instructed his phone room manager, Jimmy, to open a filing cabinet with the picks. It took him a while, but he opened the drawer as Webster walked back into his office thundering that infectious laugh that he had.

Days later, I was over at my mother’s house for dinner and I asked her what she made as a yearly income from American Express. She said that she was on her 13th year with American Express and was now proudly making $23,000 a year. Her face beamed in pride as she said the number. As I ate my meal, I thought that I had already made $30,000 in a little less than six months. I knew right then and there that if I quit high school and did this full time, I would at least make $60,000 a year. Over that plate of corned beef and potatoes that night, any thought of finishing high school was losing steam. It was time to go make some real money.

Chapter 4

Somewhere in the middle of the Bronx, a body shop phone rings. The man answers and hears my voice. “Can I speak to the owner please?”

“This is Guido, how can I help you.”

“Hello, this is Scott Starr from C.C. Delco. We are the guys who made the Slim Jims, you know the flat piece of metal that slides between the window and the door panel that unlocks car doors. Well, as you probably know, the Slim Jims do not work anymore on the newer cars. With all the slide locks and power locks they make cars with now, the Slim Jim has become obsolete. We came out with a new system that goes directly into the keyhole of the car and like your key, it unlocks the door, trunk, gas cap and even starts the car, of any car, foreign or domestic from 1958 up to today with the exception of the Mercedes Benz with the laser lock key. It is called The Master Lockout Set and it comes with a color-coded handle and a list that tells you what color to use on what make or model. It works on the tumblers like your key; just give it a half turn to the right and it unlocks the car door and starts the car. Now Guido, I know at least a couple of times a year someone in the shop mistakenly locks the keys inside the car that you are working on. You know as well as I do that a locksmith is not cheap nowadays. With The Master Lockout Set those days are over. Now you will have access to all of the cars and will never have to spend money on locksmiths. The Master Lockout Set comes with a 100% guarantee and a lifetime warranty. Sound like something you could use?”

Well right away Guido is not thinking of any legal idea to do with The Master Lockout Set. All he is thinking in his mind is how he can open and start all of the cars of the world. We would whack these guys in the automotive industry $300 a set and send it out UPS C.O.D. Back then, even if you opened the box with the UPS guy standing there and realized you had been fucked up the ass by paying three bills for a plastic lock pick set, the UPS guy was not allowed to take the box back once you opened it. Knowing that a decent lock pick set could be bought off the Snap-On truck for $20, Guido sees that he just got jacked and he is more embarrassed than anything else.

The whole thing was beautiful, because the damn things were lock picks and yes, before you made that half turn to the right like your key, somehow you had to pick the tumblers like a locksmith.

We never said it was a key, but only that it worked on the same principle. Yes, we forgot to mention you really needed to be either a locksmith or a professional burglar to operate them, but hey, what did you need these for anyway? Yes, $300 was an exorbitant amount of money to pay for this piece of shit, but sorry, Sucker, we need to cover our Watts bill from the phone company and all the expenses of running a phone room. After all, what the fuck are you ordering such a product for anyway, you greedy and shady bastard? I mean, what do you have in mind for The Master Lockout Set, you fucking grease monkey? Locksmith my ass; you wanted to open all the cars, but why? Why do you need the keys to the world? What were you going to do with them? It was questions like these that people did not want to answer, so they did not complain.

Here is a breakdown of how the numbers worked. I am going to use a scale that is smaller and easier to apperceive. By sending out 100 boxes a day across the nation C.O.D. at the price of $300, we could count on half of those C.O.D.’s as being paid. Therefore, each and every day 100 boxes go out the door and 50 a day come back. We did not look at the 50% collection ratio as any loss at all, but only the cost of doing business. We knew the other 50% would collect and 100% of that 50% was what we worked on. So, the real gross was half of the boxes shipped, then out of that, 100% of the 50% we collected.

Only 18% of the people would call back and complain. This number never moved much. Only 18% of people would call the customer service line talking about some mistake that was made. They were too embarrassed. They would call and say there was some mistake; they ordered the keys not the picks. They would never tell their spouses or business partners that they fucked up. The shame of paying $300 for a plastic lock pick set was not something they wanted to highlight to too many people. Now out of that 18%, only half of that or 9% were really hot and mad and those were the people that would receive a refund.

There was always a bank account set aside for refunds. That was the grease that made it work. If anyone complained to some state attorney’s office or the Better Business Bureau, we would say that this was some kind of misunderstanding and we would gladly refund the money. This created an illusion that we were on the up and up, because any complaints that were really heated were settled.

In another room of the building was what was called the backend room. The people who worked the backend had one function and one function only. They took the 18% of the people complaining, sorted through them, and figured out which ones were going to be real ball busters and they would refund them. That was usually around half of the 18%. Consequently, in the end, only 9% of the people who were sold an exorbitantly priced lock pick set got their money back and 91% of the 100% of the money collected was pocketed.

The reason this all worked was because it was a different time and place. It would be hard for a younger person who grew up in today’s world, where everything is interconnected and a world that feels smaller and smaller each day to understand how it was.

Back then, the world was miles apart and oceans really meant something. This was a time when our communication grid was just starting to crawl out of the primordial, technical ooze. No one spoke to each other. State lines meant something. If I sold a lock pick set to someone in Oregon and I was in Florida, whom would they complain to? They would first call some local or state entity from whatever state they resided in and then those people would never do more than pick up the phone and make a call to try to resolve it. No one had the manpower to go after some company in another state. The authorities in each state would not work together to solve a nationwide fraud, they had their own local problems. The federal government was, at the time, not set up to chase down white-collar crime with a nationwide syndicate.

The entire procedure we were following was like taking candy from a baby. If run correctly, our business model was untouchable at the time. It was, in fact for telemarketing, what was known now as the good ole days. We did not need a gun; we had the telephone.

Chapter 5

During this time and place, my life was fragmenting. My new life was progressing and my old life was being left behind. In the rearview mirror was high school, my high school sweetheart and any sense of right and wrong.

It was nearly a year that I had been at C.C. Delco, but I was already seeing that there was no place to grow with this group. In that year, I had become their number one salesman, but that worked against me. First, they already had two phone room managers running the place and they were not going anywhere anytime soon. In addition, the fact that I was bringing in so much money would have been like killing the golden goose if they took me off the phones. No one was even near my production and a promotion for me was hurtful to the bottom line of the company. I was stuck in a box and as young as I was and all full of beans, complacency was never going to become my norm.

There was a book bouncing around the office that everyone was taking turns reading that I got a hold of and it changed my thinking once and for all on the matter of being stuck. The book was called Wiseguy written by Nicholas Pileggi. When I read it, my life suddenly made sense to me. I was like the Henry Hill character in that book. I could relate to his story better than anything I had ever read or heard of at the time. That year with Webster, I had seen the dark side of the mob and learned all about murders that were supposedly happening. For me having alleged hit men and bookies in and out of the office each day was nothing and completely normal by now. As shady as their phone rooms were, they were partially a front to look like these were legitimate businessmen with legit businesses. Long before Martin Scorsese turned that book into a movie called GoodFellas, I read the book and knew I was not alone in my world. I was like a thoroughbred horse being kept in the stall. Nicholas Pileggi’s book was set in New York City and I was in South Florida; however, it all felt the same to me.

In South Florida and in the world of illegal telemarketing, we all congregated at the same bars and restaurants. We shared the same beaches and would rub shoulders with one another. We would keep up with each other and what we were all up to. We would steal each other’s pitches, salespeople and even wives. We would all know who had a good week and would pore over the day’s deeds at happy hour at certain watering holes.

Because since the age of 14 I was already 240 lbs, 6’3”, had a hairy chest and already could grow a full beard, I got into bars at an early age. I grew up in bars and pool halls and never once got asked for my identification or “carded” as it was called. Carding people was just starting to even become a concept back then and I already looked over the age to ask. Again, this was a different time and place. It was the last generation of freedom. We still had the freedom to make bad decisions without it ruining the rest of our lives, or so we thought.

I had many watering holes back then and many places I would belly up to the bar. One of my favorite places was a bar and restaurant on the Intracoastal Waterway called Le Tub in Hollywood, Florida. It was the coolest place because it was secluded, on the water and had tables outside that overlooked downtown Hollywood and its skyline. Like many of my favorite spots, you could just pull up to it with a boat or yacht.

Years later Oprah Winfrey would highlight this place on her show and declare it had the number one burger in the entire country. I remember being so shocked to hear this. I was beyond shocked that this little place on the water was even known by her and that it won some “best burger in the country” thing, and I was blown away because in all my years to this day, I have never ordered a freaking burger there, ever! I laughed thinking if she or the proprietors of Le Tub only knew of the shady conversations that would transpire over cocktails, whether it would be the mob, white-collar crooks like me or any of the drug cartels that would meet there, maybe that episode with Oprah would never have happened.

One day I was out on the deck enjoying some conch fritters and a beer at Le Tub while many in my world were there kicking back. A man who I did not know very well and had only briefly heard of his name, approached me. He was a Cuban dissident that fled Castro and made a name for himself moving this, brand new at the time, kind of marijuana called “Krypto” which was the beginning days of hydroponically grown weed.

His name was Louis Alberto and he was an older gentleman with a great smile and personality. He sat down at my table, introduced himself, explained that he knew of me and that he opened up a phone room in North Miami Beach and wanted me to take it over and run it for him. He explained that the guy who was running the room now was an idiot and that he needed someone in there who understood the business. He offered me the phone room manager job only if I could also physically throw out the man in there running it, because he would not leave and he was a relative of his wife’s and could not hurt the guy and stay married.

Of course I told Louis that I needed time to think about the offer and that I would meet him back here at the same time next week. What I did not tell Louis was I did not need any time to accept that offer, but needed time to figure out a way out from under Webster’s thumb. As I drove home that night, I could feel the blood coursing through my veins. The thoroughbred horse was about to break out of the gate. I just needed to figure out a way to do that without any injury to the racehorse.

Chapter 6

Leaving C.C. Delco was not as hard as I envisioned. Our world was changing very fast. Totally unrelated to me, someone among our C.C. Delco family was leaving too. However, his departure way overshadowed my exit. One of our sales guys went by the name of Peter Giovanni. Pete was a steady earner and was with Webster and Bob for more years than I ever was. Pete was Italian and came from a family that people knew in South Florida. Peter not only decided to leave C.C. Delco, but he went and opened his own phone room selling lock picks backed by his mother.

Pete’s mom was Italian and was loved by many in our world. Pete also had had a friend that was Cuban and this man already made his bones in South Florida and was a man of respect and no one to fuck with. Manny was his name and he was to be feared, because he was allegedly able to bring contract killers up from Cuba to do the job. Fingerprints meant nothing because there was never any record of Manny’s guys, so I was told. Peter had many friends that people around him did not realize. It was a deadly and stealthy way of doing business.

This departure was a straight affront against Webster and Bob and completely took the spotlight off my Irish ass. After all, I was nothing but a sales guy and I certainly was not starting my own phone room, but only taking the job to run another. My new life sparkled in front of me and I never looked back. I simply never returned to work at C.C. Delco and never explained myself to anyone.

Accepting this job to work for Louis was so exciting to me, but there was no escaping the fact that I had to confront this guy who ran the place. Coming from Miramar, I had no shortage of fistfights over my life. I had already earned a reputation of someone who would win more fights than he would lose. I simply did not feel fear the way I knew other people did in this regard. This was a good thing and a bad scenario for me over the course of my life. In this situation it was a little of both.

I decided not to involve anyone I knew and would just walk into the phone room and take it as it came. I never even knew what the guy, who I was to remove from the office, looked like. My plan was to walk in the door, figure that all out on the spot, and take it from there.

The office was located in North Miami Beach in an industrial section off Dixie Highway. Anyone familiar with North Miami Beach knows that this section of Dade County does not resemble Miami Beach in any way. It is the northern section of Dade County that has the railroad tracks running right down the middle of it. These were the tracks that were used by not only The Tri Rail but also the same tracks Amtrak used to connect New York City to Miami.

Louis had rented an office right on Dixie Highway facing these tracks and by no means was there any glamour to this operation. I pulled up to the front of the strip plaza and parked in front of the office. I looked into the mirrored glass that faced me knowing my new life lay on the other side of that glass, but I had no idea at the time what that looked like or who I was to throw the fuck out of there. I got out of my car with my heart pounding and just opened the glass door and walked in.

I stepped into the office to find one open room. One desk was at the end of the room and the rest of the tables were long tables with phones on them with one sales person after the other on the phones. When I walked in the room half the people looked up at me and the other half kept pitching to the people on the phone. Unfucking believably to me, sitting at one of these tables was my old fucking whore named Maria from West Miramar. I had no idea she worked in this phone room, let alone even had a damn job.

Maria was a hot Italian Dancer from the neighborhood who I used to use as some whore that I would pass around to my friends. She was beautiful with long brown hair and thick thighs. Miramar or Broward County was spreading out west toward the Everglades and she lived in a new development that was outside the suburbs and more rural. I found the girls on the outskirts of the city were very naïve and Maria was the queen of naivety, always wanting to please. The bitch was one of the greatest whores I knew and she just absolutely loved anything to do with being naked or dancing.

One day I was driving down Griffin Road in Broward heading towards the beach and my friend Steve Bonestein who was a longtime friend of the family was in the back seat. He told all of us in the car that he had not been laid in a long time and asked whether or not I could help him with this problem. As I was driving towards the coast on our way to the beach I told Steve to call this number to a girl named Maria and tell her that “your name is Bob and that I want her to take care of you.”

Steve thanked me and that was all I knew about the situation until Maria called me one day and told me that Steve called her and told her that I said to lie to her and give her another name. Steve said to Maria that he did not want to do that and he wanted to start their relationship with the truth. Maria told me that she was now in love with Steve and that she was no longer going to have sex with me or any of my friends anymore.

The stupid fuck fell in love with the neighborhood whore and took away one of the greatest pieces of ass we ever knew at the time. He betrayed us all, but that was not going to be the last time Steve betrayed me. Later on he was to have a role on the FBI tracking me down.

Now I was standing in this phone room and all I could see was Maria and nothing else. I walked right up to her and grabbed her by her head with a handful of that long beautiful hair. I snatched up her purse with my other hand and dragged her kicking and screaming out the front door by her hair. I just dragged her out the front door, threw her out into the parking lot, and blasted her in her face with her purse. I closed the door behind me, locked it and looked at everyone who was now staring at me in complete silence. I said, “I run this phone room now!”

One girl ran towards the door past me, screaming, and in front of the room started shaking the glass door trying to unlock the lock. She got out the door and a man stood up with a face full of abject fear, turned around, and ran out the back door. I knew immediately who he was and everyone else knew at that moment there was a new sheriff in town. I just looked around the room feeling like I was here now and I couldn’t wait to start. I looked at everyone who was now staring at me and asked if anyone else wanted to leave. No one did and I told them to get back to work.

Chapter 7

Running a phone room came so naturally to me. I was only seventeen years old at the time, but all these people, some who were twice my age, had to answer to me. Some I could tell resented that fact, but over time, they would learn to respect me. I changed the entire way the place was run and my changes not only made their job easier, but also filled everyone’s pockets.

I soon learned as a manager that all that mattered was the bottom line. How much my room was bringing in a week was my main function. A phone room manager lives and dies by the entire room’s numbers. Since I was the best salesperson, I knew, and the thought of leaving my livelihood to this bunch of misfits was so terrifying to me, I came up with a structural change as to how this was done.

I took a method that was used in another fashion called “The T. O.” and I made it a permanent staple in my arsenal. The T. O. was used when a salesperson would get close to a sale and needed the help of a manager to bring the mark over the top. How it worked was a salesperson would tell the person on the other end of the line that he or she was going to connect them to the president of the firm to further explain things. The salesperson would cover the mouthpiece of the phone, stand up and scream through the room “T. O.!” which meant “turn over” and the closer would get on the phone and reel the sale in.

What I did with this method was instead of using it every once in a while, I wanted everyone to do it all the time, on every sale. So all my sales crew had to do, was get them close and turn over the call to me and I would close the deal. The system worked brilliantly and now I was in charge of my own destiny instead of depending on the sales skills of the Bad News Bears of telemarketing on any given day.

It wasn’t long until I grew this little phone room into a high-powered “Boiler Room” that made incredible money for the owner Louis and his wife Connie. The term Boiler Room in regards to phone rooms meant typically that a crowded room full of sales people using high-pressure, often illegal sales tactics on unsuspecting victims over the phone would look like a boiling cauldron of water if you were near it. The imagery also referred to a room in a building (typically the basement) or a compartment in a ship containing a boiler and related to heating or steam-generating equipment. It was all about the pressure and the high pressure of a phone room that thundered out over the communication grid is what resembled a boiler room and for me, was a beautiful sight to behold.

Very quickly, I outgrew this operation and needed to move the office to a bigger and more prestigious location. As they sang in the TV show The Jeffersons, we were “moving on up.” Moving on up to a deluxe office in a bank building in Miami was our piece of the pie.

The owners that I was working for were such a strange and odd couple. Louis would drive around South Florida in his 380 SL Mercedes two-seater with the top off. I loved that car. He would sometimes let me drive it to run errands. The man always had a high dollar, leather briefcase near him and its only contents at all were an ounce of Krypto bud. The man loved his weed. He loved selling it and he loved smoking it. I do not think I ever saw him sober or straight ever at any time. He claimed he had a heart condition and needed this for medicinal purposes, but whether that was true or not, the man was always stoned with a smile on his face.

His wife Connie on the other hand, was his exact opposite. She was not Cuban but was Jewish and she dyed her hair blond. She was in good shape for her age. She was a sexy flat-belly who was at all times so wired on cocaine, that I would wonder why it wasn’t she with the heart problem. She was a cold bitch and I resented everything about her. However, they were a couple and I had to deal with her whether I liked it or not. They both lived in a millionaire’s paradise in Turnberry Isle on the Intracoastal Waterway.

Only the rich and famous lived in this high-rise. I was now rubbing shoulders with a segment of society that was miles from the Irish neighborhood I came from. I remember just sitting on the wooden dock with my legs hung over the edge above the water smoking a joint with Louis. The whole place was bumper-to-bumper yachts and Louis pointed out the one right next to us.

He said, “You see the name on that yacht?”

I said, “Yes.”

He said, “You know who that is right?”

I said, “Oh yeah, the whole country does.”

We were sitting there smoking pot right next to the yacht called “Monkey Business” which of course was the infamous boat the Presidential hopeful Democrat Gary Hart was fooling around on before he was brought down to his political knees. I just looked around at the scenery. I was musing about how far a guy like me had come. I was a long way from the world of Miramar, Florida. Even the pot I was smoking was much better. I felt like I had arrived. More to the point, I realized the higher you climb, the more shady things get. It is just a different level of monkey business, hypocrisy and crime. In the end, the only suckers were the worker ants who never got into the game. It was the sheeple who marched in lockstep to the slaughterhouse with their paychecks in hand. It was as Pink Floyd sang, “Welcome to the Machine.”

Chapter 8

Life at this point was going grand. I was running a successful boiler room business. We landed up in a nice high-rise where we shared the building with a bank, a radio station and other so-called legitimate businesses. Each day I would drive to work in my new Audi, get into the elevator, and go up to our floor. The only space above us was an entire floor that was empty that used to belong to a phone room that sold diamonds and gems. The entire floor was one open space made up of one cubicle after another. Whatever business that was there must have been huge, because this space was covered with nothing but cubicle workstations made out of white mica. I used to go up to this floor all the time to smoke pot or have sex with my employees.

Sex was plentiful back then. South Florida was and is always just full of dirty little whores who love to bang the boss. I just loved this aspect of the job. There on the top floor, I had my first experience with a black woman. She worked for my phone room and had one of those beautiful voices from the islands. Her accent was so sexy and her body would stop a clock. I was always attracted to black girls even back then, but in our neighborhood, it was ok to fuck them, just never bring one home to mama. In my family there was not even a second thought about this code among the men of the family. This sucked for me because not only did I just love black women, but also I loved those very dark black women. It was not as if I was trying to pass off some light skin to get by; I was attracted to the real deal. This woman working for me was such a sweet person. She was so smart and beyond sexy. We hit it off almost immediately and it was not long before we would go up to the top floor and smoke out and have sex in those cubicles.

Now this went on for a while. The memory of her brings back both the wonderful experience of being with her, but also reminds me of my utter shame of a situation in which I was such a scumbag. After a while, we were really getting into each other and we decided that we were going to tell our families and we were going to go out on a public date. We both made this commitment to each other and were supposed to go home that night and reveal this to our families. She still lived with her family, so it was even more of a commitment on her part. I was to drive to her home and pick her up. Now I knew her family was not going to be any happier than mine to hear the news. She explained to me what a shock to the family system this would be. However, I was to show up in a suit and a nice car to help ease the burden of all of this for her.

That night I got dressed, put on some cologne (Austin Z-14) and was ready to walk out the door to go pick her up. Sadly, somewhere between my home and hers I lost my nerve and drove instead to a bar to get drunk. I left her hanging there all dressed up with a stressed out mother and father and I never showed. The next day at work, I walked into the office and fired her on the spot. I mean, after all, I did not need a daily reminder of my shame. And what was she going to do; file a complaint? The owner of the business was an alleged drug dealer. Would she go to the authorities? Not likely she was even legal in the country. No, it was now time to send my island girl packing. I never saw her again and to this day I still think of her and what an asshole I really was. Life went on. There were calls to be closed, money to be made and other women to violate. Like I said, life was just grand, or so I thought.

Slowly but surely I noticed that I was not hearing from Louis. People were calling the office claiming they never received the product or any shipment at all. I could not ever get him on the phone and one Friday his wife Connie never showed up with the payroll for everyone while simultaneously checks were bouncing from all sorts of places.

I got in my car and drove down to see Louis at his home in Turnberry Isle. When I got up to his floor and banged on the door Connie answered and let me in. They had a huge condo as big as any house I had ever seen and she was bouncing off the walls. I could tell she was really coked up as she kept walking from one side of the room to the other. I sat her down and asked her where her husband was. After babbling all sorts of incoherent nonsense, she finally said she did not know where he was. She said he disappeared and was in trouble of some sort. She mused whether or not he took a boat back to Cuba or was maybe in New York City. She had no clue. I asked her about payroll, the bills, and all the calls I had been getting at the office. She had no answers for me and right there I knew this whole thing was over. I got into the elevator and was heading down to my car when I realized there was no way I was ever going to return to that office. After all, this was not my company and I was just the manager.

Louis was God knows where and it was doubtful I’d ever see or hear from him again. His wife was a defective human being with nothing to offer, so I felt I had no other choice. Just like my black island queen, I was just going to be a no-show. This was not my problem, this was theirs and it was time to move on. That day when I drove away from the Intracoastal Waterway, I knew I would never return to any of that mess. Now I needed to go find another job. My reign at that company was over and I needed to work out my next steps. I headed towards a bar in Broward; I wanted to drink some imported bottle beer. I needed a drink to clear my head. My life’s history will show that this night I picked the right bar. Once again my life was about to change.

Chapter 9

Strangely enough, most of my life I can point back to certain places and times and see what a pivotal moment it really was. Leaving Louis’ house and driving to a bar called Waltzing Matilda, I went into the bar and bellied up to it, ordered some exotic beer from the other side of the world, sat back, and took a sip. My head was spinning with the day’s events when I felt a hand on my shoulder.

“Long time no see,” I hear in a familiar voice. I spin my bar stool around and there stands my old coworker from C.C. Delco, Peter Giovanni, who left Webster and Bob to open up his own phone room. Peter took a seat next to me and struck up a conversation.

I asked him how he was doing with his new phone room and he went into a tirade about the crew. He continued how the crew he has in there now couldn’t hold the jockstrap of all of us back in the Delco days. He was making a living, but he wasn’t getting rich. He complained about being robbed by the phone companies and all their charges. This was commonplace for all of us in telemarketing back then.

Often I think back and remember how the phone companies just raped us for thousands a month. Phone rooms did not get unlimited calling, there was no such thing back then. We paid for every minute of every out of state call. Since we never called anyone in Florida out of fear that someone would knock on the door all pissed off about lock picks, all of our calls were out of state and the phone company was nothing short of pirates when dealing with us.

Peter asked how I was doing in Miami with the phone room I was running. I knew better than to lie about any of it, because word spread fast in our world and when people were not getting their paychecks, word spread lightning fast. I laid out to Peter what happened as we sat there drinking beer. Peter was like most Italians and would only drink beer from Italy; so he was knocking back his Peroni one bottle at a time.

After listening to my woes, he asked me what I was going to do. I told him that I had been saving up for a rainy day and that I was thinking about opening my own phone room as he did. He just looked at me and excused himself to go to the restroom. I struck up a conversation with the bartender who was this blond trollop who was telling me how she lost weight on a diet where she just drinks beer and only eats the nachos from the bar. The woman had great tits and I went here often, so I appeased her with my fake “I’m interested” look. So often in this situation, I can only see their lips moving, and I don’t hear a fucking word they are saying. All I ever think of when I meet a woman is how she would look like naked and or whether she had what is called a “phone voice” and if she could make me money with it or not. I really had no other use for the female gender at the time.

Peter returned from the restroom, said he was hungry, and asked if I wanted to go grab a bite to eat with him. I accepted the offer and we headed off to Ricky’s in Hollywood. Ricky’s is one of my favorite chicken wing places and raw bars. Buffalo wings were just taking off around South Florida and we had some of the best joints in the country. Ricky’s, Tarks and Mineo’s were three of our favorite spots for this kind of food and everyone from our world could be seen each night at one or more of these raw bars.

Ricky’s is a freestanding building. It is not in some strip plaza, but is its own building and there was parking in the back. We walked inside where it was somewhat dark, music was blaring out of the jukebox, and the place smelled like wings and beer. Peter asked if I wanted to sit at the bar or get a booth. Given this choice even today, I always choose the bar unless there are children with me. I’d rather eat a full course meal sitting at the bar any day than to squeeze in some booth in the corner. We sat up at the bar and ordered some beers and the hottest wings they had. Among many men, it has always been a contest to see who can handle the most heat. In this arena, I could stand toe to toe with any swinging dick.

During the course of our meal, Peter looked at me and said that if I was going to open a phone room that he would rather not have to compete against me. He knew my sales prowess and said he’d rather team up with me than go head to head. He explained that he was already going head to head with our old company C.C. Delco and could use my help to bury them once and for all.

I told him I was not looking to just manage another room. He told me that he understood where I was heading and was asking me if I would go fifty-fifty with him on the room he had now. Before I could get a word in edgewise, he asked me not to make any decisions tonight and invited me to join him and a group of friends to go down to The Florida Keys with them that weekend. He explained that they were renting an RV and were going to party all the way down there and all the way back. I agreed to go along for the ride. He said we could talk more about the merger on the trip. I shook his hand at the end of the night and we went our separate ways.

That weekend on Saturday morning, a huge RV pulled up outside my apartment in Hollywood. I was now living just off what is called Young Circle, which is an area of Hollywood Boulevard right before you hit the beach. I stepped outside, the door opened up, and Peter stepped out in a pair of shorts, tee shirt and flip-flops. Waving me towards the RV with a huge smile on her face was Peter’s fiancée standing behind him on higher steps in the RV. Stella was a straight out Italian fox with dark hair and dark eyes. She was wearing a lime green bikini and her hair was down. She had a body that called men towards her and a face of some olive-skinned goddess that just took my breath away. Peter had been with her for years and still had not married her yet.

I stepped into the RV and Peter introduced me to everyone. In the RV was a black, muscled, bodybuilder type by the name of Xavier Leesburg. I knew him already; we all called him X. Xavier was Peter’s muscle and the guy Pete would use to do a lot of his dirty work. Also in the RV were a couple of Stella’s friends whose names escape me now. They never left much of an impression on me. Peter got into the driver’s seat to drive the RV. He yelled we were on our way, put it in drive and took off down the street. Immediately the women pulled out a kilo of cocaine and threw it on the table. X pulled out his driver’s license and razor and started to chop up lines. Cocaine flowing, music from AC/DC’s Highway to Hell blaring and we were on our way to Key West.

Driving down to The Keys is the same for everyone; one way in and one way out. One two-lane road goes through each Key on the way down to what is called, “The End of the Road” Key West. Most people outside of Florida only know about Key West, but there are many other Keys that are just as much fun and less of a drive to the bottom. When you look at a map of Florida and follow it all the way down to the bottom, you will see what looks like a tail. At the end of that skinny little tail is Key West and one of the most famous streets called Duval Street. That was our destination, but there was a lot of cocaine and fun to have on the way.

The weekend we chose to go down there was a special event weekend when all of the restaurant industry from South Florida would go down to the Keys and party for two days. The roads were packed and our RV was rocking. X was walking up and down the aisle of the RV with this huge erection tenting out his shorts like nothing I had ever seen. He took his shirt off and was just moving to the songs. I pointed out to the ladies the obvious rock hard member that was now on display. They told me that is just X; he always gets hard on cocaine and he could not help it.

One of the gals got up from her seat, grabbed his johnson, and said to X “That’s right, you can’t help it, can you X?” and she dropped to her knees and started to perform fellatio. The other girls were egging her on, screaming and clapping. X picked her up off her knees, placed her on the couch, pulled off her bathing suit bottoms, and gave it to her right there. The chick started screaming out in pleasure in a tone I have never heard before and certainly could not produce a woman to do with my tool. Her ecstasy screams were so loud and panicked as if it were in the sound of her screaming that she took on something more than she could handle. He was pounding her and she loved it while the other girls were cheering it all on. The ladies then cut off more lines from this gigantic rock of coke.

I looked up front at Peter and he was driving the RV while looking in the big mirror to see X bang this broad and Pete was smiling a smile I simply cannot put into words. I walked up to the front of the RV and he asked me if I was having a good time and I said of course. He told me not to take so much powder right now, because we were going to pull over when we got to Islamorada and grab a bite to eat. I had no problem with that because I wasn’t too big on cocaine and I was mostly enjoying the weed and the vodka we had on the trip with us.

We pulled over when we got there and went into a bar called The Tiki Bar and ordered some fancy island drinks with umbrellas in them. The place was popping, packed with bartenders and other service industry workers just letting loose and having a good time. As time went by even the coke crowd came down from the RV when they got hungry. We all went over to a place called The Coral Grill. This restaurant was a two-story all-you-can-eat seafood buffet that hands down was the best seafood buffet I have ever had. This buffet wasn’t just the normal shit you would see on an all-you-can-eat bar. This had Alaskan king crab, lobster and unfreaking believable shit that was there for the ravishing. It was the best and freshest seafood buffet in the history of my life.

Over dinner, Peter and I discussed all of our plans that we had for teaming up together with a phone room while everyone else was in their own conversations as to leave the business talk to the adults. We made agreements about how we would split the profits after all the expenses were paid and talked about how I was going to use my new method with The T.O. and just have the crew get the caller close and that I would reel the sale in for the close. We agreed to all the power points we both wanted to make clear.

The next morning we woke up and headed toward Key West. With all the details of the work stuff worked out, I finally let loose and started to work on a professional buzz. By the time we finally got to Key West all I remember was that we walked out of the RV completely wasted, Pete pointed and said that was Duval Street and that was the last thing I remember about the whole trip. I have no memory of what we did in Key West and I slept all the way home. When we got to my apartment in Hollywood, they woke me up. Pete walked me to my door and said that he would see me Monday morning at work. He shook my hand and said we are going to rule the world, you and me. I went into my apartment and collapsed again into a deep sleep.

Chapter 10

Walking into the first day at work with my new company called Midas Unlimited Industries was a bit odd for me. The name of the company was not odd to me, because I understood that these lock pick companies were purposely named similar to well-known companies to trick people. It was not a coincidence that C.C. Delco sounded a whole lot like A.C. Delco, a well-known company. Midas Unlimited Industries sounded like Midas Muffler and that similarity was planned as we targeted the automotive industry.

What was odd and what I did not realize was that this was more of a family business than I understood it to be. I knew Pete had the backing of his mother, but I did not know that she actually worked out of the office and came to the phone room each and every day. Seeing his mother sitting behind her desk and even his fiancée working there made me realize that I was not actually going to be the equal partner we talked about down in the Keys.

Right away I felt a little hoodwinked and realized I was stepping into a hornet’s nest full of family and personalities. Immediately I could tell Pete’s mom did not like me nor did she want me there. However, as I looked around the room I saw many old faces from Delco that I used to work with, that Peter was able to steal away. Some of the best talent, in fact, that existed over at our old stomping grounds was now here working for Pete.

Now, this fact did not mesh with the concept of Pete saying his crew sucked and that he was not getting rich. I knew this sales force to be formidable. Two of my favorite sales people were here. One was Alexis Jalo aka Alex who was this Haitian guy whose family was high up in the government and had to flee Haiti after the revolution. Alex was a black dude that was whiter than most white people I knew. He came from a good and educated family. He wore suits every day of his life. His family lived in an upscale part of Broward County called Pembroke Lakes and his family only drove Mercedes Benz. Alex was someone I considered a friend. I had been to his home many times. I had met and dined with his family on several occasions and the fact that Pete told me nothing special was going on as far as sales numbers could never be true if Alex was in the building.

Another person that was there working on the phones was a gypsy by the name of Sherry. What nationality she was I had no clue. I’d guess maybe Pakistani or something like that; but she was not living the life of wherever she came from because Sherry was a lesbian and had a girlfriend and truly lived a gypsy lifestyle. The gal smoked more weed than any Jamaican I knew and she never stayed in one place long enough to call it a home. I just loved this woman. She was probably one of the ugliest women one could think of physically, but her personality to me was so attractive. She was a big girl and she and I hit it off right away. She was a smart ass with a black belt and as far as her sales ability, I’d put her up against most men I knew.

Just with those two sales people alone I could build a phone room, so I had no idea what Pete was talking about. We walked through the business and made our introductions to everyone. Peter announced to the staff that I was the new partner in the business and was here to help with sales. After that part was over, I asked Peter where my office was. He explained to me that I did not have my own office. Now this was a huge red flag, because even a phone room manager has a private office let alone an owner.

Peter explained to me that he wanted to put my desk right in the middle of the sales room to be circled by everyone else’s desk so I could run the room hands-on and be in the weeds with everything. Now, Peter knew that I knew that a central station like that was fine when I was doing that part of my job but that I needed a freaking office for other parts of my job which required conversations outside the earshot of the sales force, and on and on. I needed a fucking office, for sure. I was not getting a good vibe about any of this.

As the morning progressed, I went to talk to Pete in his office. I asked when we were going down to the bank, when were we going to see the accountants to put me on half of all the articles of incorporation and when were we going to get me on as a signer at the bank with our corporate account. Peter just looked down towards the floor and didn’t say anything. I looked at him and asked again. Peter then asked if we could go for brunch and we could talk about these things outside of the office.

We both walked back into the room and Peter told his mother we were stepping out for a bit and if she needed him to give him a call. Cell phones were just starting out in this age. I don’t know if you have ever seen a cell phone from the 1980’s, but it was a huge gadget, it was heavy and it had an antenna. I look back at those early phones and it really highlights how that was truly a different time and place. Well, he grabbed his phone and we were out the door.

Peter drove muscle cars that were built to run a quarter mile. They were loud and none of his cars ever went over 60 or 70 miles an hour without blowing up the whole engine. Those cars were geared for racing the quarter mile, period. He drove them around as his everyday cars and this day we stepped into a new Z-28 and we took off out of the parking lot.

His office was in Hollywood off Taft Street and we drove to a brick oven pizzeria in Pembroke Pines. The establishment had a real brick oven and only made 9-inch pizza pies. They just opened and I guess this was one of Pete’s places because everyone knew who he was and it seemed he had his own table. We ordered a couple of 9” pies and some beers and Pete began to explain to me the true nature of this phone room.

He explained to me that his mother controlled all of the papers and all of the accounts. I could not believe my ears. He told me all this in a tone that was blanketed in inner shame. I asked him how this could be and why on Earth does his own mother not trust him. Peter spent a considerable amount of time explaining to me that he has a weakness. That some people blow their money on gambling or drugs but that his vice was muscle cars. He laid it out for me that he had no self-control with money and that his mother knew it and was protecting him from himself. He explained to me that I would not be put on any of the books, but that I would in fact get half the profits and if I turned things around his mother would come around and warm up to me.

I can only imagine what my face must have looked like as I was picking my jaw off the ground. The whole thing was so surreal to me. I just took it all in and I told Peter that I was not going to return to the office that day, that I was going to go home, think about all this and I would be there in the morning to tell him my decision whether I was going to stay or not. He drove me back to the office parking lot and I got in my car and drove away.

That evening I drove out to see the sales guy I knew that was working for Peter named Alex. Alex lived in Pembroke Lakes as I said before and I figured he’d be home. I knocked on his door and as soon as he saw me he knew what I was there for. We went into this little room attached to the house that he lived in. I looked at him and told him to spill it. I wanted to know what the hell was going on with Peter and this phone room. Alex explained to me that Peter liked the idea of being an owner without actually doing anything an owner is responsible to do. He explained that he comes in for an hour or so and then takes off to work on his cars that his mother has no idea about anything to do with telemarketing and that Peter never hired a sales manager to run the place. On top of that, no one was investing money into the most important part of the business, which was the purchasing of quality leads to call. Peter had the entire room cold calling phone numbers straight out of the phone book.

You see, most phone rooms had every phone book published from the entire country coast to coast. This is done for more of a backup if you are between a lead purchase. However, Peter was using the phone books as his only source of leads and there is no way you can run a phone room like that. I sat there just listening to one inept Peter story after the other come out of Alex’s mouth. He sat there rolling up joints and we smoked out for an hour sitting in his part of the house going over everything.

Once I got all the information I needed, I headed towards my car. Alex walked me out and before I got behind the wheel, he asked me what I was going to do. I just shook my head, shrugged my shoulders and said nothing. As I pulled out of his driveway, I realized I wanted to make one more inquiry. I wanted to talk to the gypsy, Sherry, but I wasn’t sure if she still lived at the last apartment place I knew her to be at.

I drove across town and went to the last known location of Sherry in my head and sure enough I saw her car outside. She was still living here and I pondered whether or not this was a personal record of hers staying in one place for more than a few months. I knocked on the door and there she was standing there in that long dress she always wore, that was down to her ankles. Her ugly face was smiling back at me like it always did. Sherry had strange looking teeth that looked like they were involved in some industrial accident gone wrong.

She let me in and we sat on her couch and talked about Peter and the phone room. Everything she told me was just what Alex was saying and I now understood that the whole scenario was a mess. I thanked her and went to leave and she held me down on the couch pulling at my pants to perform oral on me. Sherry was ugly as the day is long, but I would always let her do that. She lived as a lesbian, but it was only her partner that was hardcore. Sherry needed a man from time to time. She once even had a husband and a couple of kids that no doubt went back to the mother country as soon as she declared her affinity for cunnilingus instead of being a mother or a wife. Who was I to judge? My only worry was that she did not harm me with those teeth or that someone I knew might find out that I messed around with this broad. I dropped my pants to my ankles sitting on her couch. I closed my eyes and leaned my head back. Lo and behold, with my eyes closed, it was now Lynda Carter in her Wonder Woman outfit performing fellatio on me. My imagination knew no bounds.

After I finished and she did her duty like all good gypsies do, I headed out to go home. Just like Alex, she walked me out to my car and asked what I was going to do in the morning. I gave the same gestures to her as I gave Alex. I shrugged my shoulders and head and drove away. I truly had no answer for that question yet.

The next morning, while in the shower, I decided that I was going to turn down this offer to work with Pete. There was too much uncertainty going on and I was going to go in and thank the family, but decline the offer.

I drove to the office that morning and went in. As soon as I walked in the door I was greeted by Peter’s mom standing there holding cash. I held the cash in my hand; it was thirty-five hundred dollars. She looked at me and said, “People tell me you know what you are doing and my son needs help. Here is an advance against your first profits.” She said it would be about a thirty-day turnaround to get my first dollars in my pocket and this cash was in good faith to hold me over. People were coming in to work for the morning and I felt someone grab my ass in the line of people filing in to work for the day. I looked up and saw Sherry was in the line passing by. Somewhere between my ass being grabbed and being handed this money, I completely changed my mind and decided to accept the job. Funny how it was the ladies around Peter that closed the deal with me and not Pete himself.

I looked at his mother, thanked her, and asked her where the coffee machine was. It was time to right this ship! It was time to turn this phone room around. This was a personal challenge within me to see if I could do this. Come hell or high water I was going to make this place a phone room to be reckoned with.

Chapter 11

Months had passed by now and I did everything I put my mind to. I got this phone room turned around and was making some serious money. My pure numbers were enough to keep Pete’s mother off my back and somewhat in my pocket. Peter had more money now to spend on his silly cars and I was a young man now making six thousand dollars a week. My life was flying high and the world in front of me seemed limitless and vast. Everything I touched turned into gold and I was known to be a serious earner in the industry whose talents were sought after.

It is hard to understate how many doors open up to a person when you are making serious money. Just by fortuitousness, one rubs shoulders with other people with money in other industries. One of the top money making industries in South Florida was selling drugs. There was major money in moving cocaine at the time. South Florida in the 80’s was becoming a hub point from South America that turned all of the tri-county area into a Florida Snow Blizzard. It was everywhere and so was the money, crime and power associated with it.

Coming of age in the late 80’s in South Florida shaped what kind of a person I was to be. Things were just plain different for us. There have been many books, movies and documentaries about the subject. There are now t-shirts that you can buy that say “I Survived South Florida in the 80’s” and this truly became a mantra many years later.

Those of us who survived it lost many friends back then to drug addiction, prison or death. If you grew up when and where I did, chances are you landed up in one of those categories. My head spins to this day just thinking about all of it. I mean I grew up different from most people my age. My heroes were not sports figures, politicians or priests. I did not collect baseball cards and comic books. I looked up to the greatest criminals of my time. My heroes were serious crooks who were not conformists, but rebels with a cause.

I wanted to be Pablo Escobar, Carlos Lehder or John Gotti. I looked up to and respected Michael Milken, Ivan Boesky and The Savings and Loans people. My entire moral structure was bent and twisted. I’d rather be the junk bond king or the king of cocaine than be some schmuck who punched a time clock for some corporation. I looked up to these men. They were the crowd I wanted to be like.

During the time of my rise in crime, I was constantly being offered to get into selling cocaine. I was endlessly being asked to finance all sorts of levels of some drug operation. For me I was a telemarketing guy. I was a white-collar criminal and I had no desire to get into any other thing the mob was into or anything the cartels were into. Already I knew I never wanted to stand in front of a Florida judge facing serious drug charges. People were being sent away with these huge sentences when they were caught and there was no way to talk yourself out of a situation where the cops find you with a twin-engine plane full of cocaine. If you were caught, you were going away and I mean for a long time.

My partner Peter’s friend was a Cuban dissident that was into moving powder around and I could tell Pete was tempted by this world. There were parts of Peter’s personality he did not share with the women in his life. One day he took me on a yacht to meet a guy who wanted to go into business with us. The guy was some Colombian dude who had his own lane for bringing in some powder just one boat at a time. I counseled Peter on staying away from this business. He just wanted me to meet him and then after I heard him out, we could decide.

One night Peter got in my car and told me to drive to this boat dock in Ft Lauderdale. When we got there, it was evening time and the sun was just going down. The different colors of the sky reflected on all the boats sitting in this marina. It was hot and the smell of the ocean was omnipresent in the air. We parked my car and started to walk down this wooden dock towards the yacht owned by the Colombian.

The guy was on the deck of his boat and he welcomed us aboard. We went inside and sat down and he made us some drinks. Peter did all the talking and I just sat there listening to them. I had no intention of agreeing to anything at all and was just there to placate Peter until I could talk some sense into him.

This person started opening all his cabinets on the boat and they were all filled with kilos of cocaine. I never saw so much cocaine up close in my life. It was breathtaking and I was blown away that the guy wasn’t making any attempt to hide any of it. All you had to do was open his wooden cabinets and behold, cocaine was everywhere. It was there that night that I learned that cocaine was pink, not white. I had no idea. Before the coke is sold, they cut it and it is the cut that makes the powder white. Somewhere in the process of the production of cocaine, there is a stage where it is pink. This blew me away because I never knew this.

The South Florida education I was getting was priceless if I wanted to be a drug dealer and I did not. No amount of potential money was ever going to get me to go down this road. I enjoyed a little coke to party like the next guy, but I was mostly a pothead and a drinker. Still, it did not mean I wanted to sell pot or booze for a living. I had to just walk through this with Pete and hope I could get his head right later.

The Colombian on the boat pulled out a kilo of cocaine right in front of us and cut it open with a knife. The pink rock-like substance just poured out of the wrap. He told us to try it but to do very little because it was not stepped on yet. Peter being a complete maniac ignored the warning and chopped up two regular size lines. He rolled up a hundred dollar bill and snorted it up both nostrils. I followed him doing the same thing.

Now the next words I am about to convey to you, the reader, are so understated, because there are no words in my lexicon that can properly describe this. “I got high!” I got real freaking high! I did this line and the feeling that overcame me was like no other feeling I had ever had before or to this day with any drug. I was so fucking high. I just do not know how to make you as the reader apperceive the extent of my “highdom.” It was out of this world. I was dancing on the head of a pin and at the same time feeling so happy to be alive and simultaneously looking death in the face. I was so high that I needed to get off the boat. I looked at Peter and said I am flying man, I have to take a walk. Peter stayed behind to talk further with this guy and I made my way back to my car.

I leaned up against my Audi and just stared into the sky looking at the stars. All the lights were reflecting off the boats and you could see the skyline of the high-rises of Fort Lauderdale. I leaned up against the car and was just rushing my balls off. I could barely even stand, so I went into the car and sat down behind the wheel. The rush just kept coming. My heart was racing faster and faster. I thought my heart might pop right there. Peter finally came back and I took off driving down the road.

Suddenly in the middle of the road and not at a stop light or anything I just stopped the car. I looked at Pete and said you drive. I got out of the car and we switched seats. If a cop had seen this scene, we would have been pulled over for sure. Peter took over the driving responsibilities and drove us back to my place. I told him to take my car and pick me up later that weekend so we could talk about all this. I went into my apartment, lay on my bed, and stared at the ceiling for what seemed like two days without moving. I had never been so freaking high as I was back then. I will never ever forget that experience. It was a mixture of utopia and abject fear of dying all at the same time. All I can say is if you are ever offered cocaine that is pink, be very careful!

That weekend Peter came back with my car and we drove to an ice cream parlor. In South Florida, Carvel Ice Cream was king. They ran these goofy commercials selling an ice cream cake shaped like a whale. It was called Fudgie the Whale and every stoner who smoked weed in South Florida had an intimate relationship with this whale. To hell with Melville’s Moby Dick, we had Carvel’s Fudgie the Whale!

On the car ride to Carvel I spent the whole trip explaining to Peter why on Earth we did not need to get into selling drugs and I circled his thinking back to white-collar crime. I explained the difference in the prison sentence and highlighted the fact that no one gets a life sentence for phone sales. To make my point while we were at the ice cream shop I was telling Peter that there was way more for us to do on the phones besides lock picks. I explained that we could sell anything over the phone and could make plenty of money. To illustrate my point, on the counter at the ice cream parlor was a box with discount coupons for a cruise to The Bahamas. I told Peter that I would prove this to him. I grabbed the whole booklet of coupons without the kid behind the counter seeing it and I put it in my pocket.

We paid for a couple of treats and walked out the door. I told Pete I wanted to show him something. I drove us back to our phone room that was closed for the weekend and we went inside. I sat down, finished my Carvel, and then picked up a random phone book from Maryland. I opened the white page section where people’s residential phone numbers were and started dialing the numbers.

I congratulated everyone who answered for winning a free cruise for two to the Bahamas. I told them all they would have to do is make their way down to Florida and get on the boat. I also told them that the cruise was totally free and all they had to do was pay a reservation fee of one hundred dollars to hold the cruise and that when they showed up to claim the trip they would be refunded the one hundred dollars. I explained to them that UPS was going to knock on their door to give them the paperwork and collect the money. I let the winner know that he could only pay in cash or a money order to reserve the trip; we did not take personal checks.

Peter just sat there completely stunned as one after the other fell for it. He was so excited that he got on the phone and started calling with me. We spent the afternoon in the office calling people in Maryland giving away this trip. Now understand when UPS got there, all that was in the package was this coupon for a Bahamas Cruise, nothing more. It was not a free trip. It was just a coupon that they just paid one hundred dollars for. We dialed all day and by the evening we had raised six thousand dollars. I explained to Peter that we just raised in one afternoon what I made all week selling picks. I told him we could do this at night after everyone leaves and that his mother did not have to be involved. I told him we would create corporations in our name and we would control the books and his mother would have nothing to do with it.

All of this worked. Peter had no more thoughts about becoming drug dealers and was all excited about having his own money to work on his cars. He was like a kid in a candy store. I never knew him to be happier than those days. All I cared about was just getting his mind off drug dealing.

Right away, that Monday, I started to incorporate our first companies and I set everything up to be able to start shipping these coupons out through UPS. I knew from jump street we needed the money to go to a different location. I did not want people knocking at the door and Pete’s mom being asked about vacations to the islands and coupons and such. Luckily, I knew just where to go.

Back then in the 1980’s in South Florida we had some dotheads that opened up mailbox and check cashing places. They would ship things from their storefront and receive shipments as well. It was also a check-cashing store and these dudes would cash any check for the public with no ID at all! They would cash any company check we would give them too. They did laminated picture IDs and all sorts of stuff. These crazy fucks would not care what we were doing as a business as long as we gave them some money for mailbox rentals and they got a percentage of the checks that they called a check-cashing fee. They would allow us to use an address instead of saying it was a box number like a P.O. Box at the post office. They would let us call it a “suite” and it looked like it was a real address. We would give the address of the check-cashing store and just put Suite such and such on it and the whole thing looked like it was a physical address of a company we made up. It was a beautiful business.

The whole thing was a giant laundromat for cashing checks and presenting to the public an address for fake companies. If you were some schmuck in Washington State and you would be asked to mail a check to 666 South 44th Ln. Suite 5, Fort Lauderdale, FL, it all looked like it was on the up and up. We got an address and a place to cash the checks all in one greedy little spot brought to you by our loving neighborhood dotheads. This was before there was a chain called Mail Boxes Etc., which then was bought out and became The UPS Store today. This was a hell of a racket and later on in life, it is this kind of business that brought down John Gotti Jr. in his heyday, after he took over for his pop doing life in a supermax prison in Illinois.

I put this whole thing together and Peter was pleased. We did this for a long time and banked more money than you could ever believe. After time, Carvel Ice Cream and the company that was putting out these coupons were going nuts trying to figure out why the fuck all of these people were demanding a free cruise to The Bahamas. The heat that came down over this was prodigious. I just sat back at my desk with a smile on my face, watching the whole thing go down. Here I was rocking the world of the biggest ice cream parlor chain and they had no freaking idea what was hitting them. I cannot tell you how many deep belly laughs I got out of this whole thing.

I ran it for long enough and I knew when the heat was getting hot and I would bounce and use another coupon for another trip. Maybe I had free plane tickets to Hawaii or something and rattled the airlines. I was unstoppable and there simply was no federal effort to even catch a guy like me. I was a ghost. They never even knew I existed. It really was a different time and place. It really was the last generation of freedom.

Chapter 12

South Florida during The Ronald Reagan years in the 1980’s was a great time for business people. Business owners big and small were doing well, were flush with cash and flush with opportunity. The country was feeling good as a whole after the downward spiral of the Jimmy Carter years.

Over time, we have heard bad things said about the Reagan years. Whether the criticism was from the gay community or others who did not avail themselves to the wonders of supply-side economics, in life, there will always be winners and losers. Luckily, the winners write history and I am here to say the 1980’s were a fantastic decade to be alive in America and in particular South Florida.

Peter and I were trucking along with our business ventures and life was starting to become a bit more complicated in several ways for me. One of the problems I was now facing was that Peter’s soon-to-be wife was now blatantly trying to get me to have sex with her. She would complain to me that Peter would never have time for her, but always had time for his cars. She was adeptly and outwardly making no bones about it; she wanted me. Now in any other situation I would have jumped on the opportunity. Stella was extremely hot and I was very attracted to her.

However, there was no way in hell I was going to screw up the money I was making with Peter over any piece of ass no matter how badly I wanted it. On top of that, I did live by a buddy’s code and would never do a thing like that to a friend of mine. My business interests were way too valuable to me to even consider this offer. Now I would have to dance between the raindrops, avoid her as much as possible, and really try not to get in a situation where I was alone with her anywhere.

In addition, at the same time, we were starting to get more and more heat from people who were very pissed off about their misunderstanding of the difference between lock picks and what they thought were keys. All across the country different authority figures and agencies were making more and more of an effort to get to the bottom of the phantom master keys.

We had this state’s attorney down in Dade County named Janet Reno that kept winning elections over and over again to hold on to that office. She was making all sorts of waves with telemarketing companies and child abuse cases. Janet’s parents were investigative reporters and they put that nosey gene in their daughter who never knew how to mind her own business.

In South Florida, Janet had a reputation of torturing people into false confessions by keeping them in suicide cells, blasting them with cold showers and showing up in the middle of the night to get these coerced confessions. The woman was making many enemies down there. In addition, there were all sorts of agencies that were starting to police white-collar crime. A tri-county economic crime unit was created to go after guys like us in Palm Beach, Broward and Dade counties. In the tri-county unit was a cop named Sergeant Madge who was a very capable cop who lived to hunt guys like us down. Little by little, the heat around us was starting to get hotter.

I had a sit-down with Peter and started to explain to him the realities that were now surrounding our business. Peter seemed disinterested and told me he knew I would take care of any problems. After that sit-down, I started for the very first time, to think about a life in business away from Peter. It seemed to me I was doing all the work and Peter was bringing less and less to the table.

During this period, I got wind that there might be some action taken against our business about the lock picks in the local courts. I had my attorney, Gary, who was a Jewish lawyer with an office in an upscale high-rise on the Intracoastal Waterway, look into this rumor. In South Florida, there were no better people to have in your pocket than a Jewish lawyer and a Jewish accountant.

My lawyer, Gary, got back with me and said that the rumor was in fact true and that there were the beginnings of an effort to look into what we were doing. He wanted to have a sit-down with a judge he was friendly with in chambers and preempt any action that could come our way. Gary called me into his office and told me that he was going to tell the judge that our product was in fact a key. I went through the roof! I told Gary that was the problem; that we were not saying they were keys and that we were only claiming that they work on the same premise as a key. Gary just looked at me and told me to trust him. He said they are fucking keys. Now, knowing all the tens of thousands of dollars this lawyer prick had of mine on retainer, I just had to take a leap of faith that he knew what the hell he was doing. I knew how to run a phone room, so I guess this prick knew how to be a lawyer; at least that is what I convinced myself of.

The day came for Gary to make his argument about keys and lock picks. He told the judge that he wanted all of this talk about grand juries and about keys and lock picks to come to an end. He said that his client was selling keys. Gary picked up The Webster’s Dictionary and read the definition of a key. It said “Any device that unlocks a lock” was a key. Then Gary opened his briefcase and pulled out a flat card that was used to open a hotel room door and he threw it on the table and said this is a key. Next, he pulled out some weird looking round gadget that unlocked soda machines and said this is a key. Lastly, he threw our lock pick set on the table and said this is a key. I was so blown away and speechless at the time. I just could not believe how smart this lawyer was and I was instantly thinking in my head, how on Earth could I have ever doubted this Jew. Before I could even clear my head, the judge dismissed any notion that there was anything criminal about what we were doing and we were off on our way.

Driving away from this victory, I couldn’t help but notice how the law is very similar to our world. It seemed to me everything was just a play on words. All of life was a semantical dance of language on the world’s stage. Everything was about how one worded something. You can master the English language in such a way that it can be used as a weapon. You can speak English at such a high level that no one understands what you are saying. I could thunder down my grandiloquent omniscience and make it arduous for people to apperceive the axiomatic reality of my lexicon. I could tango between words and meanings and carve out a living. Watching my lawyer work, I knew that there was not much difference between our worlds. Yet his world was legal and mine was not. What I did understand was I had a skill just as sharp as his and I was going to use it like a sword to cut out a living for my Irish ass.

I knew it was time to sit Peter down and tell him that this key thing was too hot and that we were going to need to shut it down and move onto something different. I knew that this semantically arrived victory would be short-lived and another judge might have a completely different opinion on our so-called keys. Making Peter understand this, however, was going to be a lot harder than convincing Gary’s judge of our validity.

I asked Peter to meet me at Mayday’s Bar and Restaurant which was located in Miramar in a little private airport called North Perry’s Airport. This very cool bar was located on the grounds of the airport and in a building shaped like a traffic control tower. You could sit in the booths, put headsets on, and listen live to the actual control tower of the airport. I grew up outside this airport and it was famous for having multiple twin-engine Cessnas flown by private pilots, fall out of the sky and into people’s homes in Miramar.

Many times growing up, the neighborhood would see that dark billowing smoke and all rush to whoever’s house was on fire with a plane sticking out of it. This happened so much that it became commonplace to gather at these scenes like it was a local bonfire. One pilot even took out our bicycle shop called The Bike Rack and seriously pissed off every kid in town.

I wanted to meet Peter at this place because I needed to get a buzz on and I wanted a place that was loud so as not to hear our conversation. I knew Peter was not going to be happy and that it was going to take some jawboning to make him face the truth of our situation. Pete showed up, sat at the table I chose and said that he loved this place, put the headset on, and started listening to the control tower talk to the pilots. He ordered a drink and some finger foods and asked me how things went with the lawyer. He removed the headset as I took considerable time explaining to him the day’s events and launched into my reasons why we needed to move on from selling lock picks.

After a long diatribe from me, Peter finished his food and listened to every word. He ordered another drink and looked at me with this look that I only saw once before and that was when he explained to me the extent of his mother’s involvement with the business and how nothing was in his name. That same face was now staring back at me with its halo of shame and glowing aura of discontent. Peter explained to me that it would not be that easy to just walk away.

He said that he had an arrangement with a certain group of Italians in New Jersey that we bought the lock picks from; that this group was very powerful and made a lot of money off us. He explained that in no uncertain terms would this crowd be happy with us ending this arrangement or cutting into the money they were making from it. He said it wasn’t like we worked for them, but it was like we worked for them. He said that we would actually need permission to end this arrangement and that there was no way he was going to approach these guys with this news. He told me things could go terribly for our personal health and that these guys liked the money stream they have grown accustomed to.

I sat there completely shocked. I had no idea the guys I was dealing with over the phone were these kinds of guys. I spoke to them a lot over the phone each week about product, but I had no idea that we were in this spider web. Peter explained he would rather roll the dice with the law than aggravate this group. I could not believe my ears.

We finished up at the bar and drove around to another end of the airport where there were these bleachers and benches we could sit at and watch people play paddleball and tennis under the bright lights. I needed fresh air and sitting there staring up at the night sky, I decided that neither one of these scenarios Peter had handed me was to my liking. I asked Peter whether or not he could set up a meeting with this group so I could explain to them the heat that was coming our way and make an argument on behalf of getting out of these lock picks. Peter told me yes he would set it up and warned me not to anger them too much in this meeting. Peter knew there was heat closing in on us. He knew I was running things well and he liked his life, but he also knew that in his gut, I had a point. Whatever fucking arrangement Peter’s family had with these guineas up in Jersey had to come to an end because I was not going down for any of it. I just needed to figure out a way to keep these grease balls happy and at the same time make this change.

Chapter 13

Thirty-five thousand feet in the air, I am still formulating my plan in my head about how I am going to handle this group in New Jersey. The only way out that I can see is that I need to replace this revenue stream they are hooked on with another one. That means whatever I sell next, these guys are going to have to get a small piece of it. How I landed giving away my hard-earned sweat and tears to some unknown to me, nefarious group of gangsters in Jersey is a subject that angered me beyond words. Peter was always pulling rabbits out of his ass and they always stank. While on the plane headed towards Newark Airport, I had my pitch in my head and I was going over and over again what I was going to say. Meanwhile, I was also always hearing Peter’s warning about not angering these guys in person.

As we approached the runway, I was wondering how on Earth I was going to find some unknown Italian who was supposed to pick me up at the airport. Finally, we landed and I was off the plane. As soon as I walked out into the terminal I saw this guy holding a sign that said “Walker” and I walked up to him. I said, “I am Walker” and he shook my hand and gestured me to follow him.

All I had on me was my briefcase with a change of clothes in it, so we walked straight to his car. We walked up to this huge Cadillac Fleetwood and I went to get in the passenger side of the car when he gestured for me to sit in the back. We drove away and I asked him where we were going. All Peter told me was they would pick me up and take me to The Jersey Shore somewhere around Seaside Heights and that I was to talk to a guy named Mario. The guy driving the car just started speaking Italian and I had no idea what he was saying. I told him that I was a Mick and did not speak his language. He couldn’t understand a word I was saying or at least he acted like he couldn’t. The trip to the shore was long and quiet. Just when I thought we would never get there, we pulled up to a warehouse in an industrial section and got out of the car. I remember feeling very nervous not knowing how this was going to go.

I walked inside this warehouse and the man brought me into a big open room where a bunch of guys were sitting around eating and playing cards. The smell of garlic permeated the air. I introduced myself and asked to speak to Mario. This big fat guy walked up to me and said, “You are the one having problems with the keys.” He looked at me, said there are no more problems with the keys, and tossed me a set of keys that I caught in the air. I looked down in my hand and there were the lock picks that we were selling, but now they were shaped like keys and all on a key ring.

I must have looked completely shocked because they all started to laugh and the guy patted me on the back and pointed to the guy that picked me up and said he will now take you back to the airport. He told me these keys would cost us fifteen dollars a set now. I was speechless and did not say a word. This was fucking brilliant! I could not believe they actually made these damn picks look like keys on a key ring. I thought to myself, “Fuck it; I got keys.” I left to go back to Florida.

When I got back to Florida, I walked into the phone room, asked everyone to hang up the phone and give me their attention. I held up the new lock pick set shaped like keys and I said loud and proud, “We no longer sell The Master Lockout Set; now we are selling The Master Key Set!”

Some sales guy asked aloud, “We can say they are keys now?”

I looked at the whole room and smiled. I said, “Not only are they the keys, now they are The Master Keys that will open the door, trunk, gas cap and even start the car of any car foreign and domestic up to today with the only exception of the Mercedes Benz with the laser lock key.”

The phone room exploded in excitement! I will never forget the frantic sound of everyone dialing the line and trying to get someone on the phone. For so long they wanted to say they were keys and now they could. The entire sales force could see dollar signs in each other’s eyes. I told the sales people to sell this set for three hundred dollars and they were off and running. Peter just looked at me with the biggest of smiles and said, “Are you hungry? Let’s go grab a bite to eat.” He grabbed the keys to his muscle car and we walked out the door. Even his dang mother was smiling.

Chapter 14

As time went by, South Florida really seemed to expand for me in so many ways. The money I was making created opportunities and opened more doors than I could have ever imagined. The change in sales tactics and the ability to call the lock picks “keys” really increased our revenue stream beyond anything I could have ever believed. We built this thing up to thirty and forty thousand dollars a week in revenue. It was clear, the vast majority of business owners in the automotive industry wanted the Master Keys to open and start all the cars. I never understood why on Earth the people whose life it is to work on cars, could ever be convinced that there were ten keys that could open up and start all the cars of the world. How in God’s name could these professionals believe such a thing?

However, that is exactly what they did and they did it in record-breaking numbers. By calling them keys, word got out that we were crushing our old company C.C. Delco. They were really being hurt by our deceptive sales tactics because everyone they called now wanted the keys, and C.C. Delco would never cross that line into blatant, in your face fraud. That company was supposed to be one of their fronts and needed to be as clean as possible as to hide all the alleged gambling and bookmaking or the other real gangster stuff that was going on there.

It might have been around this time that I heard through the grapevine that my mentor, Webster, had passed away from cancer. I could not believe Webster was dead and the thought of him watching me destroy his company in his last days did not go unnoticed to my conscience. It did make me understand why he did not take me out by whacking me, when he was dealing with bigger problems like his own impending death. Maybe he just secretly loved me and was proud how I made it. I will never know. As bad as all that made me feel, in the end, the money I was making was more powerful for me.

I was now a young big shot making tons of money in South Florida. I was too green at the time to even consider saving any of it; I just lived such an insanely expensive lifestyle. I did whatever I wanted to do and bought whatever I wanted to buy.

Through my new life, I stumbled across an esoteric subculture of people with money, living a swinger’s lifestyle and an all-goes sexual world that I never knew existed. I was introduced to their clubs and secret gathering places where nonstop full-blown orgies happened on a weekly basis. No more would I ever go to a strip joint and be ripped off. No more would I ever pay for a prostitute. Now, I had all the sex I needed from groups of people who treated sex more like a sport or hobby, rather than a business or a relationship type thing. I soon learned every single corner of South Florida where I could meet people and have anonymous sex. I soon learned any distinction about sexuality was also a fraud perpetrated by social pressures and the church. I was slowly letting go of any of the morals that were ever taught to me. I was full-heartedly embracing a whole new set of rules and a new way to live my life. In the rearview mirror was the only resemblance of the old me. I was being reborn and it was a brave new world. It was a very exciting time.

While everything seemed to be hitting on all cylinders, darkness was heading my way unbeknownst to me. Without me realizing, Peter’s mother was slowly not refunding people for the master keys to take the heat off us and things were going on at the bank, which I was unaware of. I had no idea the bank got hip to what we were doing and the fact that his mother was not writing checks or funding our revolving refund account was destroying us. This ineptitude brought attention to the higher-ups at the bank and we were kicked out. I had no idea we were changing banks at the time or that any of this was going on. Greed took over Peter and his family and classically things started to go bad.

The final straw on the camel’s back for me was the fact that I never had sex with Peter’s girlfriend and she got wind of my new escapades sexually and got real mad. In her mind, she was so insulted to hear I was having orgies on the weekends and screwing God knows who, but I would never touch her. On top of all that, I was going with a girl that was working for us and a friend of the family. Marlene was her name. This was a girl who just got out of a bad relationship and just received a quarter million dollars in cash due to a family death. Stella hated that I was going with Marlene and that I liked her. She convinced Marlene and Peter’s family I was trying to steal Marlene’s inheritance. The entire situation became a cluster fuck of problems all over pussy. I liked Marlene a lot, but none of that mattered, Stella was going to play this whole thing out. Stella did this to me, because I would not sleep with her and nothing will change that fact. This was a terrible situation to be in. This one thing changed the course of my life forever.

One morning I came to work like any other morning. I got out of my jeep that I was now driving and walked into the office with my briefcase. Standing there to meet me was Peter’s mom, Peter’s fiancée Stella, and Marlene who worked for me and dated me. They stopped me right there and Peter’s mom announced to me that they all knew that I was trying to get Peter’s soon-to-be wife in bed and that Peter was on the way to take care of me. I stood there completely shocked and looked Stella in the eyes and saw she was acting out some plot in front of everyone.

The women were now screaming at me at the top of their lungs and one screamed here he is! I looked at the window and saw a car barreling down in the parking lot at full speed. I stepped out of the door of the office and started to walk towards my jeep. I saw that in the car were two mean-looking Cuban dudes who I had never seen before. I did not see Peter in the car. I instantly realized that I was not going to make it to my jeep in time and started to run across the parking lot. Their car came to a screaming halt and they chased me on foot. We were no longer on Taft Street where the office was when I started to hear what sounded like gunshots!

I couldn’t believe what was happening. In broad fucking daylight, they were chasing me and I didn’t even know who they were. I ran between the buildings and popped out on the adjacent road where there was the convenience store called 7/11 and there was this little old lady just getting into her car. I grabbed the keys out of her hand and threw her to the ground. I took off out of the 7/11 parking lot and in the rearview mirror; the Cubans came around the building and watched me drive away.

I made a left turn on Taft Street and gunned it. I floored the gas pedal and headed toward The Hollywood Fashion Mall. I needed to ditch this car I just took and get away from all of this. I left the car in the huge parking lot of the mall and went in. I started to walk around the mall and blend into the crowd. I needed time to clear my head. As time went by, I realized that those Cubans could be the guys Pete’s friend was rumored to use for hits because there is no record or fingerprints on file in this country of these kinds of guys. I started to understand the real gravity of my dilemma and knew there was no going back to my apartment or anywhere they knew about. I needed to get out of town and fast. The fucking cunt Stella really did me in. I should have just fucked the bitch!

I got to a payphone in the mall. Yes, there was a time and place where we had public phones that took coins so we could call one another. Somehow, through it all, I never let go of my briefcase. I opened it up and realized immediately that I left my wallet in my jeep and that all I had was some coins in the pocket of my briefcase. I needed to call someone outside of our world to get a ride out of here. I called my little brother who was barely a teenager at the time and told him to take a cab and come and get me at the mall that people were trying to kill me. He asked me how. I told him to go into our mother’s bedroom and bust open the coin collector thing on the wall that held quarters, take all the money, call a cab, and meet me at the back entrance of the mall. Thank God, the kid did exactly what I asked him to do. My mother had been collecting quarters in this thing our whole damn lives and there were hundreds of dollars in it.

My brother Keith showed up and I got into the cab. I had the cab driver take us to the American Express building that my mom worked at in Plantation. I called upstairs and had her come down to talk to me. I explained to my mom that I was in trouble, that real bad people were trying to kill me, and that I needed to leave town right this moment and asked for some money. I told her I was going to take the next Amtrak out of town going north. My mother gave me the money, kissed me goodbye with tears running down her face and Keith and I drove to the train station. I hugged the kid goodbye, bought a ticket to Ocala, Florida where my father lived and got on the train that left within a reasonable period of time. As the train took off, I was staring out the window feeling so surreal. All I had on me was the clothes on my back, a beeper and my briefcase.

As the train picked up speed, my heart rate started to relax and my mind began to replay the day’s events. I had no idea what I was going to do; I only knew I just needed to get out of town and fast. The more north the train went, the safer I felt. Little did I know, that was the last time I was going to see South Florida for many years. Of all the things I was leaving behind, the main heartbreak for me was I was leaving behind a cardboard box full of all of my writings. My whole life I wrote short stories and poems and it was all in that box back in my apartment. There was no way I was going back to that apartment. They would have been there waiting for sure. My entire lifetime of creative writing was lost forever. Staring out the window of the train, I realized life was about to change for me once again.

Chapter 15

Once I arrived in Ocala, Florida, I needed to contact my father who had no idea I was coming or any of the trouble I was in. During most of my life and after my parents’ divorce, my relationship with my father was strained, to say the least.

However, almost every year we would take off for the mountains and go backpacking in the Appalachian Trail. When my father was eighteen years of age or so and in some drug program, his doctor told him to take up a healthy hobby to keep his mind off heroin. He chose backpacking and climbing mountains. The first time he took me up with him I was only five years old and he brought me up to The Catskill Mountains in New York. Later on in life, we mostly climbed the Appalachian Trail from Springer Mountain in Georgia up to Mount Katahdin in Maine, just segments at a time. To do the whole trail in one trip is called Thru-Hiking and it takes six months to do. We never had the money to take off six months from work and go hiking. We would go up in the mountains for seven to ten days at a time and carry all of our food, water and equipment on our backs. My father had an impressive command of topographical maps and knew how to follow them and find the water sources in the mountain ranges. It was a skill that kept the two of us alive and enabled us to be up there for days on end.

When a man describes his own father one must remember the bent and bias the child has in explaining his parent. I try to mostly give you, the reader, a view of him like anyone else would give because he really was never much of a father and I knew him like everyone else did. The man was a drug addict. Plain and simple, the man was a junkie. He first “got his wings” as he called it at the age of fourteen when he intravenously shot heroin. That one act at the age of fourteen dictated his whole existence for the rest of his life. After that day and up to this day, his only function or purpose has been to get to his next high. He is either high, planning something to get high or is coming down off the drugs. My father, sadly, only has those three states of existence; there simply is no other state of consciousness for him. I could go on and on about how book smart he is or how much potential he had, but like Robert De Niro says in the movie A Bronx Tale, “The saddest thing in life is wasted talent” and my pop was the poster boy for that concept.

Arriving in Ocala unexpected was something I had done before just to hang out or go to the bar with him. His mother, my grandmother (the evil one) lived there and I would visit her as well. However, this time was different. I was not showing up of my own accord in my car but rather arriving on a train with the sound of bullets flying in the path behind me. I did not have a plan other than to just hang out in this town that was carved out of a forest and lay low to gather myself and plan my next move.

When my father picked me up from the train station, he took me to a bar we would go to in Ocala called Hemmingway’s. There at the bar, I brought him up to speed on my situation and asked to stay with him for a little while. He told me that would be fine and went off on stories of his own, where he was in trouble or had guns to his head in the world of buying drugs. He regaled some story he told me before waking up in Harlem naked after barely surviving an overdose and knocking on some black lady’s door for help. He had many scrapes as a drug addict with criminals and the law and could keep a person up all night reliving those escapades. Somehow, my situation seemed to bond us as fuck-ups at the time.

My father worked as an x-ray technician in hospitals. He was married, at the time, to the head nurse in the hospital in Ocala. Through his career working in hospitals and marrying a nurse, he replaced his heroin addiction with an addiction to painkillers. He rubbed shoulders with people from the medical community only so he could score “schedule two narcotics” and get high on the latest pharmaceutical opiates that were raging at any given period in medicine. His education and schooling and even his marriage at the time was all planned around getting his next high. His schooling at The University of Florida and him marrying a freaking nurse was all just part of his drug addiction. It was all part of his grand sick plan.

Head nurses at that time had what was called “The Narcotics Key” and had access to all the best drugs in the hospital. He planned on bagging one of these head nurses and getting high. Well he got his head nurse, but she very much earned that title. According to my father, he married the biggest whore in all of Ocala. This woman fucked everything that moved. Almost all the male staff, black and white, and many of the patients in the hospital had been in her halls of shame. When my father first got married to her, she confessed to him while in their bed, that she would work the midnight shift just so she could go into the patient’s room, get into the bathroom, and take off her panties. Then she would mount the poor slob lying in the hospital bed and ride him to completion. My father told her now that she was married she needed to stop all that. I mean after all, the only thing he cared about was getting those drugs from her, damn if he was going to let some whorishness get in the way of this potential gold mine of perennial drugs. His wife never changed any of her behavior and he never did either. Life went on for those two like that for a while.

His wife came from a family with money. They were locals in that town for generations and owned many businesses and many ranches throughout the forest. His wife, of all things, actually owned a llama ranch and that is where they lived. That is right; the New York City heroin addict was now living on a llama ranch on a river, right in the middle of the woods. It was the strangest of sights. There was my father walking around stoned all the time with fucking llamas walking around the property. I cannot tell you how nasty these animals were. The ranch also sold potbelly pigs, and they were running all over the place, in and out of the house. His wife would walk around the ranch outside nude and feed the animals while her relatives on the ranches that surrounded her would watch her with binoculars and masturbate to her nakedness among the llamas, or at least that is what my Pop would tell me. The whole thing was beyond strange.

On the property were some huge kennels that held at least fifty dogs of all different breeds. They were mostly Russian Wolfhounds or some other of the ugliest breeds on Earth. The Moonlight Llama Ranch, it was called; but it should have been called Bates Motel or something. It was always strange visiting him there and I usually would avoid the ranch and stay at my grandmother’s when I was in town.

This trip I needed a little more than a night or two so I needed to stay at the ranch. I already knew what too much time with grandma would be like and I had enough evil that week. We arrived at the ranch and he explained to his whore wife that I was going to stay for a few days mentioning nothing of the scenario that brought me there. The slut nurse was now my stepmother and the thought of that highlighted how flawed our blended family theory of Baby Boomers really was. They both explained to me that they were leaving in the morning for a llama convention in Oregon and would be gone two weeks. They were going to drive across the nation pulling a trailer full of llamas to Oregon. My head was spinning at the time just trying to wrap my mind around the concept of a llama convention or the fact that such a travesty even existed. We sat on the wooden porch while they explained to me that I would have access to the whole ranch, their pickup truck and a running tab at the gas station, the convenience store and the butcher that her family owned in town. All they needed from me was to feed the animals for the two weeks while they were frolicking about at their utopian llama convention. It sounded easy enough to me. They showed me where the food was and how to feed the llamas being left behind, the potbellies and all the dogs.

The next morning I stood on the same porch and watched my father swallow fifteen Percocet pain pills and wash them down with a cup of coffee with vodka in it. He hooked up the trailer, his wife jumped in their jeep that was pulling the llamas and they drove off down the dirt driveway towards the dirt road that eventually ended up on a paved road where society lived.

I was now all alone standing in the middle of the woods smack dab in the middle of a llama ranch. I looked around coming to the realization of where my week started and where and how I ended up here. My first thought was, I need to get drunk, and I need to get very drunk.

Later that day I jumped in the transportation provided for me and went into town to get some food, gas and some beer. Since I had an open tab at the family business, it was time for me to avail myself of such generosity. The family’s butcher used steaks and meat from local ranches in Marion County and had some of the best steaks I have ever seen. I loaded up on the essentials and loaded the truck with steaks, eggs, beer and cash. Luckily, I was able to draw cash advances on their account. As soon as I realized that fact about the cash advance, I knew where I was headed next. It was time to go to brown town as they called it there and then.

Ocala, back then and still today, in my opinion, is like walking back in time before the Civil Rights Act. Blacks and whites were segregated in every way. One would have to go over the bridge to the other side of town to purchase all the goodies for sale that brown town naturally sold. The KKK was still strong in those days and it was nothing to see them in full-blown moronic regalia standing in front of the only gay bar in five counties. Florida is a huge state and it really needs to be cut up into many different states. Life does not resemble itself in any way shape or form from region to region. The inland parts of the state bear no resemblance to the evolved humans that populate the coast. Inland has their own form of human decay wrapped up in rebel flags, ignorance and abject hate or rage. For some reason, there are these pockets of angry white people still steaming over some war that happened many years ago. I have no idea how on Earth the generations have passed down this rage about the North and South so successfully, but when you view this in person it is quite real and strange.

Ocala was a hub for these defective human units to procreate and spread their anathematic way of life. I’ll never forget the first time my father took me to a restaurant called Rodger’s Barbeque and the two of us sitting in a booth. As I sat in the booth, all around me, in the booth and all over the walls outside the booth, were actual newspaper ads from the eighteen hundreds selling Negros. That is right. Instead of wallpaper, they plastered the restaurant with newspaper ads from the slavery days. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I first saw it. I thought to myself that this was the 1980’s and there is a restaurant like this? I pondered what kind of full-blown riots South Florida would have over a restaurant like this. Right there in the booth, while you were eating, you would stare at an ad that said “Top Dollar for one thousand Hundred Negros” or some ad offering more money for Redbone Slaves, because apparently the slave traders for their nightly rapes in the slave houses favored the Redbone, or so I was told. I asked my Pop how did they get away with this and he pointed to the disclaimer. I missed it when I walked in, but they had a tiny little plaque that said, “Please take no offense, this is our heritage,” or something to that regard. You would really have to know that it was there to see it or stumble upon it somehow, it was so tiny. The ads on the walls were not tiny. Either way that the disclaimer was all they needed to theme a restaurant like this was insane.

It was in this town where years later the actor Wesley Snipes was on trial for tax evasion and his defense team was screaming that Ocala was a racist town and no one would listen to them. I knew all I had to do was call them and tell them to go have a meal at Rodger’s Barbeque and Wesley Snipes would have gotten that change of venue he so desperately needed. Of all the federal districts in Florida and all the towns in them, the fact that The Feds picked and tried Wesley in Ocala was no coincidence. If only the guy made better movies, I might have picked up the phone to save him, but someone needed to do time for films like “White Men Can’t Jump” or “Demolition Man” and for the hours of my life that were stolen away by those movies. In the end, I must admit, Roger’s Barbeque had the best barbeque I’d ever tasted.

All I wanted to do was to go across town and grab a couple of black hookers and some weed and head back to the ranch for some relaxation time. I wanted some green weed and some black pussy. I needed to relax and slowly plan my work and work my plan for my future.

Back at the ranch, I talked both ladies into taking the rest of the day off from their nine to five so to speak, just kick back with me, and hang out eating steaks and getting drunk. My father had at the time, a cutting-edge stereo system that was one hundred and fifty watts. When I blasted this stereo, you could hear it for miles through the woods. It turned into a great day and night of music, sex and food. In the morning, one of the whores made us breakfast from that amazing local bacon and fried up some eggs. We swallowed breakfast down with Bloody Marys that I made from my old man’s well-stocked bar.

Later that day we decided to go skinny-dipping in the river. The property line ended at the river so we just walked through the woods drunk and naked. On the way to the river, we saw the strangest of things. Right there in the middle of the woods all by itself was a cast iron four-legged tub. I have no idea how it got there, why it was there and I could only ponder what kind of sick redneck shit was going on out here. We made our way to the river when one of the ladies said she could not swim. The other chick said she could and they went off babbling about who could swim and who could not in the black community. Apparently, unbeknownst to me, there is some kind of status among the blacks for those who can swim very similar to back in the day for those who could read or not. I’m always fascinated learning new shit about people and this was something I did not know. We both assured the one that could not swim that we would not let her drown. Both the girls just seemed so grateful they found a John who was nice to them and did not beat them. It seemed like it was the first time that they ever were asked to stay overnight or hang out like normal people. I normally did not like to pay for pussy anymore, but I knew of no swinger clubs anywhere near Ocala and the ladies were now just hanging out off the clock and enjoying a day outdoors and some great steaks and such. What they did not realize was I needed a day like that just as much as they did.

The next day I returned the women to their dead-end neighborhood and went on a mission to get all my identification back that was left behind in my wallet in South Florida. I knew any accounts I set up with Pete were already wiped out, but I did have another account that was my own and it had enough seed money in it to start over.

Most of that week was spent getting my identification in order and visiting my grandmother. At night, I would return to the ranch and I’d cook one of those amazing steaks and enjoy my old man’s endless bar. Pop was due back in the next day or two and I was starting to come to the conclusion that returning to South Florida was not a good idea. I needed time to pass and for things to cool down. I needed to figure out where I was going to go next. I contemplated returning to New York where most of my family still lived. I thought about going out to Vegas, which was considered the capital of telemarketing and ground zero for my ilk. Part of me even thought about moving out to California to live. My biological grandfather on my mother’s side, actor William Bronder, who worked with River Phoenix as the junkyard man in the movie Stand By Me, with James Woods in the movie Best Seller or later on in life opposite Carroll O’Connor in the movie Return to Me with David Duchovny and Minnie Driver would have been quite shocked if I knocked on his door. I dreamed of a life in Hollywood as a writer.

That night I was sitting in a rocking chair on their wooden porch when this guy walked up the dirt driveway and introduced himself as someone my younger brother Keith was friends with. During his childhood, Keith came up to the ranch to live with our father and his jezebel wife for a couple of years as an attempt to try to get to know his father. Once he figured out the true reality of that quest, he returned to South Florida.

The kid, whose name escapes me now, sat on the porch with me for hours that night filling me in on all the shit he and my brother would get into. Somehow, the conversation led to the use of drugs and the kid was telling me about all the times he and my brother would drop acid and trip in the woods. I expressed my envy of that concept and he told me he had some liquid acid that was in these gel caps and he offered me some.

I had a go-around with acid many times in South Florida, and can say to this day, it was and is my favorite drug of all. Of course, I heard stories of people having bad trips and doing insane things, but I never had any problem with it and viewed those folks as weak.

The kid offered me a couple of gel caps and I swallowed them and was looking forward to my next eight hours of laughing and having an unshakable smile on my face. He soon left and I went around the ranch to feed the animals. Now normally it takes about forty minutes to start to feel the full-blown effects of LSD and that was plenty of time to feed the llamas, potbelly pigs and the dogs. My plan was to take care of those responsibilities, return to the porch, sit, and trip while looking at the night’s sky. The moon was huge that night and it lit up the woods all around me.

I do not know what was in those gel caps, but somewhere in the middle of feeding the animals I was off and running. I mean literally running. I found myself stripping off all of my clothes and running full speed through the woods. I felt like Superman and I seemed to be able to run endlessly without losing breath. I do not know what the hell I was doing, but somehow I came across that old cast iron tub in the middle of the woods and I climbed in it. I was tripping my balls off just watching the moonlight bounce off all the trees around me. The sounds of the woods at night with all the wildlife were filling my ears and head with amazing images. I started talking to the invisible animal life of the woods. There I was naked in a tub, in the middle of the forest, tripping on acid and singing aloud to everything under the moon.

All of a sudden, I heard what sounded like a stampede rushing through the woods towards me. The sounds of the feet got louder and louder. I pictured a giant herd of elephants coming at me. I was frozen in the tub drowning in the sound of leaves being displaced in a violent manner. Here they come. Here they come. Louder and louder, suddenly I felt the wind pass my face when a pack of wolves ran by me while I lay naked in the tub. One after the other just ran past me, as if they were on some mission and had somewhere to go. In the distance, I started to hear loud screams. I could not make out who was screaming. I never heard anything like it in my life and I had no idea if it was a human scream or not. The screams got louder and louder and bounced off the trees like the moonlight and it made an echoing effect that made it hard to know from what direction the screams were coming from.

Out of nowhere, I heard another stampede coming at me but this one sounded different. I kept staring through the woods as to get a look at what was coming. From the distance, I could see it was men holding rifles and they were running towards me in the tub. I slid down the back of the tub and got as close to the bottom of it as humanly possible, hoping they would not see me. I thought that I heard them speaking Spanish and was convinced that Peter’s Cuban friends found me and now I was going to die here lying in this tub naked. How did they find me? Do they know I am in this cast iron tub? Where are my clothes? Questions were swirling around in my head as the sound of the stampede passed right in front of me and kept going.

I slowly popped my head up out of the tub to see these men running towards the wolf pack with rifles in their hands. Soon I heard the sound of gunfire in the distance. One shot after the other. I could hear the screams of the wolves as they were being shot. I could hear them drop silent through the night after the hail of gunfire. The combination of all the sounds had me overstimulated and I passed out cold right there in the tub.

When I finally woke up it was still dark. I had no idea how long I was there passed out, but the night looked different. The moon was in a different place in the sky and the darkness was more profound. I found my way back to the ranch walking naked through the woods. I was still high on acid but I was coming down fast. As I came upon the ranch, the realization hit me like a ton of bricks. Instantaneously upon arriving at the backend of the ranch, I realized that it was not a pack of wolves like I thought it was; it was the dogs that were left in my care. It was my stepmother’s dogs. I looked over at the kennel and realized I must have left the gate open after I fed them and they all got out. There were dead dogs everywhere. The corpses of my father’s wife’s Russian Wolfhounds littered the landscape. There was blood everywhere I viewed. I walked around to the front of the house and I saw pieces of torn up bodies of the potbelly pigs scattered across the property. The dead bodies of the llamas that were ripped apart covered the ranch from one side to the other. It was a bloodbath. Everything was dead. The dogs killed all the animals that were living on the ranch. They tore the pigs and llamas limb from limb. The blood of the animals was still wet and shined in the moonlight. I could not believe my eyes. I sat on the porch and lay down on the wooden floor. I couldn’t stop shaking and throwing up. I passed out again naked right there on the porch in front of the house, surrounded by all the bloody corpses of all the animals that were alive before I came into their life.

I woke up in the morning to the touch of my father shaking my arm. He was telling me to wake up, that we had to go. I sat up on the porch and he threw my clothes at me. As I was getting dressed I looked around, but I could not see anything. There was a fog so thick that morning that one could barely see their own hand extended out from their body. My father said we have to go now, that his wife was very upset. I did not say a word and just got dressed. He told me he already packed my stuff and it was in the jeep. I walked from the porch through the fog to the jeep and we drove away down the dirt driveway. I looked out the passenger window, but I could not see any of the animals because of the thick fog. My father said to me that I needed to pick a city and that he would drive me there, but I needed to leave town right now. I asked, “What do you mean pick a city?”

He said, “Pick a city in Florida and I will drive you there! You cannot go back to South Florida and you cannot stay here in Ocala, son, now pick a fucking city!”

I just looked over towards him and said, “Tampa, take me to Tampa Bay, Pop.”

Chapter 16

I chose Tampa, Florida because it was a place I had never been to before. I did not know a single soul there and it was a big city like I was used to. I felt I could find work there in my field. Before we left the city limits of Ocala, the old man told me he needed some monkeys from the zoo. That was code that meant he needed to get high. The monkeys were the pain pills and the zoo was the hospital.

He had a fail-safe way of getting high whenever he wanted and in any city, he wanted. He had a one hundred percent success rate with a kidney stone scam. How this worked was, he would drive to any emergency room and walk in holding a certain part of his lower back. With his medical training and life of being surrounded by medical people, he knew exactly where to place his hand. Then he would act out a scenario in which he entered the building in abject pain. His histrionics could have won him an Academy Award. Now the first thing they would do is to give him a cup and ask him to pee in it. One of the telltale signs of kidney stones is blood in the urine. He went into the bathroom with the cup. In his wallet, he always kept a pin. He would prick his finger, squeeze the blood out of it into the cup of urine, and twirl it around like a cocktail. Every single time without fail, they would take the collective representation he was presenting to them, the so-called trained medical professionals, and declare he had kidney stones. Next, they would shoot him up with Demerol and hand him a prescription for some pain pills. Instead of going to the bar to get drunk or go to brown town to buy heroin, this kidney stone scam became his fail-safe for decades. He brought someone to the ER with him when he could, so as not to be stuck there. The doctors would release him if he had someone to drive. Sometimes he was in and out of the hospital in less than an hour and scored his drugs. He turned the nation’s hospitals into his street corner drug dealer and he basked in the glory of it. He resented the people around him in his life that had a better education than he did, so outsmarting all of them became a rush in its own right.

After our trip to the zoo, we got on the interstate and started to head towards Tampa. While driving, he explained to me when we got to Tampa Bay that I only had four hours to find a home and a job. He told me he needed to get back because he had to work a shift at his hospital. As we were heading down I-75 toward the bay area I wondered to myself whether I was going to have to stay at a hotel or not. My father started to fill me in on his Oregon llama trip and how he and his wife fought most of the time. Apparently, she was very mad at him and my presence at the ranch just complicated that. As I listened to him explain things, I realized that the reason she threw me out was that I did not feed the animals exactly the way she wanted me to. The more my father spoke and explained why I had to leave, the more I realized that the blood massacre never happened. Apparently, the animals were all still alive and I had a terrible acid trip. I sat there listening to him laughing my ass off. I never told him why I was laughing, but I was relieved I, in fact, was not responsible for the death or slaughter of an entire ranch of animals. I wondered, sitting there in the car while we drove south, what the fuck was in those gel caps.

We arrived in Tampa and pulled over at one of the first exits in the city. I had him take me to a store to buy a local paper. I searched through the employment section for the kind of ads that we shady telemarketers would publish in our trade. The way an ad was written was almost like a code that highlighted what kind of deal it was. Any telemarketing job that offered a salary or hourly wage was no good, because it was probably legit and there was certainly no money to be made there. I looked for an ad written in a certain way that was a commission job only. Any schmuck who would work for an hourly wage was no one I wanted to hire. I needed the feast and famine kind of sales people who knew they could write their own checks the harder they pushed themselves. Anyone who would limit himself or herself to a salary was a lazy bastard and any company paying salaries was no company I wanted to be near.

I found the ad that I was looking for and called them up on the payphone. I told them, that whoever was their top sales person, I was going to come in there, blow his numbers away, and take the title away from him. I gave them a very ‘in your face, I’m the best thing since sliced bread period’, kind of attitude. I asked for their address and said I was coming over there now. When I hung up the phone, my father was just shaking his head. He said that he could not believe the way I spoke to them and said they would never hire me because that I sounded like a crazy person speaking like that. I told him to shut his trap and drive me to the office.

I walked in and found this telemarketing room to be everything I was used to. The place was buzzing and hot chicks were everywhere on the phones. This phone room was an “incoming” phone room, which meant we did not dial the phones, they rang and we answered them. They were selling vitamins by offering one of four awards when the person bought the product. I knew this was a total scam and I was in like Flynn. I got an interview right on the spot, got the job and agreed to start the next Monday.

I walked out of the office into my father’s car and told him I was hired. He could not believe his ears and kept shaking his head saying over and over, that was amazing! I looked at him and said now let us find a place for me to live. I knew I did not have time to get a place in a traditional way and just looked for some week-to-week place in a shady part of town. I found such a place on Nebraska Ave. where the hookers and dealers would walk the streets and I was set. I stood in the doorway of my new home, which was this nasty singlewide trailer, waved goodbye to the old man and went inside. As I heard him drive away I smiled, sat down on the nasty couch in this furnished place and felt real proud of myself; four hours was more than enough time. Now it was time to build my next empire.

Chapter 17

I bought some bullshit used car and started looking for a respectable place to live. The neighborhood I dumped myself in was a temerarious move, but I only had four hours at the time to get a roof over my head. The truth was I felt like I could blend into any neighborhood, rich or poor. I could float between the two worlds with ease. I felt comfortable in either world and I still do today. It is a trait that has helped me throughout the years. Some people just crumble when their income self-adjusts downward and they have an extremely hard time with it. I can adapt to any realm of the economic ladder and fit in.

When I showed up for work at my new place I soon settled in on the pitch and started to close deals. As I said before, this was an incoming phone room and how it worked went like this. The owner of the phone room would mail out letters to people’s homes telling them that they were selected to receive one of four awards and that they needed to call within forty-eight hours of receiving the letter to claim it. They would pick up the phone and call the number. On the other side of the call was I answering the phone telling them in a very excited tone, ‘congratulations!’

They would say that they got some letter that said they won something. Now the letter would never say that they “won” anything, but it was written in such a way that it strongly implied that. I would explain to them that they did not win anything, but rather they were selected to receive one of the four awards listed in the letter. I explained that this was what was called a “Premium Incentive Program” and that they were absolutely guaranteed one of those four awards on the list with the purchase of a six hundred dollar box of vitamins.

Right away, the people would say they did not need a six hundred dollar box of vitamins. I said of course you do not need such a box. Just throw it away when you get it. They would be so shocked and confused on the other end of the phone. I explained that no one needs a six hundred dollar box of vitamins, but everyone would use one of the four awards on the list.

I’d ask, “Do you have the letter with you now? Let us go over the awards on the list. Number 1 is a brand new Lincoln Town Car. Number 2 is $10,000 in cash. Number 3 is a trip to Hawaii that included buy one get one free airline tickets and eight days and seven nights of lodging paid for. Number 4 was one thousand dollars in cash. Now you are absolutely guaranteed one of those four awards with the purchase of the box of vitamins. If you only receive number four, are you going to call me back disappointed that you bought a six hundred dollar box of vitamins that came with one thousand dollars in cash? Throw the vitamins in the garbage and keep the cash if you end up with number four. Hopefully you drive away with a brand new Lincoln Town Car. The reason you have to buy the box of vitamins is that this is a premium incentive program. We are giving you a premium as an incentive to make the purchase. That way, it is not a contest and by law, you avoid all the rules and regulations that come with a contest. Most importantly, you are not actually winning anything, so you do not have to pay any of the taxes associated with winning something.”

Now for you the reader, let us revisit what I just said to the poor slob on the other end of that phone line. I made it sound like the worst he could do monetarily was number four, which was one thousand dollars in cash. However, I did not say that. All I said was, ‘if all you got was number four, would you call me back complaining?’ I just gave him a bunch of razzle-dazzle about contest and premium incentive programs. I was telling him that I was trying to sell him something that he did not need and something I told him to throw in the garbage when he got it. I gave him some smoke and mirrors about contests and tax laws. In the middle of all of that, he, the caller, only heard that he was at least going to receive in return one thousand dollars in cash, even though I did not say that. The truth was no one got a Lincoln Town Car or anything on that list of awards except the vacation trip to Hawaii. Everybody that called was promised one of those four things on that list and everyone who called would receive the vacation package to Hawaii.

It was a beautiful scam. It did not take me long to figure out that the new phone room in my new city was allegedly owned and operated by a group of the mob that ran out of the west coast of Florida. This was a completely different group of grease balls, but they operated the same. They owned the company that did the mail drops to people’s homes. They owned the phone room that the calls were routed to. They owned the merchant accounts with the credit card companies to whack people’s credit cards for six hundred dollars for vitamins. They even owned everything to do with that Hawaiian Vacation. It was allegedly another section of the mob that they got the vacation certificates from, that was based out of Las Vegas. How that worked is the people who bought the vitamins would get a vacation certificate giving them a buy one get one free plane ticket to Hawaii and eight days and seven nights of lodging paid for. The trick was that the person had to buy the second plane ticket from a certain travel agency that surprisingly was also owned by our friendly neighborhood Italians.

No matter what time of year it was, they charged two thousand five hundred dollars for that second ticket. At that time, you could walk into almost any airport in America with no notice and get the next flight out to Hawaii for seven hundred dollars. Then when someone would follow through on the trip, they would get out to Hawaii and be put up in a hotel owned by, guess who? They would allow the people one day of enjoying Hawaii and then they would knock on the door the next morning. They would strongly suggest that the people come and spend the day in this convention room and listen to sales pitches about buying timeshares. Of course, people were on vacation or on their honeymoons. They did not want to waste a day listening to sales pitches, they did not want to buy timeshares. If they refused, the next time they left the rooms, they were locked out and their stuff was on the sidewalk in front of the hotel. Now the poor schmucks were stuck in the most expensive place in the country and they had to either give in and listen to many days of sales pitches about Hawaiian timeshares or pay premium prices for a real hotel and hope they could find a vacancy. They went through all of this because they bought a box of vitamins.

I was so impressed by the scope of this scam. The Italians had everything covered from beginning to the end. Hell, can you believe they even sold timeshares to these people? A lot of them! They were making so much money that they would go around Tampa and be insulted if someone suggested they were mobbed up just because they were Italian. After all, they were legitimate businessmen, don’t you know. However, they had guns and they liked to fire them. They had many guns and did many things with them, but I stayed away from all that. I am not a gun guy, but I felt very comfortable around these people. I wanted in. I wanted to learn everything, but these people did not know me. I caught their eyes immediately when I started selling in the fashion that I did.

When I got there, the sales force was actually trying to sell the vitamins. They were telling the callers all about the benefits of the vitamins and this and that health factoid. Here I was standing in the middle of their sales room telling the same callers to throw the freaking vitamins in the trash. They could not believe their ears. The whole place was freaked out. Here was this new guy telling all of the customers to throw the box of vitamins in the garbage can. They did not know what to do. Management was stunned and right away they were having meetings over what I was doing.

The guy running the place was this hustler named Garrett Thomas or Jerry as everyone called him. They all sat in the owner’s office listening to me on a monitor trying to figure out whether what I was saying was okay or not. They never saw anything like it. When I worked on the phones, I always stood up while pitching. I never sat down. I never put the ear part of the phone anywhere near my ear. I did not care what the caller had to say, they needed to listen to me. When I was done with my pitch and talking over them, then I put the ear part of the phone in my ear to listen to their dumb questions. I had a rebuttal for every conceivable reason why they did not want to give me their money. I spoke into the phone like a one-way microphone as to not care at all what the people on the other end had to say. This phone room sat and learned for the first time what real telemarketing was and how it should be done. I gave them a class study on selling over the phones. They sat there and watched how I would change my tone of voice and how I would move up and down the inflection of my voice throughout the pitch. If anyone asked me why I would not sit down at my desk, I would tell them no one should be allowed to sit down until they get their first sale. Management loved that!

They sat and listened when some caller would ask me a question and I would answer it with an answer that had nothing to do with the question they asked me and then change the subject. The owners and management sat there in silence listening to my caller forget what the question was that they had and capitulate to my will and choke up the credit card numbers. Each day that passed, the owner Peter Pignola and on down were blown away with what I was doing. One of the Italian guys, Tony Vincenza, just stood against the wall taking down notes because he was going to write a book about how to pitch and pass it around the West Coast. Soon I showed them numbers that they never dreamed of.

When I got to the phone room, their best salesman was a guy named John Pepstall aka Pep and he sold twenty-five $600 deals a week. He was bringing in an average of fifteen thousand a week just by himself. I was closing fifty of the same deals by Wednesday and asking for the rest of the week off. Pep was their top dog and I was crushing him and taking away all the prime pussy he had to himself in the form of beautiful women working in that phone room. Until another alpha dog came into the pound, he was the only swinging dick that got any attention from the ladies. I walked away with his title as their number one sales guy and I took most of his selection of sexy snatch at United Healthcare Industries and made it my own.

Before long, the entire phone room was standing up doing their pitch and all you could hear is one sales person after the other telling callers to throw their box of vitamins in the trash. I took over this room with my sheer willpower and renegotiated the commissions I was being paid and the days I had to work. Slowly I was making a name for myself in Tampa. However, the name I was using was a variation of my name. Back in South Florida I was Charles Walker, here on the west coast I went by my middle name Richard. Rich Walker was now born and he was on fire. I hoped just that change in my name would slide me under the radar back home. If anyone got wind of a new hot shot in Tampa back in South Florida, no one would be expecting a dude named Rich Walker.

Chapter 18

Settling in on the west coast of Florida was going well. I was now making good money at this phone room called United Healthcare Industries telling people to throw their vitamins away. As time passed by, I moved into a three-bedroom apartment with three of the women that worked at United Healthcare Industries. I was able to bounce from bed to bed each night as all three women became my lovers. Sue, April and Flo were their names.

Through the relationships with these women, I learned all the juicy gossip about the Italians that owned the phone room I worked for. These ladies and one of their moms worked for Peter for a long time and through pillow talk, I was able to acquire information about all of them and the business.

What I found out was the main guy was Peter Pignola. He was the brains and money behind everything. Peter had a lock on much of the West Coast and all the white-collar crime that was coming out of Tampa. He was constantly under investigation and The Feds worked night and day to take him down.

The second guy in this cast of characters was a super cool guy to be around named Tony Vincenza. Tony, from what I was told, came from a Mafia family based out of Rochester, New York and was now based in Tampa. The guy had a great personality and just lit up any room he was in. Tony loved making money and he loved his guns. He was the one who stood against the wall and took down notes so he could write a how-to book and train all his other phone rooms. He and Peter were like partners in some things, I was told.

Peter also had a crew of people who worked under him that were very loyal. Clerical staff and management answered directly to Peter and worked for him for years. This was a tight-knit group and I wanted to break into their inner circle and truly make some real money. By sleeping with the women that worked for them, it gave me an edge with my quest to break through.

In addition, almost right away, I started up a friendship with Pep who was the top sales guy there before I came. Pep and I got into more madness and trouble than I could possibly remember. To his core, Pep was and will always be a thief. The man just loves to steal. He is one of those guys who just does it for the rush or something. He came from a well-to-do family from Hyannis, Massachusetts on his mother’s side, but due to divorce, he was rejected entirely by his mother and her side of the family. He was exiled to Pennsylvania with his father Skip who was a special crook in his own right, in a town outside of Philadelphia called King of Prussia. Skip was into mortgage fraud and made a name for himself around Philly, according to Pep. He lived in the penthouse of a high-rise that overlooked the entire city.

I was more of a white-collar criminal type and I was more interested in getting into the inner circle of Peter Pignola than I was doing some of the crazy crimes Pep did for fun. Regardless of my intentions, somehow I found myself doing crimes of spontaneity or just plain foolish and stupid crimes with Pep. I remember going to a public pool with Pep to swim and watch him dive. I was on a swim team when I was younger and he was on a diving team. I used to love to watch him dive. He was a star athlete and could have gone far if he had the right background or support. So, one day we are at this public pool and he sparks up a conversation with a chick in her early twenties that lives with her parents there in Tampa. Through the conversation, Pep gets the girl to reveal her address and the fact that she and her family were going out that night. Stupidly she told a complete stranger way too much information.

Later that night Pep talks me into doing a B & E with him, otherwise known as breaking and entering. We pull up to the house and break in and we steal everything we want. Pep’s modus operandi was to break into a place, but never steal anything of value. He did not want the electronics or jewelry. His thing was to go through your house and steal the most personal and strange shit that you have in your home. He would take your vacuum cleaner, your sexual vibrator out of your nightstand, family pictures and so much more. Maybe he liked a set of steak knives. The stranger the item he stole, the bigger the rush for him. He would just sit around afterwards laughing his ass off thinking about what the people’s faces looked like when they were telling the cops someone broke in and stole my electric can opener or golf clubs, but left the cash or gold. He was a complete maniac! In that house was one of those rugs hung on the wall with dogs playing poker. I took that one for myself and kept it for years dragging it all over the country with me. Wherever I lived back then, I always had those dogs playing poker hanging on my wall and I would never forget where it came from. I had many items like that where I kept it because of the story behind it.

One summer, Pep’s next-door neighbor knocked on his door and told him that he was going away for three days and asked Pep to look after the place. Pep told the man of course and asked when he was leaving. The guy said we are leaving now and wanted to just let you know. I watched my buddy close the door and race to the back bedroom where he had a view of the parking lot through the bedroom window. I watched as his neighbor and his wife drove away, and then Pep came running out of his bedroom putting on a pair of socks over his hands. He went outside and jimmied the front window of this guy’s apartment until it popped. He crawled through the window and was in the apartment. I could not believe it. I mean the guy just left and hell, he could come right back if he forgot something. I just stayed in Pep’s apartment. As time went by, I was reassured that the guy was not coming back and Pep was still in the dude’s place. I walked out of Pep’s front door and the very next door to the right was the neighbor’s place. I knocked on the door and I heard him yell for me to come in. As I walked through the front door, I could not believe my eyes. There was my friend in this guy’s kitchen cooking a full-blown meal. In the middle of his living room was a pile of stuff Pep collected that he was going to take. That pile had everything in it from a complete set of golf clubs to bathroom towels. I saw a vacuum cleaner and everything else in between just sitting there in a pile in the middle of the room. I walked into the kitchen and smelled this great aroma. Pep was in there cooking up some pork chops and all sorts of sides as if he owned the place. He had a very old bottle of scotch open and was offering me a cocktail. I took the glass out of his hand and took a sip. My heart was pounding and I was so excited. The whole thing was crazy. Here we were standing in the middle of this guy’s place cooking up dinner and shopping through all of his belongings as if we were at a garage sale or something.

Pep told me to go through the apartment and see if there was anything I needed. While he downed this high dollar scotch and cooked us a meal, I went through all of this guy’s personal belongings. In the nightstand next to his bed was a drawer with all sorts of sexual stuff in it. I took out a vibrator and put it in a pillow sack. In the drawer, the guy had all of these photos of his penis where he drew faces and mustaches on it. It was super bizarre. There were all these pictures of his wife doing the most ungodly of things naked. I brought the pictures out to the kitchen to show Pep and he just laughed his ass off saying that these people walk around like super Christians and are so full of shit. I kept both the pictures and the vibrator and went back through the rooms looking for some things. I found some clothes that I liked and I filled up my Santa Sack with all sorts of goodies. We sat down in the middle of the dude’s living room and ate this great meal Pep cooked and afterwards raided his well-stocked bar and started to bring over everything we picked out next door back to Pep’s place. There was so much booze that we had to hide the bottles everywhere throughout Pep’s apartment and packed in the closets all the stuff we took.

Three days later, I picked up the phone and it was Pep telling me to get over there. I drove over to his apartment complex and as I was walking up the stairs there were all these cops coming and going. Pep’s front door was open and he was there standing in the doorway talking to his neighbor. I walked up and Pep introduced me to his neighbor. As I shook his hand, Pep started to tell me that the poor guy was robbed while he was out of town. I said that it was horrible and the man told me that the cops had never seen anything like it. All of the valuable stuff was still there, but the strangest of items were missing. I stood there just listening to the neighbor explain to me how the robbers even cooked his food. I stood there with a shocked look on my face. I just kept shaking my head back and forth as to be utterly amazed at what he was telling me. Pep was chiming in on how he did not hear a thing going on next door and that this must have happened to him when he was at church. I had to hold back my laughter as I thought of Pep walking into a church and the roof collapsing down on him and the earthquake that would cause if he ever entered a house of worship.

Yeah, the neighbor just kept going on how his wife was so upset that family photos of hers were missing and that she could never get them back. After a while, we excused ourselves, went into Pep’s apartment, and closed the door. Pep looked at me with such a shit-eating grin, walked over to his couch, and lifted up the cushion. Under it was multiple bottles of the neighbor’s booze. He pulled out one of the bottles and poured us a couple of cocktails. We made a toast to how brilliant we were as I heard the cries of the neighbor’s wife through the walls next door. I knew right there and then this guy Pep was never to be trusted. At his very core, he was a real thief and a liar. I could never turn my back on a person like this.

Chapter 19

As time went by in Tampa, my plan for entering the inner circle of Peter Pignola and United Healthcare Industries was not going according to plan. It seemed to me at the time that this tight-knit group was impenetrable. The more money I made for this group the more I was boxing myself into a corner. The problem with being a spectacular salesman over the phones is that no one wants to take you off the phones. Just being a sales person was not my destiny and I could never feel content with such a station in life. On top of that, I had a huge problem with taking my talent and making other people money. Even if I was going to manage a phone room, I still wanted a piece of the action. Sitting at a desk and taking one call after the other was, in my mind, a complete waste of my talent. I also believed that if the owner of a phone room did not notice that fact, then I was working with the wrong guy with no vision. My new life in Tampa was not going the way I wanted it to.

I moved out of the three-bedroom apartment and settled in with just one of the girls that lived there. Her name was Flo Parkland and the two of us moved out together and got a completely furnished apartment in a nice suburb of Tampa Bay called Temple Terrace. Flo was the bigger girl of the three, but I always loved BBWs and took a lot of shit for it from the guys over the years. I never understood that. I knew all sorts of guys who completely cut off big girls and would never have sex with one of them. The whole concept seemed completely insane to me to take an entire segment of snatch and declare the sex off limits. Most of the time a big girl is way better in bed than those pretty, little, skinny girls who just lay there like princesses waiting to be fucked. I would take a big girl over some flat belly seven days a week and twice on Sunday. On top of that, Flo’s mother Bonnie worked for Peter and was his right hand in the office. I felt this could come in handy one day. Flo and her mom were at odds because Flo fucked her mom’s boyfriend and the mother held a grudge over that. However, I saw a lot of women have problems with their own mothers for this or that, but they always make up at some point. When things would cool between the two, I wanted that to be to my advantage, if possible, one day. With all that, I still really dug Flo and we got along very well. We had a great sex life and that was very important to me. Living in Tampa now, I was starting to find all of my sex places to go to and have anonymous sex. The city was full of these places. I found all sorts of adult bookstores that I loved to go to that had glory holes and booths throughout them. People in the swinger scene had a well built up community in Tampa as well and I really loved living there.

As far as white-collar crime, back then was a very different time compared to today. The system was slow to catch up to all the laws we were bending to our advantage. One of the things that was completely different back then was how any of us could use credit cards. To set the stage of the time and place with credit card companies back then, I can remember before I even got to Tampa, back in South Florida I was living with my friend from school renting a room in his house. There was this brand new thing called The Home Shopping Network. Cable television came of age in my generation. We watched the birth of twenty-four hour news with a channel called CNN on basic cable. My generation watched the entire music industry be turned on its head with MTV and music videos twenty-four hours a day. The world was changing and along with that, the way we as Americans shopped. Now there was a channel on TV that we could just sit on the couch and buy things without ever leaving the comfort of our homes.

The Home Shopping Network was brand new and it needed credit cards to make the whole concept work. This brought about a change in the use of credit cards because now we needed to buy something, but there was not a person to sign the credit card slip. This Home Shopping Network, in the beginning of its infancy, only needed a credit card number to make the transaction and an address to ship the stuff to. There was no check and balance put in place at the time. There were no safeguards because the concept of just using a credit card over the phone was brand new. We were no longer standing there at the checkout counter being asked for our signature on the slip. We were sitting in our homes giving out our card numbers over the phone. Now in this setting, I was living with my friend, renting a room in his house, and I would get a hold of credit card numbers from all sorts of shady ways. We would sit there in his living room, order diamond tennis bracelets all day long, and pay for them with whatever card number we had our hands on that day. We would have all the diamonds shipped to a house across the street that was always empty that time of the year because snowbirds owned the house and only used it part of the year.

Back then, The UPS Truck always came around the same time in the morning and I would go across the street and wait on the side of the house for the truck to arrive. As the delivery man started walking up the driveway I would pop out around the carport area as if I just walked out of the house, sign for the bracelets and then turn around and walk back towards the empty house. I would wait for the truck to drive away and I would walk back to the house we were living at across the street and bring in the boxes of diamond bracelets. Then we would go down to the local pawnshop and sell every one of them. Again, this was a different time and place. Pawn shops never even asked for ID let alone take fingerprints back in the day if you just sold them something. There were no video cameras, no IDs required and there were no prints. Pawnshops were, for the longest time, the greatest legal fence available to all crooks. We could steal anything, fence it at one of the many pawnshops, and never have to answer to authorities about any of it.

With that understanding of how things were back then, picture what real criminals could do with actual merchant accounts from the credit card company itself. The concept of the crook being on that side of the fence was not born yet. Any internal investigation of credit card fraud was only about what someone did with a stolen credit card. No one was watching the merchants or even conceived they were the crooks that needed to be looked at!

Within the terms and agreements of the contract with the credit card companies for having a merchant account back then, the banks had a provision that you could not share your merchant account with anyone. It might have even been a law at the time, I’m not sure, but it was called factoring. Factoring meant that you were opening up your merchant account to factor in other businesses and their revenues. Maybe another businessman did not have the credit to get a merchant account or maybe he was denied because of some fraud conviction. Either way it created an underground business where companies could go to a merchant willing to let you use their merchant account and the merchant would charge a percentage for processing your credit card business. It was easy money. Just open your merchant account to anyone willing to pay high points for the access, sit back, and collect the money.

Back then, word on the street was that Peter Pignola was the man to go to if you wanted to be able to accept credit cards and did not want to do it through the bank for whatever reason. If Peter was into this like the rumors on the street indicated, then how this would work was that other phone rooms or gambling bookie operations would go to Peter with credit card transactions. Peter would keep a high percentage of the money, then process your credit card business through his merchant account, and then give you the rest of the money. As long as the chargebacks were kept at a minimum and the person using the card was made aware that the charge account would be named such and such when they got the charge, most of the time this kind of business would go undetected by the bank. To spread out the risk the mob would go to a failing business that was about to go under and offer the guy a deal with some points if he would allow them to use his merchant account. For example, if there was a t-shirt shop on the beach that was going under, the Italians would walk in and offer the guy five percentage points of some credit card transactions for use of his merchant account. Now all of a sudden the failing t-shirt shop was sitting pretty now collecting the easy money that he had to do nothing for except just allow the use of his merchant account.

This was a business that I was interested in learning and something I wanted to find out was if Peter really was behind all of this and I wanted to find a way in. One day I went to work like any other day and I was called into Peter’s office. Peter told me, out of nowhere, that he was going to let me go. I was standing there in shock and I could not believe my ears. He told me that I had a high rate of chargebacks on the sales I was producing. I could not believe what he was saying. I just looked at him and asked him if he lost his mind or not. I told him that of course I had more chargebacks than most of the people there because I was producing, in some cases, five or six times more revenue than others working at United Healthcare Industries. He just shook his head and told me he was letting me go. I was so blown away that this fool did not see the mint he was making off me or even see what potential I had to bring to this world of white-collar crime.

I walked out of the office, got in my car and drove to the bar. I needed a drink.

Chapter 20

After being canned at United Healthcare Industries I spent a couple of weeks just lounging around. Pep had an apartment directly across the street from Busch Gardens. Back in those days Busch Gardens had all the Busch Beer you could drink free. We would just jump the fence, go into Busch Gardens, and drink all day and it would not cost us a dime. I needed a vacation and what better way to have one than at Busch Gardens drinking free beer all day. After we would get a belly full, we would go back across the street and next to the apartment complex Pep lived at was a hotel. We would go to the pool area at the hotel and order pizzas from different pizzerias in the area that would deliver. When they showed up, we always told them to bring the pies to the pool area. There we would give them a check for tons of food and beer that was written on closed accounts. We always said we had no ID at the time because we were at the pool and the delivery guy would inevitably take the bullshit check and go on his way. Then we would just leave the pool area, go back to his apartment, and go chow down. We did this every day for about two weeks. It was the one vacation at the time that never cost me a penny and I drank and ate to all of my heart’s desires while enjoying the wonders of Busch Gardens all for free. Once I was fired, Pep quit working for Peter and we just hung out having a ball.

After a couple of weeks of frolicking in the sun, it was time to go back to work. We started knocking on doors to other phone rooms around Tampa and soon found out that we had a problem. Most all of the phone rooms there at the time were connected to Peter in some sort of way. Either Peter dropped their mail for them at a good price or some other connection to Peter presented us a roadblock. No one wanted to take a chance with us as not to rock the boat in any way with Peter. It got to a point where the phone rooms knew as soon as we walked in, who we were and why we were there. One owner out in the town called Largo on the outskirts of Tampa told us straight to our faces that he knew we were talented, but no one was going to hire us because of Peter. He looked at me and asked me if I could do him a favor because he heard I was resourceful. He handed me a check that came in his mail. It was written out to a business across the street from him and he hated the guy that owned the place. It was some automotive repair shop named Scotty’s Wrench. He told me if I could find a way to cash the check, I could have half. The check was for five thousand dollars and it was made out to Scotty’s Wrench. I took the check for him and told him I’ll be back in a little while. We left the phone room and I went to a dot head check-cashing store that I knew of where you could purchase a laminated picture ID without any hassle. The dot heads did not care if you had ID or not proving who you were, they would just give you a picture ID if you had the money to pay for it. I walked in and bought a picture ID that said my name was Scott S. Wrench. We left and went to another check-cashing place owned by you-know-who, with the company check made out to Scotty’s Wrench and presented the check with a story about the typo and my picture ID and with no hesitation they cashed the five thousand dollar check. I drove back to the phone room and handed him twenty-five hundred dollars. The owner of the phone room was shocked. He looked at me with a shit-eating grin and said, “Man, you are resourceful.” He asked me how I did it. I explained how I pulled it off and the guy could not stop laughing. He said, “Man, I would love to hire you, but you know I can’t.” I shook his hand and thanked him for the twenty-five hundred and we left. As we were driving home later that evening, we passed by the offices of United Healthcare Industries. There was a huge eighteen-wheeler parked in front of the building that said United States Postal Service on it, and there were cops everywhere in the parking lot. I yelled at Pep to pull over; Peter was getting raided. We parked across the street and walked across the road and we sat on a cement wall and watched the cops bring out all these computers and filing cabinets and we watched them load all of it on the tractor-trailer. The Feds were raiding the place, plain and simple; it was a bust. I pulled out a bag of pot that I had on me and rolled a joint. We sat there smoking weed sitting on the wall just watching everything go down. We had a cop in a suit walk up to us and ask us who we were. He wrote down our names on a pad and just said nothing about the joint we were smoking and walked away.

The next day I woke up to the phone ringing. Flo answered it and one of the girls at the office said that Peter saw me sitting on the wall watching United Healthcare Industries get raided and wondered out loud whether or not I had something to do with the bust. Flo told the girl on the phone that was ridiculous and how I was just driving by and saw the whole thing.

After she hung up she told me what was said and I immediately understood the magnitude of this problem and how that must have looked to Peter with me sitting on that wall. I sat down and wrote a handwritten letter telling Peter that it was brought to my attention his public musings about me and told him in no uncertain terms that I had nothing to do with any of that. I reminded him that he really did not know me that well and that I did not appreciate such an accusation. I called FedEx and had them pick up the letter and hand-deliver it to him. I was told the next day he read it, said nothing out loud to anyone and threw the letter away. Still, I knew how these things worked and I was taking no chances with any of this.

I looked at Flo and said pack your bags we are going to live with your father in Detroit. I could not get any work around Tampa anyway and her old man was always offering her the entire basement in the house if she’d move back to Detroit. I just wanted to get as far away from Peter, Tampa and telemarketing as I could. Detroit seemed like the perfect answer at the time. Once again I just needed to get out of town for a little while. This was starting to become a pattern and I was not happy about any of this. No one was shooting at me this time, but if Peter even thought for a second I had something to do with that raid, I did not want to stick around Tampa wondering whether or not I was going to get clipped or not just out of suspicion.

Over the next few days, I made all the arrangements to make the trip to Detroit. Snow was due soon and I needed to get up there before the first snow since we were going to rent a truck and drive there. I went into the truck rental place and told them I just needed the truck for one day locally. Back then, you did not even need a credit card to rent a moving truck. I drove it home and took all the furniture that was in our furnished apartment that came with renting it and loaded it all up in the rental truck like I owned it all. Next, I went down to a local rent-to-own place and I rented every cutting-edge electronic I could think of from a top of the line badass stereo system to the biggest and best TV in the place. My first payment wasn’t even due on any of it until the first of the month, but what did I care about their payment plan; this shit was going to Detroit and I loaded it on the truck with the rest of the stuff I did not own. So, the next day I was to leave for Detroit with my moving truck that was only rented for one day locally. It was filled completely from front to back with brand new furniture and electronics that cost me nothing. This shows you what a different world it was back then. There is no way you could get away with any of this nowadays. However, back then, I could take a twenty-dollar bill, rent a truck and load it up with all sorts of rental stuff that I did not own and just drive away. We had real freedom back in those days. Heck, today there would be a camera shot at every red light and every intersection from Tampa to Detroit recording my whole felonious journey. It really was the last generation of freedom in America. Nowadays, the government tracks every moment of your life, in every confineable and conceivable way. My last night in Tampa, I spent with Pep. We sat around and drank all night long. I called my mom that evening and told her I was leaving Tampa and going to Detroit for many of the same reasons I left South Florida. Clearly, my mother noticed a pattern to my life as well, but she was still mom and loved me.

The next morning I was sleeping in one of Pep’s guest rooms when Flo came in the room and woke me up and said my mother was here. Still crawling out of my head from a night of drinking I could not understand what she was saying, when all of a sudden my mother walked in the room. I could not believe my eyes. I thought I was dreaming. What the hell was my mom doing in Pep’s apartment in Tampa? What I found out to this day is something I will never ever forget. My mother pulled off nothing short of a miracle.

After my mother had hung up with me, she declared to my stepfather that she wanted to say goodbye to me in person. He told her that without an address and phone number, it couldn’t be done. My mother knew that she had a connection with me that no one could explain and that she was going to say goodbye to me in person no matter what. Early the next morning, she got my stepfather and a friend of his named Steve Jones to set out from Ft. Lauderdale towards Tampa. The entire trip they kept telling her that this was a fool’s errand and that she could never find me in a city of over a million people. They told her that this entire trip was nuts and she was nuts for attempting it. Even though they knew that they were just as crazy as my mother was for driving her, my mother wasn’t deterred and they kept on going toward Tampa Bay. As they entered town, my mother spotted a moving truck. As with most large cities, moving trucks are just about as prevalent as taxis or buses, so when she declared that my stepfather should follow it, he and his friend just shook their heads and did as she said. At one point, they were able to get alongside the truck and they shouted out to the driver if they knew a Charles Walker. The girl in the truck replied, “Rich Walker?” and my mom yelled, “Yes!” The woman in the truck said, “I am Flo! Follow me!” They drove to Pep’s place and woke me up. How on Earth this happened is truly unexplainable and unbelievable, yet here it was. My mother just drove into a big city of over a million people and found me immediately. To this day I have a hard time understanding that miracle, but then my mom reminds me of another thing that was similar.

She claims when I was born in New York City I came into the world at a hospital in Manhattan that no longer exists called Jewish Memorial Hospital. My father was in the Navy at the time and this hospital handled service families. Anyway, after I was born, they took me and placed me in a room down the hall from my mother with all the other babies. All night long my mother would hear a baby crying and ask the nurses why I was crying. The nurses got all angry with her and said, “That is not your child ma’am.” When this kept going on all night, finally one of the nurses took me back to my mother and the nurse sat next to my mom’s bed and asked how on Earth with all the birth mothers and babies that were there, she knew that was her child crying. My mother just said, “I knew.” Those two stories, to me, are unexplainable and connect me to my mother in ways I do not have words for.

That morning we all went out to breakfast and had a nice time. Afterwards, we hugged and gave kisses goodbye to each other and Flo and I headed north on Interstate 75 towards Detroit. My life was about to change once again.

Chapter 21

We arrived in a suburb of Detroit called Garden City and transformed Flo’s father’s basement into our new home. It was actually pretty nice when decorated with all of our new items from Florida. The winter hit not too long after we arrived and soon I was living back in the snow again. Not since I was a kid in New York did I live in real winter conditions although I would visit New York when it snowed. As an adult it did not seem so wonderful trying to get around in snow and ice. I did not think that Peter was going to have me whacked but I did not want to bet my life on it. I learned over the years that Italians can be just as emotional as us Irish. I needed a break from the whole scene and decided that I would enter into The Navy like both of my grandfathers and my father. Peter damn sure could not whack me on a military base and I needed to make a living somehow. I talked it over with Flo and I decided to go enlist. The Navy at the time was the only branch that would accept someone without a high school diploma, as long as you could pass their written test to get in. I took their test over the course of two days and scored well, so they accepted me.

This was a big change for me and it was not long before I figured out that this was the greatest mistake of my life and that I would never volunteer for anything again as long as I lived. The Navy was not for me. I lasted only two weeks in boot camp before I ended up in their prison. My entire Naval career from the minute they shaved my head, to the time I was kicked out, only lasted four months. All but two weeks was I in actual boot camp. The rest of the time, I was locked up on the base in a jail that was called The Sixteenth Division or affectionately called “Nuts and Bolts.” My stint there was so short that I did not earn a discharge. What they gave me was called “a separation” and I was told that if anyone ever asked, I did not have to even admit I was in The Navy. The boot camp I went to was in Great Lakes, Illinois, but everyone called it Great Mistakes. I could not do a damn thing right while I was actually in a rifle company. All the fucking marching and learning that damn song “Anchors Aweigh”, which I still have in my head to this day, did not go well for me. Why the hell I decided to go to boot camp in the dead of the winter in North Chicago is still beyond my comprehension. All I can say is I was young, dumb and full of cum to try the military.

I was put in these metal barracks with eighty other men. My trouble started when the company commander brought me in his office and asked what job I wanted in the Navy. I told him I wanted to be a gunner’s mate. The guy went nuts on me, telling me that I scored the highest on the written exam of anyone in my rifle company and that people like me did not become gunner’s mates. All I knew was I wanted to hang on the edge of a ship and shoot the big ass guns. He explained the kind of education they wanted to give me and all these plans for a highbrow job in the service, but at the end of his tirade, I just told him I wanted to be a gunner’s mate. He threw me out of his office and spent every waking moment that I had torturing me. Every time I would make a mistake marching or making my bunk in the mornings or even get my belt wrong, this bastard would drop the other eighty men around me on the ground and make them do pushups and all sorts of strenuous exercises. One time we were in the barracks and he ordered me to sit at his desk facing the whole rifle company. He ordered me to put my legs up on his desk and eat a bag of potato chips while he dropped eighty men right in front of me and pounded them for an hour for some mistake I made. It wasn’t long before this rifle company wanted me dead. Even my Bunkie on the bottom bunk below me was abused every morning by the C. C. aka Company Commander because I never could get my bunk and locker in order each morning. I finally told the poor schmuck that I will never get any of this right and that if he wanted to stop being punished that he had to take care of my bunk and his too, each morning. He soon found that was his only way out of his torture.

I was living in the middle of the worst nightmare in my life. I signed the freaking contract and there was no way out of this. I started writing people on the outside about my problems and I wrote one letter to Flo describing to her my fantasy of having the C.C. walk in the barracks in the morning, only to find the entire rifle company had been murdered by me, as I cut out everyone’s stomach and placed it upon their chest. I described this macabre scene in my letter to Flo not knowing that the government read our mail. One day the C. C. gathered up everyone in the classroom and explained to everyone that the Navy never knows what they will get when they recruit from the streets of America and read my letter out loud to the whole rifle company. They all sat there stunned as he read the descriptions of how I was going to murder them all in their sleep. Next thing I know I get tapped on the shoulder and marched back to the barracks where I gathered up all my gear and I was taken to a prison for the mentally ill called The Sixteenth Division or ‘Nuts and Bolts’ as I later learned. They sent me to a military shrink to evaluate my mental health. I saw a doctor once and he asked me, “Do you want to get out of The Navy or do you want to go back to your rifle company?” That was a no-brainer for me; I told him cheerfully that I would like to leave now. He told me the Navy was going to discharge me on what is called a ‘medical separation for a personality disorder.’ He explained to me it would take around three months because my papers had to go to Washington, D.C. and then be sent back to the base and the captain of the base had to sign the papers. After that, he said the Navy would pay for a bus ticket back to any city I wanted in America. It sounded like a nice plan to me. However, what he failed to tell me was that I would also have to survive their version of a prison for that entire time without getting killed or charged with a crime or a litany of other reasons they could keep me there forever or how I could leave in a body bag. Little did I know, I was about to embark on the toughest three months of my life.

Chapter 22

Just imagine in your mind the worst-case scenario when it comes to prisons or mental institutions. Then times that by two and you might get the idea of this place so aptly named. My first days there I realized that I was left in an extremely violent place that was run by an out of control evil staff living out every malevolent fantasy of abuse with captor and captive mindset. The staff there at the time was completely unsupervised. The only thing I can compare it to was years later when I saw the pictures out of Iraq and the Abu Ghraib Prison scandal. The staff that ran The Sixteenth Division in The Great Lakes Naval Base, when I went there, was beyond sadistic. They were evil incarnate. I wonder to this day if that place is still in existence. I was not sure I was going to make it out of there at the time. I could write an entire book about the pure evil of that place but just to name a few things, they pitted inmates against each other in fights and bet on it like back alley cock fights. Sleep was rare as they would constantly wake everyone up pounding a metal garbage can with a wooden club screaming at the top of their lungs calling us scumbags and any other name they could conjure up. They would make us go out into the dark night and shovel parking lots of snow. That was one of their favorites because it would take up two to three hours to clear the parking lot by shoveling everything into one pile and then they would tell us, “Now move the pile over here.” My bad luck was that I went through this place during the holidays and I will never forget being woken up to the smashing sound of the stick against the metal garbage cans while the guards screamed, “Happy New Year’s, you scumbags!”

This place was something else. I can’t remember how many fights I got into the first two days. They had this thing called a ‘dryer room’ which was a concrete block four wall room with one way in and one way out. In the room there was metal wire above our heads to hang laundry to dry on it. However, the room was used to send two inmates in to fight and have one walk out and be the winner. Lucky for me I was pretty good at fist fights and was able to survive that part of my stint there.

Another stroke of luck for me was I had some bruised ribs and was sent to the hospital on the base and my visit there changed everything for me. I learned at the hospital that there was a van service that went from the hospital on the base to the civilian hospital in downtown Chicago every half hour. The important thing about that was civilians and not military personnel drove this shuttle service. In the short time that I was there in Great Mistakes I already learned that there were many civilian contractors that worked on the base and that this crowd helped smuggle in anything and everything anyone in boot camp wanted. Whether it would be cash, booze, cigarettes or anything, the civilians were making a mint smuggling stuff to the people on the base who could not leave the base. Most of the people that were going through boot camp in a rifle company would get whatever they were denied by the Navy from the civilian workers that worked at the restaurant on the base called The Greasy Spoon. The staff there had an entire underground system where anyone in boot camp could get whatever they wanted on the base through that restaurant. Once a week, every recruit that was going through boot camp on the base would be allowed religious services and access to the restaurant to eat every Sunday.

The fact that these rapacious civilians were driving the shuttle service was a gold mine for me. I knew the Navy, in a matter of months, was going to send me out into the world with no money and no hair. All I was going to get was a bus ticket. I needed to make some money to have with me when I returned to Flo in Detroit. Flo and her father knew already I was getting kicked out of the Navy. I told them and everyone after that to this day that I was kicked out of the Navy because I was in a fistfight where I partially blinded one of the staff there. I told people that because the staff started the fight, the Navy could not charge me with a crime; but they damn sure would throw me out. I never told anyone I was kicked out of the Navy for a personality disorder because they read the letter I sent to Flo about murdering everyone in my rifle company. Amazing that if the Navy believed I was a potential murderer that they would just dump me back on the streets of America to kill someone. Publishing in this book the real truth of my naval career is the first time I have publicly admitted to anyone what happened in there.

Knowing the shuttle service was leaving that hospital every half hour, all I had to do was get a pass out of The Sixteenth Division. The one thing I could always do is get a pass to leave that building to go see a Catholic priest. Once or twice a week I would get a pass to leave ‘Nuts and Bolts’ and demand to see the priest. Then I would leave the building go down to the hospital on the base and jump on the shuttle bus to downtown Chicago. I would slip the driver a twenty dollar bill each time and then spend the afternoon shopping all around downtown. I would buy everything from alcohol to cigarettes to real clothes like sweatpants people could wear under their uniforms to keep warm. I would then make it back to the base on the shuttle van and sneak the stuff back into the building. I would then sell everything. My most profitable thing was to sell a single cigarette for five dollars; this was before the government started taxing cigarettes to the hilt. I ran this hustle for the entire time I was locked up waiting for my separation papers. It was a risky thing because if I got caught I would be charged with being AWOL and I could have been sentenced to years in prison. However, there was no way I was going back to Detroit empty-handed. Once people in The Sixteenth Division figured out I was their personal store to buy stuff, I never had to fight again. The rest of my time there went smoothly.

Three months passed and my separation papers came back from Washington, D. C. and I was released forever from the Navy. I got the bus ticket to Detroit that was promised to me. I cheerfully got on the bus and headed towards my new life with a pocket full of cash. As I looked out of the bus’s window to the snow driven terrain of the Midwest I realized once again my life was about to change.

Chapter 23

Returning back to Flo in Detroit did not last or go very well. When I got back to her down in the basement of her father’s house, I’m not so sure the Parklands were exactly happy to see me. After all, I was thrown out of the service and that had no honor. I had no idea what I was going to do for a living, so just to get everyone off my back, I got a job at Pizza Hut of all places. My first day there the phone rang at The Pizza Hut and it was Flo on the phone. She was at the airport about to get on a plane to fly back to her mother in Tampa. She told me that she heard me on the phone with my high school sweetheart Ann Marie. I did not remember too much of what I said on the phone with my ex, but I’m sure the conversation was very sexual in nature.

I was standing there in the middle of freaking Pizza Hut trying to talk Flo into coming back home. I told her that she could not just leave me there in Detroit at her father’s house. I talked her down off the ledge of madness and she came home from the airport. I apologized and made all sorts of promises that night lying in bed with her. The next morning while Flo was still asleep, I woke up, grabbed my shit, and took her car to the truck rental place. I went in and rented another moving truck for the day and just left Detroit and drove back to New York where my family was. I never saw Flo ever again for the rest of my life.

I drove the truck to New City, New York in Rockland County, which was where my grandparents lived. New City was a rich county that was twenty minutes outside New York City off the Palisades Parkway. I just showed up and asked Grandpa if I could stay with him and Grandma for a while. They knew I just got out of the Navy and that it was under not so good circumstances that I left. As I sat there at their dinner table that first night, I let them know that the rental moving truck that was in their driveway was stolen. After dinner, Grandpa and I drove it to the supermarket in town and left it in the parking lot. Grandpa even helped me wipe the whole truck down to get rid of the prints. It was probably the only real crime he ever did in his life. I remember it being a real adventure for him and he tracked the truck for months before it was returned back to the rental company. He kept giving me updates as to the status of the truck. He would say, “It’s still there, Charlie.” with a grin on his face. He was blown away that no one came for the truck for so long. I told him, “Nobody gives a shit, Grandpa.” Things really were different back then. Today the truck would have been stopped from leaving its area with a GPS signal. Back then, I could just rent it for a day for twenty bucks and drive it all around the country. It was not stealing; we would just borrow the damn truck and the rental companies didn’t give two shits about any of it.

My grandparents ended up with a big house in Rockland County, New York through the strangest of ways. We were just a working-class family from the city, so having our family now based in New City was kind of cool. My grandmother had an operation and the doctor left a surgical tool the size of a big wrench in her and sewed her back up. She actually died a couple of times during this incident and was brought back to life. Needless to say, the lawyers had a field day with this and lo and behold our family was now part of Rockland County, New York. Grandpa was doing his 40/40 plan at the time with the electric company of New York City called Consolidated Edison or Con Ed as everyone calls it. His generation was the last to actually work for a company for forty years and was able to get their forty-dollar gold watch. Grandpa was a meter reader for Con Ed and would drive every morning from New City to New York City to walk the streets of Manhattan and read the meters of the buildings. He had an ironclad union job that was completely untouchable and dripping with all of the insane lifetime benefits that were afforded to blue-collar workers back then. It was truly a different time and place. This country will never again see anything close to what workers received from companies back when the union was strong.

To highlight the untouchable nature of his job, there was one high-rise in the city that had a superintendent that my grandfather hated. The two just did not get along. Grandpa had the master key to the building that could shut off all the electric of the building at one time and throw everyone into darkness. This was “the real” master key. Every seven years he would walk up to this building and turn off the electric leaving everyone to scramble in darkness until Con Ed could get out there and turn the lights back on. This incident happened every seven years, because union rules said after my grandfather did this, they could only take the master key from him for seven years. Every seven years, they would have to hand him back the master key to that building according to union rules. While walking along his route, he would once again turn the building off that very day he got the key back.

When I was younger I used to laugh at this madness but later on in life I thought about all the people in the building that had nothing to do with that grudge that were thrown into darkness over this thing between the super of that building and my grandfather. Whatever happened between those men it seemed very personal. However, knowing Grandpa, it could have been something as simple as the guy making some remark about a horse Grandpa was betting on. Horse betting was Grandpa’s passion. At the time there were storefronts all over New York that you could walk into and walk up to a window and bet on a horse race that day. Horses run each and every day and you can bet on them, if that is your thing. He would make little dollar bets on this horse or that horse each day. It was called Off Track Betting or OTB, which is what everyone called it. Grandpa lived for OTB and would stop by any given window during his shift of walking up and down the streets of New York City reading the electric meters of buildings and make a bet on a horse. Every once in a while he would turn a three dollar bet into three hundred dollars and he would be the proudest man in all of New York. It really didn’t matter what money the man had made, he had a stepdaughter, one of my aunts, that would siphon off every dollar the poor guy ever earned, but that is a whole other book. Grandpa was a standup guy and I loved almost everything about the man. He wasn’t my biological grandfather, he was my grandmother’s second husband; but he had such an influence on me anyway and who I learned my work ethic from.

Now that I was living so close to New York City, my telemarketing blood started to heat up in my criminal veins. I just knew if I started looking, I could find something right up my alley. I got word from back home in South Florida that my old partner Peter Giovanni and his entire family was busted and sent to prison. Apparently after I left, they got real greedy and were sending out the lock picks C.O.D. Cash Only and refusing to refund anyone a dime. They ran it that greedy way until they were all sent to prison for ten years or so. I felt it was all clear now to return to South Florida. For some reason I felt I was going to settle in with my new residence and I needed to just hang out low for a while. My life had been through some dramatic events and I still did not feel I had an idea what direction I wanted to go. I was still in the middle of a badass northern winter and I thought once spring broke I could make a move. I wanted to settle in with my family in New York and get in touch once again with my Irish roots. My great-grandmother from Ireland was still alive at the time and I think I needed some sense of normalcy in my insane life.

I decided to get a job in downtown New City at the drug store called Drug World. I was fresh out of the Navy and I had a very clean-cut look to me. I walked in the store and got an interview with this hot blond that ran the place. I told her that I was accepted into Princeton, but put it on hold because I was here to take care of my great-grandmother who had failing health. I was hired instantly and they were proud to have such a nice young man working for them. I would walk down Highway 304 from the house off of Arlene Court and trek through the snow to Drug World each day. I helped stack the shelves and pretty much did anything a nice young man with a strong back would do for the nice, rich, white ladies of Rockland County. After work, I would either go over to the one shady block of New City that actually had a black family living there and I would smoke pot and have sex with probably one of the very few black women in all of Rockland County, New York at the time. She also worked at Drug World and while the hot blond who ran the place was trying to flirt with me, the average-looking black lady was giving me head back in the storage room. It would have been quite the scandal if we had been caught. After work, I’d either go over to her house or meet Grandpa at a local bar in New City called Ponchos and Gringos. I’d sit and drink while listening to his stories about his colorful life or how his stepdaughter was going to take all their money because he could not stop Grandma from giving her money every time she’d ask and she would ask all the time. I pretty much spent the winter in this kind of routine. I was enjoying this time with my family. On the weekends other members of the family would show up to the big house for dinner and spend the day from all different other parts of New York. I missed a lot of this kind of thing growing up in Florida.

Life went on like this for me throughout the entire winter and into spring when everything would once again change with one phone call. The only phone in the entire huge house was in the kitchen and it hung on a wall against this god-awful wallpaper. It had an extremely long cord that you could walk around from room to room with it as to try to have a private conversation. Cordless phones had not been invented yet. Push button phones did exist at the time, but my grandparents still had the rotary phone. This was the world of communications before caller ID, call waiting and other things we take for granted nowadays like smart phones.

The phone rang and Grandma answered it. She yelled that the call was for me. I walked into the kitchen and she handed me the receiver. I said hello and the voice on the other end shocked me right down to my very core. It was Peter Pignola. It was the mob! I thought, “Oh My God they found me!” Panic set in while I tried to apperceive how on Earth they found me at this house or got this phone number. It wasn’t until many years later that I figured out it was probably Flo that gave Peter my grandmother’s number and not some superhuman power of The Mob to track me down. After all, Flo’s mother Bonnie still worked for Peter.

Peter started off the conversation saying that he owed me an apology. He said that he should have never fired me, because when they went back after I left and ran the numbers, yes I had a lot of chargebacks, but because I wrote so much business they figured out I actually had a lower percentage of chargebacks than the rest of the staff. He told me he knew I had nothing to do with the raid and that had nothing to do with anything I did for him. He explained to me that they wanted to relocate to Atlanta, Georgia and start up a new phone room there where the laws were more relaxed for our kind of thing. He offered me a job and asked me to come down to Atlanta and get back to doing the thing that I do and we can start “rocking and rolling again.” Those were the words he used. I accepted his apology and his job offer on the spot. He told me that when he hangs up with me, he will purchase a plane ticket for the next flight out to Atlanta and I needed to get down to the airport right now. He asked me what airport I wanted to fly out of and that he would have his man Jerry Thomas there at the airport in Atlanta to pick me up tonight. I told him that I wanted to fly out of Newark Airport because the traffic was easier for me. We said our goodbyes and I hung up the phone and looked over at my grandparents and said, “I got a job!” Everyone in the house stood up congratulating me. I told Grandpa the only problem is I’ve got to leave now because the job is in Atlanta and I needed a ride down to the airport. Grandpa woke up very early in the mornings to do his job and he went to bed early. However, the thought of getting me out of his hair was too inviting and he agreed to take on the evening traffic and take me now down to Jersey. I arrived at the airport where there was a first-class ticket waiting for me. I hugged Grandpa goodbye and thanked him for everything. As the plane took off into the sky, I looked back at the skyline of New York City as the plane circled around before it made its southern path. As the lights started to fade I stared out the window knowing my life was about to change once again.

Chapter 24

When I arrived in Atlanta Jerry Thomas was there to pick me up in a Cadillac. Jerry was an alright kind of guy. He was Peter’s man that ran the phone rooms for him. The problem with Jerry was his wife. Apparently, Jerry suffered from some kind of accident or condition and the word on the street was he could not get an erection or at least this is what his wife would tell everyone. She was an extremely aggressive woman that would pay the men in the phone rooms fifty dollars to fuck her. I’m not one to judge anyone’s particular freak but this lady was not a lady and I could not stand her. I never took her money and I made it a habit of not fucking other men’s old ladies in phone rooms. Jerry took me out to dinner at some Chinese restaurant in Atlanta. At the dinner he told me that Peter already got me a place to live. He said that it was a real nice place that was already furnished. He gave me the lowdown of the phone room and I realized I was going to be the first one on the phones and that they were going to build this entire phone room around me and my talents.

After dinner, Jerry dropped me off and I went into my new place. It was a real nice apartment and I just lay down on the bed with my hands behind my head staring up at the ceiling taking in my new environment, when all of a sudden there was a knock at the door. I figured it was Jerry and he forgot to tell me something. I opened the door and it was Jerry’s wife. Before I could say anything, she blasted past me holding up a fifty-dollar bill in her hand. She goes and lies on my bed telling me she is glad to see me. I was so freaking angry. I asked her to leave and told her I was tired. The woman would not listen to a word I was saying and she started to take off her clothes. I told her if she did not leave I was going to call the cops. Finally the broad gets up and leaves. I slammed the door and sat down very angry. I mean I wanted to make money with Peter for sure, but there was no other guy in the phone room for this broad to fuck. There was no way I was going to have to deal with this. I picked up the phone, called my old friend Pep in Tampa, and asked him to come pick me up immediately. He drove up and picked me up within eight or nine hours and we left and went back to Tampa. Of course, Pep helped himself to a lamp and a wastepaper basket being the thief that he is, but I was not going to complain, I just got from New York to Tampa and it did not cost me a dime.

Pep was now living in another apartment complex behind Ryan’s Steak House in Tampa. He was working as a waiter in the place. I stayed with him for a week or so and he got me a job there. After one day of that bullshit, I asked him to drive me back to South Florida. The other Peter was now in prison and all that shit was old news anyway. I was a little older and wiser now and I realized I probably never needed to even leave South Florida. I was young and on drugs back then, maybe I should have just worked all that out with Pete, but I was not one to cry over spilled milk. All I knew was I left South Florida over some dude’s chick that would not leave me alone and I returned for the same reason. Pep drove me back to Fort Lauderdale and I had him drop me off at The Galahad South, which was a high-rise on the beach in Hallandale my stepmother lived at. I needed a place to stay and I was real close with her. She was the ex-wife of my stepfather and for years I would have sex with her and her daughter who was my stepsister. Back then my mom got married to this dude and walked in and said, “Here is your new stepsister.” She was a hot blond a year younger than me. I said whatever and just took her virginity and then slept with her and her mother for over twenty-something years. For most of that twenty-something years neither one knew the other was sleeping with me. These two women had severe emotional issues to say the least but I loved both of them in their own ways and I felt safe with them.

After a couple of days hanging out at the beach I noticed that the man that was working the valet service for the building was my old social studies teacher that was fired for being a raging drunk. I could not believe my luck; it was like Christmas in the spring. Later that night I slipped him a fifth of vodka and went back a few hours later and the guy was passed out drunk in the valet room. He was sleeping on this stool just snoring away. Above his head was a board full of hooks that held the keys to every car in the building that used the valet. I saw one that said Volvo and I snatched it off the hook real fast and walked out into the parking lot. I walked up and down the rows looking for a Volvo and lo and behold, I found the only one in the parking lot. I slipped the key in the lock and bingo I had a car.

I drove through the night back to Ocala, Florida to visit my dad. Pop and my mother had been complaining that I was back but did not come and see them. Here their son had been living in Tampa, Detroit, North Chicago and New York and now he was back and was being a bad son who did not stop by to see his folks. I drove to my grandmother’s house, called my pop in the morning, and told him to come over to his mother’s and meet me for breakfast. When he arrived and saw the Volvo in the driveway he asked me where I got the car and I told him the story. He just shook his head and laughed while we sat in the kitchen. Grandma, the evil one, was cooking us breakfast and my dad asked if I wanted to go on a canoe trip. It was springtime again and the park service started up the canoe runs down the Ocklawaha River. You could park your car at the end of the ten-mile run and the park service would drive everyone back to the starting point where you dropped in the river. I told him I had some Placidyl pills from South Florida and if he brought the vodka, we could have a good trip. These were amazing pills that would get you fucked up. They were hard to get but I knew a guy on the beach who could get anything. By this time in life, I always tried to bring my father some kind of pills to make him happy to see me. Elvis famously gave Priscilla two of them and she slept for three days without waking up, so I thought he’d like these pills. We ate up the breakfast Satan cooked up for us and headed out the door to the liquor store. In order to get the park service to drive you to the starting point you had to be there by a certain time.

The trip was going fine while the both of us paddled down the river. The alligators swam beneath our canoe and all of the wildlife that lived on the river was coming alive for the springtime. Pop brought a jug that was used for drinking water that he kept empty to put all his stuff in. He could keep all his keys and wallet along with the pills in this jug that would float in case we tipped over. He wore a floatation device because he never learned how to swim and if we tipped over, he along with the jug would float. We drank vodka as we traveled down The Ocklawaha River and all of a sudden my father goes to make a sudden move and we tipped over the canoe and we found ourselves in the river. We got everything upright and made it over to the riverbank so we could get everything organized. Sitting on the bank of the river, Pop went to take some of those pills I brought him. When he opened the jug, he could see that it leaked and there was water in it. The water liquefied the green pills turning the bottom of the jug into this green puddle of narcotic soup. I told him to dump it, but he decided to drink the green liquid Slurpee-like Elvis Cocktail and I just sat there wondering what that would feel like for a high. I joined him in the madness and that changed the trajectory of the entire trip. I don’t remember much after that, but I slightly remember smashing into trees later down the river and tipping over several times. We ended up stoned out of our minds sitting on the bank of the river passed out until the next day.

At some point, we made it back to civilization and I left Ocala driving my new Volvo towards Tampa. I wanted to visit Pep next and after that return to South Florida to go see my mom.

When I arrived at Pep’s place, he asked me where I got my new car and I told him the story. He was not working that day so we decided to just hang out and party a little. Pep decided to throw a little party and introduce me to his new crowd of friends that were the service workers from Ryan’s Steak House. During the course of the night, Pep could not shut his mouth telling everyone at the party that I stole this car outside. People would walk downstairs to go look at it and point at it like it was some kind of game. I pulled Pep into the bedroom and asked him to stop telling everyone about the car. The stupid idiot could and would not shut up about the freaking car. The next morning I got into the Volvo and drove back to South Florida. I realized that Pep could not keep his mouth shut and was somewhat of a blabbermouth. Pep had no code that he lived by. He was never to be trusted and the man did not care about anybody but himself.

I drove back to The Galahad South where my stepmom lived on the beach and where I jacked the car. I parked the Volvo in the exact same parking space I took it from. Too many people knew now that I had this car thanks to Pep’s big mouth. I needed to get rid of it. I wiped the car down to get rid of any prints, I left the keys, and a half-smoked joint in the ashtray. I left all the windows down and walked away. I did not steal the car, in the end; I just borrowed it. I would have loved to see the faces of the people who owned that car, when weeks and many miles on the odometer later, their car returned to the exact same spot unharmed. I wonder whether he already got a check for the car from the insurance company yet. Either way, I noticed that my old high school teacher was no longer working valet at The Galahad South.

I called my mom and asked if I could come stay with her for a little while. It was time for me to go get a job. I had decided it was time for me to return to telemarketing in South Florida. This time I was going to really make my mark. Little did I know how much my life was about to change again. Not realizing it at the time, I was about to build a multimillion-dollar criminal enterprise that would span from coast to coast and get the attention of the Congress, the Justice Department and bring about changes in the laws of The United States that would affect every American sitting around the table eating dinner.

Chapter 25

Right out of the gate I landed a job in Lauderhill, Florida at a firm called Rest Marketing. This was one of the premier telemarketing jobs and firms in our world. The firm was owned by a man named Ed and was filled with many of the high-end talent of telemarketing closers that came out of Las Vegas. Rest Marketing was one of the two top firms in all of South Florida that employed some of the best talent on the phone that were ever produced. These were telephone con men that could pick up the phone and make six figures a year just as a salesman, while never even working an eight-hour day. Rest Marketing along with another firm, were the two top places any telemarketer wanted to be. They paid thirty-five percent and if you could sell, there was big money to be made. The real closers were called reloaders and each and every one of them was provided their own office with their own personal secretary. These were the top-tier shady telemarketers of our nation and they brought in big money and were paid accordingly. They were the tip of the spear of any and every way money could be extracted over the phone. They were the innovators of the greatest pitches and marketing schemes that ever came about. They pushed telemarketing and stretched it to its absolute limits. Journalists wrote articles about these guys. Psychologists tried to understand these men and dissect their brains. They were the kind of guys that The United States Government would chase to the four corners of the Earth once the war began on Telemarketing Fraud and I walked right through the front door and landed a spot as a fronter. It was the first door I knocked on and they did not know who I was, but that didn’t matter, I knew who they were.

I’d like to say that I was there to be a sponge that would absorb their business model and duplicate it to my own means or that I was there with a master plan. However, that day when I got the job, I wondered through my own self-doubt whether I could do it once again. Did I still have it in me to rise to the top and crush these guys? I wondered whether or not I still had the gift. It had been a while and I had been through so much. Now I had to start from ground level and learn everything all over again. I had to start as a fronter in the front room and work my way to the back offices where the big money was made and where I would get my own personal secretary. Now I had to sink or swim and I had to do it in front of some of the best that ever picked up a phone. It was time to go to the bar, I got a job and I needed a drink.

The way Rest Marketing worked was that it was an Ad Spec Firm or Advertising Specialty Company. What they sold was advertising specialty items for businesses. They strictly sold business to business and did not market anything to residential homes and the people who lived in them. They sold pens, key chains, business cards or anything they could print the company name of a business on. Rest Marketing sold these kinds of ad spec items to the business owners directly. The business owners that bought them to hand out to their clients or customers as a form of advertising used these advertising specialty items or ad specs. The sales force was separated into two categories called fronters and reloaders. The fronters were all housed in one big call center room made up of many cubicles called the front room and the reloaders or reload department were individual offices manned by one salesman called a reloader and his personal secretary. The owner and his administration staff had another part of the building and the shipping department had their section too.

Rest Marketing was an outgoing phone room, which meant that the sales force made all calls and we were always dialing out. It was not an inbound phone room where the company would drop mail and wait for the people to call. Ten years before Rest Marketing was even a company, the ad specs industry would sell their clients using a pitch over the phone that there was a company that went out of business that made pens and that we could print their company name on the pens at a discounted cost. The pitch would explain that the pens were acquired so cheap because the warehouse went out of business and that your company could pick them up at a great discounted price and we could just print their names on the pens. This pitch was a very vanilla way for selling things like pens and business cards. From time to time the pitch would also offer them on the other end of the phone some tickets to a jamboree or something. The whole thing was innocent enough or as honest as it gets. Of course there was no pen warehouse that went out of business and the prices were set by the ad spec industry, however it was a fairly clean way to sell the stuff. Now fast forward to Rest Marketing and companies like it. They were now selling the same pens to the same business owners, but this time making them think they were getting one of four awards with the purchase of the pens or any of the advertising specialty items. Just like when I sold the vitamins, the list of awards always stayed the same. The only award on the list that would ever change would be the vacation certificate and that would sometimes be replaced with a diamond tennis bracelet. The other three awards were always a large amount of cash, a car and number four was always one thousand dollars in cash. The booby prize was always number three on the list of awards. The vacation certificates to god knows where, would from time to time be under a lot of heat because of all the problems it caused, so the criminals would plug in a bullshit diamond bracelet that always came with some outrageous appraisal in writing that was not worth the paper it was printed on. If any heat over the bracelet came to the phone rooms, they would just show the appraisal to the authorities and blame the diamond people. The diamond bracelet people would always blame the appraiser and the appraiser was never to be found and always changed names.

Now because Rest Marketing did not drop mail, we had to call the business owners ourselves and make believe that we did drop mail and that the person on the other end of the phone must have missed it or maybe it got lost in the mail somehow. The pitch would go like this. I would call a business and ask to speak to the owner. Once I got through that was half the battle. After getting them on the phone, I would say something like this using my phone name. Back then it was legal to use a phone name like an author would use a pen name. I said, “Hi, this is Scott Starr with Rest Marketing; I’m calling you about the envelope I mailed to you about the premium incentive program where you were guaranteed one of four awards.”

The person would almost always say “What envelope?”

I would say, “You know the one that came to you with the gold eagle on the outside of it. Anyway, the reason for the call is, I was following up on the award that you have been selected to receive and if you don’t have the envelope with you right now, can you grab a pen and a piece of paper, I need to give you the list of awards. One of them is guaranteed to you through our premium incentive program. You got something to write on? Great, number one on the list is a brand new Cadillac; number two on the list is ten thousand dollars in cash, number three is a three-carat diamond tennis bracelet and number four is one thousand dollars in cash. The first thing I want to tell you is congratulations! You are absolutely guaranteed one of the four awards with the participation of our premium incentive program. You did not win any of this, because it is not a contest. If it were a contest, you would have to pay Uncle Sam taxes on your winnings. For you, not only do you not have to pay any taxes no matter which award you receive, but you can actually write off all of this at the end of the year in your taxes for advertising expenses. To be guaranteed one of those four awards all you have to do is buy a small box of advertising from us in the form of pens with your company name printed on them for five hundred and ninety-nine dollars. Just pass out the pens to your customers around town, write off the purchase in your taxes as an advertising expense and enjoy one of those four awards on your list. I hope you drive away with that brand new car, but if you only receive number four, you’re not going to call me back disappointed that you received one thousand dollars for buying a five hundred and ninety-nine dollar box of advertising would you?”

The pitch was just like when I was selling vitamins except this time, instead of telling the poor slob to throw the vitamins in the trashcan, I just told them to pass out the pens to people and write off the cost of the pens in their taxes. Either way, how could they lose, or so the pitch went.

It wasn’t long before I figured out that I never missed a beat and still had all my phone skills that made me who I was. Once again I dazzled the phone room with all my antics of standing up while pitching, using my voice and inflections in a certain way and all of the things that made me a different kind of telemarketer than the normal schmuck that was in and out the revolving door of the telemarketing world. For most people telemarketing was a stopover to some better job. Many people were just looking for some fast cash while going to college or looking for a better job or career. I was the career telemarketer who knew the money that could be made with this skill and trade. For us, this was our career and the suckers who played it straight were the sheeple marching to the slaughterhouse with their paychecks in hand.

Very quickly I garnered the attention of the higher-ups at Rest Marketing. The man that ran the phone room was a guy named Richard Rockwell. Richard and his beautiful wife Cat were from Las Vegas and were the career types that knew how to do this thing. Richard was an older guy who looked like Elvis and Cat was a showgirl-looking type with perfect store-bought breasts and long fake blond hair with a beautiful face. She was Italian and that olive skin just did something for me. It was there that I met Fred Sparks who was this handsome smooth-talking type that could talk a woman out of her panties or a client out of his credit card information. He was an older gentleman that always wore suits. We all struck up a friendship right away and started hanging out after work at the bar and the beach.

I was working as a fronter and fronters only sold the client once. Then, forty-five days later, the reloader would sell them again and start the client through a process with a pitch and method called “Down the Road” where they were turned into this long-term client that bought ad specs from us every forty-five days for years on end. The fronter was only there to produce leads and clients for the reloaders. We would front and then they would reload them. They would load up the client with so much of our product that after years of buying from us, the client had a garage full of advertising specialty items with their company name on it to pass out. They could spend a lifetime trying to pass out all the pens, key chains and stuff we printed their company name on and still never come across enough people in the world to get rid of it all. The reloader was the one who made the real money. He was the one who would develop a long-term relationship with the client and turn a guy who originally only wanted to claim an award, into a long-term client of our firm who spent his entire yearly advertising budget and more with us.

From my cubicle in the offices of Rest Marketing, I could see across the room to a window into an office of one of the reloaders there named Bobby. Bobby was an extremely overweight black guy who was good at three things. He could eat, close a deal over the phone and snort cocaine. These three things Bobby excelled in. In the window was this pretty chick named Tonya and she was his secretary. Little did I know at the time, but that lady behind the glass, was going to be my future wife and ride along with me all the way to the top of the food chain in the world of telemarketing and right into a set of handcuffs put on by The FBI.

Chapter 26

It did not take me long before I asked the cute girl out who was in the window of the reloader Bobby. My modus operandi with phone rooms was to sleep with the ladies that work there and find out all of the secret stuff through pillow talk. My goal at Rest Marketing was to become a reloader and break into the upper echelon of that world. These were my first intentions with Tonya. However, I soon realized that we really clicked and this was going to be something a little more than the normal routine. Tonya was one year younger than I was and we just hit it off from our first date. The first date lasted thirty-five days because we never left each other’s side. She lived with her mother in a part of Fort Lauderdale called Oakland Park, a blue-collar working class town that was mixed with all sorts of nationalities and people. Her mother drove a city bus for decades around Broward County and they had this tiny little house off of one of the main drags through town. I slept there every night for thirty-five days straight and went to work each day at Rest Marketing. Tonya turned me on to this Colombian bakery that was to die for. Each morning we’d head over there to grab some fresh empanadas and head to the office. That was a good summer full of such promise as I look back.

Towards the end of August, I decided it was time to bring Tonya home and have her meet my mother. Any time throughout my life I thought the broad was important to me; I’d bring her home to meet my Irish Mother. My mother always rejected whoever it was and told her bad shit about me. She was a typical Irish Mother and every Mick out there knows what I am talking about. My mother loved one girl I was with in high school named Ann Marie and everyone that came after that little Italian girl was always shit to Mom. So I brought Tonya into the house I grew up in and we were having a nice night with Mom when all of a sudden there was a knock at the door. I opened the door and it was a couple of cops.

Growing up in that house, my mother got very used to cops knocking at the door about her three boys. One was always into something or another, but this time the cops had a completely different posture to them. I asked if I could help them and they asked to come in. Normally the answer to that question is always ‘absolutely not’, but this just seemed very different. I let them in and they looked past me and asked my mother her name and then said ma’am we need you to sit down. The cops explained that my brother Keith was dead! The scream my mother let out was something I have no words to describe to this day. I can still hear it today echoing in my mind’s eye. All I remember was that my legs gave out; I fell against the wall and slid down it in slow motion. I just could not stand. I lost all control of my legs. I sat there leaned up against the wall while Tonya was trying to console me and the cops were explaining to us how my brother Keith killed himself.

Apparently, my brother held his girlfriend and another woman hostage at gunpoint. The friend got out of the bathroom window and called the cops, as the cops charged the house Keith walked his girlfriend to the front door and then walked back into her kitchen and shot himself in the heart. Keith was always a troubled kid and had a history of violence. I will never know why on Earth he did that to himself, but I soon learned suicide is not something that you do to yourself, but rather something that affects an entire family. It is the single most selfish thing a human being can do. In the end, I guess I was just grateful he did not take anyone with him.

I walked away from my job at Rest Marketing and kind of fell off the grid after the funeral. I was pretty fucked up over all of this and watching my mother have a nervous breakdown was something that tore into me even further. I can honestly say my mother was never the same again. I have two versions of my mother, one is before Keith’s suicide and the second is after. The two women are and will always be two completely different human beings all in one body. My family has never truly healed from this event and putting this down in this novel is the first time I have ever written about it or talked about it at all in real life. Just typing these words is a bit of a burden.

I got a job in Miami that was in no way in the circles of Rest Marketing. It was an incoming phone room that used an automatic dialing machine calling numbers and had a recording telling them to call to get an award. I knew no one knew anything about this company and I could just be left alone. The friends I made at Rest Marketing were trying to reach out to me and pull me back to a normal life, but I wanted nothing to do with it.

For months I would just answer the phones there and close deals all day and take the money at the end of the week and fly to The Bahamas with it. I just needed to leave the country and get lost. It was only a nineteen-minute flight to Freeport, Bahamas and I would take a taxi into the local part of town with a guy I worked with that was nowhere near any touristy spot and get a hotel in the real Bahamas. I would get a black hooker and smoke crack all weekend long. Sunday I would make my way back to The Princess Casino where I ate this orange glazed rabbit that they had on their buffet and I would sit at the blackjack table and drink rum and cokes for free. Then when I finally stopped shaking from the cocaine I would get on the plane Sunday night and fly back to Miami. I did this routine every week for months just stuck in this terrible depression and circle of despair. Somehow, I was still dating Tonya, kind of, and also banging some other ladies. I was just as lost as a human being could be. I was stuck in a rut and I did not care. I got off this conveyer belt of failure in the strangest of ways.

I was with my mom one night when this girl that I grew up with when I was very young who lived across the street came back to town and knocked on our door for a visit. The two of us went out to this lake we all used to hang out on and sat there on the tailgate of her pickup truck. She filled me in on how her life had been, her mom and all. Her mother was so beautiful and was always the neighborhood druggie and whore. Back then The Miramar Cops would go over Kathy’s house, bring her grass and coke, and fuck her. Her daughter Missy sat there that night telling me through her eyes what she thought of me and how she had this secret crush on me. She regaled me with stories from our childhood and slowly but surely I started to remember who I was and where I came from. Missy made me feel alive again in a way I cannot explain. It was the weirdest of things; she snapped me back and had no idea what she was doing. Looking at me through her eyes just woke me up. I cannot believe how much her family affected my life and me.

Every boy has one and only one wet dream in a lifetime. Missy’s mom Kathy was the one wet dream I had as a young boy. I remember waking up so scared about the mess in my bed and it was all over that dream about her mother. I tried to fuck Missy right there on the edge of her pickup truck; I wanted to slip it in her so bad, but she went off on some tangent about how she had been loose like her mother and she wanted it to be real with me and wanted to wait and do it right. I told her I understood and had her drive me back to my mom’s making all sorts of promises to see her again. We kissed goodnight and I went in the house and called Tonya to come pick me up. I had no time for Missy’s magical thinking; it was time to get back to my life. There was fucking money to be made and Miramar was the last place I wanted to be. Tonya picked me up that night and I kissed her, placing my lips from one world on to another, it was like I had crossed this imaginary bridge. We drove off and I looked her in the eyes and told her that I loved her for the very first time.

Chapter 27

Leaving the 1980’s behind, I personally embraced and looked forward to the 1990’s. Everything was changing in the world. My 80’s hair-bands were replaced with grunge music out of Seattle and I was now in my twenties and on the way to building my empire. I got a job as a fronter in the other of the two telemarketing firms that meant anything at the time in the world of Ad Specs. Tonya and I got an apartment and moved in together. We got our first place in Tamarac, Florida, which was back then, a well-to-do part of Broward County that was part of all the great towns that were being built out west at the time. Broward County had seen incredible expansion throughout the eighties and they were building towns and subdivisions right up to the edge of the Everglades. If you were white and had some money, you either lived on the beach or out in the western communities of Broward County.

Everything in South Florida was always a status symbol kind of thing and keeping up with the Joneses was very much a part of our collective communal DNA back then. What neighborhood one lived in really meant something in South Florida at that time. South Florida is the melting pot of the melting pot and depending on what part of the tri-county area you were in meant whether the people around you even spoke the same language you do. Where you stood, also determined whether your personal safety was or was not in fact questionable.

Tonya grew up in Oakland Park and I grew up in Miramar; our first place as a couple was not a bad move up from where we came from. Even as young as we were, everybody grows up fast in a big city. Tonya had already been married and divorced by the time I met her. She married some Colombian guy so he could get citizenship and already had some baby that she gave up for adoption when she was sixteen from another man. Between the two of us, we had a lot of life experience already and we made pretty good money together. Living with someone is the only way to really get to know each other. I do not care how long a couple dates; until they live together, they will never know each other.

During this time, Tonya and I started to really get to know one another and we got to know and meet the people of our families. She came from a big family that was from Kentucky. Most all the family still lived there, but many of her brothers and sisters lived in Florida. She never really grew up with a father figure because her mother divorced a couple of times. Giving her baby away at an early age, all added up and took a toll on her personality while helping shape what kind of a woman she was to become. She had coldness to her and she had a violent streak in her that was very surreptitious, that she only revealed to me as far as I knew. Life had not been easy for me and those traits in her felt very familiar to me. I found her to be very interesting and somewhat of a puzzle for me to figure out. She liked to be hit. She explained to me that she liked to be smacked around and actually felt unloved if I did not oblige this craving. It would turn her on and many times this would turn into sex. Our sex life was the one area we did not click very well. In her defense, ninety-nine percent of the female population would not fit my sexual desires. I liked a real whore, a bad girl that would do anything. I had been doing group sex since I was fourteen and my cravings were way off the chart from most people. Tonya was very vanilla in bed and I did not rock her boat with revealing the madness that was me. Since I had never been faithful to a woman in my life, how Tonya was in bed held very little importance to me. I had my swingers clubs and a stable of women in South Florida that I could always sleep with.

I added Tonya’s sister, Debbie, to that stable, because she was very much like me in this area. I always wondered if I settled down with the wrong sister because Debbie and I could have just lived an open lifestyle together; she loved sex. However Tonya was my girl and despite my flaws with this part of life I did enjoy being with her. It was around this time when Tonya got wind that the person she knew as her father, was not in fact her father. Apparently, she was the only one of all the siblings that had a different father but no one would tell her the truth or the story behind any of it. Tonya confronted her mother who refused to talk about it. This subject of who her father was severely hurt Tonya and it had a very negative effect on her sanity. She was going batshit crazy trying to figure it out. I decided all on my own to hire a private investigator and do some digging myself to see what I could come up with. What I found not even Shakespeare could have dreamed up.

I uncovered that Tonya’s mother Vinetta was kidnapped when she lived in Kentucky and was held hostage by her kidnapper for thirteen days in a barn while repeatedly being raped. Tonya was the product of that rapist and those repeated rapes. As I dug further, I found out that she had a half-brother who was the son of the rapist guy and that her half-brother was in prison doing life because he murdered his parents. So Tonya’s half-brother murdered the rapist that raped Tonya’s mother along with the rapist’s wife who was the brother’s mother. The whole thing blew my mind! It was this famous murder case in Kentucky that had articles and all sorts of press about it. Her half-brother killed his parents and put their bodies in a steel drum on the property and went about life like nothing was wrong. Soon the bodies of his parents were found in the drum and he was sentenced to life in prison, because he killed his own parents. This bloodline of Tonya explained the violent streak in her and so much more.

I debated whether or not to tell her the truth with what I found, but I just could not hold back something this stupefying. If I were she, I would want to know. I told Tonya and she just lost her mind crying. She confronted the rest of her family who was now very angry at me for uncovering all of this and everyone owned up to the truth. Strangely enough this entire journey brought Tonya and me much closer together. I was the only one she could trust, her whole family lied to her throughout her entire life. We were starting to build a bond I thought could never be broken by anyone or anything. Our future together would test this premise.

Chapter 28

My time working the front rooms of Advertising Specialty Firms in South Florida finally paid off. A group put together by Richard Rockwell and Danny Maze out of California got the backing of a cash-flush set of Colombians with plenty of money to burn. Richard and Danny set up an incoming phone room in West Palm Beach, Florida where they would drop mail and light the phones up. Fred Sparks and I were tapped to be the reloaders of the firm. My dream of finally joining the upper echelon of high paying reloaders was being realized. All my hard work as a fronter paid off and I was now given a chance to see if I could hang with the big boys. Richard Rockwell gave me my chance and saw in me enough talent to give me that shot. Fred and I would work side by side and share Cat Stockton as our secretary. Fred and Richard were going to teach me what it was to reload and they would have me learn the “Down the Road” pitch that was the secret to reloading. I had about forty-five days before I needed to show up at the office. The company needed to drop tons of mail and start closing deals in the front room so Fred and I could start reloading those forty-five days from the first initial purchase.

I called Tonya and asked her to meet me at one of our favorite restaurants on the water called Martha’s On The Bay. I got there before she did and slipped the Maître d named Mr. G one hundred dollars for the best table by the Intracoastal Waterway where all the expensive yachts parked outside the glass corner wall. Someone was already playing piano for the crowd and I ordered a Captain Morgan with a splash of coke and a lime and some escargot with Beluga caviar on the side. Tonya showed up and sat down asking me what the occasion was. I looked across the table at her just smiling my ass off. I said, “First let me order you a bottle of Dom Pérignon; I have some very good news.”

After getting the bottle and ordering some Long Island Roast Duck I said, “Baby, I got my shot.” Tonya asked me what shot and I told her the news. Immediately her entire face and body language lit up. She knew exactly what this meant for our future and us. She always said if I could ever get in, I would blow these guys away. She said I was the next Dave Kuhn. Dave according to anyone and everyone, who knew this kind of thing, was the best of the best. His numbers were legendary and Tonya worked with me and always said I was better than the reloaders at Rest Marketing. Over dinner I told her she needed to quit her job as a secretary for the reloader Bobby and that she needed to go house hunting for a house to rent that reflected our new station in life. She never blinked an eye and agreed wholeheartedly. I could not be a reloader in the business with an old lady who was another reloader’s secretary. Too many conflicts of interest there and just the optics of that was not what was expected of us now.

We spent the next six weeks moving from the apartment into this huge quarter-million dollar house in Coral Springs that we were now renting. This was a neighborhood and an address that meant a whole lot in Broward. We moved into this huge home with a screened-in pool and deck. I loved this house on so many levels, but my favorite part of it was the sunken fireplace. The kitchen was top-notch and all what Tonya wanted with a big island right in the middle of it. Living in Coral Springs, I could jump on The Sawgrass Express Way to the Florida Turnpike and go to work in Palm Beach County but still be living in Broward on the northwest end of the county. The entire situation was perfect and Tonya nailed everything we needed when she found us this house. Already, I was a long way from my upbringing in Miramar. I lived in a nice Jewish neighborhood now and we threw a huge housewarming party as our coming out party. We wanted the world to know we had arrived. I was so happy and I got so drunk. We invited all of our friends from the world of telemarketing. I filled the house with brand new furniture, bought a bar and stocked it and we were off and running.

Chapter 29

The phone room was perfect in every way. They took over a strip plaza in Palm Beach County and occupied the entire second floor. Some offices were used for the main offices for our South American owners. Other office space was for the front room and still more space belonged to their reload and management departments. There was a convenience store downstairs and a great Italian restaurant and bar called Enzio’s next to the plaza. A close-by bar is always needed for a real telemarketing phone room to flourish.

The front room had phones ringing off the hook. These guys were serious when it came to dropping mail. They were dropping mail in every time zone all the way to the West Coast. Back then to send someone a postcard telling them to call you to claim an award cost fifty cents per postcard and if you wanted to send it in the form of a letter then it cost a dollar. The way the phones rang with people calling for an award indicated to me these guys were dropping big bucks into this operation. I briefly met the Spanish-speaking men who owned the place. I was told they were big in moving white powder out of Bogotá, but how did I know whether that was true or not? All I knew was money did not seem to be a problem with this international group that was put together and they kept to themselves and never bothered the operation in any way. I would have never known they were there unless I’d see them outside walking to their cars. Richard Rockwell and Danny Maze were the faces of the operation and the brains behind it all.

The first day I showed up everything was ready for the reload department to begin. They first sat me down and explained what was called the “Down the Road” pitch. Mastering this concept was my job. This company was a mixture of targeting the general public and business owners at the same time. To my knowledge at that time, I never knew of or even heard of anyone doing both. Normally the type of room would be one or the other. Either it was business to business or it was residential, but these guys wanted all of the money. They wanted to target the whole country and anyone with a credit card or the ability to write a check. The businesses would be sold advertising specialty items and the residential calls would be sold an air purifier system that was a piece of shit. Both of them cost the same to the client claiming the award.

Once the person receives the mail asking them to call to claim an award, the phone would ring in the front room. A fronter salesperson would sell them either ad specs if it were a business calling or they would sell them an air purifier if it were a residential call and promised them one of four awards on the list. Then the company would ship out the product and a promissory note that claimed we would call them in forty-five days to let them know which award on the list they got. Now after all of that had transpired, the reload department steps in and starts to load up these people with tons of products and flowery visions of future prosperity.

The reloader, who was now me, would start them down the road of dreams and greed. I would call them back and announce who we were and why I was calling. I asked the person if they were the one who was guaranteed an award. They would start to get excited and say yes that they were the one who was supposed to get it. I ask them to verify that they are the one who is to receive the award by reading to me the confirmation number in the paperwork that was shipped to them along with the product. They would go get the paperwork with the number on it and come back to the phone all excited and sometimes out of breath. The whole buildup was very dramatic to them. Of course, that is exactly how it was designed and their reaction was exactly orchestrated by the design of the entire con. After they read to me the matching confirmation number, I would ask them if they were sitting down. Then in a very excited voice, I would say, “Congratulations!! You have been chosen to receive the trip to Hawaii! You got eight days and seven nights in beautiful Hawaii, two for one on the airfare and lodging paid for.”

Now the person on the other end would be all excited and sometimes you can hear them screaming out to their spouses, “We are going to Hawaii, honey!”

Immediately I would change the subject, get their mind off the trip, and start them down the road. I would tell the person that I had further good news. “On top of the fact that you are going on that trip, you have also been selected for our Grand Bonanza Bonus Giveaway. I hope you are still sitting down, because you, on top of the trip to Hawaii, you will be receiving a brand spanking new color television set! Congratulations!”

The person would scream, “What!?”

“That is right, but that is not all. We are going to be sending out all the information on the trip to Hawaii and shipping you out a brand new television set for your house; but the real good news is that we will be calling you back in forty-five days to announce the big award that you will receive for the Grand Bonanza Bonus Giveaway.”

The person would ask, “What award, what is it?”

I would say, “Now because of the rules, I am not allowed to tell you what you will be receiving in forty-five days, but I can tell you now that you better be sitting down when you take that call from me. I am going to blow your mind! Now just like before, all of this stuff you are getting is not something that you won in a contest. There are no taxes to be paid on any of this. As you know this is what is called a premium incentive program, where you have to make a purchase to receive everything.”

The person would say they already bought something from us and I would tell them that is why they are going to Hawaii. “That is yours regardless of whether you participate in the Grand Bonanza Bonus Giveaway or not. What I am saying to you now is that you have been selected to receive much more and that when you make another purchase, this time you will receive another small box of advertising, the trip to Hawaii, a brand new color television set and last and most important, I will personally be calling you back in forty-five days to announce the big one!”

They would ask again what it was and I say, “According to the rules I cannot say, but if you can hear what I am not saying and read between the lines, that this second purchase is $1150 worth of advertising specialty items, so you can imagine how big the grand bonanza bonus is going to be. Let me wrap this up by explaining how this works. In two to three weeks, you will receive a delivery from either Federal Express or UPS. In that delivery you will have another box of ad specs that you can pass out to your customers (or if you are a residence then you will receive a cutting-edge security system for your home). Also in with that delivery, you will receive all of the information and certificate on the Hawaiian trip. With all of that, they will hand you a brand new 21-inch color television set and also a piece of paper with a confirmation number on it for the grand bonanza bonus giveaway. That piece of paper is the most important thing in that delivery so hold on to it. I will be asking you for the number so you can claim the big award in the Grand Bonanza Bonus Giveaway. In the meanwhile, do you want me to charge the credit card that you used last time or would you like to use another card or write a check?”

That to you folks reading this book is the Down the Road pitch. You call them back and give them the first award, then you double the last purchase price to twelve hundred dollars, you give them a brand new TV and a dream of something bigger or better down the road in forty-five days. You take their twelve hundred dollars they gave you and buy a TV wholesale, print up some pens or give them some product for their house and ship it all to them. Everything including shipping “never” exceeds one third of the money they gave you and we the phone room, keep the rest. That is how it works, you take one third of their money and do as much as you can with it and send it to them. In their minds, they are only paying for the product. In their mind they bought some advertising pens and got a trip to Hawaii, a brand new TV and god knows what for the Grand Bonanza Bonus Giveaway. In another forty-five days you call them back and congratulate them once again and tell them they were selected personally for the year’s Presidential Grand Bonanza and this time you give them a VCR to go with the TV they got. So sell them another box of advertising and another dream of something even bigger in another forty-five days. That is how the Down the Road works. Every forty-five days you call them back and get them to spend more and each time you increase the gift in the box according to the money they gave you. Maybe this time you put a camcorder in the box with the pens and key chains, but either way, they always get some product, some gift with the delivery and some promise down the road of something big.

Through this process you never tell the person what they are going to get actually and you come up with a name for each promotion each time. As time goes by, they have been in this process for years on end acquiring all sorts of stuff, but always chasing the big one. The person on the other end was nothing more than a greedy gambler. They were greedy trying to get something for nothing and they spent their entire fortunes chasing the dream down the road.

We never ever promised them something that they never got except for the dream down the road. They would always get the products shipped and all of the electronics, jewelry or whatever stuff they wanted. We would keep files on everyone and every call. We would write down what they said, what their hobbies were, whether they went to church or this or that. Over time, we would know about everything that surrounded their lives including deaths in the family. We would build a personal relationship with them and on the next call, mention something they said last time or ask them whether Aunt Jennie got over the flu yet or whether their kid graduated from college since the last time we spoke. We would build very detailed index card files on the entire life of the person including all of their likes and dislikes. We became part of their family. They looked forward to our calls every forty-five days, because we were the only one that listened to them or who understood them. After all, they could not tell anyone around them about their gambling problem or all the money they were spending. We would build a solid, intimate relationship with the person over time that went on for years or until they bankrupted themselves.

These people were the same gamblers that would bankrupt their families with playing the lotto, or going to the casinos or horse betting. That was their inherent personalities and we grabbed a hold of that and exploited it to a psychological level never seen before. We did not need a gun, a fancy casino or a horse track; all we needed was a telephone and we could extract all their money just the same.

I now understood how to “down the road” someone and I was now set on becoming the best reloader the industry had ever seen. Fred Sparks and Richard Rockwell in their apprenticeship of me created and unleashed an unstoppable force that would grab the attention of the Government of the United States of America and end me up on the evening news.

Chapter 30

By 1991 telemarketing complaints nationwide were at an all-time high. Many efforts were made by many different entities to rein in these boiler rooms and their endless schemes. Owners of phone rooms were already having legal problems with this or that. There had never been a coordinated effort by the government to tackle the field of telemarketing in the 1980s but in the 1990s that was to change. Telemarketing nationwide got to a point where we were viewed lower than a politician or a used car salesman. It got to the point that no American family could sit down at dinnertime and enjoy a meal without the phone ringing with some telemarketer selling something. People all over the country would not answer their own phones or screen them through an answering machine just to avoid the onslaught of phone calls invading their home. Professional comics would do routines on the subject and nationwide the complaints kept mounting.

Rumors were coming out from Salt Lake City at the time that the FBI was finally going to get involved with this and try to shut it down. It was just rumor or whispers in the wind and Utah seemed so far away that no one really paid attention to it. For me life was grand. I mastered the “down the road” and was producing record-breaking numbers. Richard and Fred could not believe their eyes each day when they looked up at the production board on the wall and saw the revenue I was generating. According to them, I shattered any numbers Dave Kuhn ever did and I kept it up constantly week after week. Just by myself, I was bringing in thirty-five to fifty thousand dollars a week in pure profit after expenses. I was just one guy on the phone producing all of that. I was getting thirty-five percent commissions on all of it, so I was rolling in the dough.

I started to get sick of the driving back and forth each day to Broward from Palm Beach County. During the course of the day, we would go drink at the bar next-door and driving home some days became an adventure. I decided to rent a room in The Sands Motel on Singer Island off the coast of West Palm Beach. Fred had already been staying there renting the penthouse and the place had a European-style bar downstairs in it and I loved the idea of staying on an island. If I did not feel like driving home to Tonya in Broward, I could just stay in Palm Beach County and lay my head at The Sands.

Singer Island like most islands off the coast of Florida was a well-to-do area filled with mostly rich white people. There were two bridges to the island; one was off PGA Boulevard and to the islander’s horror, one was off Blue Heron Boulevard that connected the island to brown town or crackville depending on your sensibilities. Every Sunday night the blacks would come over the bridge by the thousands and take over the island to party. The locals were devastated by this and some even closed their businesses on Sunday night. A very similar reaction happened to Daytona Beach when Black College Reunion started in their town years later. Since I was always home on Sunday night, I never got to see this event but every Monday night when I landed up at the bar the locals would be sitting around talking about the madness of the night before.

I started living two separate lives. I had my life up in Palm Beach County where I was working and staying at on Singer Island and then I had my life back in Broward County with Tonya. I started dating a woman that worked for our phone room named Jessica and for a while, I had two solid girlfriends that I liked. Jessica had by far one of the best bodies I had ever seen. She had an hourglass figure at the time with perfect teardrop-shaped breasts that were natural size D’s and her face was pretty set in her long sandy blond hair. She literally had a heart-shaped ass. Jessica loved anal sex and that was a huge plus. She actually preferred it, but the chick refused to give head. Tonya on the other hand would not provide anal or oral and only liked being on top. So, as you can see even with two girlfriends I still needed more because my needs were not being met. Luckily, South Florida provided plenty of places and ways to fill that void.

Life went on like that for me for a while. I was making good money and I had some nice ladies in my life and for a time I had not a worry in the world. Tonya did not mind that every year I would go backpacking in the mountains with my father for a week or two at a time, but she was starting to not dig the Singer Island thing. We’d even broken up for days at a time arguing over it. It became clear I had to make a choice. I had to choose one of the two between Tonya and Jessica. I weighed out all of the pros and cons with the both of them and decided to go with Tonya because the woman was a good cook and Jessica could not boil water. In the end, I guess it is true that a way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. I broke up with Jessica and put a ring on Tonya’s finger. I stopped renting a room in The Sands and actually came home at night. Life became kind of stable or so I thought.

Chapter 31

My father called me at the office one day and said he was in town. I had him go over to the bar next-door and wait until I got off work. By the time I got to him, he was pretty well drunk already, so I ordered a drink and did my level best to catch up to his buzz. As hours went by, it was time to go home and I called Tonya and said I’d be bringing home the old man. I told him we would leave his car at the bar and I would drive us home and drive him back to his car the next day when I had to go back to work.

As we were driving home, we passed a strange-looking car with lights on it and my pop said that was a DOT car. He explained to me that the Department of Transportation did not have the authority to pull us over because we were not an eighteen-wheeler. I argued that he did because he had blue lights on the top of his car. So, we are driving down the Florida Turnpike going south from West Palm Beach back to Broward County arguing over this and I decided to test his premise. I sped up to about one hundred miles an hour and blew past the DOT guy. He hit his blue lights on and chased me down. As soon as I pulled over into the emergency lane, he got on the speaker and broadcasted through the air commands for me to step out of the car with my hands up. I looked over at Pop and said if he is a real cop, he will come to my window and write me a ticket. I held my arm out the window and motioned to him with my fingers to come to me. The guy wouldn’t even get out of his car. This went on for a while and I decided maybe this guy does not have any authority and I drove off. He followed in behind me with sirens blasting and blue lights flashing.

As I exited the Florida Turnpike on to the Sawgrass Expressway, at that juncture there is a manned tollbooth. I pulled into the tollbooth to pay my toll and he got behind me just blasting me over the speaker to pull over. He was scaring the shit out of the guy in the booth collecting tolls. I pulled right over where the restrooms were and he came up to the car this time and told me to get out of the car and put my hands on the roof. I told him no and he just stood there completely vexed. I told him that I did not believe he had any authority over me at all because I was not an eighteen-wheeler. He was a redneck type and he just stood there all pissed off. Then he turned around, walked back to his car, and popped the trunk. He pulled out this humongous book and slammed it on the hood of his car. Then he stood there turning pages in it, trying to find the written provision in writing that he has authority over me. Now I sat there for quite a while and thought that this guy can’t find it in the book, because it is not there, so I drove off again.

Now this time at the toll booth was a Florida Game Warden in a pickup truck pulling an airboat and he started chasing me along with the DOT guy. I say chasing, but it was more like an OJ Simpson-like chase going the speed limit. My father was screaming that the game warden had a gun and had arresting powers and I needed to pull over. I said bullshit. Now a car that has no authority over me is chasing me and a guy pulling a boat; I’ll be damned if I pull over now! The next exit was Hwy 441 in Margate and I took that ramp to get off the Sawgrass Expressway. There on the city streets were all sorts of police cars that were from the Margate Police Department sitting there waiting on me. I pulled over and said now that is a real cop.

They dragged me out of the car while my father was pointing fingers at me telling the cops that he told me to pull over and what a bad kid I was. The redneck DOT cop put me in cuffs, drove me back to Palm Beach County, and booked me for fleeing and eluding. Tonya had to drive up to Palm Beach to bail me out. As we drove home, I explained to her what happened and she just shook her head saying that she could not believe the shit I get into.

The next day I went to see a lawyer and told him that in the news there had been a rash of rapes and assaults by some guy who was driving around in a fake police car pulling people over. I said I was not familiar with that car and the other guy was chasing me with a boat. I told the lawyer as soon as I saw a real cop car I pulled over and surrendered. The lawyer just sat there laughing his ass off. He said you know you are facing many years in prison with this charge because it is a felony; he said that the DOT guy was a Federal Agent and not a state employee. Apparently, there are state DOT people and there are those DOT officers who work for the federal government; my luck the dude was a fed. The lawyer said if I gave him a pile of cash, this would all go away.

So I gave the shark his money and in the end, he got it knocked down to a misdemeanor. They dropped the felony charge, because there was in fact a nut case running around South Florida pulling people over, raping and robbing them in a fake police car. Coincidently, one year before I went through this ordeal, another guy did the same thing with a DOT cop on Alligator Alley and got away with it. After that guy beat the rap, Florida passed a law giving the Department of Transportation permission to pull over vehicles with four wheels. The law was less than a year old and I was the first one to test it, so I had to plead no contest to fleeing and eluding. Little did I know, that would follow me for the rest of my life. However, my life was about to change once again with another phone call.

Chapter 32

The phone rang one weekend morning to another change. I picked up the phone while lying in my bed still foggy from the night before to hear the news. The phone room I was a reloader at was done. Something happened and to this day, I have no information on it, except to say our South American owners were no longer in North America and they were never to return. They were gone like a thief in the night. Something happened in their world that I can only guess about, but it was over; there was no more phone room. All the money was gone and all of the employees were not going to get another penny they earned. Since everyone was two weeks behind in payroll, we were talking about a lot of money. The phone call also brought the news that Richard Rockwell had taken the news hard and that he had either a stroke or a heart attack, but he was in the hospital in a coma. My entire world was crumbling apart once again.

I met Richard’s wife, Cat, at the hospital and I stood over his bedside looking down at him. He was barely alive. All the color had drained out of him and he didn’t even look like Elvis anymore. I drove Cat back to her home and she was in bad shape. In her moment of despair, she revealed to me that she was in love with me, that Richard knew it and he would not let her be with me. She explained that they lived an open lifestyle, something I suspected, and that Richard could sleep with other women but she was not allowed to be with me.

I remember being so hard in my pants and wanting her so badly at that moment. We embraced and made out. Cat was a stand-up girl and would not fuck me under the circumstances. She was loyal to Richard even while he hung on for life. We agreed that life was bad timing for the two of us and I told her I cared about her as well. We had that one kiss that was a long time coming. As I drove away from her home, it was the last time I ever laid my eyes on Cat. I tried to find her many years later but had no luck.

Danny Maze contacted me and asked to meet him and some of the computer staff at the old offices. Danny handed me the Rolodex of all the clients I had been reloading. He told me that they were my clients and nobody in the world could get out of them the money I could. He said it would be a complete waste of money if he sold or gave anyone else these leads. He explained that he was getting too old for this shit now and that he could not put anything in his name, because he had a felony conviction for telemarketing out of California.

Apparently, he was under some ban where he was to abstain from all of telemarketing. He told me that with the files on the clients and my talent I could start a new company and keep things going. He told me he would provide all of the shipping support and that Gene who was an older Jewish guy who handled all our computers, was willing to come along with me, if I kept his pay the same. Gene made eight hundred dollars a week or forty-two thousand a year. I took the files from them and shook everyone’s hands and agreed to start another phone room. With that handshake went the last time I was ever a sales person on the phones. From that moment forward, all I ever was and would ever be is an owner.

I had to move fast because I needed to create a corporation in the State of Florida and that took some time to process through. I wanted to name the new phone room as similar to the last one as to not create any speed bumps transferring over the new clients to the new company. I decided to create one corporation that would be my base of operations never to change and another one for the phone room. I also made sure I opened up in Broward County where I lived, so I no longer had to drive to Palm Beach each day. I took the next couple of months finding the space and setting up the phone room with all the office furniture, phones and stuff. I hired a sales force, some staff and I was off and running. We were open for business.

Chapter 33

By 1992, I was amassing great power and money. I decided to pay all reloaders 50% instead of the industry standard 35% and word spread far and wide that there was an owner and a phone room in South Florida paying that kind of money. I started to collect all the greatest talent that was out there. Slowly each and every reloader worth a damn either knocked on my door or called me to get a spot. No one ever paid a salesman half of the net profits anywhere in the country. I live by the motto that I’d rather have one percent of the efforts of one hundred men, than to have one hundred percent of the efforts of one man. Living by this code served me well in those days.

One day I was at the local bank that I had the accounts with and I was told that all of the funds had been frozen and that the accounts were under internal investigation. Apparently, our business practices offended the sensibilities of the bank’s higher-ups and I was standing there with my dick in my hands. I had all sorts of obligations not to mention payroll for my entire network. I went to see a lawyer who explained to me that banks used laws that were put into place for drug dealers and money launderers against phone rooms. He said I’ll probably never see that money again or at the very least it will be tied up for years. When I walked out of his office I had to make a decision. I either had to go into my personal pocket to pay all the bills and payroll until I could set up another corporation and bank account or I had to walk back to my offices and shut it down and fuck everyone out of the money.

Many people and their families were now depending on me to keep it all together. I decided to float everything out of my own pocket and keep things going without alerting anyone to any problem. This was a learning experience for me and a mistake I was not going to make again. From this point on, I would always have a bank account and a corporation waiting in the shadows to jump to. I would now line up my ducks in a row and when one account and company went down, then I would have more companies just lying in wait, as to never miss a beat. Once a bank account goes under suspicion with the bank, opening up another account in another bank under the same company name becomes problematic. I needed a whole new corporation and a new bank as a backup from now on. This was going to be my plan of action and how I would handle these kinds of things in the future.

I had my one corporation that was to always be squeaky clean. For the world, I presented that consultant firm as my front. All other corporations that I would create were to be the revolving and ever-changing names of the phone rooms and who the customers made their checks out to. I would strictly just accept checks and I would pay a courier to go out and pick them up within hours of every sale. I did not want anything to do with credit cards. I already had the reality of each bank freezing up the accounts when things looked weird to them. Inevitably someone would call the bank itself looking for one of the four awards or the “down the road” they were promised. One call to the bank and flags would go up immediately with the bank’s internal watchdogs.

How it worked was that you would just run as much money as you could through any particular account until the bank freezes it. Most owners of the phone rooms would at that moment close down the room. That was why half of the phone rooms came and went. No owner would float the bill when it happened. They would just fuck the sales force, the telephone companies that they owed tens of thousands to and everyone who had anything to do with the phone room. Every time a bank would freeze a phone room’s account there would be a rippling effect throughout the economy as the dominos fell of all the people that were lined up to be paid. I felt that this business practice was short-sighted and filled with greed. I had a more long-term look at our trade and was going to do things differently. I wanted to build a reputation that with this Irishman, “everyone” gets paid. I did not want to leave any trail behind me of unpaid creditors and sales people. I was going to do things completely different from the other people that were shitting all over our craft. I was raised up and taught by the old school guys and considered what we did a trade. Yes, it was criminal of course, but it was a tradecraft and people needed to treat it with respect. After all, did we want to be like the poor schmucks that worked for the man for their forty-dollar watch or did we want to be men and go out into the world and earn it? I wanted to be an earner, period.

I was sitting at a bar in Coral Springs, Florida called G.W. Sharky’s close to the house around the time all this happened to me and overheard a conversation between two drug dealers who were talking about how loose their bank was and how they could just write checks to cash for everything. These two Colombians went on and on about what a shady bank this was. I sat there for a long time just waiting for them to say the name of the bank. I ordered one drink after the other just sitting there waiting on the most important tidbit about their conversation. What was the name of the bank they were talking about? I could not just walk up to them and ask. If they knew I heard what they were talking about, I could get shot in the parking lot for sure. In South Florida, minding your own business was a way of life for us. So I just sat there waiting in their conversational shadow for the one bit of information that I needed. The name. I just needed the name.

I was just about to give up, because they changed the subject of their conversation to pussy and I got off my bar stool and went to take a leak in the restroom. When I came back out, I was going to cash out my tab and go home. While passing their table in the bar, I heard the name I was waiting for. Bingo, I had the shady bank. The bank’s name was “Citibank” and I could not believe my ears. One of the nation’s top banks was the shady bank they were talking about! I thought it was going to be some local South Florida bank, not a huge Wall Street chain. However, that was the bank these drug dealers were bragging about and I needed to go check out this so-called loose bank in the morning.

The next morning I woke up, went down to Citibank, and talked to a rep there about me opening up a bank account for my “advertising” firm. I peppered her with questions and to my delight got all the answers I was looking for. I could in fact just write checks to cash. In our conversations about signers on accounts and such, it came out that their bank only requires a facsimile signature stamp to sign corporate checks. All that was needed was the first initial signature and the rest of the checks could be stamped with a signature stamp. I couldn’t believe my ears. When I walked out of the bank that morning, my mind raced with all the possibilities. The main thing was I wanted to create many different corporations, but I could not just keep putting them in my name. In fact, I was not going to use my name ever again. The only thing my name would be officially attached to would be my consultant firm.

I came up with a plan to take actual bums that lived under the bridges of South Florida and put corporations in their name. I would literally go under the bridge, take the bums, and put them up in a roach motel off Dixie Highway or some other shady part of town. I would explain to them that I am currently going through something like a divorce with my business partner and that I needed to create a new company that my partner did not know about and after the so-called divorce, I would pay the bum five hundred dollars to put the company back into my name. Of course the day they signed the company back over to me never came.

I would supply them with whatever vice they had that landed them up under that bridge. If the bum was a crackhead, I’d bring him crack. If he was a drunk, I would bring him booze and so on. I would keep and feed the bums for about four to six weeks at a time. While I had them, I would take them to get a Florida state picture ID if they did not have one. Then I would create articles of incorporation with the state under the bum’s name. I would have a signature stamp made of their signature from a print shop. When the papers came back from Tallahassee, our state capital, I would clean up the bum and put him in a new suit and march him down to Citibank to open up a bank account under his name. I would do all the talking at the bank and all I would have to do was get the bum to sign the signature card on file with the bank and let them record the signature stamp as well.

Once the account was opened and active, I would take the ID from the bum, bring him back to the bridge he was under, and leave him there with some drugs, booze and some cash. I even let the dude keep the suit. I did this over and over and over again. That way when the heat came down, the authorities would never be able to find the owner of the company. They would say look at this bank account that ran a million dollars through it and ask where is the owner? They could never find the owner because there was no address to be found. The owner never had a cable bill or utility bill in his name. The freaking owner lived under the bridge completely off the grid, so they would never find him. I used to laugh my ass off just thinking of the faces of the men trying to find all these owners. I mean the guy lived under a bridge, so they could never find any of them. I had belly laughs wondering how no one noticed that all of a sudden, all the bums under the bridges were now walking around with tailor-made suits under those same bridges. I mean didn’t anyone notice the change? I laughed so hard some days just thinking about it. I had a drawer full of signature stamps back at the office and some days I’d open the drawer, just look down in it, and crack up laughing. The bums never knew my name or who I was. The irony of the bum living under the bridge with hundreds of thousands of dollars in the bank was priceless.

Once in a while I would get some smart ass bum who would return to the bank and ask for a check and then cash it. As soon as I saw that transaction, I shut it down and never put another dime through that account. I mean who the fuck did they think they were helping themselves to my hard-earned money. Mostly the bums never returned to the bank. I even used bartenders and did the same thing to them. I’d sit up at the bar, tell them my sad story of my pending divorce with my business partner, and offer the bartender the same deal as the bums. I’d give them five hundred dollars up front in cash, so they never doubted the story. It must be real and they certainly wanted the other five hundred when they were to sign the thing back over to me. In the end no one knew me personally, so good luck to the cops trying to figure that one out. I had all the corners covered and it was my intention to take this whole thing to another level. I was really coming into my own that year.

Chapter 34

The money and the power that flowed from it just got bigger and bigger. I had entire phone rooms across the country call me up and tell me they can route all their business to me if I paid 50% to them. I just kept growing and growing. I now had entire phone rooms in other states where I never met a single soul in person and never cared to go see. All they had to do is send the business my way and I took it on.

Tonya and I planned our wedding for this year. Since 1992 was so good to us, I wanted to throw a huge wedding with all the trimmings. I moved us into a mini mansion in Woodmont Country Club in Tamarac on a golf course. We got this huge house to rent for twenty-five hundred a month with a pool and all of the amenities that come with something called a mini mansion. We spent the year planning out the wedding. I wanted us to have a big Catholic wedding and since Tonya was not Catholic, she had to sign papers saying we’d raise the kids Catholic and we had to go away with other couples that were getting married on a weekend retreat thingy.

I wanted the big church wedding followed by a badass reception ending with a dream honeymoon in the Poconos. I hired a film crew to follow us and record the entire thing from the planning stages to the end of the reception and professionally put it to music and do all sorts of cool stuff with the film.

That year we made a trip to Kentucky so I could meet her entire family. They all lived around Louisville and the surrounding areas. It was a great trip. I had never been to Kentucky before and I just loved that city. We had all of these offers to stay with this one or that one, but I found a sex motel that pumped in porn to the rooms and had its own adult bookstore with private booths and glory holes. Somehow, I convinced her to stay there and I was able to slip down the hall and have anonymous sex with strangers and got to partake in oral sex through the glory holes. Tonya had no idea what was going on and thought we were staying there because it was cheap and we were saving money for the wedding.

Some of her family lived in this awesome Catholic town called Pleasure Ridge Park that I fell in love with. It was lined with these cool red brick homes and just the way the neighborhood was laid out, I fell in love with it. She had family everywhere around Louisville; some were in the city, some were in the suburbs, some in the country and others were living in what they called the sticks.

Her family had incredible marijuana that they grew there and everyone was so nice to me. I rode horses for the first time and just partied for two weeks straight. I had what was to this day, one of my favorite meals of my entire life. I was up in the country in a town named Jeffersontown or J-Town as they called it and the family matriarch had this real cool country home. All the family was there for dinner or supper as some called it.

The old lady that ran the family asked me if I wanted to go shopping with her to get dinner for everyone. I said yes and I put on my coat and walked towards the front door. She said, no Rich it is out this door, pointing to the back door of the house. I did not understand because if we were going to the supermarket then the front door is where we would get to all of our cars. I walked out the back door and in her backyard she snatched up a live chicken and killed it right there in front of me and started to pick potatoes and other vegetables that were growing back there and we walked back into the house. Everyone was laughing and asked me if I went shopping yet? The old broad put the chicken in the kitchen sink and started to pluck the feathers. She cooked up the veggies and made white peppercorn gravy and we all sat down and ate. It was one of the best meals of my entire life. I could not believe how fresh it all tasted and how awesome the meal was. I had this meal over twenty years ago, as I write it down in this book, and I can still remember how great it was. Hands down that was one of the best meals I ever had and I will never forget going shopping in J-Town, Kentucky. Those two weeks in Kentucky were one of my favorite trips.

Also that year, I carved out some time to go backpacking with my old man in the Appalachian Trail in Georgia. We spent a week up into the mountains and did our usual routine where we hiked up a metric gallon of vodka and got drunk the first night. That trip, on the first night, we made it to a lean-to, which is a wooden shack with three walls built on a mountainside, and got drunk with five or six other guys that were there that night.

It was all I could do to cram everything a single guy could do before he ties the knot. I knew not much of my life would change after the wedding vows, but it was fun acting as if it would. I knew I would still go on backpacking trips and still slay all the vagina I wanted after the big day. After all, Tonya only gave me access to one hole and that was two holes short of my libido’s playground.

That year I spent as much time as I could with Tonya’s sister, Debbie. You could say I was falling in love with her for sure. Everything about her was more my style and she was so fun to be around. Tonya was prettier, but I did not give a damn; Debbie was fun. We would sneak away from the rest of the family at events and have sex right under their noses. It was very exciting and a cool time. She was fun to talk to and was a drinker like me, so we hit it off in many categories.

It was becoming clearer and clearer to me I was marrying the wrong girl in the family. It wasn’t like I did not like Tonya, but I kind of didn’t. She was a cold fish in so many ways. The more money I made, the more she spent it. The money I was making almost meant nothing to me. I was hooked on the power it brought.

I was able to do anything. I could eat at the best restaurants, buy the best clothes and I had all the toys any man could dream of. I wanted for nothing in those days. I never cared about saving any of the money because it was just so damn easy to make for me. I literally burned through money. I would throw parties where I would light one hundred dollar bills on fire in front of everyone just to watch them scream in horror at the sight of money literally burning in my glass ashtray. It meant nothing to me, but it damn sure affected my guests to watch that spectacle.

A friend I grew up with had a mother who was the vice president of a rent-a-car company and I would rent brand new cars for the whole month under my company. Each month I drove a different spanking brand new car. People around town would see me in a different car all the time and wonder what the hell I did for a living. So many people back then including most of my family, never believed for a moment I could be living as I was off phone sales. They were convinced I was a drug dealer.

My mother would ask me to my face whether I was a drug dealer or not and I would tell her that I was not, but in the end I would have to do some time for it anyway. I always would tell the people who knew me my whole life, who would be so proud of me, that one day I would pay for it and go to prison. No one ever would listen to me back then. They would just pat me on the back and tell me how proud they were of me because I came from nothing.

Tonya was completely out of control spending the money. She bought these real expensive Persian cats that had pedigree papers and everything. She kept buying one cat after the other as if she was trying to fill some hole in her soul with them. At one point, we had nine fucking Persians and eight of them had papers! Then she moved on to dogs and rabbits and the next thing I knew I had all of these animals. Most of them I could not stand and every freaking week, one or more of them were going to a vet.

I was the cornerstone to that vet’s motherfucking practice and probably paid off his mortgage for all I know. I never really thought about murdering people too often, but I had money and I really did think about whacking that fucking asshole just out of principle. However, Tonya would just find another vet to soak us. People think vets are good people because they work on animals, well that is bullshit, and they are greedy money-hungry bastards that should be more closely regulated by the fucking government. To hell with the boiler rooms Uncle Sam; go look at these fucking veterinarians that are soaking housewives out of their husband’s hard-earned money. That whole industry is riddled with fraud. Do not get me started with vets! I’d have them all thrown off a cliff if I could.

Tonya’s spending became something that I started to deeply resent about her. I would send her to the top high-end hair and nail salons in South Florida and even her best friend owned a nail salon, but no, that was not good enough for this woman; she ordered the entire table and workstation that you see in any salon. You know the one with the lamps and the arm thingy and all. She literally set up a corner in our home and turned it into her very own nail salon so she did not have to bother herself with making an appointment and actually getting up off her ass and going to one. The extravagance that she lived in was something that made me dislike her more and more. I did not care about the money she spent, but when I saw what it did to her, it sickened me.

She was not the girl I fell for in 1989, she became this rich bitch who cared more about her stuff and those dumb animals than she did me or even her own mother. I told her to buy new furniture for both of our mothers and she just looked at me with that selfish face. I looked back at her and said, “Just do it, Tonya.”

With all that said, the wedding was still on and the day grew closer and closer. Destiny mandated that this cold fish was to be my wife. Ironically, fish were the only pets we did not have, but I would have never known that when I lay in bed each night.

Chapter 35

The wedding day arrived and I found myself standing in the room in the church where the priests dress and put on their robes and such. It was time for the wedding to start and there was no sign of Tonya. Fifteen minutes go by, thirty minutes go by and now forty-five minutes from the start time and still no Tonya. The Deacon there explained to me that it looks like I was left at the altar and that the whole service took an hour to do and we were running out of time. He explained the church sets aside a certain time and then has other things to do with the building. I asked him to give her fifteen more minutes and then I would explain to the crowd. Five minutes after that the limo showed up with Tonya fifty minutes late to her own wedding.

If the church officials thought they were mad, they had nothing on my anger. I had to keep any anger I was feeling inside and hide it. I thought that was a clear sign that this wedding should not go off, but somehow I just kept marching to the beat of the day’s events. I stood up there while we were being married wondering to myself why I was doing this. I guess everyone I grew up with was all getting married and stupidly I felt like it was the thing to do. I knew standing at the altar I did not love this woman in any measurable way. However, I was young and I went through with it all anyway.

I remember being at our reception when the master of ceremonies did this routine where he announced that I am married now and that all the women in the crowd that had a key to my place had to bring up the key and place it on the table in front of the wedding party. Prior to his announcement, he had passed out keys to all the women that were there. We had a crowd of over one hundred people that showed up to our reception and when all the ladies brought up the keys, the ones that had been my lovers had this special wink in their eyes. I remember just sitting there looking out among the crowd and being alarmed about how many people I had sex with that were there at my wedding. It was more than I realized. When we sent out the invitations I was not thinking about any of that when we made up our guest list. I decided to make a party of my own wedding and I danced, drank and had a great time.

That night when we went to our hotel room to have our so-called wedding night, Tonya invited all of her girlfriends. I could not believe it. She said she was not a virgin and that we were going away for two weeks to the mountains and that she just wanted to party. As I fell asleep on my wedding night I looked across the room at all the bodies passed out everywhere and all over our bed and thought if this did not show that this was a mistake, nothing would. I was crushed that she shared our wedding night with everyone like that and I just kept it all inside and never cared about the concept of a wedding night ever again after that.

We showed up at the Champagne Palace at the resort in the Poconos. Now we had two weeks to ourselves, and there was no one to bother us. Our room was a two-story room with a giant Jacuzzi shaped like a champagne glass that spanned the entire two floors. There was a sauna in the room along with a heart-shaped bed. We finally consummated our marriage with some uneventful sex and went down to the club to eat, drink and see the shows.

To give you just the slightest idea of what kind of woman I just married or how this honeymoon went, I’ll share with you my biggest memory of those two weeks. We were up in the mountains on horseback with many other couples staying at the resort that just got married or renewed their wedding vows being led by a tour guide who was also on horseback. While we were riding horses through the mountains, Tonya broke off one of her acrylic nails. She made this big ordeal over it and the next thing I knew, the whole mountainside tour was over and everybody was off their horses and on their hands and knees looking for Tonya’s broken nail. Yes, the princess broke off an acrylic nail and everyone had to stop his or her honeymoon and look for her nail on the ground. I was mortified sitting on top of that horse watching this all go down. Tonya’s prissiness knew no bounds and right there on that beautiful mountainside, I knew without a shadow of a doubt, I could not stand this woman and that I regretted ever doing this. I numbed myself with alcohol that trip and just pressed my pain and humiliation down deep inside me. I just knew I screwed up marrying this broad. I just wanted to get home, have sex with Debbie and a few other people, and get back to making money. I could not wait for the honeymoon to be over.

When we got back home, I decided that I was going to create a tool company and open another phone room doing the lock pick thing. Everything else was running smoothly and I wanted to see if I could bring back the glory of the lock picks and make some money doing it. A couple of weeks after we returned from our honeymoon, word got out that there was a hurricane coming. I, along with some friends of mine, went around to all our parents’ houses helping them board up their homes before the storm hit. The storm was to hit the next day and it wasn’t anything too alarming, just another average hurricane that we were very much used to living through in South Florida. They called this one Andrew.

Most of them, we would just throw hurricane parties and drink throughout the storm. While driving around in a car with my friends boarding up our parents’ homes, one friend of mine offered me some cocaine in a tin foil packet. I rolled up a dollar bill from my wallet and snorted up a big huge line. Immediately I screamed to pull over the car and I hung out the car door and threw up. My head started spinning and I just felt strange.

They dropped me off at my house and it was time to batten the hatches down at our place. Tonya was already bringing in the plants off the pool deck. The phone rang at my house and it was my friend agonizing over me, saying that he gave me the wrong tin foil and he could have killed me. He told me the white powder was heroin and not cocaine. He explained that it was something called super pure and was a form of heroin so pure that you can snort it. However, one takes just a little bump of the stuff and not a huge line of it, because they can overdose. I hung up the phone and realized I survived the overdose and I was happy that now I understood what I was feeling. I never did heroin before or after that. I remember it was a great feeling. Once I knew what I was on and why I was feeling the way I did, I just enjoyed my buzz and was going to ride out Hurricane Andrew stoned on heroin. It sounded like a plan to me.

Early in the morning, we were told that the hurricane went nuts and turned into a category 4 or 5 and that people were going to die. We were watching Bryan Norcross who was our local weatherman at the time and he was on TV explaining that people were in fact going to die tonight and that this was a killer hurricane. As the storm hit, my mother called me screaming that her shed in her backyard that held all of our stuff from lawn mowers to tools, just blew by her kitchen window. It was very clear this was not a normal storm. I walked outside on my back porch stoned out of my mind watching my entire hedge line bend under the assault of the wind. Things were flying around in the air so I went inside.

When it was over we went outside to see that the roads were all blocked from trees and all sorts of stuff in the road. Word got out quickly that a little south of us in Tamarac is where the eye wall hit and people were saying the entire city of Homestead was gone. People were saying the entire city was wiped out and no building survived. Reports of deaths were coming in and our local weatherman was being hailed as a hero because he saved so many lives when he instructed families to get in the closet and pull a mattress over their heads. People were calling in the news stations saying that was the only way they survived. Bryan became a national weatherman and was promoted up to the networks on CBS and he eventually took over the National Weather Service. Somehow, I survived the meanest hurricane of my life stoned on some really good heroin. When anyone ever mentions Hurricane Andrew, I just know that that was the only cat 5 hurricane I was in and the only time I ever did heroin in my life. That time holds memories close to my heart, good and bad.

Just hours after the storm people were standing in the middle of major intersections selling ten-dollar gallons of water. That price gouging upset many people, but it brought a smile to my face because of the pure capitalism it was. Life went on and it was time to make some money.

Three days after Hurricane Andrew I was at my office in Tamarac in the middle of a meeting about setting up another phone room for the lock picks when my secretary told me my brother Steve was on the phone screaming. I picked up the phone and he was screaming that mom’s house was on fire! I told him to put out the fire but he said he could not because it was too big already. He said my stepfather’s mother was smoking and started the fire. I jumped in my car and drove at an unbelievable speed to get from Tamarac to Miramar in Broward County.

I pulled up just in time to watch my childhood home burn down to the ground right in front of me. I just stood on the street looking at my brother and my stepfather’s mother who was a schizophrenic and should have never been allowed to smoke in the house or be left alone with my idiot brother. I stood there and watched the house I grew up in burn down to the ground. My mother showed up not too long after just standing in the street crying beyond words. Her home survived Hurricane Andrew only to be burned down to the ground three days later by her crazy mother-in-law.

In a matter of a few weeks, I got married, got hit with a cat 5 hurricane and watched my family’s home I grew up in burn down to the ground. The year 1992 was one hell of a year for me as I look back. It was definitely one for the history books and a year I’d rather forget.

Chapter 36

My attempts in 1993 to revive the lock pick scheme failed completely. Every dollar invested into getting it off the ground and all the time and effort that went into it was a waste. It was scorched Earth territory and nothing more. I never saw anything like it. I have no idea what Peter Giovanni did after I left or whether he had a trial or not, but the entire targeted market of the automotive industry was completely aware of the master key/lock pick scenario and every single call to a prospective buyer only ended up rehashing the fraud of the heyday of lock picks. It seemed like there was no one left who we called that did not attack us over this issue or was completely aware of the scam. I had to shut the whole thing down before it ever really got off the ground and accept the fact that it was a complete and total loss.

Things were changing already in our world and there were things bubbling under the surface. It felt that maybe there would be some kind of seismic shift in the world of boiler rooms coming our way. It wasn’t anything I could put a finger on until March of that year.

In March of 1993, two things happened that caught my eye and caught the eye of almost everyone in our world that had a brain. President Bill Clinton’s nomination of our South Florida nemesis Janet Reno to the nation’s top cop position of Attorney General was confirmed and the same month the FBI arrested hundreds of telemarketers in a sting called Operation Disconnect. I cannot tell you the shock waves this Operation Disconnect caused in the world of boiler rooms. It was official; the United States government was now working collectively to target the world of telemarketing fraud across state lines. Up to this point and since the 1970’s there had been no federal effort to combat telemarketing fraud. This lack of organization and inability for local municipalities to work across state lines was the only reason our world was even able to exist. It was that window, in the birth and rise of our modern communication grid, which gave rise to the world of illegal telemarketing. It was that era in the evolution of communication technology in America, which created its own category of crime. This was the period in American history that I rose to power.

Right away, other owners and reloaders alike were getting together at our watering holes to discuss what was going on. Hundreds of people we all knew or knew of, were arrested, but when the smoke cleared, The FBI never got to any of the real players in our world. Those of us that survived Operation Disconnect and were still standing were empowered with a false sense of invincibility. We felt smarter and stronger than ever.

Personally for me, I knew that the way I conducted business with my system of using bums under the bridge was nearly untouchable. The other phone rooms in my world were sitting ducks and had no understanding why they were. The key to my prowess was that I never told anyone else how I did it. I never shared my special secret sauce with a single human being. The entire world around me only knew I seemed to have an unending stream of corporations that I could use and a network of people that I kept close to my breast that would execute what I wanted done. No one person ever had all the goods on me and I made sure everyone around me made good money as to keep their loyalty. No one knew the totality of what I was doing. I thought to myself, let them chase those ghosts under the bridge; they will never find me.

They certainly knew who I was. Around this time, I got a visit at my home in Woodmont Country Club by the head of the Economic Tri County Crime Unit, Sergeant Marge. I let him in the house and we walked through my home while he eyed the opulence of my lifestyle commenting on my expensive dining room set. He asked me if I was worried and whether or not I wanted to lose all I had. He told me of a person he personally nabbed that I knew and the whole thing with the FBI made it seem as if I should be on the ropes or something. I told Sergeant Marge that my company that I owned did not have a single complaint anywhere on it and that I was not responsible for other people’s companies and what they did. He just shook his head at me and I think we both knew that if I was going down that it would not be from some local cop and that I was a little bit out of that league so to speak.

I liked him a lot and thought he was a pretty cool guy. Some people in South Florida did not take him seriously, but I was not one of them. I knew he was a serious man that earned our respect and was very good at what he did. However, with all the smarts and resources of Sergeant Marge and the Tri County Economic Crime Unit, he was not the Attorney General of the United States and he did not have the full weight of the Justice Department and the FBI at his fingertips. My point of concern and my laser focus would be keeping an eye on Janet Reno knowing her reputation for being brutal and the fact that The Feds were now in the game. For me this is when the chess match began.

Back in the day, we could get away with anything and we did. One con after the other was our way of life. I remember when car phones were brand new and they were some big phones that were connected to a cord in our cars. It seems almost laughable now, but we used to have these hideous giant phones in our cars. Back then, I would just advertise a top of the line car phone for ninety-nine dollars and ship them out a plastic phone shaped like a car. There was no FBI to stop us. We did all sorts of stuff through the years like advertising top of the line satellite dishes and shipping them out a Chinese Cooking Wok with a brand name of Satellite. We’d have them send us twenty dollars for a bronzed head piece of Abraham Lincoln and send them a penny. We did whatever we wanted to make a buck. It was easier to ask people to send in fifty dollars for a program on how to make money and send them out a letter telling them to get a job than to rob someone with a gun. We used our wits as weapons and in most cases that was more than enough.

Everything was a scam back then. Do you remember that commercial on TV in the 1980’s that said you could lose weight while you sleep? Dream Away, it was called. Lose weight while you sleep was the pitch and they ran those comically fallacious commercials over and over again for years before anyone stopped them. Those guys were sending out sugar pill placebos or something as some magical diet pill raking in millions. When they were finally stopped, they were only fined a quarter of a million dollars or some pittance. Hell, that was the cost of doing business; they brought in three or four million dollars running that scam, I heard. This was the world I grew up in and now that was all changing.

The fact that the government would put resources behind going after people in my world was not something I ever took lightly. I tried to explain this to other owners of boiler rooms, but it was clear to me they were still stuck in a time capsule and were not facing the axiomatic reality of the changing situation. I knew however that it was time to downsize, streamline and get my ducks in order.

Chapter 37

At the time, I was entering a phase of introspective declaration and remembering the lessons of John Gotti and how his flamboyant lifestyle seemed to have fueled the constant attacks on him by The FBI. I had allowed myself the same kind of arrogance and clearly became too big for my own britches. Living in a mini mansion and taking in phone rooms from all over the country with people I have never even met, seemed to me at the time, to be too far out there on the branch. Driving around with a new car every month was not good for a person that should be in the shadows.

Word started to spread through my world that the FBI had a former phone room manager that was working in their pocket and had flipped to become our industry’s Sam “The Bull” Gravano. The rumor was this guy was spilling all our industry secrets and that The Feds were now going around posing as lead sellers. The buying and selling of leads was the fuel or the gasoline that kept the engine running. Good leads were like gold and there was big money in just the selling of leads alone. If the FBI was now going around selling leads then any unknown face knocking at the door could be a federal agent in disguise. I got these knocks at the door a lot, so I realized the magnitude of this problem.

After I had the visit from Sergeant Marge and realized cops walking around in my mini mansion is not a good thing, I decided to downsize and streamline the entire operation. I decided to go buy a normal house and go buy a couple of normal-looking cars and not draw attention to myself. After Hurricane Andrew, the entire county of Broward changed demographics overnight. All the riffraff that lived in Dade County somehow got pushed up into Broward and I did not like what I was seeing. I chose to look for a house in Palm Beach County instead.

I found a brand new home that was just built in a normal-looking upper-middle-class subdivision off Jog Road called Serene Run. I bought the house and took on a mortgage like any normal person. I bought a Nissan Pathfinder for the old lady and a 240 SL Nissan for myself and I took on car payments like the next schmuck. I shed the outlandish lifestyle we were living. I wanted at a first glance, to look like any other working stiff out there. I cut off and dropped all out of state phone rooms that I was dealing with and got rid of most of my sales force and chose a small sales force of powerful reloaders that I knew and that could hang with me for the long run. It was my intention to weather the storm that was brewing with the federal government. I made all of these massive changes almost overnight. I streamlined my entire operation, sat back, and began to study what the Justice Department was up to.

By April of 1993, the country was starting to get to see what we in South Florida already knew about Janet Reno when the whole Waco thing went down. People watched in horror as Janet attacked the Branch Davidians and burned up all of the women and children. We knew her treatment of women by rumors of torture and forced confessions in South Florida jail cells. I kept telling anyone who would listen in our world to keep an eye on this woman, but not a single peer of mine ever understood the threat Janet posed to our world.

The downsizing of our lifestyle did not go over well with my wife who was already addicted to shopping and spending money, but I needed to do this without raising any suspicion in her. The woman never knew about my secret sex life and I’d made damn sure she never understood anything about my business. I had her write checks and balance a couple of checkbooks, but the woman truly had no clue with what I was up to. I tried to appease her without drawing attention by letting her spend money on things for the new home.

Right away, we added a pool, a screened-in porch and deck that surrounded the pool. We placed a waterfall that was not too crazy in the front of the house. I even had a bunch of cages built for the damn rabbits in the back. I used to spend my afternoons walking around Worth Ave. in Palm Beach and hanging out at the bars over there across the bridge where the really rich people lived and where the Kennedy Estate was. After the downsize, I found my own neighborhood sports bar that I would go to in my neighborhood in Lake Worth called the Sports Page and I started to settle into my new life in Palm Beach County.

No one in my industry was making these kinds of moves to downsize as far as I could see. In fact, there seemed to be a completely new tone that started to creep up after Operation Disconnect. From my vantage point, it seemed that many people in our world decided that there was no use in shipping anything or any product to a customer if in the end the Feds would bust you anyway. There was an unspoken collective vibe that there was no appreciation of our tradecraft by The FBI. There was a growing collective mindset that the government was ignoring the fact that the clientele of most “down the road” telemarketing firms were more of a gambler type personality and not some victim. These were the same kind of people who had bookies and bet on everything.

Collectively my world started to feel that there was absolutely no acknowledgement by the FBI and the courts that some of us went to painstaking efforts to be as legal as humanly possible. Ad Spec firms were now being lumped in with the worst of illegal telemarketing and the IQ of the people in our world took serious offense to calling any of these greedy motherfuckers on the other end of our phones some freaking victim. After Operation Disconnect many phone rooms together threw up their hands and stopped shipping any product at all. The federal bust actually created an atmosphere where the customers of America were now going to be ripped off with no questions asked. This was the birthplace of what was called rip and tear rooms on a huge scale.

One phone room after the other just promised whatever to the caller, took their money, and did nothing for the consumer. No one was worrying about shipping anything to anyone and the phone rooms would be gone overnight. This created an atmosphere of boiler room whack-a-mole where phone rooms would pop up and then be gone in an instant. It sent our entire industry down a hellhole never to return again to any sensible code of conduct. It became the Wild West and it became harder and harder to do business on many levels.

By 1994 I was already paying a company crazy money to sweep my phone room for electronic bugs and taps on our phone lines. Word was getting out that more and more people were being flipped and that they were now working for the FBI going in phone rooms as salespeople undercover. I never bought a lead from anyone that I did not know after Operation Disconnect and I never hired anyone I did not already know for anything. I had my group of people that I trusted and I wanted nothing to do with anyone else in the business. If I did not know you then you could go fuck yourself!

I started to move my phone room around every few months just for caution’s sake and I soon got sick of doing that. I decided to sit in one place. I bought all of the equipment to sweep for bugs and taps instead of paying this crazy money to these firms that were raping us weekly over this issue. I created a new system that I would never again send any money to the address where my phone room was located. I created a runner system where I had runners open up mailboxes around the country and pick up the mail and then FedEx it to another mailbox and have that picked up by another runner. I created a massive system of mailboxes and people willing to make some extra money unwittingly opening up these boxes around the country and sending the mail down to another box in Florida.

This way of doing things allowed me to stop moving my phone room around and was an attempt to be more stable. This system was not foolproof and it had its flaws. When a mailbox address came under suspicion or something would go wrong with the runner, I would lose money in the pipeline. This happened so many times that it became the cost of doing business.

One time the Postmaster General went into this guy’s house in Massachusetts who was one of my runners. He just got home with his wife from the hospital having just given birth to their baby when his house filled up with postal agents pointing guns in their faces. The runner called me on the phone at gunpoint and told me his house was filled with all of these men from the post office with guns asking me what to do. I told the guy to put whoever was in charge on the phone. The Postmaster got on the phone with me yelling at me about this mailbox and this and that. When he was done with his tirade, I told the dude that he needed to get out of those people’s home and put away his guns. I explained to him that he had no jurisdiction over anything I did because I used private couriers like FedEx and others and I never used the postal service to mail anything. The guy was so pissed and couldn’t believe his ears. I told him who I was and where I lived and told him I had nothing to hide and that he has no right to question these people or me about anything. He challenged me to come to Massachusetts and make such an argument and I politely declined. He put the runner back on the phone and I told him that they would be leaving now and thanked him for his service. The runner seemed pretty shaken up. This was the world we lived in now after Operation Disconnect. Oh, how I yearned for the “good ole days.”

Chapter 38

In the summer of 1994, Janet Reno and the FBI launched another operation targeting telemarketing fraud, but this time she launched it right from the heart of South Florida in her old stomping grounds in Miami. It was called Operation Sunstroke and it was the Miami FBI office teaming up with the Fort Lauderdale Police Department. By this time, the feds had flipped so many people from our world that things started to get confusing. The FBI was sending out droves of former telemarketing types as undercover people in all areas of our world. The problem that the cops never realized was that a whole bunch of these people that they thought they flipped were in fact playing both sides of the fence. These people were more double agent than some cooperating witness.

Rumor had it at the time that these people working for the cops immediately started selling the information they had on Operation Sunstroke. They were actually selling lists of who the informants were and where they had been placed. It created a new field for lead sellers, where now boiler rooms everywhere were spending money on the leads of names of phone rooms that had these rats in them. The double agents also revealed that the cops were setting up phone lines and recording pitches. Those numbers not to call became leads for phone rooms.

Now our industry could buy leads that were called hot lists and the industry would purge these phone numbers or names from their systems to stay one step ahead of the cops. These do not call lists were bought by boiler rooms so as to not get caught up in the cops’ trap. It got to the point where no one knew which leads were good and which were not. The operation in the end was dubbed a failure on many levels and the FBI was under a lot of heat because they were unable to stop the stem of these calls from fraudulent telemarketers. The FBI actually stirred things up and made it worse for the American consumers.

That year of 1994 Janet Reno launched a nationwide public service campaign to educate Americans about their rights and obligations under the law. She set up a hotline for people to call if they got ripped off by anyone. Janet started a campaign to ask Congress for a billion dollars to combat telemarketing fraud. I knew she was going to get the money. I started to tell people she would because of how she was now going about it. She came up with a brilliant pitch of her own and I noticed it right away. Any time Janet Reno would now say the word “telemarketing,” she would also, in the same sentence, say the term “Senior Citizen” without missing a beat. Now all of a sudden every telemarketing firm in the world was painted to be ripping off senior citizens.

As she publicly and privately argued Congress to give her money, she did it under the guise of protecting old people. Since old people were such a strong voting bloc, the whole plan worked and Janet finally got her money to go after us. I actually sat and watched her ask Congress for the money on C-SPAN at a Senate Subcommittee Hearing that was televised.

That year as I stood at the pinnacle of my career and power, I was never so miserable in my life. It was one of the saddest years for me personally, as I slipped into a deep depression. My marriage was falling apart because I could not stand the woman I was married to. I felt so trapped. I even went to see different shrinks and one doctor said I had Borderline Personality Disorder. Another doctor just seemed afraid to even see me because she found me to be intimidating or whatever that meant. I was in a very bad place in my head and once again the profession of psychiatry was no help. The only positive thing from that time in my life was that all of these emotions inside kick-started my writing once again and I began to write poetry and short stories. Some of the most amazing writing came out of me during that bad part of my life.

That year another one of my sisters-in-law flew in from California and I met her for the first time while she visited Florida for a week. She was Debbie’s older sister Brenda and I could tell she knew what was up between Debbie and me. Debbie and Brenda were Tonya’s stepsisters, not blood relatives, but it was clear that Debbie shared our relationship with Brenda after Brenda dropped hints to me that she knew what was up.

I decided around this time to go fly out to Seattle and visit a guy named Chuck who I grew up with in Miramar and was living out there. That same day Brenda was flying home to California. I had never been to Seattle and I wanted to climb the Wonderland Trail that circles around Mount Rainier. When I got on the plane, Brenda was there on the same flight to Houston waving me over telling everyone I was her brother-in-law and she got people to switch seats so we could sit together. I had no idea we were going to be on the same plane to Houston and that both of us had separate connecting flights there that would bring us to our destinations.

She opened up her huge purse and showed me it was full of beer cans and she seemed already on her way to a good buzz. I started drinking asking the stewardess to bring me three of those little shot bottles at a time. Once we got in the air we were knocking back beers and shot bottles at a fast clip and the next thing I knew we were making out right there on the plane. The people around us were all freaked out because we had already announced that we were family. During the make-out session, Brenda reached inside my pants and gave me a hand job right there while we were thirty thousand feet above the ground. I never was a member of the Mile High Club, but this felt like I was damn close to joining it. She made me cum right there inside my pants sitting at my window seat.

After my orgasm, I went into the bathroom to clean up and I smoked a cigarette. When I sat back down the stewardess came over all angry at me and saying that I cannot smoke on a plane and this was a violation of federal law. Times were changing for cigarette smokers. I looked her right in the eye and said I was offended because I was a non-smoker and that cloud of smoke was in there when I went to use the bathroom. She did not believe a word I said and just walked away very angry.

Later on in the flight and after that cunt stewardess kept bringing me three bottles of rum at a time, I got a real good buzz and went back into the bathroom to smoke another cig. This time when I got out, all of the stewardesses were standing right outside the bathroom door waiting for me to come out. When I opened the door they started yelling at me telling me that they were going to tell the Captain and I was going to get arrested. I once again denied it was me smoking and told them to leave me alone.

My flight to Seattle had a connecting flight in Houston, Texas. Brenda was also flying to Houston. She was going to get on a connecting flight to Southern California to go home, and I was going to get on a connecting flight to Seattle to go visit my friend. We got off the plane and kissed each other goodbye as lovers do and went on our way through the airport.

When I got to the terminal of my connecting flight to Seattle, the people at the gate would not let me on the plane and said that the Houston Police Department wanted to talk to me. Three uniformed cops walked up to me and told me they were arresting me for public intoxication. The freaking airline could not get me officially on the cigarette thing because I denied it, so now they were having me arrested for being drunk after the airline itself got me drunk. I was blown away. I lay down on the ground and said if you are arresting me you will have to carry me. The cops grabbed my arms and legs and started to carry me through the airport belly down towards the ground. I started screaming at the top of my lungs to everyone in the airport that they were killing me and asking people to help. The cops dragged me to this side door, kicked it open, and dragged me down these metal steps onto the tarmac letting my face smash into each step going down.

On the tarmac were two Houston police cars and they cuffed me and threw me in the back seat of one of them. As I looked over to the other patrol car, there was Brenda cuffed and in the backseat of that one. As the cars drove away, through the window, I could see Brenda being driven to jail and it was the last time I ever saw her again. They drove me to the jail and booked me for public intoxication. I fell to the ground inside the booking department and faked an epileptic fit flapping around on the floor like a fish. A doctor/cop dude stood over me and held my eyelid back and screamed he is faking it. Next, the cops just started kicking me with their boots over and over again and beating me to a pulp. They pulled my pants and underwear down to my ankles and threw me onto the floor of a jail cell filled with fifty other people. I just lay there bleeding all over the floor while my dick just lay there on the ground completely exposed.

I stayed jailed in Houston for three days until I finally got to see a judge who released me with a fifty-dollar fine. I hailed a cab and had him drive me back to the airport. I told the cabbie what happened and he said I was the third guy this week he had picked up there with this story. Apparently, in Houston, the airline brings you drinks and then has you arrested for being drunk. I walked up to the ticket counter to find out there was not another flight to Seattle for a couple of days, so I opted to take the next flight back to West Palm Beach which was not until the next morning.

I got a hotel room at some high-end hotel by the airport. I walked in the room, called room service and asked for nine White Russians to be delivered to my room. The guy on the phone tried to explain to me some rule of theirs about how much booze he was allowed to bring me. I told him what happened to me and he sent up the booze like I asked. I picked up the yellow pages and called an escort service. I told them to send me two girls, one black and one white. I drank and banged the two whores that night and the next morning flew back home. When I walked in the door at the house, Tonya met me in the doorway and when she saw how beat up I was from the cops, she started crying and running for the camera saying we were going to sue everyone. I told her to let it go and that I did not want any more to do with any of it. I did not want the Brenda thing to come out if I pushed the issue, so I had to let it go. Funny enough, I have never been to Texas except for the time I spent three days in a Houston jail.

Chapter 39

By the fall of 1994 I was in such a dark place in my personal life. I was self-medicating with crack cocaine and booze and I hated going home each day. One day I threw this huge party at the new house with our friends and family. At the party, my sister-in-law Debbie showed up with some chick I had never seen or met before. They were both very drunk already and this friend of hers kept walking around to my guests telling them that she knew I was more than just a brother-in-law to Debbie. She was slurring her words and making her way through my house towards Tonya. I saw what was about to happen and I took Tonya’s hand and brought her into our bedroom.

I sat her down on our waterbed. Waterbeds were the thing at the time back then and everyone had one in the 90’s. Tonya of course needed one that cost ten thousand dollars with four posts and mirrors and dressers built in it, and all the shebang, but don’t get me started. I told her I needed to tell her something. I figured there was no way this was not going to come out that night and Tonya should hear it from me and not some drunken bitch Debbie brought to our party that neither one of us had ever met. I told Tonya right there sitting on the bed that I had been having an affair with her sister Debbie and I wanted her to hear it from me first. I explained to Tonya what was going on outside our bedroom door with Debbie and this drunken chick. I explained to her that she needed to hear it from me and that I was very unhappy in our marriage. Tempers exploded and things got out of hand.

After the smoke cleared, I called my father in Ocala and asked him to come and get me, that I needed a break from the drugs, Tonya and everything that was making me so sad and angry all the time. The old man drove down to Lake Worth, picked me up, and drove me back to Ocala to my grandmother’s house. Of course, he was supposed to be helping me sober up, but clearly, I called the worst person in the world, so ill-equipped to help me in this state. My father helped me by buying crack from his dealer and I continued my self-medicating in Ocala as we both just drank and got high.

While I was there in Ocala, my father revealed to me that he found and went through his father’s naval records. My father uncovered that his father’s blood type and his mother’s blood type could have never made him. We found out that my grandfather John Walker was not my father’s biological father. I was in shock. We had no idea who we were. I got very angry over all of this and told my father we needed to confront his satanic mother and find out who the hell we really were! Pop said we needed more information so we started calling family members all around the country on his side to find out the truth.

As he talked with one family member after the other on the phone, it was clear that there was this deep family secret, but no one would tell us the real truth. The best we were able to do was narrow it down to two things. One explanation that came to light was the fact that my evil grandmother was actually raped in Central Park, most likely by Satan himself, and that my father could have been a product of that rape. The second thing that came to the surface was that there was wife-swapping going on in the family. Amazingly, my grandmother and her sister were in love with each other’s husbands and they swapped bed partners for decades. This was something that a lot of the older generation did according to the people that told us this. Divorce was forbidden and older couples would sleep in separate rooms and lead different lives. My father’s uncle could have been his real father, and to top that off, the fucking guy was Italian! I was spinning with all of this new information.

I told my father it was time to confront his mother. Pop explained to me that he couldn’t do it and that I would have to be the one, but that he would stand next to me as I spoke. We sat my grandmother down at the kitchen table and told her that we knew we were not Walkers and that we needed to know who my father’s father was. We explained to her that we narrowed it down to the rape or the wife-swapping thing, but we needed to know the truth. The old bitch went nuts screaming and crying and locked herself in her bedroom.

That night I went to sleep on the couch in the formal living room where John Walker, who was not related to us, used to nap. I woke up that morning and grabbed my chest. I could not breathe! I blasted through the back door of the house and fell to my knees on the grass in the backyard pounding my fist into my chest trying to get my lungs to take in air. I could slightly get in a partial breath and I got up and got the keys to my car. I had the car sent up to me after I left South Florida and now I needed to drive myself to the hospital. While driving to the hospital my lungs started to open up better and I decided instead to drive to my mother’s house.

My mother, after her house burnt down, left South Florida and bought a house in Ocala, Florida and I now had both of my parents living in this godforsaken town. While I was driving, my lungs were doing better, but my eyes were starting to water out of control, I could barely see the road through my tears. I got to my mother’s house and went right into the shower to wash my eyes out. I tasted this chemical taste on my lips as the shower water rinsed over me. I finally got my eyes to stop burning and I got out of the shower all red-eyed and dizzy. I picked up the phone and dialed my grandmother’s phone number through my bloodshot eyes and my father picked up the phone on the other end.

I explained to him what happened to me and he said, “Oh my God, Son! I wondered why?”

I asked, “You wondered why, what, Pop?”

He said that when he woke up that he saw a can of Raid bug spray sitting on the kitchen counter and wondered why his mother messed with the bug spray in the middle of the night. He said it was so out of place because for the can of Raid to be sitting there meant that his mother somehow in the middle of the night, went out into the garage, got that can of Raid from the shelf out there, and brought it in the house. He wondered why she needed Raid in the middle of the night when she was in bed sleeping. He told me that she must have sprayed me! I was completely blown away. I asked my father what he wanted to do. He asked me what I meant by that.

I said, “Pop, your mother just tried to murder me by poison on the night we confronted her on our bloodline!” I started yelling at him that his fucking mother tried to kill me! I could just imagine that evil bitch standing over me while I slept, bending down and spraying the poison into my mouth, while I lay asleep on the couch. Everyone in my family knew I slept with my mouth open and this broad tried to whack me over this family secret. I told my father to go get the can of bug spray and read the poison warning and see if I needed to go to the ER. He came back to the phone and said it looked like if I had survived it to this point that I should live. I again asked what he wanted me to do. I said I thought I needed to call the cops!

At this moment, my father made a decision that would affect our relationship for the rest of our lives. He told me that he would protect his mom and not admit to the cops anything about the poisoning and that there was no proof. My father went into protection mode, but it was not protection mode over his kid, but protection for the person that tried to murder his kid, the same person that tortured all of his kids for years. I hung up the phone and knew I could never forgive him for that choice, not ever. My entire personal life was in shambles. My marriage was shot, my grandmother tried to murder me and I had no idea what my last name should really be. This was a very dark part of my life. Just recounting all of this for this novel makes me sweat. Not everyone can claim that their own grandmother tried to murder them. All I knew was that I realized at the time I was in big trouble emotionally and I needed to get as far away from all of these people as possible.

I got on a plane and flew out to San Francisco, California. I did not know a soul in the whole state except for a guy that I grew up with in Miramar who was now living in San Mateo. I flew right to the city and the minute I stepped off the plane, I felt like a new person. If I was going to get off crack cocaine, I needed to get far away from anyone I knew who did it. California seemed a world away and for me, at the time, was a place for rebirth. I had my old friend pick me up at the airport and drive me into the city. He asked me where I wanted to live and I told him right in the middle of the heart of everything. I wanted to be around everything that made this city great. We drove Highway 101 towards the city from the airport and right past the part of the highway that so famously pancaked during the 1989 San Francisco earthquake. They were still working on stuff at the time and retrofitting all sorts of buildings and bridges preparing for the next great quake.

We got off Highway 101 and drove into the city. I felt a feeling of hope and renewal as I looked up at the high-rises. We drove right to the most famous road called Market Street and my friend said if you want to be in the heart of San Francisco, Market Street is it. I landed up getting an apartment on the corner of Market and Polk in the famous Fox Plaza.

The Fox Plaza high-rise is a beautiful 29-story building located at 1390 Market Street in the heart of San Francisco. Wikipedia says it was built in 1966; the high-rise stands on the site of the famous historic Fox Theatre at 1350 Market. It was opened in the year of 1929 and later demolished in 1963. There is so much cool history to the building. The first twelve floors house office space. Unlike many buildings, the Fox Plaza high-rise has a 13th floor, actually labeled with the number "13", however, this floor is used only as the service floor and is not rented out. The 14th floor contains a laundry facility and a gymnasium as well as apartments, while floors 15 through 29 are exclusively high-end rental apartments. There was no Wikipedia back then; they just had the history of the building on a giant plaque that was displayed when you walk into the building.

I walked into the building and asked for the penthouse. I was told it was already taken, so I got one of the next apartments below it on the 28th floor. I called up a Rent-A-Center and had the whole apartment furnished. I sent for my car to be brought to me by rail and I walked out onto my balcony that overlooked the city. There from my balcony I could clearly see the Golden Gate Bridge. I stood there staring at my view of San Francisco with all the high-rises around me and realized my life was about to change yet again. I was in California now.

Chapter 40

It was now 1995 and I was running my business from California. The beauty of telemarketing is that you can live anywhere and do it. That is why most telemarketing hubs were located in some of the greatest cities in America. I decided I was going to live in San Francisco for at least a year and run everything from there. I also decided to continue to support Tonya back in Florida. I had to financially support both homes and float everything, but for me, it was worth it, because I finally felt a sense of peace.

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to me at the time, the FBI had mounted the biggest undercover operation in the history of the agency called Operation Senior Sentinel. For the very first time ever, the FBI got retired law enforcement officers to volunteer on a massive scale to help the Feds with this operation. They even got hundreds of American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) members to pose as victims. The FBI built a gigantic undercover web of people who would act as agents for the FBI and pose as callers, buyers, lead sellers, sales people and so much more. They created a vast fake world of telemarketing from one end of the industry to the other. They had phone lines and people set up across the country from coast to coast recording telephone calls and the pitches that were made by sales people in our industry.

I had no idea something of this scale was going on. I knew they were busy fucking with our industry and I knew they would have to show results to Congress to justify the money given to them, but I had no understanding of the scale of what was going on. This kind of effort or this push by the federal government was nothing less than a full-scale war to shut down illegal telemarketing. The scale of this operation alone meant nothing less than the complete destruction of my entire industry. The Feds were all in now and would stop at nothing to achieve their goal.

Living in California I had to make all sorts of adjustments. I was an east coast guy and had to adapt to the time zone I was living in. Everything was done just a little differently out there. I remember the first time I walked into a supermarket in California and saw that in the aisles, they were selling all their booze. That blew me away. Back in Florida, we sold our liquor in separate buildings and children were not allowed in those buildings. Here your kid walks down one aisle, there is Cap’n Crunch cereal, and the next aisle is Captain Morgan Spiced Rum, which was all so wild to me.

Being in California in January of 1995 was something else as opening statements in the OJ Simpson trial got off. Everyone was glued to the TV and everywhere I went, it was the only thing people were talking about. Having a car in San Francisco is actually somewhat of a burden. Parking in the city was limited and I had to pay for underground parking each month. I never really needed my car too much because I could go anywhere in the city for just a few dollars in a cab. I would hail a cab, go down to Chinatown and eat at the Far East Café. I loved that place because they had good food and there were these private booths that all you had to do is push a button on the wall and some Chink would pop up at your table ready to serve you. Even their food was different in California. When I went to order egg drop soup, they called it white flower soup.

Being the consummate Mick that I was, I would often go down to Fisherman’s Wharf and eat at my favorite Irish pub called the Fiddler’s Green and stare out to the island of Alcatraz and wonder when my time in prison was going to come. The city was full of adult theaters so there was no shortage of sexual exploits for me to dabble in.

One of the greatest things at that time, when I was living in California, was just months before I got there. Heidi Fleiss got busted for her high-class call girl ring. To my utter delight, many of her ladies got scared and ran up to San Francisco to get out of Los Angeles and away from the cops down there. I will never forget the one day I picked up the yellow pages and called an escort service to send a hooker to my apartment. When this broad knocked on the door and I opened it, I almost died. I realized immediately that I was about to fuck, hands down, the best-looking woman of my entire life. I mean I have had pretty ladies before like any other guy, but there was no doubt that this woman standing in the middle of my apartment in this high dollar business suit was the absolute best-looking chick I was ever going to have sex with.

She was beyond stunning; she was physically perfect. I could not find a flaw in this broad and I looked from head to toe like a blind man running his fingers over Braille. Over time I got to know her very well and she explained to me she was one of Heidi’s girls and that many of them came up to Frisco to get out of the heat from the cops down in L.A. As soon as I heard she was not alone, I asked her to bring a friend next time and make sure she was black. I banged those two for a while until I got sick of them. You see, even the most beautiful girls in the world become boring to a man.

Back in Florida, when we were on the beach and would see somebody surely hot, we would say somebody is at home sick of that fine ass. You have to have a dick to understand this kind of thinking. However, there I was living in California having sex with Heidi Fleiss’s gals and far away from my depressing family back in Florida. I tried not to think of any of them and I just kept myself busy. Cocaine never even crossed my mind and when I was offered it out there, I never partook in any of it. Somehow, I got back to being me, which was a drinker and a pothead, like I always was and ever will be. No way around it, cocaine is a loser drug for losers and I was never going back to it.

I spent my time running my business and glued to the OJ trial. On the weekends I would drive up north of the city to the mountains and I would hike to the top of Mt. Wittenberg and pitch a tent and read a Tom Clancy novel. Mount Wittenberg is also an area where deer are protected and are allowed to flourish. They had no fear of man; I never saw anything like it. There I was on top of a mountain overlooking the Pacific Ocean surrounded by deer reading Tom Clancy. California was working out just fine for me.

One day I got a call from my little brother begging me to give him a job. The kid and I never got along and I always suspected my mother fucked the milkman and had my brother Steve. He was nothing like me or my dead brother Keith. He didn’t even look like my father or me in any way. We were very far apart in age and I cannot remember a time in my life when I even liked this kid on any level outside of his infancy. Still, he was my mother’s kid and he was down on his luck. I explained to him what it took to pick up the phone and extract money from people. I trained him and set him loose on the world. I gave him a list of numbers not to call that was floating around the industry on the hot lists and sent him on his way. Two weeks later, he called me up and quit, telling me that he cannot do telemarketing. I was relieved and he went on his merry way.

I had my entire business so narrowly focused at the time. I streamlined it down to a handful of players and I structured everything for the long haul and not so much towards making as much cash as I could. Rumors were so omnipresent about law enforcement back then. Our entire world was already turned upside down and the industry was far away from the “good ole days.” While out in California I sat down with some west coast guys in our world and this crowd seemed way ahead of the curve about how things were changing in our industry and what to do to survive. They offered me some deals that I turned down, because by this point, if I did not know you for years, I did not trust you.

On the morning of April 19, 1995, I woke up, made a cup of coffee, and turned on the TV. I just stood there looking at some chaotic scene going on live in Oklahoma City. The federal building had been blown apart and the FBI was on the hunt to find who did it. I have to say I was not surprised to learn later that this whole event happened because some guy got angry with Janet Reno. Timothy McVeigh was pissed at Janet for her butchering of all those people in Waco and that poor family in Ruby Ridge. I always wondered if Bill Clinton’s first two choices for Attorney General did not have problems with the legal status of their maids, would history have been completely different if we had another A.G. who was not such a brute? Of course, we will never know the answer to that, but in 1995, I felt that the illegal world of boiler rooms and telemarketing had little to worry about from the FBI with all they had going on that year. As I stood watching the federal building smoking in ruins that morning, I thought to myself, “Well, they will be busy now.” I could not imagine with all of this going on, that the government would waste resources chasing down telemarketers. I would soon find out how wrong I was.

Chapter 41

Mark Twain once said the coldest winter he ever spent was a summer in San Francisco. I never understood that quote until the summer of 1995 when I had to turn my heat on in my apartment. When I first got that apartment and moved there, I asked the guy showing me the apartment where the air conditioner was. He laughed and said there was no air conditioner in the building or most any building in San Francisco. He said we only needed the heater. Most of the year the city stays between 35 degrees and 70 degrees and they have a fog that blankets the city like nothing I have ever seen.

Unless you have seen San Francisco fog, you have never known fog. Trust me. What was so wild was at the same time, I had my heat on in my high-rise while the Midwest of the country was having one of the most deadly heat waves in my lifetime. Over three thousand people died that summer from the heat and in Chicago alone, over seven hundred and fifty people left this planet due to that heat wave. I remember feeling a little homesick for Florida that summer because of how out of place the cold in San Francisco felt to me.

When word reached me that July that the Space Shuttle Atlantis was docking with the Russian space station Mir, I really felt a wave of homesickness. It was too soon to return home, so I decided to get out of San Francisco and go backpacking in the White Mountains of New Hampshire for a week. I just needed to have a change of scenery at the time. I had some business I needed to take care of in Massachusetts and I could accomplish both by getting on a plane.

I flew to Boston and met with a guy I had running my runner mailbox system for the New England area and squared away some details with him and then I rented a car and drove up to Conway, New Hampshire to go climb the Presidential Trail in the White Mountains. I had my marijuana in my backpack that went through the cargo bay as I flew across the country on a commercial flight. My equipment all smells like nature and the outdoors, so I knew any smell of weed would be camouflaged.

While I was living in California, I would have my wife Tonya FedEx me the best weed from Florida to keep me content. I got to Conway, New Hampshire and got a room at the Yankee Clipper Inn. I had been to this hotel before. In my life I had climbed the Presidential Range many times and I used to have a t-shirt that said “This Body Climbed Mount Washington.” I was so proud of that shirt because you could only buy it at the store on top of that mountain. Mt. Washington is the tallest mountain in America east of the Mississippi River. You can drive up it or you can hike the trails to the top. On top of the mountain they built a weather station and a hotel and restaurant/store kind of thing.

That July day when I got to Conway, it was one hundred degrees at the base of Mt. Washington and at the very same moment, it was fifty degrees on the top of the mountain. I left my hotel room and went to have breakfast at the Blueberry Muffin Restaurant. I never really hiked in the summer time because of the bugs and that hot day I remembered why, as I got bit up by mosquitoes just going to eat at the restaurant. I ate my blueberry pancakes and I went back to my room to see that the fucking maid robbed me and stole my North Face jacket. I was so enraged because, one, it was a very nice jacket and two, the pot and my airline tickets were in the pockets. The front desk, of course, could not do anything or prove it was the cunt maid, so now I had to get new plane tickets home and I was out of weed.

Let me tell you how cool Conway, New Hampshire is. When you read their license plate on their cars that say Live Free or Die, they are not kidding up there. So, I went to the bar all pissed off that I had been robbed and I told the bartender my woes and how I lost my weed. The bartender threw a duffle bag on the bar, opened it, and showed me all of these bags all measured out to be a quarter ounce of weed each. I asked how much and gave him the cash and I was back in business being the happy hiker. I freaking love that town! The next morning I went to start up Mount Washington and even with the bug spray, I was overwhelmed with the bugs. I never made it past the tree line before I turned back and declared this one huge mistake. I got in my car, drove back to Boston, and decided to make a trip out to the Cape and do a little partying in Hyannis.

I got out to Hyannis Port and drank at a bar called Steamers and had some great seafood and many cocktails. I knew a guy who grew up there, so I drove in front of his family’s home and took a picture of myself standing in front of his mother’s house and then I dropped it in the mailbox. Back then, a stamp only cost thirty-two cents. I wanted him to go get his mail one day and out of nowhere, see me in Hyannis, Massachusetts standing in front of his family’s house with no note or explanation, just a picture. I cracked up thinking of his face when he opened the envelope, laughing all the way on my drive back to Boston. I stopped in the city to eat a meal in the Italian section of Boston and then went over to the Irish part and did some drinking in Quincy Market. It was time to return to California.

When I got to the airport, I had to argue with the airline over the stolen ticket and I flew back to San Francisco. I got back a day before my birthday July 13th and I was haunted once again by homesickness watching the Space Shuttle Discovery launch off into space. On top of the launch, it was also my former high school sweetheart’s birthday. Ann Marie was born on the 13th and I was born on the 14th of the same year and all of my life, I would never forget her birthday and think of her the day before mine, even to this day. I picked up the phone and called a restaurant in New York that her family owned that was only open in the summers. I got a hold of her aunt and told her who I was and that I had a dream of Ann and that she had short hair in my dream and not the long beautiful hair when we were in high school. Her aunt was blown away by my call and said Ann cut her hair not too long before I called. She was married to some military guy now and the aunt told me she would pass my message to Ann of hello.

I was often haunted by my decision to end my relationship with Ann Marie and felt that this was one of my life’s biggest mistakes. I never had closure with her and it haunts me throughout life. It is strange to see what affects us truly and what rolls off our shoulders while we are here on this planet.

The one thing that did not just roll off my shoulders was my dysfunctional marriage to Tonya. I flew my wife Tonya out to San Francisco to come stay with me for a few days. We tried to stay civil at the time, but just having her there in California made me sick. I couldn’t wait for her to leave. I could tell she was a full-blown cokehead by now and I started to put some pieces together about her and started to realize how long she had a problem with cocaine. It was a serious habit for her now and I wanted nothing to do with it or her. She tried her level best to hide this fact from me, but she was too far gone not to see the signs. I instructed her to do something with her life. I gave her the information on a bartending school and gave her the tuition to pay for it. I knew I’d be divorcing her soon and I wanted her to have a way to support herself after the marriage was over. The woman loved to host parties and make drinks. I thought it was a perfect fit.

As soon as she left, I felt normal again. Not too long after she left, San Francisco completely changed from its normal vibe. It was not anything that you could see, but it was something you could feel throughout the whole city. Word got out that Jerry Garcia of The Grateful Dead died of a heart attack in a drug rehab in California. I do not even have the proper words to describe how sad the people of that city were. It didn’t matter if you listened to his music or not, the guy was a son of San Francisco and that city wept with the passing of their icon. The public held a memorial in the Polo Fields of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Tens of thousands of people showed up with tie-dye shirts and flowers. They did a bagpipe rendition of Amazing Grace and collectively the city said good-bye to their famous son.

Chapter 42

September of 1995 came around and The New York Times and The Washington Post published a thirty-five-thousand-word manifesto from the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski. The FBI had their hands full at the time chasing this nut down and made him their most wanted. Janet Reno was busy that month and telling Justice Department employees that they needed to be more helpful with helping the public with the Freedom of Information Act and she created a rating system to judge them on their performance. There was so much going on at the time that I falsely believed that they had very little time to police telemarketing fraud. All their efforts up to this point fell short and none of it came even close to me and what I was doing.

My entire viewpoint going into the fall of 1995 was based on false assumptions and flawed introspective looks at my industry and my business in general. I was busy at the time keeping my business afloat. My computer guy Gene who had been with me now for years was asking for money for something new put out by a company named Microsoft called Windows 95 and he was bugging me about something called JavaScript. At the time, I was demanding that as part of Gene’s job he would have to type out my handwritten poetry and short stories I wrote. He wasn’t too happy about it but he did it anyway.

Technology was changing in 1995 and to give you an idea of what a different time and place it was in that year, a brand new invention was born into the world called a DVD. Years later this invention that was announced in 1995 would take off in America and change our lives. It really was a different time and place. Anyone that was still standing in the world of boiler rooms felt like we survived the storm. There was a new normal and we knew that the government would now always be a part of regulating our industry, but there was this false feeling that, if we operated in a certain way, we would be fine. Nothing could be further from the truth.

That year I hired my father to be a runner for me. I had him open up some mailboxes to help him make some money. He was down on his luck, needed something to do to keep him busy, and asked me for a job. His marriage fell apart when his second wife finally realized the magnitude of his drug addiction and he had been fired from nearly a dozen different hospitals. I also came to the conclusion that I was going to divorce my wife. Stricken with Catholic guilt at the time, this was no small decision for me. It did not help matters that the Pope, John Paul II was running around America at the time reminding me of my vow and upbringing. However, the Pope was never married to Tonya and if he wanted to try that for a little while, then I might listen to him and his teachings on the subject.

I had been out in California a year and floating two homes was getting expensive. A trip back home for a couple of days showed me my house was being used as a flophouse by all sorts of shady types Tonya was now associating with. These cokeheads turned my formal living room into their very own dart bar as they were throwing darts at my wall playing Cricket. There was this black guy walking around my house like he owned it and was clearly fucking my wife. I could not believe my eyes, but I knew I had to handle all of this gingerly. I did not want a full-scale war with a nasty divorce because of my business. I needed to come back to Florida and try to do this slowly and over time. I started to tell Tonya that I wanted to come back and work out our problems.

Sometime in October, I started to plant that seed in her head. The world was stinging at the time from The O.J. Simpson verdict and the Million Man March was going on creating a strange time in America between the white and black community. Tonya was now hanging out with black guys in the cocaine world and I needed to get back in the door and get control of the situation. Making believe I wanted to reconcile with this coked-out woman was not an easy thing to do, but too many people were depending on me for a living and I had to play the part.

A guy I knew was getting out of a Florida prison in the beginning of December of that year from a telemarketing stint he was doing time for. My plan was to drive across the country, pick him up when he walked out the gate, and take him home to South Florida. Then I would go visit my mom in Ocala for a few days. After all that, I would drive back home to West Palm Beach County and start the process of unwinding my marriage once and for all. I told no one of my plans for any of this.

I wanted someone to drive with me across the country. I had a childhood friend of mine take an express bus from Florida to California to join me in San Francisco.

This guy was a friend of the family going way back. He was one of those guys who was born a loser and would live the life of a loser and eventually die as one I am sure. His name was Steve Jones. Nothing he could do in life would work out. He was the epitome of bad luck and I and my family always felt sorry for the guy. My mom would take him in from time to time when he was down on his luck, which seemed like always. I liked the guy and I put a corporation in his name and paid him four hundred dollars a week for the use of it. It was the best paying job he ever had, but of course, he had to fuck that up. The cat walked into the bank one day and asked for a check for thousands of dollars for drugs and that ended our arrangement. That was one of those accounts that went south for the winter. It was never a perfect science, but as long as I covered all losses out of my pocket as the cost of doing business, then I could retain my talent and earn their loyalty. I forgave him for his transgressions constantly and pretty much understood to expect certain behavior from him.

When he showed up at the bus station in San Francisco, he called me telling me he thought he had body lice from the drive and the people on the bus. I had to show up at the bus stop with the proper bug spray and spray him and all of his things down. That pretty much personified the luck this guy had. As I said, he was the same guy who married my neighborhood whore Maria yet he was shocked to have his marriage end when he came home to find Maria naked fucking another guy in Steve’s bed right next to their baby’s crib with their infant in it. The guy was his best friend at the time. Steve went after Maria with a knife to cut off her beautiful hair and because she grabbed the baby in the middle of the fight and had it in her hands, Steve was arrested and charged with child abuse. The poor schmuck had his teeth knocked out by some black guy in jail over control of a TV. In one week he lost his teeth, his whore wife and visitation with his kid.

While he was in jail for all of this, coincidentally, my old telemarketing friend Alex Solomon was in jail there too for stealing something petty. Alex became a drug addict and a thief. He completely threw away his life. It just shows you what a small world it is. Both of these guys I knew were in the same jail at the time. Steve however was always down and out half the time. Steve Jones was like a bad penny in life that would keep showing up. He never worked or kept a job for any period of time, so I knew he’d be available to just have the time to drive across the country.

I tied up some loose ends in San Francisco over the next few days and then we took off on our drive back to Florida in my Nissan. During our trip across the nation, my friend revealed to me that he landed up in jail in the middle of a small town in Georgia and all of a sudden he said the FBI showed up at the jail asking him about me and the account that was in Steve’s name. That certainly got my attention but I did not worry much because not a single human being had any idea of the scope of what I was doing. Everything was on a need-to-know basis and I was insulated from the worry about some cooperating witness of any kind. Simply put, no one knew shit, period. Yes, Steve could tell them what he knew, but that was so limited in scope. I could easily defend myself against any one particular thing. I had a deep belly laugh driving down the road just thinking about what Steve’s face must have looked like when the FBI walked into his jail cell in that small town in Georgia. Let’s just say my buddy Steve was not the sophisticated type.

I got Steve back to Florida without even pulling out a map. I just drove across the nation and figured out how to drive from California to Florida on my own. I was kind of proud of that feat. I dropped Steve off and met my schedule to be there outside the gates as Pep walked out of a Florida prison. He walked out of the prison gates and into my car. I drove off and handed him a bag of weed to roll a joint, a bottle of booze to drink on the ride home and I handed him a few grand for walk-around money. He was clean for so long in the joint that the booze and weed hit him fast and he was buzzing away.

While driving him back to South Florida from the Panhandle he told me that this guy would come up to the fence and talk about telemarketing with him. He told me that he told him all sorts of stuff about the industry and me. He tried to tell me that it was just some nice guy who was allowed to walk up to the fence and talk to him or some incredulous thing like that. Just some guy who likes to talk about telemarketing my idiot friend said. After I stopped laughing real hard, I told my friend, "That was the FBI, you dumb schmuck." He was not too bright, but I could see the Feds were taking a real good look at me. My friend knew almost nothing about my business and was in prison for his own thing that had nothing to do with me. I wasn’t too alarmed because my entire career was going head to head with some agency that was trying to police me for this or that.

I had no problems going up against anybody because I knew the rules. If I know the boundaries and the rules of the game then to me, it was just like a chess match. I wasn’t going to give an inch to anyone. Give me a set of parameters to work with and I will win every time. I will find your weakness and exploit it all day long. That is what I did for a living and I thought whatever was coming my way I will handle.

I dropped my buddy off in South Florida and started to drive back to Ocala to spend a few days with my mom. I never even told Tonya I was in town and I stopped at an XXX porn theater to get a BJ and watch a movie while some other guy sat next to me and just watched me get head. I was so close to my house, but did not want to let Tonya know because I still wanted to spend time with my mom and I needed some more thought into how I was going to handle this whole thing with my marriage.

I drove back to Ocala and went to sleep in my mom’s guest room. The next morning the doorbell rang at my mother’s house. I was expecting a Federal Express that I had re-routed to the house with about five grand in cash in it. I got up out of bed with one of the pee hard-ons a man gets that can break concrete. The pup tent in my pants was at full attention so I kept that part of me blocked from the front door and only stuck my head out to receive the delivery. As soon as I opened the door, a man screamed, “FBI, put your hands against the wall!”

I put my hands against the wall on my mom’s porch and looked down to watch my pup tent in my pants completely disappear. There was a male and female FBI agent along with a Marion County Sheriff in a marked police car. As I stood on the porch my first words to them were, “What took you so long?”

The man asked what I meant by that and I said I had been in the industry since I was fourteen, what makes this day so important? He responded that I would soon find out why today was the day. He read me my rights and told me I was being charged with mail fraud and conspiracy to commit mail fraud. I thought to myself what a ridiculous charge and asked if I could go brush my teeth and get dressed.

We all went inside and they went to my mom’s bedroom and just walked in. They leaned over the bed and woke my mother up saying that they were the FBI and that they were here to arrest me. My mother thought I was playing a prank on her and she started laughing saying get out of here with your pranks. The lady agent said, “Ma’am we are the FBI and would you please get out of bed.”

I was brushing my teeth with the cop standing over me and I went into the closet and grabbed a pair of pants and a sweater. My mother came out of her bedroom and she started to cry once she realized this was all real. I told my mother not to worry about anything and that they would book me and I would bail out and then see what kind of discovery they had and not to worry. I told her this was part of my business and not to worry about anything. The FBI told her they would take me down to downtown Tampa and book me at the FBI building there. I was actually very excited and could not wait to see what they thought they had on me. I was not rattled in any way, but dreaded the long drive from Ocala to Tampa, which was about ninety minutes if they drove at a good clip.

They walked me down my mother’s driveway and put me in the back seat of the car. The male agent was driving and I was in the back. This was the first time I actually looked into their faces. As I looked into the rearview mirror, I realized that this FBI Agent was the guy that was in the XXX porn theater in South Florida sitting next to me watching me get head. I wondered how on earth the FBI could follow someone into a porn theater. I mean what the heck does that have to do with telemarketing? The first words out of his mouth were to ask me about some old gangsters that I knew. He asked me what I knew about Peter Pignola and Tony Vincenza. I could not believe my ears. Why the hell was the FBI asking me about those guys?

Now I really wondered what the hell they did have on me. I hadn’t had anything to do with Peter Pignola or those guys in Tampa for many years. I said, “I know Tony likes his guns.”

The agent said, “Yes, he does. As a matter of fact, we just executed a warrant on Tony’s house this morning and we did find guns.” I told the agents I had nothing to say about any of those guys.

He said, “Okay, well it is a long drive would you like to hear a tape of your brother making a pitch to a cop that was recorded?” He went to go slip something in the cassette player in the car and I said, “No I do not want to hear a pitch of my brother.”

Right away, I realized my idiot brother called one of the numbers on the list I gave him not to call. The fucking kid works for me for only two weeks and now he has me all fucked up with the FBI! I started to get so pissed off. Then, he asked me if I wanted to hear a taped conversation that took place on top of a mountain around a campfire. He asked me if I remembered that backpacking trip with my father and that around the campfire that night were six guys. That trip was years ago and I could not believe that they were on me that long or would follow me up a mountain. Again, what the fuck does that have to do with telemarketing? I am sitting there wondering. I told him I had no desire to hear such a tape. I knew whatever they had would all come out in discovery and I could address it then. Next he revealed to me that his name was Agent John Mule and that he had seen me in South Florida the other night. He said it in a way like he was letting me know he knew what I did in that porn theater and insinuated that he had weight on me. I thought to myself if this guy thinks he is going to tell my wife and I would care, then he has no idea who he is dealing with or believed that bullshit I was saying on the phone to Tonya while he bugged my phone. Immediately, I thought of many ways I would use that because, hey man, you were in there with me too, what did you tell your bosses you were doing in that porn theater?

When we got to Tampa, Agent Mule told me, “By the way, we are arresting your father and your wife today.” I was completely stunned.

I said, “Why on Earth would you do that?” I said, “They had nothing to do with anything.” He said Tonya wrote some checks and my dad opened some mailboxes and that they had to know. I told him if you have been following me that long, then you already know that they do not know anything, but you arrested them anyway. I asked if that was not a violation of their civil rights knowingly arresting people that you know did not do anything. He told me you cut off the head of the snake and the rest will die.

Chapter 43

After they officially booked me, Agent Mule brought me up to the floor in the high-rise that housed the FBI White Collar Crime Unit. We walked into this big open room where the walls were lined with individual cubicles. John pointed to one cubicle that had tons of paper stacked to the roof. It was the only one in the room that looked like that. He said, “You see that desk? That is mine. That is me tracking you for three years.” He told me he almost lost his job over me because he was unable to bring an indictment against me. He said I was like chasing smoke and that they, the FBI, never saw anything like me. He explained to me that they never tracked a telemarketer who paid his bills. He told me that I never even screwed the phone companies out of money and that I kept such a tight-knit group of people together that were all so well paid. He said everyone around me made money and kept quiet.

I asked him how on earth this is getting me. I complained that the FBI changed the rules of the game. I told him, “You have not arrested a single person I have done business with in all the years I was in this field and that arresting my family that you know had nothing to do with anything, is not exactly getting me fair and square.” He had no answer for that or any smart-ass quip about snakes. All he told me is that if I fight this and go to trial, more people will get arrested and they will throw the book at me and charge me with more crimes. All of a sudden, the room filled with FBI Agents and everyone started putting on these jackets that read FBI in big letters on the back of them.

Agent John Mule looked at me and said, “Remember when you asked me why today is the day?” I said yes, as he started putting handcuffs back on me and chaining me to some other people I did not know. He said, “This is why.” I asked him where we were going. He said, “We are going to walk you downstairs into the streets and then cross the road into the next building. Then we will wait a little while and walk you back to this building.”

I had no idea what the hell he was talking about until we hit the streets of downtown Tampa. All the press was there with their cameras screaming questions at me and the others chained and shackled to me about ripping off old people. The FBI walked us across the street in their FBI jackets to the building across the road. When we got inside they told us that was a perp walk. Then I realized it was a dog and pony show completely organized and planned by the FBI and the press. There was nothing spontaneous about it. The press did not just happen to catch some footage of our arrest; the whole thing was an orchestrated fraud. What I did not know at the time, was this was the image that was shown on the evening news on all the networks across the entire country. We were the faces of Operation Senior Sentinel that Janet Reno and the FBI dragged across the evening news announcing their giant operation to the nation and the hundreds of people across the country that were arrested. All I knew was I did not think people watched the news anymore. However, just my luck, everyone I knew from family and friends down to my priest just happened to see the FBI drag me across the streets of downtown Tampa that day.

There I was in cuffs while they did their perp walk in front of the press. Even my drunken cousin in New York looked up from the bar and caught the vision of me on TV being arrested by the FBI. He screamed at the bartender to turn the TV up. "That is my cousin,” he yelled. All I remember thinking was that fucking bitch got me. When I got back to the FBI building, I asked John what the fuck was this bullshit about ripping off old people. He said, “You had some old customers.” I looked him in the eye and we both knew what total bullshit that was. This template or narrative about old people was Janet’s pitch from the start when she wanted money from Congress to go after us. The government had their pitches too.

When they told me the name of this FBI Sting, Operation Senior Sentinel, I knew what this all was about. Of all the things I did in telemarketing since I was fourteen years old, how I landed up as the face of something I was not doing was beyond ironic. They brought me in front of a federal judge for a bail hearing and gave me a federal public defender. At the bail hearing I requested what is called a signature bond where I just sign and go home and promise to show up for court. The judge asked if there was any reason why I should not receive such a bond and the government attorney stood up and said, “Yes your honor he was charged with fleeing and eluding!”

I couldn’t believe my ears. That freaking day with my father that we challenged the DOT cop was now biting me in the ass! Because of that incident, I was denied a signature bond and had to put up money to get out of there. I got out of jail and went back to my mother’s house to calm her down. Mom was really rattled over the whole thing. When I got home, I heard about everyone seeing me on the news and people calling my mother asking how I could rip off old people. Even one of my aunts in New York asked me, “How could you, Charlie? How could you do that to old people?” I was so pissed beyond words. I was painted to be some guy who mugs old people or is some kind of purse snatcher or something. The FBI really did a number on me with this old person bullshit.

I tried to explain to people that I did not target old people and that there are laws against that and I was not charged with anything like that. However, after being the star of the evening news, I was toast in any public opinion. It did not matter what happened to me in the courts, I was already judged by society and there was no reversing any of that. I spoke to my dad and my wife who begged me to make this all go away. Both of them were distraught over all of this beyond words.

My father lived in Mobile, Alabama at the time and was going to school to upgrade his career from x-raying people in hospitals to x-raying hulls of ships and airplanes. They put his face on the front page of their newspaper in Mobile and the entire town turned on him. He was thrown out of his school and even his dentist refused to finish the work on my father’s teeth, claiming he had too many old clients and that my father needed to find another dentist.

Tonya hid in the closet of our house with the dogs barking while the FBI raided my home and arrested her. She cried and made me promise I would take care of all of this and keep her out of prison. Our names appeared in newspapers all over the place. My family begged me to do something as to keep them out of federal prison. I was in a real pinch. I wanted to have my day in court and fight this, but my family’s pleas to save them trumped me taking this ordeal any further.

My heart was broken. I never in a million years thought anything I did for a living would affect my family. Why would I? They never had anything to do with what I did or even understood what I did. Despite what I thought of my wife and my father, they did not deserve to go to prison because they knew me. I felt so horrible about what the FBI did to them. I remember seeing my federal indictment for the first time. I looked down at the paper, the first thing I read was “The United States of America vs. Charles Richard Walker Jr.,” and I thought, man that does not sound like a fair fight.

The writing was on the wall; I was going to have to throw myself on the sword. I certainly did not need to pay a high-powered attorney to do that. I contacted the federal public defender they issued me and told him that I would plead guilty if they would promise to keep my family out of prison. The lawyer told me he would contact the U.S. prosecutor and set up a sit-down to cut a deal. At that meeting the prosecutor would not talk to me about a deal until I admitted that I was the head of a million-dollar criminal enterprise that spanned from one coast to the other. I had to admit there was no one above me and that I did not answer to anyone but everyone answered to me.

What they had on me were two mistakes that I made. I opened two accounts under two people’s names that were traced back to me. One was my idiot friend Steve Jones who was off the grid until he popped up in the system in a county jail in Georgia, and would testify that I opened the account in his name. The other account was a bartender in Ocala, Florida that my Pop went to named Suzanne Adams. She was also shocked as the FBI walked into the bar she worked at and demanded to know where all the money was. All she knew was that my father drank at her bar and that his kid paid her to put a bank account in her name because he was going through a divorce-like thing with his business partner. She was told the bank account would stay dormant until my business divorce was over and that I would pay her some more money when she signed the inactive account back over to me. She was apparently aghast to find out the account was used for telemarketing fraud. Those two accounts, along with some testimony from the moron I picked up from prison who knew almost nothing, were what the Feds had on me.

I told the prosecutor that if he kept my wife and father out of prison that I would plead guilty and not take anything to trial. They were really concerned and thought that I had had someone inside working for me at the bank. They wanted the bank real bad. I had to explain to them that it was not that I had some inside help, but rather this is how Citibank does business. In truth, I could not have done any of this stuff without some shady bank that would ignore all the strange business models that I presented to them. Signature stamps and writing nothing but checks out to cash would not fly in any other bank I knew of. They were sad to see I could not hand them some bank conspirator, but we cut a deal anyway.

In exchange for my guilty plea, they agreed to keep my family out of prison. They put Tonya through some pretrial diversion program and if she jumped through the hoops of that, they would drop the charges. As for my father, well Pop took a felony hit, but he was sentenced only to probation and as long as he jumped through those hoops, he would not go to federal prison. They had more of a problem with him, because he drove around the entire state of Florida knowingly opening up mailboxes under false pretenses. Each mailbox he opened was five years in prison and a quarter-million-dollar fine, so he was happy just to receive probation.

In the end, in February of 1996 I pled guilty to mail fraud and conspiracy to commit mail fraud in the federal courthouse in downtown Tampa. Ironically, I never used the postal system for anything, but on the application for the mailboxes I had opened, it had a line about their jurisdiction over anything to do with the mailbox itself. A federal judge named Elizabeth A. Kovachevich was originally nominated by President Gerald Ford, appointed by President Ronald Reagan and confirmed by Congress, sentenced me. Judge Kovachevich was the first female judge on the sixth Judicial Circuit. I stood in her courtroom and asked her why do I, a first-time white-collar felony offender, have to go to prison. She explained to me how Congress stripped federal judges of a lot of power and came up with a predetermined system which includes minimum mandatories. I just stood there and shook my head thinking of all the people who walk for more serious offenses than telemarketing. I was sentenced to thirty-three months in federal prison, eight hundred and thirty-two thousand dollars in restitution and three years of probation or “supervised release,” as the feds call it.

Operation Senior Sentinel, in the end, resulted in hundreds of arrests across the entire country. Over one thousand boiler rooms were taken down and put out of business forever due to all the efforts of the FBI. It was one of the biggest undercover FBI operations in the history of the agency. For the first time in the FBI’s existence, they successfully eliminated an entire category of crime. Branching out from all of their efforts was Congress creating a whole bunch of new laws starting with the National Do Not Call Registry.

Finally, since the early days of our communication grid, Americans for the first time could sit down to dinner at their homes and not be bothered by telemarketers. Households, now guarded by answering machines and caller ID technologies, no longer feared the ringing telephone. Congress has continually tweaked these laws to fit the ever-changing world of technology. The never-ending crushing government regulation of the field of telemarketing put down any possibility of boiler rooms going back to the days when they terrorized a nation. In March of 2003 President George W. Bush signed into law the National Do Not Call Registry and strengthened the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 while forever changing a nation and their personal relationships with their phones.

Most all of my peers landed up in jail or prison. Peter Giovanni was sent to prison for many years by the State of Florida for telemarketing. John Pepstall was sent to prison by the State of Florida for telemarketing. The Feds even got Peter J. Pignola and sent him to federal prison. The first year I was in federal prison, Peter Pignola paid taxes on over forty million dollars, I heard, but they still got him too. Federal Judge Bucklew blasted Peter Pignola with ten years on a mail fraud beef, to be served after the eight-year sentence for telemarketing fraud even after he became a police informant and testified against one of his partners.

The authorities chased all of us down to the four corners of the earth. It was a war against our way of life and the cops won. They even nailed Peter Pignola’s phone room manager, Garrett Thomas or Jerry as we called him, before he passed away from cancer. Hell, I bet his whore wife tried waving a fifty-dollar bill at the arresting officer, knowing her. Even Steve Jones and Alexis Solomon spent their lives in and out of jail for petty crimes. I don’t look back at school yearbooks to see the people from my past, I look back at their mug shots. That is how I travel down memory lane, sadly.

In the course of writing this book, I realized what a different time and place America was back then. I thought I was writing a story about me, but I soon recognized that this story is about all of us in America.

Technology and everything is moving so fast now that it is hard to even picture a lot of this today. All of this happened before 9/11/2001 and we forget there was a world before this big surveillance state we have collectively built up as a society. It is hard for a person today who goes through what they do at an airport to understand smoking cigarettes on a plane or the Mile High Club, but that world did exist. It is hard for a young person today with a smart phone to apperceive what life was like with a rotary phone back then. We need to tell the stories of what America was like when it was free before 9/11. Before technology chipped away at the very core of our privacies, in a world where we had the freedom to make a choice from right and wrong, a time and place where not everything we did was recorded or watched in some way.

Just like the story of my cousins driving down from New York to Florida and asking what a pay phone was, there are generations alive today who will never know the freedom we had back then. My story is one of many. It was just one story told from The Last Generation of Freedom.

C. Rich