Friday, June 24. Ten days after the murder.
The day after Suzy and I visited Olivia at the Pentecostal meeting in Little Tokyo, I was scheduled to go back to work. That all changed when a knock came at the front door just as I was stirring a spoonful of sugar into my instant coffee.
“Cuauhtemoc McCarthy?” The man in the dark suit and sunglasses said as I opened the door. His partner stood quietly in the rear. I knew them both. “It’s nice to see you again, sir. We need to have a word with you about the murder of Roland Shavosian.”
“I told the police everything I know.”
“We’re not the police. You know that.” The agent smiled. “C’mon, Temo. It’ll just take a few hours. You can visit the headquarters in Westwood again. Just for old times’ sake.”
An hour later I was in an interrogation room in the FederalBuilding on Wilshire Boulevard near the 405 freeway. The two agents faced me across the table. Alex Weisbein and his partner, Harvey Chang. I had met them both a few months earlier when Roland and I were on a project.
Weisbein and Chang were intelligent, powerful men. One was born in Israel, the other Taiwan, but they both grew up on the west side of Los Angeles. The guys from the Westside seemed to be operating at a different level than the people I grew up around, even though we were raised a few freeway exits apart. My people stumbled through life like they’d been shipwrecked on some hostile, jungle island full of snakes, scorpions, and quicksand. They spent their youth getting bitten, trapped, and attacked without any means of protection. Hopefully, they figured out how to survive and learn the lessons of their scars.
Guys from the Westside like Weisbein and Chang might have been on the same island, but they had a map. They knew where the dangers were and how to avoid them. They also knew where the good stuff was: like fruit and fresh water and maybe even a little buried treasure. These guys had it all figured out. By the time they were teenagers, they knew more about how the world worked than most guys from my neighborhood would learn in a lifetime.
“How you been Temo?” Weisbein asked. I could’ve sworn he looked like some actor on TV, but maybe that was because he was Jewish. “Did you win that company award yet?”
“No. Not yet.”
“We’re still rooting for you,” Chang said with a wink.
“Thanks. The whole company has sort of been sidetracked by the murder investigation.”
“I would imagine. We know the police spent a lot of time questioning you,” Weisbein said, shaking his head. “They’re like cats chasing their tails. They have absolutely no idea what they’re doing.”
“That’s pretty obvious,” I said.
“We figured we’d let them sputter around for a week, see if they come up with anything,” Chang added with a chuckle. “Now we’re getting restless.”
“I thought the FBI usually doesn’t get involved in murder cases,” I said.
“That’s true. We only come in if there is some special angle,” Weisbein said. “Now of course you know from our prior encounter that anything related to Passion Financial has some very special angles.”
“You’re talking about the identity theft case?”
“Bingo,” Chang said.
“Roland was your partner in that case, wasn’t he?” Weisbein said. He knew the answer to that question.
“Something like that,” I said in a low voice.
“Sure he was. You guys were blood brothers, right?” Harvey laughed.
“Man, not you guys, too! I expect this kind of crap from the cops, but you, too? After everything I did for you?”
“I’m sorry,” Chang said.
“No, seriously,” Weisbein continued. “We know that you faced great danger in that case. I mean, you two were just call center guys. I couldn’t believe how well you held up through the identity theft thing.”
“Especially you, Temo,” Harvey said. “You saved Roland’s life. We know that.”
“Imagine those stupid cops down in Torrance,” Weisbein said, grinning and shaking his head once again in disgust. “They don’t really think that you murdered Roland for that reward after you risked your neck to save him?”
“Why don’t you talk to police then?” I said impatiently. “In one of the sessions, I asked them to check with you guys. I told them you’d vouch for how I saved Roland’s life. Why don’t you tell them once and for all that I would never do something like that? Tell them they can cross me off their list for good.”
Weisbein stopped smiling. So did his partner. It seemed like I must have pissed them off.
“We’re here to talk about what you can do for us,” Weisbein said. “Then after that maybe we’ll talk about what we can do for you.”
“Tell me what you want,” I said.
“Tell us your story again, Temo. That same story you told us when we had you in here in February. Tell us how you solved the identity theft problem with Passion Financial credit cards. Including the part where you saved Roland’s life. Refresh our memory. Then maybe we’ll be in a better position to vouch for you.”
So once again I did my best to remember a chapter in my struggle to win Employee of the Year. The problems with the credit card fraud cropped up in the month of February, right after the Super Bowl.
I remember that Monday because I was in great spirits. I was riding high from my first place finish in January. I took the top spot in collections that month off a single call to Jesse Stark. It was a victory for me and made my boss look good as well.
Teresa had just completed her first full month running the call center since Lenny got fired. She was smart, she was effective, and her performance was so good that Lenny had become a distant memory in the minds of the executives. She even received a compliment from Marcus in his monthly e-mail communications to the staff, something Lenny had never earned in all his years.
Everybody got the sense that Teresa was a star, rising fast and spectacularly within Passion Financial. So it was a complete shock when I came into her office and found her on the phone, sobbing desperately. She was yelling angrily through her tears at the person on the other end of the line.
“That’s all you have to say?” she shouted. “After all the money I paid you, you’re saying there’s nothing to be done? You’re saying he can’t change?”
She paused as she listened to the response, wiping her eyes.
“Well, you’re wrong, doctor. My son will recover. He’s not going to be like this for ever. He’s going to learn to communicate. He’s going to learn to love. I don’t care how much you think you know about this condition.”
She listened impatiently as the doctor replied.
“Yeah, I know I am angry. I know you think I am just a crazy, bitter bitch, just like all the other moms you deal with. Well, you’re right about that, but you’re wrong about my son. You don’t know what he is capable of. So fuck you and all the money I wasted at your clinic for the past year.”
Teresa slammed down the phone and finally realized I was standing there.
“I am sorry,” I said. “You called me in here.”
“I know I did,” she said, wiping away tears and smeared make-up. “I got some bad news.”
“You sure you’re all right?”
“Don’t worry about it. I brought you in here because I need your help with something. The CEO has called us into a meeting.”
“Marcus Davis? The big man wants us in a meeting?” I couldn’t imagine why. The only time I’d ever met our heroic leader was the ping-pong tournament.
“That’s right. He’s very upset.”
“Why?”
“Something happened yesterday after the Super Bowl.”
An hour later I was on the top floor, in the boardroom next to the CEO’s office. The view of LA was stunning. I could make out the Hollywood sign and the skyscrapers of downtown in the distance. The furniture was made of some rich, gorgeous type of stained wood I’d never seen. There was a broad table with speakers in the center. I figured every meeting was tape recorded. I saw a minibar tucked behind the corner, but none of us was offered any refreshments when Marcus’s handlers came in to prepare the room for his arrival. They set a glass of sparkling water with ice at the empty spot at the head of the table.
Teresa and Roland sat on either side of me. Charlie and Larry from the security team sat across from us, both wearing sports coats and shirts opened at the collar. The only person who looked at ease in the boardroom was Gina, who obviously knew the environment and the protocol.
We waited fifteen minutes in silence until Marcus abruptly entered through a side door from his office and explained what happened on his trip to the Super Bowl.
I knew that Marcus was a big football fan. He played quarterback in high school down in OrangeCounty. Since Passion hit the big time, he made a special tradition of going to see the Super Bowl each year, like a sort of pilgrimage. Every year he would fly by chartered jet to watch the Super Bowl in sky box seats. He made the game every year, no matter what city it was played in.
This year the economy was a little bumpy. When times are tough, leaders also have to make sacrifices, Marcus told us in one company meeting. I guess this applied to leaders everywhere. I heard that during the Iraq War, Bush decided to give up golf. So in recognition of the hardship many in the business world were facing, Marcus and a couple of his CEO friends decided they would share the same private jet to fly to Miami for the football championship.
In the last company meeting, Marcus had joked around about flying to the game with his friends, using it as an example of the importance of sacrifice. He told us he’d be sitting next to his buddy Dan De Concini, the real estate magnate who owned the PassionBuilding and leased it to our company. De Concini owned dozens of offices and shopping centers around Los Angeles. Marcus told the staff he’d made a deal with Dan before the flight that whoever had the higher stock price would get to use the middle arm rest. That was the kind of joke Marcus would find funny. Since we were his employees, we should find it funny, too.
Marcus took great pride and comfort in his friendships with fellow CEOs as well as celebrities, politicians, and other people in high places. He made a special effort to ensure they used Passion products and services. He provided some of them with special loans. And he made sure they were all card-carrying members of the Passion Elite Gold program, an exclusive offering that Marcus set up to rival American Express and other VIP credit card programs. The Passion Elite Gold cards came with limits up to $200,000 and plenty of perks and loyalty point tie-ins. There were thousands of Elite Gold members, the crème de la crème in Passion’s customer base, well-educated, high-rolling, power players who lived in a different world than the everyday deadbeats I chased down in the call center all day long.
Everyone in the boardroom had this background, even those who’d never met Marcus. We knew that whatever happened at the Super Bowl probably was somehow related.
“I don’t get to spend a lot of time with my friends,” Marcus said. “These Super Bowl trips are very important for me. So they’re important for you, too.”
“Marcus,” Gina offered gently. “We understand this is a serious situation.”
“Let me tell you what happened to one of my friends this weekend. Dan De Concini, the man who owns this building we’re all sitting in. He was sitting next to me in the sky box yesterday telling me one of the most goddamn awful stories I’ve ever heard in my life. Some criminals used Dan’s Passion Elite Gold card to make over $20,000 in purchases on Friday and Saturday. His assistant checks his online statement and sees a bill for 20K that he doesn’t know anything about. Some bastards stole my friend’s identity! And they did it with a credit card from my bank! Our signature product!” He banged his fist on the table.
“That’s awful,” Gina said, with heartbreak in her voice. I wasn’t crying. Dan De Concini was a billionaire like Marcus. Besides, like every other cardholder, he wasn’t responsible for fraudulent purchases. Passion would waive the bill to him and probably force the merchant who authorized the charge to take the loss. “What did they use the cards to buy?” I asked.
Marcus took a drink of sparkling water. “Hospital services up in Fresno.”
“Hospital services?”
“Charlie, tell them what these sick fucks used to the cards to pay for.”
Charlie rattled off the details from a case that he’d probably been studying all night long. “Epidural. Caesarian section. Anesthesiologist. Postnatal care. Obstetrician fees. Related childbirth services.”
“Baby deliveries?” I said.
“Three different babies in two days. Three different men impersonating Dan De Concini, paying for childbirth services on behalf of three different mothers. They paid in person,” Charlie explained. “They always settled payment at different times of the day, different shifts so they were always talking to a different person in the billing office. No one made the connection.”
“They actually had Dan’s card?” I asked.
“No, but they must have created a pretty good replica. All the details on the card were accurate. The name, the expiration date, the security code on the back, the magnetic swipe data. Once you have all that, all you need is a fake driver’s license with Dan’s name on it. Those aren’t too hard to buy.”
Marcus pounded his fist again. “Three babies in two days at the same hospital. None of the systems raised a red flag. The hospital missed it. They’re probably on zombie shifts, one step a way from Chapter 11 like all the city hospitals. Our partners at Visa and MasterCard missed it. What do they care? They throw back all the risk on the banks and the merchants anyway. We missed it. We don’t have any excuse. We should have caught this. What the fuck, Charlie? You’re in charge of Risk Management. What the hell happened? What the hell do I pay you for?”
Marcus walked over to Charlie, staring down at him, shaking with rage. Charlie wasn’t nervous. Any man who’d squared off again a rioting mob in South Central could handle the lashing of a corporate executive. But Charlie did look ashamed, like an old soldier who just lost a battle.
“It was unacceptable, sir,” Charlie said. “And unfortunately I have more bad news. Mr. De Concini wasn’t the only Elite Gold member violated during this time. Two more Elite Gold members were hit with fraudulent charges from the delivery ward of this hospital during the same time period.”
“This is a nightmare,” Marcus shouted. “These are our top customers! This gets out and it will destroy us. If we can’t protect our cardholder’s identity, what the fuck good are we?”
Charlie bravely spoke up again. “Sir, everyone at this table is deeply sorry about what happened. But I am the one in charge of security. I accept full responsibility. If you want my resignation, I fully understand.”
Charlie was impressive how he played it. Most people would’ve have flailed around making excuses or pointing the finger at someone else. Charlie just put it right out there like a man.
Marcus laughed for the first time since he entered the room. “If I wanted to get rid of you, Charlie, you’d already be gone. You know that. I know how to get rid of people who aren’t useful. That’s not what this is meeting is about. This is about finding a solution to my new No. 1 problem. We have some smart criminals out there who decided that Passion Financial is an easy target. We’re going to prove they made a big mistake. I’ve called Charlie and everyone in this room because Gina tells me you’re the best team to catch these identity thieves. Credit card theft is a crime that requires knowledge of technology, security, and human nature. You’re my top people in the Risk Management and the call center, the best expertise I have in these fields. Charlie’s team knows how the card systems work. Teresa’s team knows how the card users’ minds work. You track down the deadbeats. You even salvaged that situation in Corona. I am expecting all of you right here to fix this fraud problem. I am expecting you to catch the criminals who think they can raid Elite Gold accounts with impunity.”
“Sir, that might be a difficult task,” Gina pleaded. “These are complex, organized crimes that even the federal government struggles to solve with all their resources. This could be a sophisticated computer hacking. It could be an international network.”
“I am assuming these thieves are smart and coordinated. If they got away with something easy, then you’re morons and I should’ve fired you all a long time ago. But this was probably a complicated scam that took time to set up. I am assuming they’ll try to hack us again since it worked the first time. If we can’t track them down from what happened at the hospital, then we try to get them the next time.”
Marcus paused to finish his sparkling water. “Let me be clear. I am giving everyone in this room the rest of the month to get to the bottom of this. If you can’t figure this out by then, you’ll all be gone. I am going to be looking at a whole new team next month.”
Marcus stormed back to his office. One of his handlers came in and told us we had three minutes to clear the boardroom before the next meeting started. That was fine, of course. The rest of us had nothing else to discuss.
We went back to the call center and met in Teresa’s office. Everyone from the board meeting was there except Gina. Roland was leaning back in his chair, probably processing it all in his head and working out some sneaky way to profit from the situation. Charlie was there and didn’t seem rattled. A security guy always knows his main job is to wage war against thieves, so he was very matter-of-fact about it all. Hundreds of companies had been victimized by credit card fraud so this was nothing out of the blue for a Risk Management officer to go up against. Larry Vincent, the ex-cop, also took the lashing upstairs in stride. Teresa was the hardest to read. She was new to the financial industry so she’d never been through something like this before. But she’d be OK. She didn’t have to lead, she only had to support Charlie the best she could.
Charlie revealed more background on the Passion Elite Gold fraud. The spike in incidents actually started earlier, before the Dan De Concini disaster on Super Bowl weekend. One weekend in earlier January, two cards were hit with thousands of dollars for stays in a New York hotel. In a separate case, a single Elite Gold member was wrongly billed for dozens of cell phone calls with expensive services for data and international roaming.
Then he started going into some of the technical details. I didn’t understand technology that well, so some of Charlie’s explanation went over my head. Charlie went through great pains to segregate different pieces of customer data on different machines in the network. Passwords, billing addresses, card numbers, and security codes were stored in different encryption settings on separate servers. The servers were also rigged with multiple firewalls and alarms. The idea was that even if a hacker got into one machine, he’d only be able to access one subset of a customer’s key information. The rest would be somewhere else on the network, so he’d have to guess which machine each piece of data was on and deal with a whole new set of barriers and traps in every incremental attempt. All of this was supposed to make it nearly impossible for hackers to get a complete record of customer card data.
Yet it seemed like the thieves were able to do this with ease. The crimes showed an intimate knowledge of all the Elite Gold member information that flowed through Passion Financial. They were getting not just the sixteen-digit card number, expiry date, and security code, which any common waiter or shopkeeper who came in contact with the card could know. They were getting the cardholder’s social security number, billing address, and magnetic swipe data. Once a hacker had all that, it was easy to produce fake replicas of the plastic card and a driver’s license with the cardholder’s name and any face in the photograph. Once they had the fake card and fake identity, the thieves had a window of time to buy anything they wanted until the real cardholder got the bill and saw the unauthorized purchases.
The thieves had found a hole somewhere in Passion. They would keep sucking money out until either we found the hole or the money ran out.
Teresa told me and Roland to work directly with Charlie and Larry. In an empty office at the far end of the call center, we set up a special “war room” where our teams would camp out during the project, focusing all our energy on the credit card fraud problem.
There would be another change.
“I am bringing someone else on board,” Charlie said. “The IT guys I have now are obviously out of their league. So Marcus has opened the checkbook for me to go out and hire the best data security guy on the market.”
“Why are we involved in this?” I asked Teresa once Charlie and Larry left the war room. “We’re not security guys. We’re not technical.”
Our beautiful boss smiled. “You and Roland know how to solve problems. Temo, you figured out how to squeeze money out of that Rebel Without a Cause situation. And Roland here recovers a fortune from deadbeats every month, even during December when Lenny tried to punish him with a list of the hard-core delinquent accounts. You guys may not have the pedigree, but you know how to hunt down people and find missing money. That’s what this is all about. The only difference is this time instead of deadbeats we’re going after professional thieves. I am not sure that’s such a big difference.”
“I am sure we’ll figure it out as we go along,” Roland said coolly.
“Exactly,” Teresa was pleased with his confidence, especially compared to my uncertainty. “And remember. Roland, Temo, whatever differences you’ve had with each other, put that in the past. You guys are on the same team. Look out for each other on this assignment. You’re both here to help Charlie nail these thieves. That’s your number one mission this month. I’ll make sure you both are well rewarded, including merit points in the Employee of the Year contest to make up for the time you’re away from the phones.”
Roland and I left Teresa’s office and stopped by the break room. Our relationship had been bad for so long, an awkward silence usually fell between us when nobody else was around. I poured fresh coffee into a Styrofoam cup and handed it to Roland as a peace offering.
Finally I spoke up. “She’s right, Roland. Let’s put the past behind us. We’re going to need to treat each other like partners for this assignment.”
Roland held his hands in the air, palms open, rejecting the coffee I’d offered to him.
“Fuck you, Temo. You’re going to try to make nice now? After the way you played that whole Rebel Without a Cause case last month? I get sent down to the rent-a-prayer in OrangeCounty like a sacrificial lamb. Then after I get my ass handed to me on the TV news, you get to step in and win all the glory? I cleared the way for you to collect that Stark money. I was set up for failure so that you could succeed. You wouldn’t have won Caller of the Month for January without my work.”
“Roland, that’s not my fault. I didn’t tell you to go down there! Nobody knew what was going to happen. It was just dumb luck the way things turned out.”
“You’re right about that part, Temo. It was dumb luck that you won last month. When I win it’s because I know what I am doing. That’s why I am going to come out on top in the end and take the Employee of the Year prize.”
“We both want the award for our own reasons. But we still have to work with each other. We have to figure out a way to cooperate.”
Roland checked the doorway of the break room, making sure we were alone. Most of the people in the call center found him charming because that was the face he showed in public. I am sure he didn’t want them to discover what a miserable son of a bitch he was underneath it all.
“Teresa can sing that kumbaya stuff all day long about how you and I are supposed to be brothers. That’s a leader’s job in the company structure: to make everyone feel like we’re all in this together. But deep down she knows it’s bullshit, just like you and I know it’s bullshit. We are not all in this together. We never were. That’s not how things work. I am in this for me. Period. You’re exactly the same. It’s too late in the game to pretend otherwise.”
Roland left me alone. The cup of coffee I’d offered was still in my hand. I felt stupid for reaching out to him, imagining it would end any differently than this.
Author's Note: Employee of the Year is a book published in 2011 available on Amazon.com. I will be publishing one episode per week for the next several months or you can purchase the Kindle version of the entire book on Amazon for $1.99.
Copyright 2011 Dmitri Ragano www.dmitriragano.com