Tod Goldberg - The Reformed

“Okay,” he said. “Okay. Yes. There is no ‘might’ here.”

I let go of him and said, “Barry,” again, because sometimes just hearing your name reminds you that you’re a real person and that you’ve disappointed someone. Your name is the one word in the history of language that has the power to mean about five hundred different things depending on inflection and the person speaking. In this case, I wanted “Barry” to mean “you idiot.”

“I know, I know, I’m stupid,” Barry said, getting it. “But, Mike, it’s not like I’m flush with business right now. I’ve grown accustomed to a certain level of comfort and, as such, my station in life requires that I continue to grow my brand.”

“Your brand,” I said, “has worsened a substantial problem.” I told him about Father Eduardo and Junior, about the Latin Emperor compound out in Homestead, what we’d discovered at the Ace Hotel, what Sam had uncovered and about Fiona’s fact-finding mission at Honrado, which I’d learned just prior to Barry’s arrival had yielded us plenty of information and, apparently, another damsel in distress… in addition to Barry, of course.

Barry took in all of this information without saying much. At first he just calmly ate the second sandwich my mother dropped off; then he attempted to drink a second glass of strawberry Quik, wisely gave that up midway through and asked for a beer and, finally, began to knead his hands together.

“Just to clarify,” Barry said when I’d finished, “I didn’t know that Pistell girl was some college kid. I had good intel that she was a very wealthy Connecticut business woman.”

“She’s not,” I said. That Barry was using the word “intel” was not a good sign. Apparently he’d decided his consulting business should include military words.

“Well, I can fix that one. Now that she’s got such good credit, it won’t be a problem.”

“Is that a joke, Barry?”

“Yes. Just attempting to find some levity here.”

“Tell me what Junior wanted to know,” I said.

“First, just to be clear, I told him that I couldn’t get involved with a criminal organization,” Barry said. “I didn’t come right out and say it, but I intimated to him that the snitch factor was too high for my liking, and he seemed agreeable to that. Some kid off the street gets pinched, and all of sudden I’m doing fifty years.”

“Probably only ten,” I said.

“I couldn’t do ten minutes,” Barry said. “You know you’re not allowed any kind of skin lotions in some prisons? I’ve got an eczema thing on my knees that, untreated, could be a real problem.”

“Barry,” I said.

“Right. So he asked me about the best way to launder his money so that he could still invest it, so that he could make his money work for him. He actually said that. I told him the only positive illegal marketplace right now was in religious groups and faith-based non-profits. The FBI and IRS are so busy chasing all the shady mortgage lenders and refinancers and sham banks that they just don’t care about the little guys when there are billions of bad dollars floating around in the banks and the automakers and the insurance companies. You don’t see any churches asking for bailouts. So I told him, kind of joking-you know, levity, like I said before-that he should start a church. How much could it cost to start a church?”

“It could cost eternity,” I said.

“Hey, I don’t play the morality card with these people. They want to defraud God, have at it,” Barry said. “I’m just offering opinions. Good, solid, fact-based opinions.”

The sad truth was that Barry was correct. Running an illegal operation through a church is one of the safest routes an enterprising businessperson can take. Cash donations are difficult to track, but they are the stock and trade of many small churches and one of the easiest ways to clean dirty money. It’s also one of the easiest ways to defraud people. If you want to get someone’s personal information, tell them you’re working for God and that you need their help. Offer to pay someone a small amount of money for a task, and they’ll give you the keys to their entire life in return, all in the form of the W-2 and I-9 forms they’ll need to fill out to get paid. It’s a small investment for the possibility of a wide return.

It also made his shakedown of Father Eduardo all the more clear-cut: He didn’t just have a church; he had an entire faith-based organization of small businesses and had the ear of important people

… which meant the mere idea that the FBI, IRS or any other organization might decide to investigate it without probable cause seemed remote.

Of course, working the money through a church had a side benefit: It’s nearly impossible to get a warrant to bug a church. It’s not that the idea of sanctuary still exists from medieval times, but what someone says to his clergy is privileged, just as if he were speaking to his lawyer. Even the nice relic from the Bush administration-the warrantless wiretap-would be pretty far out-of-bounds inside a church, but particularly since this was a church that was actively helping people with the aid, probably, of government subsidy.

Junior was smart, but he wasn’t smart enough to know all of this from his perch inside a prison. But Barry, well… Barry knew his industry better than anyone in Miami, so everything I knew, Barry had imparted to Junior, too. Junior was wise enough to go to him; Barry wasn’t wise enough to run the other direction, which I told him, with more than just a little regret.

“Mike,” Barry said, “it’s not like the Girl Scouts show up at my house with questions about how to move their cookie money around. Good people don’t need me, present company excluded.”

“Did you tell Junior all of this before or after he paid you?” I asked.

“He’d already made a down payment,” Barry said, though he seemed a bit unsure about that answer. “I let him put the rest on a layaway plan.”

“You’ve become the Kmart of money launderers.”

“We actually had a trade agreement at first,” Barry said. “He had some credit cards he needed to get rid of; I had a guy who would buy them. I don’t like to work in trade usually, because it’s a dirty business. People always end up thinking that they can get more out of you than if you pay cash, which is sort of what happened with Junior. He came back with more questions, and I told him I needed to be paid this time, which is when things got dicey.”

“So you received stolen property from the Latin Emperors and then sold it?”

“If you want to look at it that way,” Barry said.

“Is there another way of looking at it?”

“I guess not,” Barry said. “I guess it’s pretty much 3-D as it is.”

“4-D,” I said.

“I’m not familiar with that,” Barry said.

“It’s called reality,” I said.

“I’m just trying to find some middle ground with you, Michael. I came hear willingly to talk to you, Mike. You don’t have to interrogate me.”

“No, you didn’t,” I said. “If Sam hadn’t found your number on Junior’s phone records, you’d still be in the same place you were: hiding.”

“What would I need to hide from?”

“I don’t know, Barry. Why don’t you tell me?”

“You went to his place, right?”

“Right.”

“Pretty sweet setup, wasn’t it? That was my consulting work right there. Pretty proud of that.”

“You told him to buy that house?”

“No,” Barry said. “But I told him to quit-claim it to Julia Pistell. And I told him about, you know, a lot of secret criminals-only stuff.”

“You mean the rental houses, the security cameras someone stole from RadioShack and the cars with the dealer plates?”