Tod Goldberg - The fix

Still, he always tried to put a dash of sugar into their conversations. He called her under the aegis of just checking into an investment opportunity, making sure all was legit. A perfectly reasonable thing for someone to do, Sam thought, if one had the connections. But as soon as he brought up the White Rose Partners, he could actually hear her training take over. "I'm going to need to call you back, Samuel," she said abruptly.

She always called him Samuel. She was the only person alive who called him Samuel. But this time it didn't sound remotely affectionate, like it usually did. Fifteen minutes later, she called him from a secure conference line, which required him to enter his social security number to gain access. That was the thing about talking to people at the IRS: A real paucity of secrets existed.

"Why do you want to know about White Rose, Samuel?" Lenore said when they were finally hooked back up.

"I've got a buddy, name of Eddie Champagne, who told me they were a great investment group," Sam said. He heard her clicking away in the background, and for a long time she didn't respond. It always bothered Sam that people in government had such poor phone skills, that they couldn't pretend to have chitchat while they sourced your every word. It was harder to do back when everyone was still working on typewriters, Sam wagered, though he was sure he would have been annoyed by the sound of the dinging return and papers being shuffled, too.

"Samuel, you know you're not investing anything. You need to see about getting more in your 401 (k), you want my opinion," Lenore said finally.

"I was just going to give them a few thousand dollars," Sam said, not that he had a few thousand dollars. "My girlfriend, she's looking to put some seed into…" Sam didn't know what he was saying. He figured if he just let the words drift, Lenore would pick them up. She did.

"Let me put it to you this way," she said. "You give them money, you'll never see it again and, most likely, you'll be a plaintiff in about two months."

Lenore explained that White Rose was under investigation for mortgage fraud, but the problem was that no one had rolled on them yet. They were still making investors money, or at least enough to keep them hoping it was all legit. Right now, she said, it was the banks who were flagging them.

It was a classic scheme: White Rose used straw buyers to purchase land at full or slightly above full price; then they would bump up the price significantly on the contracts they sent to the mortgage lenders, thus generating huge extra fees on top of the mortgage. To make it all work, they had an accounting firm, two separate mortgage brokers and three different appraisers on the payroll. They had paperwork in order, she said, W-2s, pay stubs, everything, but it was all falsified. They ended up with the land, which they could resell, and which they usually did, flipping parcels within thirty days if they could, often for even larger profits based on the faulty appraisals, huge back-end fees and loans they'd have to touch. "They got people who got other people, too," Lenore said. "I wouldn't be surprised if they had a few flexible people at the banks, too."

"I guess I won't give them any money," Sam said, trying to sound as innocent as possible.

"Samuel," she said, "you can drop that ruse if you like. Our conversations are confidential."

"Are they really?" Sam said.

"Probably not," she said, "but if someone didn't want you getting this information, you wouldn't get it."

Sam knew that was one of the fringe issues related to working with me-there were forces on the inside working for and against me. And if I was being tracked, Sam was being tracked, and all of this was getting approved by someone.

"How not surprised would you be about persons in the banks?" Sam asked.

"Enough to know that it's going to ring some bells on Wall Street," she said.

That sounded fairly dire. If Sam actually had stocks or bonds or whatever it was people did on Wall Street, he'd figure out how to utilize that information. He made a mental note to tell Veronica, since he was fairly certain she actually knew about that sort of thing.

"You got anything on their investors?" Sam said, figuring, What the hell? Might as well just drop all pretense.

Lenore told him it was just as simple as could be. People were being duped, but paid. Investors put in their money, were probably promised a healthy return, and then, at least to start with, got it. The market in Miami was hot, just like in every other metropolitan area with a halfway decent view. And just like every other place, the market had turned to shit. "It's just a matter of time before they stop getting dividends on investment," she said. "They've been running this now for quite some time without a hiccup."

It made sense to Sam, knowing that they were coming to Cricket every two weeks for cash. They were probably seeding their largest investors to keep the money flowing in, waiting for the next explosion in the market. But that hiccup? It was here.

"So Stanley Rosencrantz," Sam said. "Ballpark net worth?"

"Enough to fill a ballpark," Lenore said. "Won't matter, though, when he's doing Fed time."

Sam liked it when Lenore threw out terms like Fed time. This got Sam thinking. "Would it be possible to get a few of the addresses they've bought and sold?"

"No," Lenore said, but he heard her clicking in the background, and in a second his phone beeped, letting him know he'd received a text. That's how the IRS worked. They said no, but they meant yes. "Before I lose my job, is there anything else you might need to know, Samuel?"

He wasn't going to do it, but… "You have anything on Brenda Holcomb?"

Lenore gave out a perceptible sigh. He heard the familiar click-clack of keys again. "She's not right for you," Lenore said. "You be good and stay with Veronica."

"You're a sweetheart," Sam said. "But it's not like that."

"It's always like that with you, Samuel," Lenore said. He had to admit that she had a point. She'd been looking into women for him for too long. It was just his policy to make sure women he slept with weren't sleeper agents for terrorist organizations, or, at the very least, didn't have husbands in the mafia. "And, Samuel? You might want to tell your friend Eddie Champagne, if you see him again, that he's now officially on the no-fly list, along with his friends at White Rose. In case you're curious."

"You caught that?"

"I catch everything," Lenore said. "Patriot Act, Samuel-you should learn to embrace it."

What Sam opted to embrace, after he hung up with Lenore, was the list of addresses she texted him. In the last year, there were three houses on Fisher Island, two office parks in North Miami, a dentist's office in Coconut Grove, a nightclub, a T-shirt shop, a strip club and an address Sam recognized immediately, since he'd spent the better part of the morning looking at it on Google Maps, trying to figure out how he was going to get his goddamned car back: the offices of Longstreet Security.

He had to hand it to Eddie Champagne. He was a scumbag, but man, he had huge balls.

Early the next morning, Sam recounted all of this to Fiona and me as we drove around Miami in Cricket's Mercedes (which I figured probably wasn't being monitored by any satellites-it at least didn't have any tracking devices on it), looking at the properties Eddie Champagne had purchased, flipped and lured investors into. We saw homes worth only a few hundred thousand dollars that he'd managed to get loans on for nearly a million dollars. We saw the remnants of the Lyric Theater in Overtown, one of the poorest neighborhoods in all of Miami, but which had once been the hub of what was called Little Broadway in the thirties and forties, and which Eddie had managed to get a loan of four million dollars on, when its value was more historical than nominal. And finally, we drove past Longstreet.