Haggai Harmon - The Chameleon Conspiracy

Sydney, Australia, August 17, 2004

“I’m not Albert C. Ward III. My name is Herbert Goldman! There must be a mistake.” The man in the hospital bed was insistent.

I was amused.

“Look here,” he tried again, when he saw my knowing smile. “I’m a sick man. The doctors say I shouldn’t get overexcited. What you’re doing to me is murder, you’re killing me!” Seeing that I wouldn’t budge, he rolled his eyes. He was dressed in a hospital gown that bared his backside, and a feeding tube crawled under the top part. Looking at him, I almost felt sympathy. Albert C. Ward III could have been any other patient in the ward: a slight, almost unnoticeable middle-aged man, lying there now like a deflated balloon. But that was Ward’s greatest asset. Who’d be suspicious of a small man in his late forties, whose few remaining teeth weren’t in such great shape? He had thinning hair that he combed sideways, applying the “savings and loan” comb-over: saving on the side where it still grew, and loaning it to the side where hair was long gone.

We had just met for the first time, but I knew who I was dealing with. Right there in his hospital bed, he might have seemed older than his years, and he might have seemed humble. Albert C. Ward III was humble; he wouldn’t confront or cross you on anything, unless you were an investor or a banker sitting on some money, while he was thirsty for cash. The problem was that he was always thirsty. To quench that thirst, Ward would become a human chameleon and change from nobody to somebody in a heartbeat-a sneaky little devil, who’d siphon money from banks and walk silently away while the banks collapsed into the receiving hands of federal regulators for being under-capitalized, while investors lamented the loss of their uninsured savings, and while American taxpayers picked up most of the bill. Yes, that was Ward’s expertise. He was a banker for a new era: he banked on people’s foolishness and greed. A con artist of epic proportions.

Ward was the only patient in a small room at the internal-medicine department of Macquarie Street Hospital in Sydney, Australia. It was a public hospital in the city center, not far from my hotel. Ward could have been mistaken for the man behind the counter at the post office…the refrigerator repairman, maybe. But that’s not entirely fair to say. Those good people never made history. Albert C. Ward III did.

One detail set Ward apart from the other patients in the hospital: a uniformed Australian policeman sat beside him, making sure that Ward wouldn’t vanish again. Ward lay there in a simple metal-frame hospital bed, its white paint chipping around the edges. The room was clean, almost sterile, but no one would linger unless they had to. The unbroken view of cement wall, the smell of antiseptic mixed with human urine, and the hollow eyes of patients for whom this would be the last stop ensured that.

For Albert C. Ward III, it was definitely not the last stop. This was his usual route-feigning a critical illness, approaching death’s door when he felt the law closing in on him. The history Albert C. Ward III made wasn’t an achievement to be inscribed on his tombstone when the time came. He wouldn’t make the record books. But still, he was a champion of something. Otherwise, how could he have evaded law and justice for nearly two decades, not to mention evading me for longer than any other target I’d ever chased? Well, he had come close.

The only available pictures of him, dating back to high school, were on my desk, at home, and even in my car. Ward was a wanted man. Everyone was after him, including the FBI and the Office of Asset Recovery and Money Laundering of the U.S. Department of Justice (with me their senior investigative attorney). All of my life-three years at the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service, and the time spent earning my Israeli and American law degrees-had been leading up to this. As an investigative attorney at DOJ, I’d been finding the money launderers, the scammers, the con artists who made off with other people’s money and stashed it away in sunny, far-off places and brought it back to the United States. Sometimes I also brought home the perpetrators. We called them absconders, targets, or defendants; the tax havens of the world called them investors. Obviously there was an ongoing conflict between me, the asset hunter, and these exotically located asset protectors. A better word would be battle, or even war . Conflict is a laundered word for stiff-upper-lip delegates at the UN.

We had long been at war with the money launderers and their guardians. And when you’re at war, you enlist the finest. As for whether I fit into that category, well, you could ask any of the people who dealt with me professionally-that is, if you could get into prison to find them. So although I had pity for the chameleon that was in Albert C. Ward III’s bed, I was still awed by how he had managed to pull it off. Not once, not twice, but eleven times. And those were only the cases in which the FBI had determined him to be the main suspect. Who knew how many others there had been?

“Mr. Ward,” I said. “I’m quite impressed with your display. But would you kindly stop the drama and talk to me?” His resistance impelled me to try again.

“Here you go again,” he sighed. “I’m not Ward, my name is Herbert Goldman.” I noticed a slight accent when he pronounced the word here.

“I need to rest, I don’t feel too well. You’ll have to excuse me.” He closed his eyes and turned his face to the wall. I stood there for five more minutes until a nurse came in.

“Please, you are disturbing our patient,” she said, in a tone reserved for intruders aged ten and younger. I had thought Albert C. Ward III was disturbing my patience.

The policeman looked bored as he sat there apparently not listening. He never said a word.

The cafeteria outside was just about to close for the day. There was only one other diner, a man with a protruding nose hair noisily slurping a soup that even from a distance smelled like my socks after two weeks of basic training in the desert. I was hungry, and meat loaf with potato pancakes seemed safe. But one bite was enough. The meat loaf was probably made of the ass of an ass, and the potato pancakes tasted as if they had been fried in castor oil and lightly seasoned with sawdust. The plate smelled of ammonia. I pushed the tray away. Even my voracious appetite had its limits. Anyway, it was time to write my report on my meeting with Ward. My boss, David Stone, the director of the Office of Asset Recovery and Money Laundering, was going to love it.

Walking to my hotel, I thought about how long I had waited to face Ward, how long I had mentally prepared what I would say to him. But when the time had finally come, there had been no bombast, no fireworks. Just hollow emptiness. I wasn’t recognizing yet that the battle wasn’t over, it had just begun.

It wasn’t just the anticlimax, I quickly realized. I was still disturbed by the meeting and didn’t quite know why. Something just wasn’t sitting well.

I pulled out my cell phone and called Peter Maxwell, the curly-haired, easygoing Australian Federal Police agent assigned to help me. I decided not to share with him the tinge of doubt I had.

“I think it’s him all right,” I told Peter. “Let’s wait for the U.S. Department of Justice to prepare the request for provisional arrest with a view toward extradition. Meanwhile, just make sure he doesn’t leave the hospital until the request arrives.”

“He isn’t going anywhere, might,” said Peter.

“What do you mean, might?” I asked in a startled voice. “He could still leave?”