should not have panicked. The amount looted was sixty million, serious money, but as it turned out just the beginning.
Less than a week after he tapped the insurance reserves, one of Farrell's trading companies in Europe purchased a little over fifty million dollars of platinum and immediately sold it to a German automaker. This was a routine transaction, but the money received was wired to a newly created cash pool. From there the money bounced into various accounts, then became untraceable. There were more moves like this in the same company over the next two weeks. The same thing happened in some of the commodity companies in which Farrell had controlling interest. Ten here, thirty there. No one was getting overly excited. It was just business as usual and a few million falling through the cracks. It was the kind of theft anyone in business could execute, the downside being it was going to catch up with the perpetrator quickly, unless of course one arranged to disappear.
Malloy had not realised Farrell had been preparing for his vanishing act for weeks. He should have. You don't put half-a-billion dollars in your suitcase or melt down ten tons of gold and carry it off in the boot of your car. And you don't make it all go away with the press of a button. You work at it. You plan out the financial moves. You keep the red flags to a minimum for as long as you can. You take out a loan you don't intend to repay, you miss a payroll, you lose the paperwork on a wire transfer. You send people looking in the wrong places. You create problems with a shipment and withhold payment until the problem is settled and then wire the funds to a holding account. From there on to the Caymans or Panama City or Nicosia or Beirut or Liechtenstein or any other country where banking officials are permitted or encouraged to refuse access to Western law enforcement agencies. Some here. Some there. And all the while the clock is ticking. Farrell's wholeworld had been ready to come crashing down on him the moment people in his various enterprises began talking to each other about the problems they were suddenly having.
In Montreal Farrell had got new identities for himself and Irina Turner. He then flew a private jet to Barcelona, though the flight was originally scheduled to Ireland. Less than a week after Farrell's disappearance, Irina Turner surfaced and was arrested by the Spanish Federates on false document charges. The FBI was invited to Spain to conduct interviews. Malloy didn't have the actual transcripts but he read the summaries. Turner was cooperative and gave enough detail that the FBI could trace Farrell's movement from New York to Barcelona. So they knew where he had been but not where he had got his false documents or, more importantly, where he was going.
Soon after Irina Turner surfaced, the Hamburg Police received an anonymous call from a public telephone telling them Jack Farrell was at the Royal Meridien. The Royal Meridien was a five star hotel in the heart of Hamburg. The police staged a midnight incursion into Farrell's suite minutes after the call. They found steam on the mirrors, moist towels, rumpled and apparently well-stained sheets, a man's wallet on the bureau, passports and credit cards - everything but Jack Farrell. Within hours police had identified Farrell's new girlfriend - Helena Chernoff.
FBI Special Agents Josh Sutter and Jim Randal caught the first flight out of Barcelona and were in Hamburg by noon.
Malloy shut his computer down and tried to get some sleep. It didn't happen. There was too much he didn't like about Jack Farrell's run. By rights he should not even have known about a sealed indictment and the pending arrest, and yet he had run within hours of the indictment. Worse still was the decision to start moving money out of legitimate enterprises and into secret accounts just as the SEC started sniffing around his company's procedures. If CEOs ran every time that happened, they'd all be fugitives!
It
Less than a week after he tapped the insurance reserves, one of Farrell's trading companies in Europe purchased a little over fifty million dollars of platinum and immediately sold it to a German automaker. This was a routine transaction, but the money received was wired to a newly created cash pool. From there the money bounced into various accounts, then became untraceable. There were more moves like this in the same company over the next two weeks. The same thing happened in some of the commodity companies in which Farrell had controlling interest. Ten here, thirty there. No one was getting overly excited. It was just business as usual and a few million falling through the cracks. It was the kind of theft anyone in business could execute, the downside being it was going to catch up with the perpetrator quickly, unless of course one arranged to disappear.
Malloy had not realised Farrell had been preparing for his vanishing act for weeks. He should have. You don't put half-a-billion dollars in your suitcase or melt down ten tons of gold and carry it off in the boot of your car. And you don't make it all go away with the press of a button. You work at it. You plan out the financial moves. You keep the red flags to a minimum for as long as you can. You take out a loan you don't intend to repay, you miss a payroll, you lose the paperwork on a wire transfer. You send people looking in the wrong places. You create problems with a shipment and withhold payment until the problem is settled and then wire the funds to a holding account. From there on to the Caymans or Panama City or Nicosia or Beirut or Liechtenstein or any other country where banking officials are permitted or encouraged to refuse access to Western law enforcement agencies. Some here. Some there. And all the while the clock is ticking. Farrell's wholeworld had been ready to come crashing down on him the moment people in his various enterprises began talking to each other about the problems they were suddenly having.
In Montreal Farrell had got new identities for himself and Irina Turner. He then flew a private jet to Barcelona, though the flight was originally scheduled to Ireland. Less than a week after Farrell's disappearance, Irina Turner surfaced and was arrested by the Spanish Federates on false document charges. The FBI was invited to Spain to conduct interviews. Malloy didn't have the actual transcripts but he read the summaries. Turner was cooperative and gave enough detail that the FBI could trace Farrell's movement from New York to Barcelona. So they knew where he had been but not where he had got his false documents or, more importantly, where he was going.
Soon after Irina Turner surfaced, the Hamburg Police received an anonymous call from a public telephone telling them Jack Farrell was at the Royal Meridien. The Royal Meridien was a five star hotel in the heart of Hamburg. The police staged a midnight incursion into Farrell's suite minutes after the call. They found steam on the mirrors, moist towels, rumpled and apparently well-stained sheets, a man's wallet on the bureau, passports and credit cards - everything but Jack Farrell. Within hours police had identified Farrell's new girlfriend - Helena Chernoff.
FBI Special Agents Josh Sutter and Jim Randal caught the first flight out of Barcelona and were in Hamburg by noon.
Malloy shut his computer down and tried to get some sleep. It didn't happen. There was too much he didn't like about Jack Farrell's run. By rights he should not even have known about a sealed indictment and the pending arrest, and yet he had run within hours of the indictment. Worse still was the decision to start moving money out of legitimate enterprises and into secret accounts just as the SEC started sniffing around his company's procedures. If CEOs ran every time that happened, they'd all be fugitives!
It
Similar Books
