Death Broker

1 For the Love of …GUNS

In his youth Remi spent many hours with his father in his small gun shop.

His father was in the gun repair business, and he also ran a gun shop that exclusively handled antique weapons. It was not a very lucrative business since the number of guns were few and the selling price very high. The occasional sale was always celebrated with a family outing or special dinner prepared by his mother.

He loved the feeling that occasionally he got when he was allowed to handle these antique weapons. He became quite talented at gun repair, the loading of the shell, the cleaning and polishing the various pistols and long guns.

That was all now a pleasant memory that always made him feel better.

He had recently become aware of someone checking on his business. One of his shop managers had described a young green-eyed man who had come in and asked him to show him some good pistols.

He had shown him three different top end guns and had taken him to the one lane practice range behind the store to test the weapon.

During their conversation, this person inquired about two other shops and their practices.

The shop manager said that the questions about the other shops were shops that were at the gun show, but he had not shared any information about them.

After that conversation, Remi decided to investigate who that person might be. He was not sure who this person was or why he might be interested, but he planned to make sure whoever he was he would pay a price if he screwed up the flow of money that was steadily going into his various bank accounts.

He was not going to humor or coddle anyone investigating his doings.

He hired some mafia contacts to find out who was looking into what he was doing. He figured that they would have the means to discover who was mucking around his personal business. Once he knew who, he would confront them and see what was going on and take the action that was necessary.

No matter what, he was not going to allow some individual to screw things up.

His biggest worry was the way he managed his gun sales business and whether some government entity was curious. He knew that he used every loophole and means to get around the gun laws.

California had the toughest gun control laws. He had started his business expansion in California that had the toughest gun control laws.

Though it had the toughest laws, it did not have the enforcement staff. They only managed to check about one percent of the larger gun shops, and his gun stores most likely did not even make their radar screen.

His gun shops all operated on their own and the shop manager deposited his money into the bank at the end of each business day.

He had purposely planned each gun shop to appear to be independent and separate.

He took his take in what he thought was a very sophisticated, open, semi-legal way.

Each of his gun stores paid a consulting fee to a gun consulting organization that he had established. The gun shop business books were then managed in strict compliance with each state and US laws. The stores paid their taxes as required by law.

Only he knew what happened to the consulting fee that was paid out.

He moved that fee through several US holding banks before sending it on to one of several offshore banks that ultimately handled and managed the money.

He had set up each of those banks with different unique identities. He had two US bank accounts on the west coast, two bank accounts on the east coast and two in the middle of the country.

He figured that it would be impossible for anyone to figure out what banks and what accounts he had.

He adhered to a low-tech approach and did all his business transactions in person, via paper and in cash.

He utilized technology to make his life easier, but he kept most technology out of his business.

He had utilized his dark side connections to get six different passports and six corresponding driver licenses.

He smiled as he thought about the selection of the names of these six identities.

He had used names that he had gotten off tomb stones in cemeteries in the city where each of the six US banks were located.

Then he had his passport preparer make him a passport and driver’s license using his picture but the names from the tombstone.

He then went to each bank and opened an account. Over the years, he came to enjoy the process of opening the next account.

He had found out that he enjoyed the leisurely walk through the cemetery and the time he took to select the name from a tombstone.

He always found seven names and then walked the route again before voting on which one he would select.

He laughed as he thought about the fact that he had probably brought those people back from the dead to participate in a very different life than they might have had.

He stayed away from the large and sophisticated banks. All the US banks he chose were regional, local banks in smaller cities. He was interested in the banks only as a waystation for the cash flow that he generated so he maintained small accounts in each.

On a monthly basis he moved out five thousand dollars to the off shore banks that were managing his money. Each offshore bank had sophisticated investment management groups that then managed his wealth. He watched as year after year the money in these offshore accounts grew.

It was a very satisfying and reassuring feeling.

The money he made once the money was offshore, he cycled back into the offshore account and never again paid taxes on it. This was one of the main reasons for having established them.

His offshore accounts grew almost twenty-five percent each year.

So, his money was making even more money. He was acutely aware that it all started with selling guns.

Remi did not buy into the concept of the seller having any responsibility for how a weapon was used.

He felt he was only responsible for the condition of the weapon at the point of sale.

Most often he adhered to the local law but did not seek to follow it wholeheartedly.

In fact, he supported several organizations that had either delayed the required background checks or had the background check law tied up in court to keep it from being enforced.

He additionally held gun shows and made a point of selling his guns as “antiques” to circumvent any required background checks. He figured if he were ever caught, he would apologize, pay a fine and move on.

He had spent much of his life fighting the bleeding hearts that thought that guns should be regulated and heavily taxed.

His father had been a gunsmith who repaired guns and often resold the ones that were never picked up.

He had listened as his father railed against the proposed restrictions on guns and had slowly taken the same position.

After graduating high school, he went to work in a small gun shop owned by a friend of his father.

He was good at convincing prospective buyers to buy. When his boss decided to sell the gun shop, he was able to work out a deal to take over ownership incrementally by buying the owner out on a yearly basis.

He modeled the purchase like people buy and pay for a car.

This was what gave him a chance to get his foot in the door. He soon proudly put his name on the sign over the store’s entrance.

He still had the ownership title to that first shop framed and hung up in his home.

Since the time of buying the first shop he had worked his way up the coast of California buying small gun shops. He then went on to cross the border into Oregon and then went on to Washington. It had taken him several years of steadily looking for the next gun shop.

He was not interested in large gun shops or franchised gun shops. He sought out the struggling mom and pop gun shops where he often found willing sellers.

He had each of his small shops operate independently. Unknown to those operating the gun shops they cooperated and supported each other because of the gun shows they participated in.

These were gun shows that he set up and ran near each shop on a rotating basis.

He had a booth for each of his shops at each gun show.

It made the gun show seem very large and diversified when in reality he owned every booth in the show. It did not matter to him when a potential buyer rejected a gun from one of the booths because they were not getting the discount they wanted and went to another.

All the money ended up in his pocket.

All the people working at the booths worked for him and they all shared in a percentage of the final sales for that gun show.

His stores were each run to maintain a profit and the gun shows generated a boost for the store hosting the one near their store.

He and the managers of the stores thought of the shows as the icing on the cake.

The gun shows made a small fortune along the West Coast. It was a fortune that fueled his desire to make that fortune even larger.

He had then cast his eyes on the East Coast. He recalled the spring when he decided to follow the blooming of the flowering trees from Maine to Florida looking for and buying small gun shops.

It had been an intense year but a very successful period. He followed the same slow and steady pattern of buying out small gun shops and getting each setup to be profitable. He made sure to keep the staff lean and the pay as low as he could possibly keep while maintaining a very low turnover.

He found that providing health care benefits was the key to keeping people working for him. He had each gun shop become a member of an Association Health Plan to make the insurance coverage available at a reasonable cost. His employees stayed because of this plan and the fact that he also added a profit-sharing plan to sweeten the pot.

He had reduced his staffing to the minimum and that staff worked hard but they were also rewarded well.

He had a soft spot for those that were at the bottom of the wealth ladder, but he had no qualms about making sure that he was at the very top of the wealth ladder.

He had achieved being in the one percent and planned to stay there and continually move himself farther into that group.

He did a mental inventory of the homes and boats he now owned and decided that he had too many toys but in fact he enjoyed all his toys in slightly different ways.

He had a beachside home in San Diego that he considered his primary home since it was in the city where he had grown up. He had also purchased a sixty-foot sailing yacht that he had anchored at a dock at a top end marina.

He had a condominium in San Francisco on Knob Hill an area he and most other people considered the epitome of old-world elegance.

He had a fifty-five-foot yacht not far away.

He enjoyed walking the steep hills but often took a taxi back up to his condominium. He often walked to one of the many nearby great restaurants that graced that section of the city.

He had a home in Seatle that had a great view of Puget Sound and a fifty-five-foot yacht tied off on the pier that extended out from the edge of his property.

He had three beach side homes along the east coast from Maine to the southern end of Florida and either a power yacht or a sailing yacht that was associated with them.

And then there was his favorite location at the very southern point in Louisianna where he had a seventy-five-foot yacht on which he spent as much of his time as possible.

He had only one boat captain that traveled to the location where he planned to use one of his yachts. Each of his yachts had been purchased offshore and licensed offshore and he had not needed to pay any sales taxes.

The cash he used to purchase the homes had all been transferred from his offshore accounts.

Once he owned the homes, he paid his property taxes with money held in his US banks.

So, in essence, he straddled the tax laws as well as the gun laws.

He still felt that, even with all these elaborate ways of avoiding taxes, he paid too much in taxes.

The next amazing money generating opportunity had occurred one day at a gun show where he met a person who wanted to sell him his collection of weapons.

None of the weapons were registered and the owner needed the money to pay off some pending debts. He decided to buy the collection and offered just over twenty-five dollars per weapon.

It was then that he did some research and found out that there was close to four hundred million unregistered guns in the continental US. He began word-of-mouth advertising for those guns at each of his gun shows. He was amazed at how many weapons surfaced.

He had to hurriedly set up a way to off load the weapons he purchased at a song.

He found a connection in Mexico and not long after his first truck full of weapons made its way across the border into Mexico.

The next border he crossed was into Canada.

He hit on a connection that provided a sea route to several countries.

The rapid expansion of business had him buying guns from his various stores to fill the demand.

He then had them smuggled to the global hot spots.

The money that he made from the transnational sales overshadowed the money from all his US gun shops combined.

He kept as low a profile as he could in this new market so that he would not get into conflict with the traditional gun runners.

During one transaction someone had given him the monicker “The Death Broker” and it had become the code name that he went by in all subsequent transactions. When someone wanted a supply of weapons, “The Death Broker” was often the one that fulfilled their request.

Those fulfillments each showed up as a huge inflow into his, gun runner, off shore bank account. This bank and the account was separate from all his other ones.

So, his worries about having someone investigate him were about them trying to find out how he had made his hidden fortune. He knew that most of his business growth money infractions were past the time where he could be charged with any laws that he might have broken but he didn’t need anyone dragging his business out into the open and making his life difficult.

He had the connections, the money, the fire power, and the will to eliminate anyone that threatened what he had worked hard to establish. He intended to find out who was investigating him and once he knew the who and the why he would take the action necessary to protect what he thought of as his right and his to have.

There was no doubt in his mind that he would prevail.

2 The Book Trail

It was a gorgeous morning on Maui. Annie was sitting in the shade of the pool side cabana looking out at the waters and working on her next painting.

The girls were at school, Brian and Kekoa were working in the veranda searching for their next wayward billionaire.

She had no clue how they would find such a person. She knew that so far Brian and Kekoa had made more money than she ever dreamt possible.

She had done exceedingly well as a painter and had made several million, but she knew that both Brian and Kekoa had more than one hundred million dollars each.

It was amazing to her that her millions had come from fifteen years of being a chained captive in the Pennsylvania forest and staying sane by focusing on painting, studying history and mathematics.

Her abductor had wanted her devotion and love, so he gave her everything she asked for but her freedom.

She knew that her rescue by Alex and her recovery was nothing short of a miracle.

She had spent countless hours talking to her therapist, her parents and with Alex her striving to get back into a world that had changed dramatically during the fifteen years she has been chained in the woods.

Alex was the person who had done the most to bring her back into the world. She had looked at all her paintings and had them put on the market for sale. She remembered fighting against doing that, but Alex had pointed out that she had two daughters to think about and to raise.

That had made her think about the future. It turned out to be a good future.

Then to have found Brian and realize the first time that they had looked into each other’s eyes that they were soul mates was a second miracle. His embrace of her, Linda and Laurie and his devotion to them from the very first time they met instantly bound their journey to each other.

Brian’s story was very different. He had a sad start when he was young, and his mother died. Then Kaia and Koni had raised him as their own and he liked to say he had grown up in the gateway to heaven. What was amazing to her was that he had generated his fortune immediately the year after getting his law degree.

She thought of their experiences as the separate foundations that they each stood on, grew on and flourished. Their experiences were diametric opposites but somehow complementary.

Brian and Kekoa were joking back and forth about the fact that they were terrible hunters of wayward billionaires and that after more than six months they had not found the next one.

One morning during their target practice at the gun range Brian suggested they search the gun and weapons market for such a person.

Kekoa had replied that the gun market seemed to be a highly regulated market where it would be difficult to circumvent the law.

Brian agreed and said that such a market would be where someone who had figured out how to get around the law in some way would also most likely make a fortune.

He suggested that they search for small independent stores since most of the large, syndicated shops or those in larger sporting goods stores would be owned by companies that would not be involved in circumventing the tax laws. They might use every tax loop hole, but they would focus on selling guns at the highest profit margin they could get gun enthusiasts to pay and they most likely would be successful.

Kekoa did a search for small gun shops in California. Once he had the list he decided to start in the southern part, hack into a shop’s internet, and figure out the shop’s computer connections.

It did not take him very long and once he had made that connection, he figured out what bank the shop did business with.

Then he hacked into that bank’s system and checked out the account for that gun shop. He then checked to see if the money in the shop’s account was transferred to another bank. He was searching for where each shop’s money went.

It was a tedious process that he had not been able to automate because of the high level of security most banks employed. He decided to just bear down and slug his way through it.

Brian suggested they select those gun shops that did business with smaller banks that might be less secure.

Kekoa was quite willing to narrow down the list of gun shops based on Brian’s suggested criteria.

He did the analysis on about half a dozen gun shops and their banks. He shared the fact that the shops all seemed to have a clean relationship with the banks and vice versa.

He said that there was one shop that had a rather unusual consulting fee that was paid to an account in another US bank. He hacked into that bank and once he had that account, close examination showed that money being moved to yet another bank. He followed that money to yet another bank and then he found a connection to an offshore bank. The account at that bank showed the money being deposited on a monthly basis.

He let out a whoop and said that he had followed the consulting money trail from one small gun shop all the way to a bank in the Caymen Islands.

Annie heard the whoop and took the opportunity to say she was bringing out a pitcher of iced tea and that she had ordered a spaghetti Alfredo lunch with sides of asparagus and a small mixed salad. She suggested they gather at poolside, eat, and relax before the two of them once again immersed themselves in the hunt.

Brian gave a small laugh and thanked her for ordering lunch and bringing him and Kekoa back to reality. He jumped up and went to the edge of the pool, took off his shirt, made a shallow dive and took a couple of laps. He got out, dried off, put on his shirt, and sat down at the table. He felt rejuvenated.

During lunch Annie asked how the hunt was going.

Kekoa explained that he had traced money from one gun store all the way to an off shore account and added that now he would need to find another store where the money took the same route. He let out a groan and added that finding another would most likely be like looking for the next needle in a haystack and he was dreading it.

Annie asked if he could begin from the off shore bank and see if they had money coming into that account or another account from California and trace it back to some gun store or stores. She wondered if that might make things go faster.

Kekoa nodded and said that was a great idea and as soon as lunch was over, he would give that a try.

After lunch he was surprised at how many different sources of incoming money was coming from the same US bank and from that bank, he was able to locate the banks in California. He was then able to trace the money back to four additional gun shops.

He was then able to verify that each of those stores was owned by the same individual.

He and Brian decided that they should try working backward from similar offshore accounts in the banks that their previously targeted billionaires had used in the Caribbean.

Kekoa agreed and said that he had experience with those offshore banks, and he would try the approach that Annie had suggested.

That idea failed miserably; he got zero hits.

Brian suggested that they go to the first bank and see if there were other similar accounts that had monthly deposits coming in.

A few moments later Kekoa let out another whoop and said that he had found five more accounts with different customer names but similar cash flow profiles. He commented that only one led to a California gun shop, but the rest did lead to gun shops in Oregon and in Washington.

He then did a name search of the gun shops in those two states and found that they were all owned by the same individual. Kekoa said the issue seemed to be the fact that stores seemed to be owned by a different person when in fact it was most likely the same person using fake identifications.

Brian said that seemed to make sense. The person skimming money from these stores knew he intended to break the law and was trying to hide his identity by using different names.

Brian suggested they get a picture of the owner of the first store and then do some field work to see if the same person owned the other stores. He said that he would do the field work to see if the stores that they had so far identified were owned by the same person.

Kekoa made up the list of stores.

Brian said that he would plan a trip that covered all the potential stores and field verify the ownership. If one person owned all the stores, then they possibly had found their next target. However, Kekoa needed to tally up the amount of money that those stores had deposited to the banks in the Caribbean. He suggested that he also search for other banks that might have similar links to California, Oregon, and Washington State.

Because of the flight time to the mainland and the connection wait times for flights to Cincinnati where Annie and the girls had been living, Brian no longer used commercial flights. He called the private service that he had started using and arranged for his trip to San Diego.

He also rented a top end conversion van outfitted with twin sized bunk beds and a work desk that came with a driver that was offered by a small private rental company.

He figured that he would forgo staying at hotels so that he could travel as continuous a route as possible and not have to constantly be packing and unpacking a suitcase.

He felt the he needed to make the trip as fast as possible and get out of the field before anyone figured out what he was doing. He had the feeling that he had found the trail of his next wayward billionaire, and that this individual would be more of a challenge than the previous billionaires he and Kekoa had pursued.

He let Annie know that he planned to spend the next week or so going from the southern part of California to Seatle to verify the ownership of the stores that Kekoa had identified by using her suggested approach.

Annie, as always, gave him a hug and asked him to be cautious and that if this gun shop owner was a billionaire, he was most probably surrounded by gun toting people who might be very willing and maybe even eager to use their weapons to help him.