“Thanks.”
“For what?”
“For stopping the government and the civil lawyers from grabbing the place I bought for my mother. It would’ve crushed her to lose her garden. She even knows the scientific names for all the plants, her little babies.”
“They all thought you were hundred percent a crook,” Gage said. “I convinced them you were only ninety, and the clean money was invested in her house.”
“Why’d they give in?”
“The paper trail you left behind was too complicated for them to figure out.”
Charters grinned. “Man, I was good back then.”
“No, you were mostly bad back then.”
“Well, thanks, anyway.” Charters took a sip. “Let’s see, where were we?”
“Anston.”
“Ah, yes. Anston. Genus: Legalis, species: Rodentia major. When you started hounding my accountant in the Caymans I knew right away it was just a matter of time before you knocked on my door. I flew down there to see the attorney who set up my companies. You remember him, Leonard Quinton. He and I needed to get together and… uh…”
“Coordinate your stories?”
Charters laughed. “Yeah, that’s a good way to put it. At my trial the U.S. Attorney tried to make it sound more like obstructing justice.”
“He succeeded. It was count four and you got convicted of it.”
“Hey, I won the appeal. That means I’m innocent.” Charters took another sip of coffee. “Anyway, while I was in Grand Cayman I asked Quinton who I should use when I got indicted. He told me to hire Anston.”
“Anston’s not a criminal lawyer.”
“But he’s a partner in one of the judge’s old law firms. Even though Brandon Meyer didn’t get assigned the case, I figured it couldn’t hurt. Who knows what goes on back in the judge’s chambers? Maybe Anston gets Meyer to put in a good word for me at sentencing time.”
“Did you get your money’s worth?”
“In the long run.” Charters smiled. “Well, the money made a long run.”
“You mean you paid Anston offshore.”
“Still at the top of your game, aren’t ya? But that’s his problem, not mine. It’s not my fault if he didn’t declare the income and give Uncle Sam his share.”
“You remember where you sent the fee?”
“I didn’t have to send it anywhere. The money just got transferred from one of my accounts at Cayman Exchange Bank to another one controlled by Anston. Quinton took care of it.”
“You remember the name of the account the money went into?”
Charters narrowed his eyes and bit his lower lip, then shook his head. “Quinton would know.”
“You ever hear of a company called Pegasus?”
Charters slapped the table. “That’s it. Pegasus.” He grinned like he’d been caught by his wife staring at a waitress’s breasts. “I thought about doing one of those myself.”
“Doing what?”
“A fake insurance scam.”
“How do you know it’s fake?”
Charters clucked. “I thought you were at the top of your game. You should’ve already…” Then he smiled.
“Let’s just say I thought it was some kind of tax gimmick,” Gage said, “but I hadn’t figured out the details. That’s why I’m here.”
That wasn’t the whole truth, but Gage didn’t want to risk scaring Charters off by telling him that money transferred into Pegasus might have been the reason for a burglary at Socorro’s and what had brought him to Las Vegas was fear for her and her children’s safety. The longer Charters believed Gage’s investigation only concerned tax evasion, the better.
“They did a riff on one of those old tax shelters,” Charters said. “First, the clients would wire fake insurance premiums to Pegasus, then it would wire the money back as loans to buy yachts or cars or vacation homes.” He hunched his shoulders, and reached out his hands. “Offshore captive insurance has been the best tax scam ever.” He pointed at Gage. “You ever deal with Stone amp; Whitman in New York?”
Gage shook his head.
“They set up the ones for TransCont Trucking and Universal Tractor and a bunch of other giants. But Anston’s genius was to make it available to the little guy.” Charters laughed. “You know, the one-billion-dollar company, not just the ten-billion-dollar company.”
“What was his gimmick?”
“Rent-a-captives, like Pegasus. Anybody could send premiums. Pegasus would bank the money, wait a couple of months, then ship it back into the States. It was sweet-swee-eet. Insurance premiums got tax deductions going out, and the money coming back in as loans was tax free.”
“Like those old fake offshore consulting schemes.”
“But way better. Because when you hire a consultant you’re supposed to get something in return. A marketing plan or an advertising campaign. And the IRS can come by and ask to see what you paid for. But with insurance? It’s a…” Charters cocked his head toward Gage. “What do they call those things in outer space that sucks everything in?”
“A black hole.”
“That’s it. Insurance is just a black hole people throw money into. Everybody knows it.”
“How did Anston get his cut?”
“And Meyer. The firm was Anston amp; Meyer back when it all started. Anston was the tax expert, but in the deep background. Meyer was out front. He’s the one who brought in the customers.” Charters lowered his voice. “In order to get into the deal, the client had to do two things. One was to buy a legal opinion letter from Anston saying the tax shelter was legit and the other was to pay the accounting firm. And they always used the Big Four to make it all look like it was on the up and up. The opinion letter alone cost a butt load. A hundred grand.”
“And he used the same one over and over.”
“Exactly. Plus he got ten percent of the money the client saved on taxes each year by using his gimmick. They save a million, he gets another hundred thousand. It was like an annuity. And the same thing for the accounting firm. Except they got half a mil up front in addition to their percentage because they managed the whole thing and were on the hook if the IRS came knocking.”
“You know how many of these Anston and Meyer did?”
“If I had to guess, maybe a couple of hundred. Thirty or forty million dollars a year, could be a helluva lot more. And most of their fees were paid offshore.”
“How did Anston amp; Meyer move their fees back into the States? I don’t see them telling clients how to evade taxes, then pay them himself.”
“How Anston amp; Meyer did it, I don’t know.” Charters leaned forward. “But I’ll tell you about a guy I know. He had real cool deal. Every month he’d have the Cayman Exchange Bank pull fifty grand in cash out of his account and hand deliver it to Citibank, right across the street in George Town. Citibank would treat it as kind of an advance credit card payment. That way my friend could spend all kinds of offshore money in the States and nobody would know. And no one knows where the money is from because Citibank credit cards all look the same.”
“Almost.”
“Yeah, almost.”
“Your… uh… friend still doing it?”
Charters grinned. “Naw. He switched to debit cards, harder to trace the transactions.”
Linda walked up, placed down their orders, then folded up the check and stuffed it into Charters’s shirt pocket.
“Graham’s is on the house, but you gotta pay.”
Charters bit his lower lip as he watched her work her way back toward the counter, then exhaled and said, “I should’ve divorced my wife and married that girl.”
“True love or only so she couldn’t testify against you?”
Charters bit into a French fry. “Both.”
“Did Anston and his people ever get investigated?”
“Yeah, because they made the same stupid mistake everybody else did. They’d send the money offshore and it would bounce back into the States from the same company. It was too obvious they controlled the money the whole time. IRS didn’t like it. Didn’t qualify as an arm’s-length transaction. So Quinton-oops.” Charters offered a weak smile. “I hope you knew that already.”
“Let’s say I did.”
“You’re keeping me out of this, right?”