The Vicodin Thieves. Chip Jacobs
Читать онлайн книгу.
the agent at the Golden Tulip and took him to a different walled compound. At a picnic table inside, the agent was shown stacks of what appeared to be American currency “five wide and two across,” the mission report said. They money was wrapped in thick plastic and stored in a small, metal box. When the agent tried touching the currency, he was warned he was not allowed to by one of the Ghanaian’s associates. The associate tried delicately unsealing a packet to show him it was genuine, only to clumsily reveal ordinary paper with the dimensions of U.S. dollars tucked under the real ones.
Realizing his own vulnerability in the midst of a flimsy con, the agent pretended he was satisfied and requested to be driven back to the Golden Tulip by the Ghanaian’s associates. The car took a long, winding path in the dark until the agent determined they were headed in the opposite way of the hotel and maybe to someplace from where he would never return alive. When traffic slowed, the agent jumped out of the car and “evaded” the men, the mission report said, in what might have been a scene out of an espionage flick. From solicitation to dangled loot, the whole setup was a “scam,” the report concluded.
Sholtz estimated she lost more than $125,000 of her own money on the failed excursion. There is no indication RECLAIM credits were involved. Toler said one of the chief reasons he agreed to go, despite suspecting beforehand the $35 million was bogus, was that Sholtz herself was planning to make the trip, and that she likely would have been either kidnapped for ransom or killed by the Africans. (Sholtz acknowledged she had intended to go.) Toler, overall, blamed Keller for whipping up Sholtz, who he described as dishonest and gullible. “Much of this [currency repatriation] is fantasy,” Toler added. But Sholtz “believed there was money in the Philippines and Ghana, even though she had been advised by me it didn’t exist. It was her greed. People made a lot of money off her. I’ve seen over the years folks who think the world revolves around a deal.” Toler said that Keller died in the Bahamas a few years ago; this may explain why the feds have had difficulty saying whether they ever charged him.
In October 1992, about five years before the Ghana operation, a congressional probe into international bank fraud suggested that Toler’s firm, a now defunct Virginia machine-tool company called RD&D, was part of an alleged, clandestine effort quarterbacked by the CIA to arm the Iraqi military and curry favor with Saddam Hussein’s government. A federal prosecutor appearing before a Senate intelligence committee testified that Toler’s company was not a CIA front, but wouldn’t respond when asked if Toler had worked for the U.S. National Security Administration, which conducts global eavesdropping operations. Whatever his background, Sholtz said she was stunned at Toler’s negative comments about her. Sholtz said that Toler in 2002 tried to locate money she contends that Keller had “stolen” from her. “Toler said we were the victims, and now he’s changing his story,” Sholtz said. “I’m speechless.”
Also involved in the Ghana operation, records and interviews show, was the Jedburgh Group, a Lake Mary, Florida-based firm that provides intelligence, security and financial services to industry and governments worldwide. Former U.S. Intelligence and Military Officers work for Jedburgh. By far the best known is retired U.S. Major General John Singlaub, a decorated military officer involved with the CIA’s predecessor agency, the Korean War, and American counterinsurgency efforts. In the late-1980s, he was connected to the Iran-Contra scandal and ultra-right-wing, anti-communist groups in Central America.
Jedburgh executive David Keith Freeman confirmed to the Weekly that his company was a client of Sholtz’s “for a short time a very long time ago,” and said it helped evaluate the mission’s “potential for recovery.” He refused further comment about Ghana and other work the firm provided for Sholtz, citing client confidentiality rules. Freeman did say the practice of people posing as former or current U.S. Intelligence Officers in financial scams is fairly widespread and known in the industry as “hooky spooky,” he said. “It’s the frog and the scorpion.”
Roughly six months later after the Ghana operation debacle, in November 1999, with authorities still unaware of what had occurred, Sholtz was not a marked smog credit broker, by any means. She was an invitee to a major climate change conference at the United Nations as a member of the Emissions Marketing Association, records show.
IT COMES AND GOES
So why weren’t these activities in the Justice Department’s crosshairs if they wanted to send a message about tainting cap-and-trades as the regulatory milieu shifts toward them? Furthermore, even if there are legitimate ex-spies and soldiers traveling around the globe for someone like Sholtz, shouldn’t there be some transparency? USC Law School Professor Rebecca Lonergan, who worked in the U.S. Attorney’s Los Angeles office for sixteen years, said prosecutors probably made a judgment call based on what they could prove in court, what evidence they could gather overseas, the intricacies of her different schemes and other factors. “When you have a person like [Sholtz] one of the difficulties is sifting through the mass of seemingly exculpatory evidence,” Lonegran said. “You have a person who would make a great movie living as a con artist but you have to find out the individual schemes. Criminal prosecutors simply can’t charge a person with being a fraudster.”
True as that may be, there is still interest. Larry Neal, deputy Republican staff director for the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said Congressmen Barton and Walden believe it is important to remove the veil of secrecy over the Sholtz matter to follow where it leads. “We haven’t seen allegations on currency repatriation scams, but it is our aim to gather all facts surrounding the Sholtz case, regardless of what they entail,” Neal wrote via email. “It has been more than a year since the sentencing and there’s still no public justification for all the judicial [secrecy]. After all, the case was about an Anne Sholtz cap-and-trade scam, not an al Qaeda terrorism cell.”
For his part, AQMD Executive Director Barry Wallerstein both refused an interview about Sholtz and forbade anyone at the air district from commenting for this story. (His feelings about Sholtz aside, Wallerstein is said to be upset about a book on the iconic Los Angeles smog crisis this writer co-authored with a former AQMD staffer.) But that does not mean he’s not talking. In a seven-page letter to Representative Henry Waxman who chairs the House’s Energy and Commerce Committee, Wallerstein portrayed the RECLAIM cap-and-trade as virtually bulletproof to criminality. In this letter, prompted by congressional interest in Sholtz, Wallerstein ticked off the AQMD’s robust computer database that checks the availability and ownership of credits, well-scrutinized trade registration forms and a three-person trade approval team. “The safeguards…have been successful in preventing any fraudulent trades from ever being registered,” Wallerstein concluded.
Yet considering the breadth of Sholtz’s activities, questions about whether RECLAIM bankrolled attempted asset-repatriation ventures, much less speculators’ profiteering of the market during the 2001-02 electricity crisis, there are obviously cracks in the machine. Would stamping the credits with identification numbers and developing methods to police their ownership history in real time have helped? “What this points up is that there had to have been a failure in the design,” said EPA Senior Counsel Allan Zabel. “It’s ridiculous if people can get away with this sort of stuff. The system must be sufficiently designed so that somebody trying to do it would trigger a red flag that brings in investigative interest.”
In answering some of Barton and Walden’s questions about cap-and-trade fraud, the EPA said its criminal investigative agents meet with AQMD officials weekly. As of June, though, the EPA reported it had no criminal cases with filed charges involving emissions trading crimes—anywhere. But the story does not end there. Between the time of her arrest and the date of her sentencing, Sholtz tried softening her punishment. In 2005, she testified in the trial of a con man who stole about $4.5 million from an Idaho businessman in a wire fraud case that she knew about from her financial dealings. More provocatively, she offered to spill about sensitive subjects closer to home.
On April 9th, 2005, her lawyer, Richard Callahan, emailed the U.S. Attorney’s Office a two-page letter entitled “Areas of Possible Cooperation for Anne Sholtz.” Callahan wrote that his client would share “credible firsthand information” on four different subjects if it would help Sholtz’s plea agreement. Sholtz, Callahan wrote, knew about a “major U.S. bank” that was engaged in money laundering, check kiting, manipulation of