Crime(OFF)beat YouTube Channel Archive Page

August 29, 2018

PI finds the child’s body in less than 24 hours 

Sometimes, the gun, badge, and uniform get in the way of establishing rapport.  The grandmother of the missing boy contacted the PI and he found the child’s body in less than 24 hours

http://www.kwch.com/content/news/Private-investigator-discusses-effort-to-find-Lucas-Hernandezs-body-483742801.html

 

July 25, 2018

Would You Stop?

 

 

 

July 18, 2018

 

Double Trouble

Double Trouble

DOUBLE TROUBLE

“You know damn well that I wanted to take a recorded statement. We scheduled this time and this place to do it.” The micro-cassette recorder sat impotently on the table in front of me. He had been jerking me around for close to a half-hour and I was losing my patience. 

“I don’t remember ever saying that I was going to sit here and have you grill me. You know the fine print of insurance policies and I am afraid to say something that will give you the reason to deny my claim.” Mr. Blowhard said. Dressed in a blue blazer over an open-collared white button-down pressed shirt, chinos and deck shoes with no socks, he was every bit the part of the put-off, well-to-do yachtsman. 

“From now on, we will do everything in writing. If I don’t get a recorded statement now, the next step will be an Examination Under Oath and a production of documents, including your financial statements for the last three years.” I waited. This was my last shot to get something productive out of a three-hour trek that started before dawn and then into a blinding sun and metro rush hour before arriving at the marine surveyor’s offices on Boston’s South Shore. 

“Is this normal? I paid my premium. My boat is missing. I reported it right away to the agent. The adjustor already talked to me. You tried to trick me and now you are threatening me with a lawyer. I am not sure that you are treating me fairly.”

“You have to cooperate with the investigation of this claim. I am the investigator. There are questions that need to be answered. You have an obligation to answer them.”

“Not now and not with you pal.” With that parting shot, he got up and walked out of the conference room. 

I was fuming, this was his plan all along. He came today to size me up and try to find out why a Special Investigator had been assigned to his missing boat claim. He was fishing and I wouldn’t bite. The policy said he had to cooperate, but nowhere did it say I had to tell him why I was investigating his claim, and that’s what we had been going round and round on. He must have known that I couldn’t deny his claim for failing to give me a recorded statement.

The marine surveyor hustled into the conference room as soon as Mr. Blowhard motored out leaving me bobbing in his wake.

“That didn’t sound good.” He said. Henry has been surveying watercraft since his discharge from the Navy after Korea. He could tell you the value of a boat and, as importantly, how much it would cost to repair one that was damaged or replace one that was stolen by just looking at a good set of photos.

I stared out into the marina next to his offices. Yachts, power boats, cigar boats, sailboats; all kinds of pleasure craft were in the water or up on stilts. The pilings acted as sentinel stands for the seagulls to keep watch on. They were giving me a one-eyed stare and judging me now on what a lousy job I did of casting a net around this insured.  

“Henry, that sailor boy just played me,” I said. “He wanted to see if the coast was clear.” 

“What did he say about buying it for salvage?” Henry asked.

“Nothing, we didn’t even get that far. He didn’t carry in any paperwork either. That was my first clue that I wasn’t going fishing with him.”

Henry just shook his head. “Doesn’t make sense that he’d come all this way not to give you a statement.”

“Sure it does. Somehow, he knew that I am not part of the normal claims process and when it became obvious that I was going to ask lots of questions, he walked, but not without trying to get something out of me first.”

“He’s hiding something,” Henry said.

“Yeah, but what?” I said. It was Henry who first suspected something was amiss a month ago when he was assigned by my company’s yacht claims manager to work up a replacement value for the missing boat. Turns out that Henry had seen the boat last year, right after Hurricane Bob. Its starboard side was smashed into matchsticks when Bob roared up the coast all the way to Canada, hitting all the marinas on the East Coast like a little kid splashing around in a bathtub. The yacht manager, in turn, made a referral to me when he learned that the agent had not seen the boat before putting it on the policy. Then the red flags really went up when its inspection was delayed twice by Mr. Blowhard before the boat mysteriously disappeared.

We both looked out at the gorgeous day unfolding, but little did we know about the next storm that was brewing just beyond the horizon.

* * *

He revved the engine and blared the horn. It was going to be close. The mad Slav was bearing down on the jay-walker that pretended not to see his bright Yellow Cab.  The pedestrian jumped out of the way with inches to spare as he blurred past my passenger window.

“They move.” the Slav said.

The thrill ride up North Calvert Street from BWI through the Inner Harbor of Baltimore, Balmer to the locals, couldn’t take my mind off why I had been summoned to my employer’s home office on the North side of town. It was all about that sailboat and how Mr. Blowhard was trying to turn the tables on me. This was a busy seaport. Cargo ships, Supertankers and the gigantic cranes hovering over the water reminded me of Philadelphia or Boston with just as rich real history. It was from this very harbor that Francis Scott Key penned our National Anthem. 

I worried, even though my boss assured me, that I wasn’t being called on the carpet and that they would come to my office in my home if they were going to fire me. I had jumped on a USAir direct from New Haven to Balmer to brief the president himself of the billion dollar insurance company that I worked for. I was holding up the payment on this yacht claim. Normally, a claim investigation or even a denial of payment would not merit a meeting with a president. This was unheard of, but the boat owner had raised the stakes. He seriously upped the ante and I wasn’t about to fold my hand. Being a fairly good poker player, I recognized the bluff, but now I was being told that it wasn’t my pile of chips that I was playing with anymore. The company needed to see my hand.

I was ushered into the finely appointed boardroom overlooking the Balmer City skyline and Inner Harbor. The president gave me a nod from the head of the long table opposite me. The furniture, all deep colored woods, was made with the precise hand-crafting of a pre-industrial time. The artwork depicted fox hunting scenes renowned for the area. Who was the fox today?, I wondered. The scenes of rolling horse farms harkened back to that time between our founding as a country and the war to prove once and for all that we were truly the United States.   Flanking us along the Mahogany table were the claims guys on one side and the marketing suits on the other. Too many to play poker and too many to make the decision, as far as I was concerned.

Flanking the president furthest from me, were the vice-presidents of Marketing and Claims staring at each other. Next, the Marine or Yacht program marketing manager sat across from the Yacht claims manager and lastly, the Marine underwriter was positioned across from my boss, the director of Special Investigations or SIU.

The president and I could see each other’s reflection in the table top and I could tell he was sizing me up. I was told that he was a maverick, a real firebrand with a quick temper. My reputation as a “Top Gun” and a straight shooter earned me a seat at this shindig. Maybe, if we stared long enough at each other’s reflections, we might get a glimpse inside.

“This is a grave matter. Never before in the history of the company have we ever been faced with such a threat to our position in the industry. Our carefully designed marketing program to boat owners is one of trust and indemnity.” The head honcho from marketing began. He fired the first shot across our bow. 

As if on cue, the Marketing manager continued. “The Yacht program is the most successful program we have. It gives us warm relationships with wealthy individuals, businesses, and corporations. This is a demographic that we don’t want to lose.”

The underwriter looked up from his spreadsheets and agreed. “The combined-loss ratio for this line of business is the lowest by a far margin.”  This was insurancese for saying that although the program wasn’t making a lot of money, it had the highest profit margin.

But then, the eight hundred pound gorilla was introduced to the room when the Marketing Veep said, “Our parent company could easily sell this piece of business off-it’s our flagship.” There it was finally out on the table.

The conversation just shifted from a not-so-simple boat claim to the end of their careers. The recent history was pretty straight-forward. A foreign multi-national had bought the company and installed this president to turn it around and make it profitable. If we couldn’t do better than the fixed rate of return from thirty-year Treasury notes, the company would be broken up and sold. The individual parts would fetch more then what they paid for the sum. The pressure to produce was on. This old-line venerable carrier was under assault on several fronts. They were slow to catch up with automation. Dumb CRT terminals still fed data to a balky mainframe for overnight batch processing. Claim payments went out from one central location, the next day.

Direct Writers like GEICO and Progressive were cutting out the middleman, the agents, with brutal efficiencies and saturation marketing. It seemed the whole agency system with hefty commissions was going the way of dinosaurs. My employer was slow to get on board with SIU and was being targeted by professional fraudsters. We were one of the last companies to shove off with a bonafide SIU program. It hadn’t been smooth sailing and now our actions, more appropriately mine, were being called into question.

A silence fell over the room, a long uncomfortable silence; The kind of silence that begged me to say something. Anything.

“Since when do we negotiate with terrorists?” I asked. Before anyone could answer, I added, “This is a shake-down, pure and simple.”

Defending the honor of the boat owner he never met or talked to, the Marketing manager shot back. “Your attitude, Mr. Hoda, is precisely why he has requested that you be removed from this claim.”

“I’ve known John for twelve years and he has worked dozens of cases with serious criminal implications and never once did his professionalism or character come into question. I wouldn’t want anybody else on this case. Besides, I thought we could all talk frankly here.” My boss delivered his own volley. 

Emboldened, the Yacht claims manager zinged the Marketing manager. “Understand that all of this came about because the agent didn’t inspect the Marlow-Hunter 37 before putting it on the policy.  By the time underwriting scheduled the marine surveyor to inspect it, it was gone. All we have is this one photo. But what made me refer this claim to SIU, was the fact that, after Hurricane Bob turned hundreds of boats into matchsticks, the same surveyor had inspected – this same Marlow-Hunter, deemed it a total loss and later sold it to the policyholder for salvage. How did this vessel rise up from the graveyard and become seaworthy? That’s what I want to know.” 

Following his lead, I added, “That was exactly the tact I took when I scheduled a meeting with the insured. He insisted on a time, early in the morning, at the surveyor’s office on the South Shore of Boston. I was crystal clear that I wanted to take his recorded statement. He knew I was driving up from New Haven before dawn.” I was now talking directly to the president. Everyone else could wait their turn. I was telling a story.

“So I schlep up there with the sun in my eyes the whole way and this joker gets cold feet, telling me that I never told him I wanted to take his statement. The whole time he is trying to wheedle information out of me about the claim’s process, how much I knew and what I was planning to do. He came to the meeting empty-handed even after I told him that I needed to review all his purchase invoices and repairs and maintenance logs. He didn’t produce any documentation whatsoever and wasn’t going to talk to me on tape. He was on a fishing expedition and when he realized that I was the real deal, he wasn’t going to sit there and watch me filet him. I was pissed, but I didn’t show it. I quietly told him that our next meeting would be when he submitted to our attorneys examining him under oath and that he would be required to produce what I had originally asked for plus all his financials for the last three years.”

Those at the table knew the next step after that would be to mail him a formal proof of loss. Both the Examination Under Oath and the Proof of Loss could be required under the terms and conditions of his yacht policy. If he didn’t comply, we could deny his claim for lack of cooperation. Ironclad defenses. With no lien holder on the vessel, he would be out for everything that he put into it. 

“I heard a different account of how that meeting went down from the agent.” the Marketing manager said. I decided then and there that he was the designated hatchet man for this meeting. 

Keeping my eyes on the president, I continued, without taking the bait. “So I went ahead and contacted one of the best insurance fraud attorneys that I know, who just so happens to practice in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

“What happened next?” The president asked a simple question that cut through all their posturing. How refreshing.

“We raised the ante and scheduled the Examination Under Oath of not only him but also his wife who was also named on the policy. That’s when he called our raise and upped the ante with that letter.”

The letter I was referring to was the top sheet of the packet brought in by each of the suits. I was familiar enough with the contents to have it committed to memory. Mr. Blowhard was threatening to take out a double page ad in the most widely read boating magazine, inviting other plaintiffs to join him in a class action suit against the company if they felt their boat claims were not paid promptly or in full. Talk about throwing chum into the shark pool. That move caught everyone by surprise.

Fingering the piece of paper like it was kryptonite, the Marketing Veep said, “We can’t afford this negative publicity even if it is groundless and without merit.” Dropping it on the table, he added. “It’s better to make a business decision and quietly settle this case.”

The argument was a good one. Pay an $80,000 claim and save possibly untold hundreds of thousands of premium dollars from being lost thanks to the negative press. 

The conversation turned to how the advertisement could have a snowball effect. They did not have an apparatus in place to deal with the adverse publicity. Agents would drop them. The demographic, we so coveted, would quietly not renew or expand their coverages. The gloom and doom continued. There was lots of cross-talk. The president and I just listened. From time to time he would look at me. I didn’t flinch. Business Decision was just a euphemism for looking the other way. I didn’t do it as a cop, I didn’t do it in the fifteen years since I left the PD and I wasn’t going for it now.  

Above the din, He asked me, “What do you think? Will he do it? 

All eyes were on me now. Not just the people in the room assembled, but my wife and kids back home, the banker that held my mortgage, the church where we tithed, the car loan company. I took a deep breath. I had met the boat owner only once and talked to him on the phone briefly to set up that meeting. I didn’t have a crystal ball, but I had sparred with him enough to get a sense of who I was dealing with.

“No sir, he’s bluffing. He just wants money. Causing us all kinds of pain will not put a dollar in his pocket. He’d be smart to walk away now, but his Achilles heel is that he thinks he’s smarter than all of us.”

Nobody in the room was going to admit to that.

That message got through loud and clear to the president. “Okay”, looking back and forth at his Veeps, “tell the agent that we are not responding to this guy’s threat and that we expect him to comply with the terms and conditions of his policy in making the claim.” Looking at me with a hard stare, “Hoda, you’ve got 60 days after that proof of loss is filed to finish your investigation, is that clear.”

“Yes, sir.”

* * *

“He didn’t send us anything,” my lawyer said. We met to go over any documents that may have arrived by the next-day delivery that morning. 

“Playing head games again,” I said.

“No policy provision saying that he had to send his documentation in ahead of his EUO.”

We were early for the meeting with the insured. The transcriptionist set up her equipment at our end of the table. This room was used by out of town lawyers for depositions or examinations under oath (EUO) at the old Essex County Courthouse. It was a nice day, clear, warm and sunny. It was a shame that I had to sit inside, head down taking notes. The two earlier meeting dates had been postponed; most recently because his wife claimed to be sick and on the first occasion when the boat owner said he had trouble getting all the requested documents together in time. He was not represented by a lawyer and they would attend by themselves. Not that it would matter much. Other than objecting to form or relevancy of the questioning, a lawyer would still have to sit there and watch his or her client answer the questions. That’s how it worked with an EUO. My job was to make sure that amongst all the bluster and posturing, the questions would be answered to my lawyer’s satisfaction. I also listened to the language used by the policyholder to present his claim under oath. 

Since graduating with a B.S. in Criminology in 1975, eighteen years earlier, I had made the art and science of interviewing my specialty. First was the Reid Technique, then Investigative Discourse Analysis and just lately the basic and advanced schooling of Avinoam Sapir, an Israeli polygraph specialist at the Laboratory of Scientific Interrogation in the SCAN technique. These classes were not about learning parlor tricks.  Watching body language, listening to the language people used to talk about an event and dissecting written or transcribed statements became a potent tool in my arsenal. It was amazing stuff really. I learned that people used different language in recalling an event from memory than if they were making it up. I was beginning to see the forest from the trees. Just a simple change in pronouns or ending a statement with “that’s about it” was only two cues of many to press the interview into great depth. Day in and day out, I was practicing better interview techniques and on long rides in the car, I would play back recorded statements to grade myself.

My thoughts were interrupted when Mr. Blowhard walked into the room and took one look at me.

“I don’t want him here.”

“Good morning sir, do you have the requested-for information pursuant to the terms and conditions of your policy.” My lawyer replied.  

“I said that I don’t want that guy in the room. You didn’t say that he would be here.” He hadn’t sat down yet and was trying to establish control. 

“Thank you for your response, but could you please answer my question. Have you brought the information that we requested.” My lawyer didn’t blink.

“You don’t get it. I’m not saying anything until he leaves the room.”  

“I’ll ask the transcriptionist to start transcribing right now. I want to have this conversation recorded. If you decide to leave this room now, the company will consider you to be in breach of the policy conditions and I will recommend that they deny your claim for failure to cooperate. Mr. Hoda will not talk to you, he will only address me during this session. I will be asking all the questions. ” With that, my lawyer launched into the preamble and the transcriptionist began working the keys.

He stood there undecided as my lawyer finished the preamble, ” and let the record reflect that the policyholder is present. Would you please have a seat and spell your name for the record.”

We sat there and waited. The transcriptionist’s fingers were poised over the keys. 

He tried to even up the odds and now he was forced to fish or cut bait.

I envisioned opening a  copy of Boaters World to the staple pages in a couple of months and seeing a nice glossy two-page four-color advertisement inviting all kinds of whoop-ass on my soon to be ex-employer. Of course, the nice people in the unemployment line would be wondering why I was reading about yachts when I was trying to collect.

“Yeah, if he says one word to me, I am out of here, you got that.” He sat down with a huff and tossed an overstuffed manila envelope of papers on the desk.

I smiled. I didn’t have to say a damn thing. I didn’t have to think of how to formulate questions, what sequence to put them in or even how to phrase them, I just had to listen and pass notes to my lawyer who had turned the switch on and became the steely-eyed professional. 

“- and I consider this harassment. I paid my premium and reported a legitimate loss. I have not been paid a dime and have not had the pleasure of my boat through all of the boating season and you’re telling me you want more information. When will this nit-picking end.”

By the time he started this line of rehearsed complaining, we’d been at it for over three hours. Each document was discussed in detail and most were marked as exhibits. There were numerous times when I passed a note. He didn’t answer your question. The first few times, my lawyer would look at his notes, pause and ask the transcriptionist to read back the responses. Very quickly, he learned to state. “Thank you for your response, but my question was—“. 

Talk about a worm squirming on the hook. There were times when the insured would launch into some long-winded explanation and my lawyer would hold his pen in mid-air eye-closed and listen until the amateur sailor would have no more wind in his sail. Then the lawyer would repeat, “Thank you for your response, but my question was—-”

I counted him doing this four times in a row when he asked about the insured’s movements in the 24-hour period prior to when the insured discovered his boat missing from a mooring at the marina. Our boy wasn’t prepared for that question and was floundering. He bought a salvage piece at an auction and contracted with a “friend in the business” to restore it. The friend wanted to be paid cash under the table which the insured agreed to and then refused to produce a receipt. The friend didn’t want to pay taxes on the income for his labor.  The stammering continued when we asked him where and how often he visited his boat during the re-build. He gave us the name of the supplier of some of the materials as he paid for them directly and had gotten receipts.  He was vague on details and said that his friend had moved and disconnected his telephone line after their last argument.  So there we were. No one else rode with him before he reported his boat missing. He could not produce any receipts for overnight stays at marinas around Boston or Cape Cod. Nobody else could put him in that boat from the time it was allegedly repaired until it was mysteriously stolen. He hadn’t enough time on the water to really take her out on a shakedown cruise, we were told.

The insured showed us large cash withdrawals from his checking account that became his representations of how much and when he paid his friend. They got the boat into the water. He talked about their maiden voyage with ease and enthusiasm.  How did he handle the mainsail and the jib? What kind of knots did he use for the ropes? What instruments did he have on the bridge? I didn’t know a jib from a jab until earlier in the week when I had the marine surveyor educate me about boating for an hour. I still thought of a boat as a hole in the water that you poured money into. I could never understand how you could spend that much money on a short-season hobby in New England. Talking to the surveyor and now to the insured about sailing, you thought that if God made anything better, God had kept it in heaven.

The Lawyer paused and this was my cue to look up for the one-two punch of questions that were about to follow. I had been surreptitiously watching our boy’s mannerisms while answering questions to that point and now I wanted to see his reactions to these two questions.

“What should happen to the person that made your boat disappear?” 

Now if it was my $80,000 boat that got stolen I would use every pirate movie phrase from walking the plank to getting keel-hauled as to the fate of the person that made off with my pride and joy. Instead, I heard;

“Could you repeat the question?” He clearly understood the hundred other questions that day.

“What should happen to the person that made your boat disappear?

Silence, then slowly. “Well, he should be made to give it back.”

“Will you assist in the prosecution of the person responsible and assist in obtaining restitution for any expenditures made by the company resulting from this claim?”

“I guess.” 

“Could you answer yes or no?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you for your time here today. There is still the matter of certain documents that we asked for that you did not bring today. This EUO is not concluded until we have possession of them and your notarized signature agreeing with what you said today.” The attorney went on to list on the record the documents that we still needed. I sat back and stared at the insured for the first time all day. Slumped over, sullen with arms and hands below the table, I had seen that posture many times before. This was a simple examination under oath, not an interrogation. No trickery or half-truths, no confrontations to forcefully overcome objections, no softer themes of why he decided to commit an insurance fraud. This was just skillful questioning with a few zingers thrown in. 

Exhausted, he made the same tired arguments why his claim should be paid and then demanded to sit in while his wife was examined. Usually, we would ask that only one person would be permitted to in the room at a time. We didn’t want him to poison the well. We didn’t object because we had the sense that she would not have anything substantive to offer and we were right.  He sat there while she told us that she had never been on the boat, never seen the boat in any stage of repair and that she didn’t know anything about their finances as he handled all of their money. She was a dental assistant working full-time. They had no kids. We asked her about when his boating hobby started and what kind of boats he owned previously to this ocean-going single mast sailboat. It was clearly a hobby that she was not a part of. In their life together, there were many things that she was not a part of. She had the steady income and benefits. She stayed home and worked and he did this or that and played on weekends.

His records were on the table and she confirmed that he bounced around sales jobs and then into multi-level marketing. His earnings over the past three years were dependent on where you were looking.  His reported earnings to the IRS and Massachusetts were just-above the poverty line, yet you saw these large swings of cash in and out of his checkbook. Seeing his reported finances splayed out in front of his wife became increasingly difficult to him and her when we pointed out how much cash was coming in and going out. She was clueless but was starting to get the picture. Ms. Frugality meet Mr. Big-Spender, but not on her. Our examination was coming to a close, but we got the queasy sense that her questioning of him would continue well into their evening, behind closed doors with the drapes tightly drawn. 

You had to feel sorry for her, but not for Mr. Blowhard. He was a player and he was trying to play us all. This day it caught up to him. It may be the first time in his recent life that somebody held him accountable for his actions.

* * *

We sat outside in the beautiful sunshine, both having talked non-stop during our late-afternoon sandwiches. 

“It doesn’t look good John- I couldn’t get anything that he couldn’t explain away. He’s got a decent excuse for why he didn’t want to play ball with you initially. He couldn’t get his friend to give him the receipts. You put him between a rock and hard place and he needed time to try and get receipts for all the under-the-table work the guy did to rebuild the boat. Your guy didn’t do anything wrong, he was just trying to save a buck.”

“Yeah but it’s really convenient how the boat builder is a ghost now and there is nobody else that saw the boat in the water.”

“True, but that’s not his problem, that’s yours. He shows enough cash outlays to cover the labor and materials for the rebuild. I bought us a little time with the other documents, but if he can’t produce them, we can’t deny him for failure to cooperate. He basically met the requirement. Once he signs off on the EUO and returns the Proof of Loss, you’ve got a 60-day window to pull the rabbit out of the hat.

“What did you think about his response to the two final questions?” I asked.

“Never saw that before, I have to remember to tell my people to end all their theft EOUs like that. That was beautiful. The guy didn’t know whether to wind his watch or soil his pants.”

“So I’m onto something.” I persisted.

“Yeah but proving it is going to be a bear, you didn’t come out of this with anything to really hang your hat on. The guy didn’t walk away from this claim, he still thinks he can pull it off.”

* * *

The Insured scrounged the documents up and there was nothing in them to write home about. He and his wife signed their EUOs without any corrections and returned the Proof of Loss.  Now that no bombs had dropped on him, he kept up the pressure on us by telling his agent he would follow up on his threats. Time was running out, as I remembered the stern stare from my employer’s top alpha male. The boat builder had left no traces. He was into the wind as the saying goes. He owed money to suppliers.  He owed his landlord after moving out in the middle of the night. Local marinas wanted to find him too. He had taken healthy deposits on different boats around the area and walked away in the middle of the season with all the jobs uncompleted. It was up to each boat owner to sue him for breaching his contracts. The bad will caused at the marinas was palpable. It looked like he split town and left everybody holding the bag. The marine surveyor did tell me that the builder had bought another boat that was destroyed in Hurricane Bob. Did he buy it for parts? Was he going to rebuild that boat too?  The surveyor was checking to see to whom it was registered. 

What did I have to work with? The builder was just one person and not a company and he couldn’t be found to verify the work and the payments. Nobody had seen the boat after it supposedly rebuilt. Did it even exist? The insured could have taken a picture of another Marlow-Hunter 37 at a mooring anywhere and represented that it was of his boat. That it disappeared before the surveyor could inspect it was huge, especially when we knew that the boat had been a total loss from a hurricane. The hurricane itself was a catastrophe to the boating community in New England and the claims apparatus for this sleepy part of the business was still swamped.

I was swamped with work too. This was only one of my cases. I had a monster case taking up almost all my time in New Jersey involving a staged-accident ring. It made this case pale in comparison. I was running and gunning on multiple assignments throughout the Northeast, grinding out 40,000 miles a year on the company car. I was one busy guy. Finding time to work this case was hard to come by, but since this case had the attention of the hierarchy of my company, it behooved me to shuffle my cases around to finish the job I started. 

* * *

Mattapoisett, Massachusetts is on the way to the Cape.  Cape Cod; that is, to the rest of us. Its harbor is nestled in Buzzards Bay. I was hoping to knock on some doors at the last known address of the boat builder and verify the receipts from the materials supplier given to me by Mr. Blowhard at the EUO. I would be shutting the case down if I didn’t get anywhere that day. Again, I drove before dawn from Connecticut. I was assured of getting a full day of sunlight to work before driving home.

“Just some bar fights is all, he’d get released when nobody wanted to sign complaints against the other party.” The local cop said. “Nice enough guy when he was sober, though.”

“Yep, he drives an old blue Ford F-150 pick-up, you’ll recognize it when you see it.” The landlord said. “He still owes me for two months rent and when you see him, tell him that he can kiss his security deposit goodbye.”

“No Ma’am, but thanks anyway,” I said to the lonely housewife that lived across the hall from the boat builder’s apartment. “A coffee would be nice, but I have a lot of ground to cover today.” She hadn’t seen him with any women during the time that he lived across the way, both of them on the ground level. She did verify his physical description right down to the mullet and mustache in his mugshots at the PD. 

The girl at the local package store hadn’t seen her regular beer customer for a couple of months and was worried that something might have happened to him; same with the diner waitresses and the guys at the pizza joint, where I had two slices and a coke. I would hit the bars later at happy hour when I had the best chance of catching somebody that might have a line on the guy. There was a neighborhood Blarney Stone on almost every major corner down in this old seafaring town. It would make no difference if it was a weekday or not with his crowd. Any day that ended in the letter Y would be the only requirement for the crowd I was looking for. 

“Yeah when his credit was good, we did a nice bit of business with him, but it seemed like he decided to screw us when he owed us the most. Should have seen it coming.” The supplier said. He was an older guy; the business had been in his family for three generations. He was taking this deadbeat skipping out on him personally.

“Yeah, it was like he decided to stiff everybody at the end; Landlord, boat owners, suppliers. Like he was going to just vanish.” I said.

I was looking at the stack of bills. “What’s all this stuff mean?”

The old sailing man looked at the bills and said, “Looks like it wasn’t going to plan. He was reordering more epoxy and glue than I would imagine he needed.”

I showed him the copy of the photographs from when the boat was a total loss up in dry dock. “He turned this into that”. He studied the ‘after’ photo closely. I’d seen fingerprint examiners do the same thing with prints taken from the scene of a crime and compare them with prints from a suspect.

He went back to the bills and shuffled through them again shaking his head. With that much damage on the starboard side. I’d think that he would need a lot of fiberglass to patch up all the holes. He hardly has any.”

“Could he have ordered the fiberglass elsewhere?”

“Hold on a sec.” He put down the photos and bills and dialed the phone.

Three calls later, he confirmed for me what I was beginning to suspect. This was no ordinary repair. “He didn’t get the fiberglass anywhere in Plymouth county. He’s got enough glue and epoxy for two boats but not enough fiberglass to fill the holes for even one.”

“I know he bought a second boat himself as salvage from the hurricane. Could it be for the other boat?” We were spitballing now.

“Possibly, but that doesn’t explain why no fiberglass.” the sea-faring man said.

The guy that knew everything about sailboats and the investigator who got seasick on the Port Jefferson Ferry just looked at each other trying to figure out what was going on. We both knew we were on to something, but that something was eluding us.

Finally, he said, “Why don’t you go poke around his shop and see what you might find?”

I looked at my notes, “The insured said it was an industrial park in Fair Haven, but he didn’t have his driving directions and said that he was there only twice. I was going to canvass the town to try to find it after I left here.”

“I can do you one better, young man. We had to deliver a few times to him.” He pulled out a receipt that hadn’t been given to me by Mr. Blowhard and showed me the delivery address scrawled on the bottom. He then showed me a second one with the same address in Acushnet, the town just North of Mattapoisett. “More glue, both times.”

He initialed and dated those two receipts before tearing off carbonless copies. Both had been billed for delivery to Mr. Mullet and Mustache and not for the insured. I had seen neither copy before today. Why not? Wouldn’t they have added to the cost of the repairs? Were these even related to this boat rebuild? Could it have been for another customer or even the salvage piece the re-builder bought for himself? I mulled over this on the way.

His directions were dead on. I pulled into the nondescript collection of single story corrugated buildings set out in no particular order.  

I finally found the unit I was looking for. The doors were padlocked, there was no sign on the outside of the building, but the area reeked of glue. I took out my camera and popped a few pictures when a man in a work shirt stenciled with the name Ned above the shirt pocket popped up next to me and made me jump almost out of my shoes. He walked over from the machine shop across the alley. You could hear the other grinding going on from the open bay doors.

“You from the Health Department?” He asked. He was working on several days of a salt and pepper beard and had lifted his safety glasses to his forehead giving him a raccoon look. 

“No, I am an insurance investigator investigating a boat claim.” I handed him my card.

“What kind of boat claim?” Ned asked.

“A guy up by Boston Harbor claims his boat was stolen. Problem is that we never got a chance to inspect it after he put it on the policy. It disappeared before we had a chance to look at it.”

“Where’d he lose it?”

“Up near Boston-nobody at the marina had ever seen it there in the water.” 

“So why are you here?” He asked.

Not knowing if this was a good guy or a bad guy asking me all these questions, I just gave him the honest answer in an aw-shucks sort of way. “The boat had been wrecked in Hurricane Bob and he bought it cheap. The guy that fixed it up for him had his shop there. I said pointing to where I was shooting my camera. “I am just trying to put the puzzle together. The guy that did the repairs is in the wind. I can’t find him anywhere.”

“Yeah”, he said. “A lot of things are in the wind, do you smell the glue?”

I nodded.

“That asshole started gluing the boats together in there and had the fans blowing out here. I thought you were from the Health Department. It was bad. I was getting headaches and even if he didn’t huff himself crazy, I thought I was getting high from it. It was really bad. He couldn’t keep the door down and he had nowhere else to ventilate the glue when it was setting.”

“Whaddyamean, he was gluing the boats together?” I was confused. 

“He had two boats and he glued them together and made one boat. Two boats went in there and one came out. I bet he left all his crap in there too.”

He saw the expression on my face. I just stood there and was trying picture what he was saying. 

“You can’t do that with a car.” He said. “Once a car frame is compromised you can never put it on the road again.”

I still wasn’t getting it. 

Waggling his right hand in front of his chest palm down, Waggling his left hand the same way, he put his right hand on top of his left and stopped waggling them, “He took the boat with a good port side and glued it to the boat with the good starboard side …… and trashed the damaged sides which are probably still in there.”

Now it came rushing at me like a tidal wave Two boats. Two titles. Mr. Blowhard carefully staged it where he showed me the side of the boat that he bought along with the title for that side and poof it disappears. There is still a boat out there with a title that comes from the other boat. “That’s why he needed all the glue and none of the fiberglass.”

Now it was time for the grinder to look at me. “Huh?”

“I just came from the guy that supplied him with all the glue you smelled. He couldn’t understand why your neighbor there needed all the glue but no fiberglass to patch the damage. Now it makes sense. He just slapped the two good sides of the boats together.

* * *

“Yeah, How’d you know?” The marine surveyor must have thought I was clairvoyant when I told him that the boat the boat-builder salvaged was identical to the boat, Mr. Blowhard salvaged. 

“Put it together,” I said.

Silence.

“Put them together,” I said.

Silence. 

“Take the pictures of the two boats and put them together so that both good sides are showing.” I could hardly contain my sheer joy at what he was about to see in my mind’s spy-glass.

“Holy Mackerel!” Oh my God! That’s incredible!”, the surveyor was now shouting.

“What’s even better”, I said. The insured sat there in his Examination Under Oath and swore to us about the repair progress. He never said jack-squat about taking the two good halves and sticking them together with epoxy resin and Super Glue. I would never have covered that aspect in a recorded interview. By messing with me, we really made him explain all his movements. He never said anything about the boat builder buying an identical boat and using it to make one.” 

“Somewhere out there is the boat using the other title with a clean Hull Identification Number.”

“The boat builder didn’t sell it yet?” I asked.

“Not in Massachusetts at least.” He replied. “He’s still the registered owner.”

We went over scenarios for a few more minutes before the conference called me down to Baltimore. He began jabbering in nautical terms with the Yacht claims manager that first sniffed this one out. The Yacht claims guy was excited about knowing that he was right. Something fishy had been going on.

An hour later, the conference call grew to include my boss and the lawyer and I was getting exasperated.

“His answers were just vague enough about where the repairs were done and what kind of repairs were done.” My lawyer said. “You’ve got to give me more, John.”

He was right and I didn’t want to admit it. Mr. Blowhard was looking smarter than us by the minute. 

“Find me the boat.” The lawyer said.

“The boat builder won’t be far away. We know his truck and his physical description.” I said.

The Yacht guys then clued us in that the boat could be anywhere on the East Coast and even possibly in Mexico or the Caribbean. It would be like finding a needle in the haystack. By the time the call ended, the wind was pretty much out of my sails. 

* * *

Time went by slowly until a week before the deadline. We had to deny the claim or pay up. It was that simple. Deny it without rock-solid proof and we ran the risk of seeing a full-page ad in the yachting magazine. Pay and we could still imagine him writing a nasty letter to the editor complaining of his treatment at the hands of the Gestapo. I could only hope that he spelled my name right. My daydreaming was interrupted by a phone call.

“You’re buddy’s back.” He said.

“Who’s this?” I replied.

“Ned,” Ned said.

“I’m sorry, do I know you?” I asked.

“You remember looking for the guy that glued the boats together? Well, he’s back cleaning out his tools. I went over there and asked him what he was going to do about the smell. He said that he was gonna take care of it when he comes back tomorrow.”

I now instantly remembered the Grinder whom I had given my card. “What else did he say?”

“Said that he was getting a big payday soon and that he was headed off to Florida in his boat.”

“Anything else?”

“Naw, he kept promising me that he would clean it up real nice. Yeah, right, that ain’t gonna happen.”

“Did you say anything about me?”

“Naw, I figured that you’d want to introduce yourself.”

“You figured right, Ned. What was he driving?”

“Same ratty pick-up.”

“Blue F-150?”

“Yep.”

“Thanks, Ned, I owe you big time. Do me a favor, don’t say anything to him tomorrow.”

“I won’t be here because I’m going hunting.”

“Good. Happy hunting.”

“You too, I imagine.” Ned hung up.

Things moved quickly then. The next morning two tinted-window vans with long CB antennae followed the boat builder back to the parking lot of a marina in New Bedford without being detected. There, the marine surveyor and I who had been following the chase at a safe distance spotted the boat in the water at a slip with an electric hook-up. The boat builder was living on the boat. On the transom was painted ‘Double Trouble’  

There it was in plain view. They were mocking us all the time. They were oh- so smart.

The marine surveyor carefully noted the slight differences between the port and starboard sides. Those observations were sworn into a search warrant executed a few days later by the Marine equivalent of the Mass State Police. Also boarding the vessel, when the warrant was executed were the two previous owners of the two boats. They were confused at first, but each noted items that were unique to the remaining portions that only they would know.

The man with the mullet and mustache began singing immediately. He said was going to get some traveling money from the claim pay off in one week and he was taking the boat to Florida to make a fresh start. He was walking away from all his debts and only came back to the rental storage unit to get his tools so that he could work on boats in the sunshine state. He would have been in the wind sooner if we didn’t drag out the claim.  He blamed the whole scheme on Mr. Blowhard, who tried to turn the blame around by saying that it was a straight-up theft by the boat builder. It was all a big mistake. Blah. Blah. Blah.

In the end, they both pled guilty and the mullet man was socked with the restitution and reimbursement of all our expenses. The local papers covered the story, but there was no full-page ad in Boaters World.  Imagine that.

* * *

Three days after his pleadings in open court, Mr. Blowhard received a nondescript package in the mail. It was postmarked from somewhere off I-95 along the coast of Maine. Inside was a red box from Old Spice, you would know it instantly by the picture of a sailing ship on the bottle of after-shave. Inside the box, however, was soap on a rope with a little crayon note nicely written by a six-year-old girl named Emily with two words. Bon Voyage.

June 27, 2018

 

Doggie CPR: Does that include mouth to mouth?

https://fxn.ws/2tqgGX5

June 6, 2018:

 Man Breaks Into Funeral Home, Dresses in Dead Man’s Clothes 

 

http://www.insideedition.com/headlines/25578-man-breaks-into-funeral-home-hangs-out-for-hours-steals-dead-mans-clothes-cops

June 14, 2018

Beware: Robbing 7-11s Can Be Risky

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