The Rich and

Powerful
 “The rich and powerful take what they want…”—and
here’s how they do it. The following notes are excerpts
from a guest lecture by President of I.Y.S. Insurance,
James Sterling, given at the INTERPOL General
Secretariat in Lyon. The lecture served to introduce
new investigators to the many facets of financial
crime. Mr. Sterling went on to become a senior
INTERPOL investigator himself. Precisely how these
transcripts came to be in private hands is, at present,
unknown… [Hear that, Parker? We’re “unknown”!
Do they have any idea how hard it was to plant a bug
on Sterling? “Romantic vacation in France,” Nate
said… Hah!]
ii
Note to Fixers: Knowing a little bit about the
technical details of your Mark’s criminal activities
makes it easier to give clues to the players about
the weak points of the Mark’s plan. That lets them
find the best way to provide their own particular
form of leverage. Hackers and Masterminds,
especially, can investigate a Mark’s finances and
come up with a paper trail that suggests ways of
taking the Mark down.
Follow the
Money
 Every criminal enterprise rests upon one human
weakness: greed. Someone wants something they don’t
have—or more of something they do have—and is willing
to break the law to get it.
Rule number one—follow the money. We’ll look at the
ways criminals manipulate money from the bottom up:
how they make their ill-gotten gains accessible, and where
it came from in the first place. This matches the pattern of
the typical investigation—you’ll generally catch a clue at
the bottom tier, and have to work backward.
Art Fraud
Elaborate robberies and complex con games are all
fascinating exercises, but the most common form of art
theft is one in which the art isn’t actually stolen at all. A
fake robbery is the best of both worlds for the “victim”;
he gets the insurance money, and he gets to keep his
prized possession.
If a robbery actually happens, the insurance
underwriters have to pay off. Of course, there might be
a raised eyebrow or two if the amount of insurance is
more than the item is worth. Forget “sentimental value”
nonsense; something insured for more than its appraised
value isn’t a lovely keepsake, it’s bait for a trap.
Case File: Steven
Cooperman
In 1992, retired eye surgeon Steven Cooperman reported
that his Brentwood home had been broken into, and that
two paintings had been stolen. These weren’t just any
paintings; Picasso’s “Nude Before a Mirror” and Monet’s
“The Customs Officer’s Cabin in Pourville” were valued at
$2.5 million. The paintings were insured for a total of $12.5
million—and that, ladies and gentlemen, is a red flag.
The police were immediately skeptical; nothing else
was missing, there was no sign of forced entry, and the
alarm system installed in the Cooperman home hadn’t
4 The Rich and Powerful
Essayist Lewis Hyde calls con artists “barren creators,”
and that’s true of all white-collar criminals; they’re
creative, but not productive. They have the inspiration
to be innovators, but instead of producing something
honestly new, they create fairy stories to dupe the
unsuspecting. Hyde compares white-collar criminals to
the tricksters of myth, leading people astray. Not untrue—
and very poetic besides—but it makes criminals into
larger-than-life characters. In reality they’re just greedy,
lying bastards out to make a fast buck at someone else’s
expense. Most financial crimes start with a lie of some
sort, but all of them end with laundering the money.
gone off. The doctor had an ironclad alibi, though; he and
his third wife had been vacationing on the New Jersey
shore when the robbery occurred. The second and third
red flags, for those of you keeping count.
Dr. Cooperman filed a claim with his insurers for the
full $12.5 million. Because of the peculiar circumstances
of the “crime,” the insurance company quite rightly
refused to pay. Cooperman sued his insurers for the full
value, plus punitive damages. The company settled out
of court for $17.5 million, and the paintings remained
missing for another five years.
Fast-forward to 1996; police responded to a report of
domestic abuse in a Cleveland suburb. They discovered
that the alleged abuser, James Little, in addition to having
a cocaine habit and a bad temper, had millions of dollars
worth of stolen paintings. Little received immunity from
prosecution in return for leading the FBI to a rented
storage locker, where “Nude Before a Mirror” and “The
Customs Officer’s Cabin in Pourville” were concealed.
Little had received the paintings from a former
colleague, fellow attorney James Tierney. Tierney was
an employee of the law firm Milberg Weiss, which had
handled dozens of cases for Dr. Steven Cooperman;
cases of limited legal merit, I might add. The pieces were
starting to fit together.
 At the time of the “theft,” Cooperman’s medical license
had been canceled by the California Medical Board amid
accusations of fraud. He’d been in dire financial straits,
with over $6 million dollars in outstanding loans, some
of which were secured by the very paintings that were
“stolen.” Need I say “fourth red flag”? James Tierney
testified that he and Cooperman devised a plan; Tierney
had keys to the house and knew the code to disarm
the alarm. While Cooperman established his alibi,
Tierney entered the house and removed the paintings.
Cooperman told him to destroy the art, but Tierney just
couldn’t bring himself to do it. Instead, he passed them
to James Little to hide.
In 1999, Cooperman was convicted in a Los Angeles
court of insurance fraud, but the story isn’t quite over.
Facing a decade in prison, Cooperman was released on
a $10 million bond. He hired a new lawyer, who offered
to cut a deal with the prosecuting attorney for a reduced
sentence. This deal would only work if Cooperman
had something to trade; it would have to be something
significant, and of interest to the Federal government.
Art Theft
I. Y. S. insures a large number of art collections. The
sad truth is most world-famous pieces of art are under-
protected and under-insured. Most museums can’t
afford elaborate security systems, laser detection grids,
and round-the-clock monitoring. The biggest deterrent
to art theft isn’t the defenses surrounding the art, it’s that
famous pieces can’t be easily fenced. National treasures,
if stolen, go onto the black market for maybe a tenth of
their true value. The payoff is hardly worth the risk.
When a famous painting or sculpture goes missing,
there is one way for unscrupulous types to make a lot of
money. I’ll get to that in a moment.
Most high profile art thefts are actually robbery-to-
order; the thieves are hired by a collector to acquire a
specific item. Needless to say, that item never winds up
on the black market, let alone on the open market.
Once a piece of stolen art is in private hands, it’s
likely to stay there—even in the unlikely event that the
Fortunately for Cooperman, he did know something
big; he knew the dirty secrets of his friend Tierney’s
employers, the law firm of Milberg Weiss. And they say
that there’s honor among thieves.
Note to Fixers: This is the sort of Job that might turn a
Foil into a Client. Suppose that an insurance investigator
was about to lose his job because he’d failed to find
some missing paintings, and his company had no choice
but to pay out—even though the investigator is positive
he’s been outwitted. Where can he turn when he needs
help, except to the only people who’ve ever outwitted
him before?
The trick to making a Job like this work is to keep
the Foil-turned-Client from seeming unnecessarily dim-
witted. He may be desperate, but from his point of view
he’s got a brilliant plan; following the old adage “set a
thief to catch a thief.”
collector decides to let it go, he can’t just advertise that
it’s for sale. Sure, he could set up a Zanzibar Marketplace,
but even secret, invitation-only auctions can be crashed
by the police, or by other crooks. My theory is that most
high-end stolen art only changes hands when someone
else steals it. Naturally, I have no proof; only an idiot
would report a crime like that.
Remember those unscrupulous sorts I mentioned
before? They can make a killing by selling a forgery of
the highly publicized stolen painting. They can even sell
more than one forgery—people who buy stolen art tend
not to compare notes about their latest purchases, after
all. Grifters call this the Mona Lisa Shuffle because, at
least according to legend, it’s been pulled with that very
painting on more than one occasion. Ask anybody in the
business: the Mona Lisa in the Louvre is a fake.
Follow the Money 5
 Bribery
Bribery is a form of financial manipulation, all right—
financial manipulation of people. In some parts of the
world, it’s standard practice and an investigator, private
or government, is bound to face a bribe at some point.
Obviously, don’t take it. Whenever I’m offered a bribe,
though, I can’t help but smile. It means I’m talking to the
right person—if he’s willing to part with some cash to
make me go away, he’s exactly the guy I want. I’ve got to
admit, there is a certain joy in taking down somebody
like that, the kind of person who really deserves it.
Enforcing law and order may be hard, but justice is
always easy.
6 The Rich and Powerful
Here’s an advanced technique; it’s effective, but use it
sparingly if you use it at all. Negotiate for your bribe; see
just how high the other guy is willing to go. The more
he offers, the guiltier he is of something. All you have to
figure out is what.
The bribe usually comes right about the time you’ve
followed the trail of cash back to its source. It’s the
moment when you’ve become an actual threat. This
is where we shift from financial crimes dedicated to
making illegal profits accessible into financial crimes
that are just dedicated to making illegal profits.
 Creative Accounting
It’s not all that creative, really; it’s just structuring
financial reports so that they’re not quite fraud. There
are plenty of other euphemisms for this: “earnings
management,” “aggressive fiscal practices,” and so on.
It’s all spin doctoring of one sort or another.
There are as many methods as there are practitioners,
but one thing is always the same: when you look at their
financial records, they’re overcomplicated, and if you
look closely, they have a narrative flow. Financial data
can certainly tell a story, but it shouldn’t have a plot.
“Creative accounting” is all about convincing the
reader that something is true when it’s not. “The
company is making a tidy profit, not hemorrhaging
money.” “The Board of Directors isn’t preparing to
short-sell the stock and retire to Acapulco.” “R&D really
isn’t a slush fund for hookers and blow.” If the financial
statements and reports seem a little too dedicated to
creating a particular story line, they’re probably lies.
The main flaw with this sort of near-fraud is that
it sometimes crosses the line into actual fraud. The
temptation to skew the figures just a little bit more than
the law allows is very strong, and there’s often some
outside pressure as well. If business has been good, and
the books have been cooked to make it look just a little
bit better, what happens when things take a downturn?
If “good” wasn’t good enough, “not so good” must be
terrible.
Creative accountants lie about sales figures, they
lie about expenses, and they lie about the value of the
company’s assets. They also lie by omission, and “forget”
to mention outstanding debts and financial obligations.
It’s a complicated juggling act. Running a company
based on the rosy picture you’re trying to paint is a
bad idea; you need the real figures to do real business.
That means leaving a paper trail. Duplicate books
(these days, duplicate spreadsheets) are pesky pieces
of evidence a creative accountant has no choice about
keeping around. The thing about a paper trail is that it
can be followed. A smart investigator will keep digging
until he finds something he can take to court.
Case File: Enron
At its height, Enron was America’s sixth largest company,
with offices in more than forty countries and $138.7
billion in reported revenue.
That’s reported revenue. It’s a little complicated,
but most businesses use a model for reporting share-
trading revenue where only the brokerage fee received
is reported as income. Enron reported the total value
of each trade, which let them post revenue increases
of more than 750% between 1996 and 2000. Just for
comparison, most energy industries considered growth
of 3% per year to be respectable.
Using the Enron method, income from projects
like pipelines, power plants, and trades in energy
futures could be recorded, even though the company
never actually received the money. Financial earnings
on paper looked strong—but in following years, the
“profits” from those projects couldn’t be included, so
new sources of income had to be found.
The corporate leaders at Enron were trapped by
Ponzi’s mathematics. More projects had to be started
each year than in the year before, whether they were
earners or not. Share prices skyrocketed as Enron
looked to be one of the fastest-growing investments in
history, but it was all a sham.
Creative accounting concealed what was going on.
Enron’s financial statements were so complex that they
confounded analysts. Liabilities and debts were hidden,
assets were inflated, and special-purpose subsidiary
companies were calved off to dump risk. Shareholders
were told that Enron had entered into financial hedge
deals to limit risk, but they weren’t told that the partner
companies were financed with Enron’s own stock.
Enron retained an external audit company to verify
their financial dealings—but the huge fees being paid to
the auditors created a conflict of interest; if they pointed
out that Enron was a house of cards, those fees would
Follow the Money 7
 go away. In the end, when the SEC started investigating
Enron, it was the auditors that shredded tons of
documents and deleted thirty thousand computer files
relevant to the investigation. But it didn’t matter; enough
was left to expose the truth.
Enron’s shareholders lost $74 billion dollars when
the bottom fell out. Share prices dropped from ninety
dollars a share to just twelve cents. The investigation
revealed $67 billion dollars of debt to assorted creditors.
The pension funds for Enron’s front-line employees were
invested in Enron stock; the pensions were all worthless.
A New York Times reporter called it “the perfect financial
storm.”
8 The Rich and Powerful
Note to Fixers: A slightly-less-perfect financial storm
makes a good structure for a Job. The Client is one of
the hapless employees of a company wrecked by fiscal
mismanagement, who’s lost her job, her pension, and
her future. The Mark is a CEO who took the “golden
parachute” as his company crashed and burned. The
problem for the Crew is that most of the money was
never real to begin with; the pension fund was just an
empty promise, based on inflated stock prices. They’ll
have to find some other money to extract. Maybe the
Mark has developed a new source of income….
 Credit Card Fraud
& Identity Theft
Getting access to someone else’s line of credit is
frighteningly easy. I’m personally aware of a pair of
young men, either brothers or lovers depending on who
you believe, who’ve crisscrossed the U.S. a dozen times
in the past seven years on an increasingly bizarre crime
spree—all financed by credit card fraud.
Even rank amateurs can steal a credit card from
a wallet or purse, or grab a discarded statement from
somebody’s trash. The amateur drains money up to the
card’s limit, hoping to get as much as possible before
somebody cancels the card. Single instances like that
are unpleasant for the victim, but credit card companies
usually make good on the loss.
Creating entire fake accounts is a bit harder, and takes
longer. Stolen documents (or forged documents) have to
be submitted to the card issuer, and the crook has to wait
for a card to be issued, mailed out, and verified for first-
time use. It’s slower, but since the victim is the issuing
company, no one’s going to cancel the card prematurely.
The company will figure it out when the first payments
come due, but by that time the crook has moved on to a
new fake account.
Identity theft, and the associated takeover of an
existing credit line, is quicker. With an actual ID, or the
information from it, a competent forger can create a
fake ID in minutes. Thanks to the interlinked nature of
modern banking—and the tendency for people to reuse
codes and passwords—it’s easy for a crook to step from
a single account to total control of a victim’s finances.
Lucrative as the control of a person’s entire financial
structure can be, the wholesale harvesting of credit
card numbers and their identity data is where the real
money is. A small device attached to an ATM card slot
that reads the cards passing through it can skim off
thousands of card numbers in a single day. Hundreds
of thousands of card numbers can be acquired at once
by hacking the computer system of a major corporation
that does business using credit—and what corporation
doesn’t, these days?
Most operations of this sort originate in Eastern
Europe, in places that used to be Soviet Republics. The
technology and skills are already there, and governments
that have only recently reorganized generally haven’t
had time to pass laws making tech-crimes illegal.
The criminals who collect numbers in bulk don’t use
the numbers themselves; they sell them to end-user
criminals for a few dollars per account. That’s money
that almost launders itself; the transactions will be listed
as sales of a “contact list” or “aggregated marketing data,”
if they’re listed anywhere at all.
Follow the Money 9
 Embezzling
An embezzler misappropriates money (or some other
valuable asset) entrusted into his or her care, and takes it
for personal use. This is different from ordinary theft—a
thief hasn’t been entrusted with the care of anything.
Theft is a crime, but embezzlement comes with an
additional stigma: the unmistakable whiff of betrayal.
Every business bigger than a mom-and-pop-shop
has some financial officer whose job is to write checks
on the company’s behalf. The bills have to be paid, after
all. The people in the offices with the blank checks have,
presumably, been vetted before they were hired, and
been determined to be trustworthy, upstanding citizens.
There are an embarrassing number of embezzlement
cases, however, that stem from lack of verification. Too
many non-profit organizations and charities suffer from
excessive trust, and subsequently suffer from being
robbed blind by an insider. Performers who concentrate
more on their art than on their income have the same
problem. Lesson learned: never let your half-brother act
as your accountant.
10 The Rich and Powerful
Some embezzlers start with semi-honest intentions.
“I’ll only borrow a little money, and I’ll pay it back later.”
Maybe the money does get paid back—but now the
embezzler’s had a taste. The next time he needs cash, he
knows just how to get it. Treating the money in his care
as a source of easy no-interest loans is sure to become
addictive; and every addict winds up needing another
fix, and then another.
An embezzler who also has a taste for risk is a
disaster waiting to happen. He might “borrow” money
and pay it back, but if he’s “borrowing” to make a “sure-
thing” investment, or to finance a quick trip to Vegas,
the odds—and the law—will catch up to him sooner
rather than later. Spotting embezzlement is simple: just
audit the accounts. Spotting the embezzler is almost as
easy: look for the person driving a car he can’t afford.
Case File: Minnie
Mangum
Flip comments aside, not every embezzler is an
accountant with a power tie and a Ferrari. Historically,
more women embezzle than men, and one of the most
successful was Minnie Mangum. Over a period of
twenty-two years, she quietly and carefully stole $2.8
million dollars from the Commonwealth Building and
Loan Association of Norfolk, VA.
Mangum was described as a “plump spinster,” who
regularly attended church and even taught Sunday
school. When she wasn’t at work at the bank she spent
her time, get this, caring for her invalid mother and blind
sister. At this point, I’d be suspicious just on general
principal; she’s just too precious to be believed. Minnie
Mangum put in long hours at Commonwealth, working
weekends and never taking a vacation. By 1933, she’d
been promoted to a position where she was in charge of
personnel, and that’s when the fun began.
She took care to hire female clerks with little or no
experience as bookkeepers or cashiers, ensuring that
she wouldn’t be found out. The scheme started with
small checks drawn on the bank’s reserve funds, and
“signed” with the bank president’s signature stamp.
They went to Mangum’s friends and family. The very
real withdrawals were balanced with fake deposit slips.
Eventually, Mangum moved up to larger thefts, enough
to finance homes, cars, and businesses—not to mention
her extensive charitable donations. She paid a group
of janitors and cleaning staff at other local banks to tip
her off when state or Federal auditors were in the area.
That gave her enough advance warning to make sure her
figures always balanced.
Unlike most embezzlers, Mangum didn’t spend any
of the money on herself; she drove an ordinary car, lived
in a modest home with her mother and sister, and was
described as wearing “the same dowdy clothing year
after year.”
In 1955, Minnie Mangum made her one and only
mistake: she hired Esther Marie Cannon, an experienced
bookkeeper. Cannon found discrepancies in the bank’s
accounts, and of course she brought them to Miss
Mangum’s attention. Kindly Miss Mangum immediately
fired Esther Marie. Sure then that something was very
wrong, Esther Marie sent an anonymous whistle-
blowing letter to the authorities, and twenty-two years
of secret vice began to unravel.
In the end, this so-called “modern-day Robin Hood”
stole $1.1 million dollars for 43 members of her family,
another $363,000 for 32 assorted friends, and financed
the purchase of a total of 85 new cars. In 1956 she was
sentenced to twenty years in prison—but she only served
nine before being paroled.
Note to Fixers: This is a tough one, despite
Sterling’s scorn. Minnie Mangum was a one-woman
Leverage Crew! An ordinary embezzler makes a fine
Mark, particularly if they’re stealing from a charitable
organization or some other worthy cause. A “Robin
Hood” embezzler, on the other hand, is doing almost
exactly what your Crew is doing; why on Earth would
they want to stop her?
Suppose, though, that instead of an FDIC-insured
bank, your “Robin Hood” embezzled from an important
local business—a major employer, and a vital part of the
town’s economy. Maybe she had her reasons, but when
the insolvency was discovered, the company folded,
taking all those jobs with it. Now, people are hurting,
their incomes are gone—and not everybody benefited
from the embezzler’s generosity. It’s a Job without a
Mark. Your Crew will have to con someone into making
this right.
Follow the Money 11
 Insider Trading
In the U.S., the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 defines
what’s legal and what isn’t when it comes to trading
stock—and the U.S. has some of the toughest laws
worldwide when it comes to stock markets. An “insider”
for legislative purposes, is anyone who’s an officer,
executive, or a greater-than-ten-percent shareholder in
a corporation.
If an insider buys or sells stock based on private
information gained through that status, it’s illegal.
That’s not to say that insiders can’t play the market;
most of them do. But they can’t play using privileged
information. If an insider knows that share prices will
drop as soon as a company-wide disaster is revealed to
the public, he could sell now, while the prices are still
good. After the news goes public, he buys the same
stock back at its new, lower price and realizes a profit.
Naughty, naughty.
There’s a funny gray area to this; the law requires
insiders to make their stock trades public, so naturally
people watch what the insiders at a company do, and
follow suit. An insider can use that to manipulate the
market by remote control; buy, buy, buy to drive the
share prices up, or sell, sell, sell to drive them down.
Why drive the price of your own company’s shares
down? Maybe because you want to let someone snap
them up “on the cheap,” so that they can sell them on
to you later, consolidating your holdings. Or maybe
because you want the company to look insolvent, to
protect against a hostile takeover.
The SEC also takes a dim view of anyone passing
information to a third party so that they can buy or sell
stock at an unfair profit. Conspiracy to commit securities
fraud is a serious crime. The trick is proving who knew
what when. Your investigation will center on connecting
the insider to the person making the suspicious trades.
Hope for recoverable e-mails, or a conspirator willing
to rat out his confederates. Funny thing about people:
someone almost always will.
12 The Rich and Powerful
If a crook can’t get real insider information, he can
always just make something up. It helps if the story
is plausible, but anything works if the audience is
gullible—or desperate—enough.
Case File: Le Empereur
est mort!
In February of 1814, a man dressed as a British army
officer appeared in a traveler’s inn on the English
Channel coast, spreading the tale that Napoleon had
been killed in battle, and that the costly, bloody war
with France was over. People wanted to believe that
their national enemy was a goner, and that peace was at
hand. The story spread by word of mouth; by the time it
got to London people were dancing in the streets—and
the sudden economic surge drove up the price of every
stock listed on the London Exchange.
Of course, it didn’t take long for the news to be
proved a hoax. Lord Thomas Cochrane was suspected
of being behind it, since he’d made considerable profit
by selling shares at their temporarily inflated prices. He
later received a Royal Pardon, which in itself might be
considered suspicious.
Note to Fixers: Sterling fails to mention that this is the
earliest provable incident of Stock Market manipulation
in history. A modern Job based on this concept could be
triggered by an Internet rumor, or a hack of a respected
financial news page. Stock markets are a lot bigger now
than they were in 1814, so the manipulatory rumor
would most likely target just one sector of the market—
bio-tech, military contractors, maybe even snack-food
manufacturers.
This trick is also the sort of thing a Crew might try
themselves, as a way to set up a Mark. Artificially inflate
a stock’s value via the rumor mill, until the Mark takes
the bait—then pull the rug out from under him.
 Insurance Fraud
Ah, my favorite topic. Sometimes I think that the only
reason some people get insurance policies in the first
place is so that they can try to defraud their underwriters.
No insurance company likes to pay out, but the odds are
in our favor; statistically, the premiums we collect more
than equal the settlements we pay, as long as everybody
is playing fair.
There are two broad categories of insurance fraud.
The first type is opportunistic fraud—it’s that “little
white lie” to the insurance company after something
happens, overstating how much something was worth,
or exaggerating how much damage was suffered. It’s like
padding your expense account; it may be a sign of moral
weakness, but everybody tries it occasionally.
The second type is premeditated fraud, where the
event claimed against was staged, or never happened at
all. People stage accidents, robberies, fires…even deaths.
Anything that can happen can be faked, of course, but in
the insurance business we live and die by our actuarial
tables. I can quote the exact historical odds of a wide
variety of events, and if a claim is too unlikely, I get
suspicious.
The more valuable an item is the more care its
owners should take to safeguard it. That’s only natural.
But suppose that there’s a glaringly obvious hole in the
security surrounding a particular object, and suppose
that it disappears—stolen by someone taking advantage
of that single glaring flaw in security. Well, you have to
wonder: was the hole deliberate?
That’s the meat of an insurance investigator’s job:
asking questions. How likely was the accident? How
convenient was it? Who profited? There are firms that
specialize in securing the return of stolen items, but
getting things back isn’t really my concern; I’m more
suspicious of my client than I am of anyone else.
When it comes to insurance fraud, life insurance
scams are classics. Collecting on your own life insurance
policy and living to enjoy the money is quite a feat. It’s
an egotist’s stunt, and that’s one way to tell: look at the
personality of the principal. If there’s no identifiable
body, and the “deceased” seemed to always think he was
the smartest guy in the room…he’s not really dead. As
investigators, you might also run into this as the final
phase of a bigger scam—being dead seems like a great
way to throw people off a trail. Here’s a tip: your fugitive
will be at the funeral. Anyone who pulls this stunt will be
constitutionally unable to resist showing up.
Follow the Money 13
 Money Laundering
Money laundering is taking money that can’t legally be
spent or declared as income, and concealing its origins
through a series of transactions. Afterward, the money
is reintroduced to the economy, just as if it had been
legitimate all along.
Obviously, somebody laundering money is also
guilty of some other crime—the illegal money came
from somewhere, after all. Drug traffickers, embezzlers,
corrupt officials, and, of course, con artists are the
most common types of crooks who need this service.
Their illegal money usually comes in the form of
inconveniently large piles of cash. Don’t get me wrong,
cash is very handy—but it’s also very bulky. A million
dollars in $100 bills weighs twenty-two pounds and fills
an attaché case. And a single million just doesn’t go as
far as it used to.
Laundering money has three steps. First, the money
has to be inserted into the financial system; it’s deposited
into one or more banks. This is the risky part, because
banks are required to report high-value cash transactions
to the government, for tax purposes. Making a bunch of
smaller cash transactions won’t help; banks are required
to keep track of that, too, to catch people who try to
structure their deposits and withdrawals to avoid the
reporting requirement.
The second step is “layering”; think of it as the
electronic version of Three-Card Monte. The money is
split up, moved from account to account, changed into
different forms, used to buy high-ticket items like yachts,
homes, cars, and jewels, invested in stocks or various
funds, and generally shuffled around to make it hard to
trace back any specific dollar to any specific source.
The final step is “integration”: getting the money back
together in spendable form. The big-ticket items are sold,
14 The Rich and Powerful
the investments cashed out, the lire and yen are turned
back into dollars, and the deposits roll in. It’s hard to
catch a money launderer at this stage of the game, even
when you’re sure they’re guilty. Most of the heavy lifting
has already been done, and if he’s got skill, there won’t be
a viable paper trail to follow.
Businesses with a high cash flow in actual cash are
ideal for the “layering” part of the scam. Shops and service
industries that do a lot of cash business can feed “dirty”
money into the system along with their regular income.
Parking garages, tanning salons, and convenience stores
all fit this profile, but they can’t move large amounts of
cash without someone noticing. The ideal business of
this type is a casino: mostly cash transactions, a huge
bottom line, and not a receipt in sight. There’s a reason
the Mafia got into Las Vegas early on.
If the money launderer can’t get into the casino
business, he can always buy himself a bank. It’s
ridiculously easy to launder money through a bank
you own yourself. Actually, buying any valuable real
estate or business works to launder money; the criminal
offers a low “official” price, and makes up the rest with
dirty money under the table. Then he has the property
appraised for its true worth, sells it “at a profit” (maybe
even back to the original owner) and gets his dirty money
back again as the legitimate sale price, nice and clean.
Service companies also make excellent money
laundries. Service companies don’t sell things. Things can
be tracked, and they have an established market value.
Services happen, but they leave precious little trace
afterward. If that’s not convenient enough, the money
launderer can double-invoice for services that never
took place at all, and move even more cash through the
system.
Ponzi Schemes & Pyramids
Everyone here knows what a Ponzi Scheme is,
(Leverage pp. 169) so I won’t bore you by rehashing the
basics. There are plenty of variations though, and a few
things that work similarly, or straddle the line between
a Ponzi Scheme and a Pyramid Scheme. The come-on
for a typical Ponzi Scheme is a high payout with little
apparent risk; but Bernie Madoff ’s variant, for example,
used modest, steady gains and Madoff ’s unquestioned
respectability instead.
Other schemes aren’t investments per se, they’re
“business opportunities.” The Kubus Kwekery company
in South Africa, for example, sold “starter cultures” to
naive entrepreneurs for 30 Rand each. The cultures were
to be grown in milk, producing a supposedly vitamin-
rich substance called “kubus” for the cosmetics industry.
After two months, the company would buy dried kubus
from investors for 10 Rand per envelope mailed in—one
envelope per starter per week, please. The dried kubus
was ground up, envelopes and all, and repackaged as
new “starter cultures.” None of it was ever used to make
cosmetics.
All Ponzi Schemes are pyramids, but not all pyramids
are Ponzi Schemes—they’re not even all illegal. Most
pyramids are marketing strategies that induce new
members into becoming marketers for the pyramid.
From “chain letters” to multi-million-dollar businesses
hawking cleaning supplies, “multi-level marketing
programs” count on constant growth and expansion for
their survival. Early investors actually make money; they
get a small cut of everything that their recruits bring in—
the more recruits downstream, the more income. The
higher tiers in a multi-level marketing structure wind up
making more from the sales of training and motivational
material to their recruits than they do from the sales of
whatever it is they’re supposed to be selling. Of course,
those materials have to be bought from somebody in
the highest tier; it’s like one pyramid stacked on top of
another. The lower tiers of either pyramid mostly wind
up losing money.
Pyramid schemes demand that members get out and
recruit more people into the scheme. Rule of thumb:
if all you’re being asked to do is fork over money, it’s a
Ponzi Scheme, not a pyramid.
Follow the Money 15
 Case File: Charles Ponzi
Carlo Pietro Giovanni Guglielmo Tebaldo Ponzi: born
March 3, 1882, died January 18, 1949. In between, he
became famous as a swindler and con artist. In the
early 1920s, international business mail was hampered
by currency exchange rates; return postage had to be
pre-paid in the currency where the returning letter or
package was mailed back from—hence the creation of the
international postal reply coupon. The varying exchange
rates of currency and the effects of European inflation
gave Ponzi an idea for an investment opportunity;
purchase international postal reply coupons in foreign
countries at discounted prices, and re-sell them at face
value in the U.S.
Ponzi promised his investors a 50% profit on their
investment within forty-five days, and a 100% profit
within ninety days. Even if his business plan had worked
the way he intended, he couldn’t possibly have lived up
to those figures. In reality, he didn’t have to: he was
paying off his early investors with the money given to
him by the later ones.
16 The Rich and Powerful
It’s possible, if a bit unlikely, that Ponzi didn’t intend to
be a con man, at least not at the start. Perhaps, desperate
to fulfill his contracts with his early investors, he dipped
into the funds earmarked for importing IPR coupons,
and once he started, he couldn’t stop.
That makes for a nice story. But before all this started,
Italian immigrant Carlo Ponzi had worked as a teller
at a bank where the loan officer conducted a similar,
if smaller, version of the same scam. Maybe Mr. Ponzi
learned more than English while he worked at the bank.
Note to Fixers: Although Sterling is skeptical that
Ponzi could have dug himself into a hole with a legitimate
business idea gone wrong, a similar case with the serial
numbers filed off could make an interesting Job for your
Crew; one where the Client has discovered that he’s in
too deep, and asks for the Crew to help find a way
out—without robbing his clients blind.
Case File: Bernie Madoff
Bernie Madoff was a non-executive chairman of the
NASDAQ stock market, and a respected stockbroker
and market authority—he was also operating the largest
Ponzi scheme in history.
Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities was a very
lucrative “third-party” investment brokerage firm.
Initially, Madoff Securities profited from executing stock
trades so fast that they were actually paying a penny a
share to other brokers as a “legal kickback,” just to be
allowed to execute their customer’s trades for them.
Madoff ’s company turned a profit on the deal thanks to
the spread between the bid and the asking price. Ethically
questionable, but since it didn’t affect the price the actual
customer paid for the stock, the SEC let it slide.
By 2003, Madoff Securities was worth $750 million,
and executed almost fifteen percent of all the trades
of the New York Stock Exchange. Madoff was also
managing approximately $15 billion in other people’s
investments—or at least that’s what it looked like.
He varied the tried-and-true Ponzi method by offering
only modest returns. Returns of 10-16% are good, but
not unbelievably good. The S&P 500 had shown an
average of 16% gains for over a decade, and investors
felt that doing “as well as the market average” was safe
and sound. Most people didn’t realize that typical hedge
funds weren’t doing that well; the few that did pointed to
Bernie Madoff himself as the steady, experienced hand
on their portfolio’s tiller.
The only suspicious part of Madoff ’s scheme was
that the returns never varied, regardless of whether
the market was up or down. That was a red flag; a real
investment portfolio has good days and bad days;
Madoff ’s imaginary portfolio was too regular to be
believed. Financial Analyst Harry Markopolis thought
so. He ran some numbers to prove it, and wrote a memo
to the SEC titled The World’s Biggest Hedge Fund is a
Fraud. The memo pointed out dozens of other red flags
that should have been noticed earlier, but the biggest and
reddest was that the fund had only had four bad months
in fourteen years of operation. Implausible for anything
that was actually responding to market forces.
In reality, Madoff hadn’t traded a share of stock since
1990—everything since had been faked. Thanks to
Markopolis, the SEC was turning their attention in his
direction, but something worse than that was about to
happen to Bernie Madoff: on September 29th of 2008,
the Stock Market crashed. By December 8th, when the
Federal Reserve set the lending rate to 0, people were
clamoring to get their money out of the market, and
Madoff didn’t have the new investors to support his
Ponzi scheme any longer. On the 10th, he confessed to
his sons Mark and Andrew that the hedge fund was a lie.
Mark and Andrew Madoff reported their father to the
authorities.
Ultimately, Bernie Madoff was sentenced to 150 years
in Federal prison, having cost his customers somewhere
in the neighborhood of $65 billion dollars.
Note to Fixers: One of the things that let Madoff
be so successful was his position in the community.
He preyed upon people who were fundamentally like
himself: similar in age, income, ethnicity, and political
beliefs. A Mark of that sort can generate a lot of ill will
among the people who’ve been betrayed. If, unlike
Madoff, the Mark successfully absconds with the money,
he may have worse than your Crew on his tail; he may
have independent Hitters after him, as well. Keeping the
Mark alive long enough to get the money back could
seriously complicate a Job.
Follow the Money 17
 Stock Fraud
Stockbrokers handle investment portfolios for clients
who don’t want to go through the day-to-day grind of
monitoring the market themselves. They’re in a position
of trust—and trust can always be abused.
Brokers can falsify trade prices, even fake entire
trades, but the most common technique for bleeding a
client dry is called “churn and burn.” The broker makes
unnecessary (and unnecessarily frequent) trades for
little or no profit, but takes his commission on every
share. The account principal is drained away by the
constant commissions, and any profits from the trades
aren’t sufficient to make up for it.
Case File: Douglas
Reid, Vampire Broker
When L. R. Castelein wanted to invest in U. S. Treasury
Bonds, he contacted a broker named Douglas Reid.
Reid’s business cards identified him as a broker with
Bear Stearns, a well-known and lucrative hedge fund.
He promised a reasonable 7% return on Castelein’s $12.5
million initial investment. Treasury Bonds are very safe
long-term, so Castelein was feeling secure. It was a false
sense of security, though; Reid’s business cards, like
almost everything else about him, were faked.
Reid set up the account with his actual employer,
Corporate Securities Group. With the money on deposit,
Reid forged Castelein’s signature and routed all the
18 The Rich and Powerful
account information through his own office. The reports
he passed on to Castelein were all falsified. Instead of
leaving the money in T-Bonds, Reid began actively
trading with the account, churning it for commissions.
He also paid out hefty management fees to himself and
another CSG employee.
Eventually, Castelein smelled a rat, and tried to get
more information about his investment. After three
months of barking up the wrong trees, he sued—and
discovered that his account had been bled dry. The entire
$12.5 million was gone, and so was Douglas Reid.
Note to Fixers: It’s unusual for the Client in a Leverage
game to be one of the “rich and powerful,” but a Job
similar to the Castelein case could make that a reality.
Someone who has been cheated out of millions by an
unscrupulous stockbroker or business partner is an ideal
Client, but how does somebody like that get in touch
with your Crew? The most interesting way might be for
the new Client to be a former Mark. The “one that got
away,” perhaps, or a Mark they took down—but not all
the way down.
If you go with this angle, the first question you’ll need
to answer is “why would the Crew want to help their
former Mark?” They’ll need a compelling reason to go
after someone who just succeeded where they failed…
actually, that might be a reason right there.
 Tax Evasion
Once illegal gains have been laundered, they appear to
be legitimate income, and legitimate income is taxable
income. After doing all that work laundering it, there’s
always the temptation for persons of, shall we say,
nefarious disposition to try to avoid paying taxes on
their profits.
Frankly, no one enjoys paying taxes, and there are
dozens of legal methods to avoid or minimize the amount
paid: tax shelters, offshore tax havens, numbered Swiss
bank accounts, and so on. All very interesting, but not
actionable.
Illegal methods are things like overstating charitable
donations, under-reporting cash income, and claiming
that profits were earned in lower-tax jurisdictions.
Unethical Business Practices
We in the insurance industry are not in the business of
determining guilt or innocence; we’re in the business of
determining who has to pay. Nevertheless, if a business is
engaged in, shall we say, questionable practices, it makes
me suspicious. Someone willing to lie to their customers,
their employees, and their business partners is likely to
be willing to lie to their underwriters too. When I meet
someone like that, I’m inclined to walk the other way.
When I find out my firm is insuring someone like that, I
fire the person responsible, then walk the other way.
Of course, INTERPOL doesn’t have the luxury of
simply avoiding contact with this stuff. As investigators,
you’ll run into all sorts of criminal enterprises. Some
of them might even be ingenious. In every case, I
guarantee; if you follow the money it’ll lead you to the
guilty parties.
Case File: NEPACCO
In the mid-1920s, Times Beach, Missouri was a summer-
resort town for wealthy St. Louis families. By the 1970s,
it had become a working-class neighborhood. The
Of course, plain old lying works, too; people claim
deductions they aren’t entitled to, write off losses that
didn’t really happen—or that were reimbursed by their
insurance companies.
These are all actionable offenses, with substantial
legal penalties. That’s why pursuing a criminal for tax
evasion is a viable strategy for law enforcement; you can
lock someone up for a long time, even if the evidence
of the original crime won’t stand up in court. It was
an indictment for tax evasion that brought down Al
Capone, after all; this proves that there is no enemy more
tenacious than an IRS agent scorned—present company
excluded, of course.
town’s only interesting feature was that it was located on
“America’s Highway,” the famous Route 66.
With over twenty miles of dirt roads and no money
to pave them, the city of Times Beach hired Russell
Bliss, a waste-oil hauler, to spray oil on the roads to keep
down blowing dust. From 1972 to 1976, Bliss sprayed
used motor oil on the roads for six cents a gallon.
Mr. Bliss also took a contract from a company called
ICP to dispose of waste generated by the Northeastern
Pharmaceutical and Chemical Company. NEPACCO
had a facility in Verona, Missouri that manufactured
Agent Orange, a defoliant used during the Vietnam
War. Sludge-and-water waste from that plant contained
tetrachlorodibenzo-para-dioxin, a toxic by-product.
NEPACCO paid ICP $3,000 per load by to remove the
waste from their processing machinery. ICP in turn
paid Bliss $125 to haul the stuff off.
Bliss wasn’t informed by ICP of the toxic nature of the
sludge. He hauled it in the same trucks he used to haul
waste motor-oil—the same waste oil that he sprayed on
the roads. A spraying to control dust at a horse stables in
Follow the Money 19
 1971 resulted in the deaths of 62 horses. The Center for
Disease control identified dioxin contamination as the
cause, but it took time to track it back to Russell Bliss.
By then, the levels of dioxin in the soil at Times Beach
were one hundred times higher than the safe dosage for
humans.
Times Beach was evacuated, the buildings and
homes bulldozed, and in 1996 a $110 million Superfund
cleanup program began incinerating the debris at
temperatures high enough to destroy dioxin molecules.
The town ceased to exist. The Federal Government filed
suit against NEPACCO and ICP. Russell Bliss faced civil
suits from former Times Beach residents, but was never
charged with any crime.
Note to Fixers: The case of Times Beach is a model
for an interesting two-stage Job. The initial Mark
blamed by the Client may be technically guilty, but not
necessarily “bad.” When your Crew discovers that they
are targeting a person who’s already been made a patsy
by someone else, they will (probably) feel inclined to dig
a little deeper, and get at the real Mark behind it all.
Maybe they can even get some payback or closure for
the patsy, while they’re at it.
20 The Rich and Powerful
Case File: Matthias
Rath
Matthias Rath is a medical doctor, who runs the Dr. Rath
Health Foundation, and founded the Dr. Rath Research
Institute. He’s also a vitamin-pill entrepreneur. He’s been
called “the most powerful crackpot on Earth.”
His first, European, snake oil sales pitch was based
on the not-terribly-startling claim that “90 percent of
patients receiving chemotherapy for cancer die within
months of starting treatment.” Notice that there was
no mention of how many months. He suggested that
chemotherapy wasn’t the answer, and that his vitamin
supplements were the real cure for cancer—the one that
the pharmaceutical industry didn’t want you to know
about.
Rath amassed quite a fortune before truth-in-
advertising laws forced him out of Europe. He moved his
operation to South Africa, with a brand new variation
of the old pitch: he placed full-page ads in newspapers
proclaiming “The answer to the AIDS epidemic is here.”
His contention was that anti-retroviral drugs were
“poisons,” and that his vitamin treatments were able to
cure AIDS. Fortunately for Rath (and unfortunately for
HIV-positive South Africans), South African President
Thabo Mbeki was convinced by his rhetoric. President
Mbeki refused to believe that the HIV virus was the
cause of AIDS, refused to implement anti-retroviral
treatment programs, and even refused to accept
charitable donations of anti-retroviral drugs. Over three
hundred thousand HIV-positive South Africans died as
a result.
Rath profited the entire time from the state-supported
sales of his vitamins, regularly suing anyone who
questioned his claims for “defamation of character.”
Note to Fixers: Even Sterling is subdued when
describing this tragic story. It’s likely too horrific as it
stands to make a good Leverage Job, but a less genocidal
form of modern snake oil salesman makes a fine Mark.
 Most modern snake oil pitches start with “the
secret someone doesn’t want you to know about,” with
“someone” being Big Pharma, or the Government, or
even the Phone Company. Then the pitchman offers
anecdotal testimony “proving” that his homespun cure
really, really works.
The most poetic way to take down a snake oil salesman
is, of course, to sell him some snake oil of your own.
Case File: The Dominion
of Melchizedek
The Dominion of Melchizedek is a micronation,
claiming sovereignty over several Pacific islands, all of
which are part of other, established nations. The DoM
claims on their website to be recognized as a sovereign
state by several national governments—all of them small
and notably corrupt.
The DoM was created in 1986 by David Pedley and
his son Mark Logan Pedley, a.k.a. “David Netzer Korem”,
a.k.a. “Branch Vinedresser.” Pearlasia Gamboa became
involved in 1994 when she married Mark Logan Pedley,
and became the Dominion’s first President. She’s a
Filipina-American businesswoman with over twenty
known aliases and a long history of being at the center of
controversial international banking transactions, bank
fraud, and securities fraud.
Back in 1982, the father-and-son duo wound up in
Mexico, fleeing prosecution for real estate fraud. In
1983, Mexican Immigration arrested the elder Pedley
for failing to renew his visa. While incarcerated and
awaiting extradition to the U.S. to face fraud charges, he
wrote the Melchizedek Bible, a translation of Genesis,
Exodus, Matthew, and parts of Revelation. While in
Mexican custody, Pedley senior died—at least according
to his son. The funeral was a closed-casket affair. The
FBI requested permission to fingerprint the body, but
the family refused.
The DoM and its leadership claim to own multiple
businesses around the world: gold mines, banks,
and high-tech start-ups—but they’re all empty shell
corporations. Hundreds of banks are chartered in the
Dominion, and quite a few of them have been involved
in serious fraud. The Dominion also issues passports to
people applying for citizenship—provided that they can
come up with $10,000 in accumulated fees.
The Asia Times reported that the DoM “had duped
hundreds of local Filipinos, Chinese and Bangladeshis
to pay up to $3,500 for worthless Melchizedek travel
documents they were told were ‘internationally-
recognized passports.’” The victims were promised
jobs in the Dominion—on islands that are currently
uninhabited, and in some cases tidally submerged. The
DoM didn’t have to worry about people discovering that
the jobs didn’t exist; the travel papers weren’t real either,
so no one could actually emigrate.
Note to Fixers: “Let’s go steal a country.” If your
Crew is ever interested in taking on a really big Job,
one based on the Dominion of Melchizedek might be
perfect. It has it all: international fraud, travel to half-
submerged tropical islands, religious fervor, multiple
layers of implausible aliases, and maybe even a faked
death. Alternatively, your crew might want to set up a
micronation of their own—it could be just the thing for
drawing in a really untouchable Mark.
Follow the Money 21
 Case File: Victor Lustig
Victor Lustig; what can I say? You actually have to
admire the man’s nerve. He sold the Eifel Tower—twice!
It was spring in Paris, in 1925. France was recovering
from the Great War, and money was tight. Victor Lustig
read a newspaper article discussing the problems the
government had just keeping the Eifel Tower painted,
and hatched a marvelous scheme.
He had some fake stationery printed up, and invited
six scrap metal dealers to a “confidential auction.”
He explained to them that he represented the French
Government, which wanted to sell the deteriorating
tower for scrap. There was certain to be a public outcry,
so negotiations had to be kept quiet until the deal was
closed. He took his Marks on an inspection tour in a
rented limousine, pointing out the peeling paint and
spreading rust-stains. He asked for sealed bids the next
day.
The truth was, he’d already selected the “winning
bidder”—the most gullible scrap-man in Paris: Andre
Poisson. Poisson may have been gullible, but his wife
wasn’t. She was immediately suspicious, and insisted
that her husband meet with Lustig again, privately, to get
some answers. A good idea, but it didn’t turn out the way
she’d planned.
At the second meeting, Lustig played the part of a
corrupt government official, explaining his need for
“discretion” about the scrap deal. Poisson fell for it, and
paid Lustig a sizable bribe to ensure that his bid won the
auction! The next day, having scored not only a hefty sale
price but also a huge bribe, Lustig skipped town to wait
until the heat was off.
22 The Rich and Powerful
Surprisingly, there was no heat; Poisson was too
embarrassed at having been swindled two different ways
at once to report anything to the police. Lustig waited,
but he heard nothing, so he headed back to Paris to do
it again!
He picked out another half-dozen scrap dealers, and
repeated the entire scam, secure in the knowledge that
his previous victim hadn’t told anyone a thing.
Victor Lustig died in prison, of course, but not for
selling the Eifel Tower. He was sent to Alcatraz for
counterfeiting. Sooner or later, a Grifter’s ego always gets
the better of him—and when it does someone like me
will be there, waiting to snap on the cuffs.
Note to Fixers: A larger-than-life character like
“Count” Victor Lustig doesn’t make a good Mark, or a
good Client—but he makes a great Foil! An independent
con-artist working in the same “conceptual space” as
your Crew, and occasionally trying to out-do them at their
own game can be a source of both frustration and fun.
Make your Foil a charming cutthroat competitor,
always a half step ahead of his rivals. If your Crew steals
something to use as a convincer, he’ll steal it from them.
If your Crew plans to fleece a Mark, he’ll get there first,
or ensure that whatever valuables the Crew acquires are
worthless. Eventually, of course, your Crew will decide
to take him down, or, like Victor Lustig, he’ll bite off
more than he can chew—and ask the Crew for help!
 Credits
Writing: Photography:
H.M. Dain Lybarger Page i: Parker learns to appreciate art rather than stealing it ©
2012 Leverage 5 Holdings, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Page ii: A moment of truth for Sterling © 2011 Leverage 4
Editing: Holdings, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Sally Christensen Page 3: Sophie and Nate run into an unwelcome complication ©
2012 Leverage 5 Holdings, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Development: Page 6: The Mark, CEO Sanders, played by Mitch Pileggi © 2011
Cam Banks Leverage 4 Holdings, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Page 8: David Lampard (played by Steve Valentine) © 2012
Leverage 5 Holdings, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Layout & Production:
Page 9: Agent Casey, played by Catherine Dent © 2012 Leverage
Daniel Solis 5 Holdings, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Page 10: Phony funeral director, Darlene Wickett (played by
Based on the LEVERAGE Roleplaying Game by Cam Banks, Anne-Marie Johnson) is the crew’s latest Mark. Roger
and Ann Newton are her latest victims © 2011 Leverage
Rob Donoghue, and Clark Valentine with Tiara Lynn Agresta,
4 Holdings, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Matt Forbeck, Stephanie Ford, Laura Anne Gilman, Fred Hicks,
Page 13: Sophie cases the auction © 2012 Leverage 5 Holdings,
and Ryan Macklin. Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Page 15: Eliot Recants His Side of the Story to Nate © 2010
Leverage 3 Holdings, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Page 16: Haridson explains how he did it © 2010 Leverage 3
Holdings, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Page 18: Nate Ford, in character as Diego Messi, on the trading
floor © 2011 Leverage 4 Holdings, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Page 20: Sophie and Nate watch as Sherman realizes they
managed to con him © 2011 Leverage 4 Holdings, Inc. All
Rights Reserved.
Page 22: Nate (in character as commodity mogul Diego Messi) as
he sells the con to Sherman © 2011 Leverage 4 Holdings,
Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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