Osmar and his boys were still loitering in the streets of Rio, watching the same places each day. If she came back, they would see her. Osmar used a lot of men, but they worked cheap down there.
RETURNING to the Coast brought back bitter feelings in Benny Aricia. He had moved there in 1985 as an executive of Platt & Rockland Industries, a mammoth conglomerate which had sent him around the world for twenty years as a troubleshooter. One of the company's more profitable divisions was New Coastal Shipyards in Pascagoula, between Biloxi and Mobile. In 1985, New Coastal received a twelve-billion-dollar Navy contract to build four Expedition Class nuclear submarines, and someone upstairs decided Benny needed a permanent home.
Raised in New Jersey, educated in Boston, and the husband, at the time, of a repressed socialite, he was miserable living on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. He considered it a serious diversion from the corporate hierarchy he longed for. His wife left him after two years in Biloxi.
Platt & Rockland was a public company with twenty-one billion in stockholders' equity, eighty thousand employees in thirty-six divisions in a hundred and three countries. It retailed office supplies, cut timber, made thousands of consumer products, sold insurance, drilled for natural gas, shipped containerized cargo, mined copper, and among many other ventures, built nuclear submarines. It was a sprawling mass of decentralized companies, and as a rule, the left hand seldom knew what the right one was doing. It amassed huge profits in spite of itself.
Benny dreamed of streamlining the company, of selling off the junk and investing in the prosperous divisions. He was unabashedly ambitious, and through the ranks of upper managers it was well known that he wanted the top job.
To him, life in Biloxi was a cruel joke, a pit stop from the fast lane orchestrated by his enemies within the company. He detested contracting with the government, detested the red tape and bureaucrats and arrogance from the Pentagon. He hated the snail's pace with which the submarines were built.
In 1988, he asked to be transferred, and was denied. A year later, the rumors of serious cost overruns on the Expedition project surfaced. Construction came to a halt as government auditors and Pentagon brass descended on New Coastal Shipyards. Benny was on the hot seat, and the end was near.
As a defense contractor, Platt & Rockland had a rich history of cost overruns, overbilling, and false claims. It was a way of doing business, and when discovered, the company typically fired everybody near the controversy and negotiated with the Pentagon for a small repayment.
Benny went to a local attorney, Charles Bogan, the senior partner in a small firm which included a young partner named Patrick Lanigan. Bogan's cousin was a U.S. Senator from Mississippi. The Senator was a rabid hawk who chaired the subcommittee on military appropriations, and was dearly loved by the armed services.
Lawyer Bogan's mentor was now a federal judge, and thus the small firm was as politically well connected as any in Mississippi. Benny knew this, and carefully selected Bogan.
The False Claims Act, also known as the Whistle-Blower Law, was designed by Congress to encourage those with knowledge of overbilling in government contracts to come forward. Benny studied the act thoroughly, and even had an in-house lawyer dissect it for him before he went to Bogan.
He claimed he could prove a scheme by Platt & Rockland to overbill the government some six hundred million dollars on the Expedition project. He could feel the ax dropping, and he refused to be the fall guy. By squealing, he would lose any chance of ever finding comparable work. Platt & Rockland would flood the industry with rumors of his own wrongdoing. He would be blacklisted. It would be the end of Benny's corporate life. He understood very well how the game was played.
Under the act, the whistle-blower may receive fifteen percent of the amount repaid to the government by the offending corporation. Benny had the documentation to prove Platt & Rockland's scheme. He needed Bogan's expertise and clout to collect the fifteen percent.
Bogan hired private engineers and consultants to review and make sense of the thousands of documents Aricia was feeding him from inside New Coastal Shipyards. The scheme was tied together nicely, and it turned out not to be so intricate after all. The company was doing what it had always done-charging multiple prices for the same materials, and fabricating paperwork. The practice was so ingrained at Platt & Rockland that only two upper managers at the shipyards knew it existed. Benny claimed to have stumbled upon it by accident.
A clear and convincing case was assembled by the lawyers, and they filed suit in federal court in September of 1990. The lawsuit alleged six hundred million dollars in fraudulent claims submitted by Platt & Rockland. Benny resigned the day the suit was filed.
The lawsuit was meticulously prepared and researched, and Bogan pressed hard. So did his cousin. The Senator had been placed in the loop long before the actual filing, and monitored it with great interest once it arrived in Washington. Bogan did not come cheap; nor did the Senator. The firm's fee would be the standard one third. One third of fifteen percent of six hundred million dollars. The Senator's cut was never ascertained.
Bogan leaked enough dirt to the local press to keep the pressure on in Mississippi, and the Senator did the same in Washington. Platt & Rockland found itself besieged by hideous publicity. It was pinned to the ropes, its money cut off, its stockholders angry. A dozen managers at New Coastal Shipyards were fired. More terminations were promised.
As usual, Platt & Rockland negotiated hard with Justice, but this time made no progress. After a year, it agreed to repay the six hundred million dollars, and to sin no more. Because two of the subs were half-built, the Pentagon agreed not to yank the contract. Thus, Platt & Rockland could finish what was planned as a twelve-billion-dollar project, but was now well on its way to twenty billion.
Benny got set to receive his fortune. Bogan and the other partners in the firm got set to spend theirs. Then Patrick disappeared, followed by their money.
Chapter 20
PEPPER SCARBORO'S shotgun was a Remington .12 gauge pump he purchased from a pawnshop in Lucedale when he was sixteen, too young to buy from a licensed dealer. He paid two hundred dollars for it, and, according to his mother, Neldene, it was his most beloved possession. Sheriff Sweeney and Sheriff Tatum, of Greene County, found the shotgun, along with a well-worn sleeping bag and a small tent, a week after Patrick's death as they were making a routine inventory of his cabin. Trudy had given permission for the search, which in itself was a major problem since she had no ownership interest in the cabin. Any effort to use the shotgun, sleeping bag, and tent as evidence in Patrick's murder trial would be met with fierce resistance since they were found without a search warrant. A valid argument could be made that the sheriffs weren't searching for evidence since there wasn't, at that time, a crime. They were simply gathering up Patrick's personal effects to hand over to his family.
Trudy didn't want the sleeping bag and the tent. She was adamant in her belief that they didn't belong to Patrick. She had never seen them before. They were cheap, unlike items Patrick would buy. And, besides, he didn't camp. He had the cabin to sleep in. Sweeney put labels on them and stored them in his evidence room, for lack of a better place. He planned to wait a year or two, then sell them at one of his annual Sheriffs sales. Six weeks later, Neldene Crouch burst into tears when confronted with Pepper's camping gear.
The shotgun was handled differently. It was found under a bed, along with the tent and the sleeping bag, in the room Patrick slept in. Someone had hurriedly slid the items under the bed, in Sweeney's opinion. His curiosity was immediately aroused because of the presence of the shotgun. An avid hunter himself, he knew that no hunter with a brain would leave a shotgun or hunting rifle in a remote cabin for thieves to take at their convenience. Nothing of value was ever left in a hunting cabin in these parts. He had carefully examined it on the spot, and noticed the serial number had been filed off. The gun had been stolen at some point since its manufacture.