Chapter SIXTEEN
The controller sat at his desk staring at Biscayne Bay and the skyline of Miami Beach. He was a careful man who spent his life making money from money. He was an investment advisor and a money launderer. He took the proceeds of drug deals throughout Florida and the Caribbean and laundered them through legitimate stock offerings, bonds, certificates of deposit, and any other kind of financial instrument that he deemed worthy of his time. He always made money on that which he invested, turned a fair profit back to his clients and, most importantly, gave them back clean money to replace the enormous sums they made in the drug trade. The controller kept an agreed percentage and became wealthy in the process.
The dirty little deal he had working now bothered him. The drug dealers were ruthless and would think nothing of killing him if he did not perform up to the standards they expected. But they weren’t crazy, or at least most of them weren’t. They understood finance, and the controller had helped make them immensely wealthy, so he was pretty much in the position of any other businessman dealing with other people’s money. If he bet wrong, he would lose the account. If he hadn’t lost too much of his client’s money, he’d probably survive, since his clients knew he was doing his best. At least, that’s what he told himself, and that gave him some peace of mind.
But, this deal could come off the rails without any reason. A dozen years before, one of his clients had given him ten million dollars to invest. He was told that this would be long term, that there was no reason to hurry the money through the laundering process, because it would be years before the owner of the money needed it. The controller invested the funds and sent the investor regular reports showing how wisely he had grown the money. The reports showed that the controller took his percentage and made the money grow, so that the client was satisfied that in twelve years the ten million had become almost thirty million.
Now it was time to start moving the money out of the account. His instructions had been explicit and had come from the same client who had given him the money, a man named Arturo Fuentes, who was also known as the crazy don. The controller had no illusions about Fuentes. The man ran one of the biggest drug cartels in the region. He was based in Puerto Rico and ran smuggling operations into the mainland United States through Florida and Mexico. He was absolutely ruthless and unforgiving. Men had died terrible deaths because they’d made a small mistake in carrying out the crazy don’s orders.
The controller thought Fuentes was probably insane. He seemed to take pride in the fear he induced in his subordinates, and he made a point of regularly killing one of his managers chosen at random. Each of the men who reported to Fuentes knew that he could be next, that he might be the one chosen for execution. But, each of the managers also knew that if he tried to leave the cartel, he would invite not only his own painful death, but the death of his family members out to the second degree.
The controller was, thankfully, not one of the managers. He stood outside the organizational chart, hidden in his Miami office, quietly moving money. He became well known in Miami social circles and had a number of legitimate clients drawn from the moneyed layer of South Florida society who would have pulled their funds and run if there had ever been a hint of scandal attached to the profits they made.
The controller was accustomed to dealing with the insane drug dealers, greedy businessmen, and trust fund babies. He was not used to dealing with the scum the crazy don had now ordered him to support. In his mind, the controller heard the faint tolling of his own funeral bells. Maybe it was time for him to pull the plug and put into operation the escape plan he had so painstakingly built over the past thirty years. Maybe it was time to go.