Chapter Ten

 

THE ADVENTURERS

 

 

 

 

"Laundering methods keep changing to stay ahead of the authorities and the good guys are overwhelmed by the size of the problem."

 

US News and World Report

 

 

 

 

 

The poor bastard used to have a real name, but in November 1986, after he showed up at the DEA office in Seattle, Washington, with a story to tell, they christened him CI-#1. And, once the DEA awards you Confidential Informant status, you are forever known by your number.

 

CI-#1's story began: over the three-day period --- from Monday August 25, 1986 through Wednesday the 27th --- two brothers from Los Angeles were running a gang that smuggled 23 tons of high-quality Thai marijuana into the United States.

 

CI-#1 said: two local fishing vessels, escorted by a surveillance plane loaded with radar equipment to protect them from intervention by US Customs, rendezvoused with the mother ship several hundred miles off southwestern Alaska, and brought the product ashore in Anacortes, a commercial salmon port 60 miles north of Seattle. The shipment was so large it filled two tractor-trailers and the same brothers were now planning a much bigger haul for summer 1987.

 

CI-#1's story ended: I didn't get paid what they promised me and I'm looking to get even.

 

So Special Agent Gary Annunziata gave him his chance. He wired CI-#1 for sound and sent him back into the smuggling business.

*****

 

 

Bill and Chris Shaffer were in search of adventure.

 

As kids, they'd lived in London because their old man worked for the US Navy, but after high school, in 1963, Bill went back to America, got himself a degree from Penn State and a job teaching school in New Jersey. Chris stayed in Europe for a while, running around with a girlfriend. When they were able to put some money together, they bought a sail boat and headed for Australia. There they worked charters until they could buy an 80 foot sloop. Slowly but surely, their charter business turned into amateur smuggling. They made a few runs, brought in some dope and picked up some fast money. It worked well the first few times so they kept doing it, fetching bigger loads each time. In the meantime, Bill gave up his teaching job, dealt a little cocaine in Florida and wound up in Los Angeles. He continued dealing drugs because it was fast money with very little risk, an easy way to get through life while trying to maneuver his way past the periphery of the film world. By the time Chris came back to the States in 1983 and joined up with big brother in LA, they both knew a lot about the drug business.

 

The Shaffers told people they were treasure hunters, marine salvage experts who went in search of sunken galleons. Chris even set up a company in Britain, China Pacific Films, to fund their salvage work. In reality, all it did was finance a ship for smuggling. By January 1985 the Shaffers had raised enough money to pay $1 million for a fishing vessel out of Hawaii called the Six Pac. Along with the boat came its captain, a former British merchant mariner named Terry Restall.

 

It was a fortuitous encounter. Restall had been smuggling hashish for years and was savvy to the ways of the drug world.

 

Within two months, the Shaffers sent Restall into the Gulf of Thailand, where he was met by two Vietnamese fishing boats and took on board seven tons of marijuana. Restall brought the product to a rendezvous point 600 miles off the coast of San Diego, California, where it was transferred to a fishing vessel called the Pacific Rose and eventually brought ashore near Santa Cruz.

 

On his next trip, Restall returned with eight tons.

 

Early in 1986, the Shaffers invested in a shipment that they weren't transporting, five tons of product, which was seized by US Customs near Hawaii. It shook the brothers into realizing just how vulnerable they were.

 

Suddenly worried that the authorities might be watching them, Bill and Chris went looking for a vessel that had never before been used in any American smuggling operation. They found the Niki Maru, a 110 foot oil supply ship, sitting in Japan. They bought it, then spent $300,000 converting it to look like a Japanese fishing boat.

 

It was the Niki Maru that brought in the 23 ton shipment.

 

*****

 

 

 

In February 1987, thanks to CI-#1, Annunziata learned that the Shaffers had purchased a big fishing boat in Seward, Alaska, the Stormbird, which they’d brought to Seattle to be converted for smuggling. For the next seven months, the DEA patiently gathered evidence on the Shaffers, until September when the refitted Stormbird slipped out of port heading for Alaska. That’s when the DEA decided it was time to arrest the entire gang.

 

But Bill Shaffer had developed a sixth sense, acute paranoia, and something told him he was being watched. He hastily acquired a new boat, the Blue Fin, then he put out the word that the load was coming ashore in Mexico.

 

Gullibly, CI-#1 relayed that story to Annunziata.

 

A Shaffer boat called the Manuia delivered the product to the Six Pac south of Hawaii, the Six Pac brought it to the Stormbird in the northern Pacific and the Blue Fin met the Stormbird south of Alaska. By the time the Stormbird arrived back in Anacortes on September 21, empty, the Blue Fin had already docked at Bellingham, 25 miles north, and unloaded 42 tons of marijuana.

 

And all the time, the DEA were looking towards Mexico.

*****

 

 

Because the drug business functions through its subculture, successful dealers move through the underworld, finding the people they need to know. People with access to product. People with access to boats. People with access to distributors. And specialists. People with expertise in buying, off-loading and money laundering.

 

The Shaffers worked their way inside this subculture. While Bill was clearly man in charge, he gave the orders and managed the financial side, Chris was the one who dealt with logistics and transportation. But they couldn't do everything themselves and over the years an organization grew up around them. It started out with friends and soon included friends of friends. The problem was, the larger the group, the more vulnerable they became.

 

Buying product in Southeast Asia put them in business with two of the world's largest dealers.

 

One of them was Brian Peter Daniels, an ex-pat American, from whom the Shaffers purchased their 1987 shipment. The same age as Bill, with the same taste for adventure and the same appetite for flashy women, Daniels lived in Thailand and for a time was a serious contender for the title of the world's most important marijuana supplier. In the four years between 1984 and 1988, Daniels is known to have smuggled several hundred tons of marijuana into the US.

 

Each bale of Daniels' product was tightly wrapped in heavy, dark blue nylon canvas, and bore the Eagle Brand sticker --- a white tag, with a crudely drawn blue eagle and the bold red words "Passed Inspection." Whether he was warning rivals, "This belongs to Brian Daniels," or he was just being pompous, the Justice Department isn't sure. There is some evidence to suggest that the Eagle Brand was never exclusive to him. What the Justice Department does know for certain is that Daniels couldn't possibly have operated on the scale he did without a lot of help.

 

The man whose title he was challenging was known in the States as Tony the Thai but referred to at home as "The Duck." Then in his mid-30s, although he looked older, he spoke good English and fronted his illicit trade with a small but successful empire in real estate, hotels and night clubs mainly in the northeastern province of Nakhon Phanom.

 

He was heavyweight champ, the man to know if you wanted to buy high-grade Thai marijuana.

 

He was also secretly indicted by a federal grand jury in San Francisco in November 1991 on charges of smuggling 45 tons of marijuana into the US, conspiracy and operating a continuing criminal enterprise over a 14 year period, between 1973 and 1987. That indictment remained sealed for three years, without his true identity being revealed, while the Feds looked for ways to lure him to the States where they could arrest him. When he failed to take the bait, they ripped a page out of the 1989 textbook kidnapping of Manuel Noriega --- which brought the Panamanian dictator back to Florida to stand drug trafficking charges --- and several plots were bandied about. The idea was to lure Tony out of Thailand and into a friendly place, such as Hong Kong, where US agents could bang him on the head and bundle him onto a waiting plane. But three years after the indictment, a newspaper in Bangkok broke the story that Thanong Siriprechapong, a member of Parliament, had been formally incriminated in the States. So the decision was made to unseal the order, publicly acknowledge that Tony was Thanong, and seize whatever assets he had in the States. Those holdings included a $1 million Beverly Hills home and a 1987 Mercedes-Benz.

 

Of course, Thanong protested his innocence. But the evidence against him was overwhelming enough that Washington demanded his extradition. It now appears that Thanong was not the only Thai politician moonlighting in drugs. The deputy leader of the Chart Thai party and the Deputy Finance Minster have also been named as suspects in drug cases by Washington. Like Tony, the other two also deny the charges.

 

The charges against Thanong were minutely detailed by members of the Shaffer gang. According to Restall, Thanong invited him to meet in Bangkok so that he could show the Shaffers what they were buying. When Restall arrived, Thanong personally took him into the jungle, north towards Chiang Mai. When they arrived at the Laotian border, no one asked who they were or what they were doing there. Now in Laos, they were met by a senior, uniformed police officer who escorted them to a heavily guarded warehouse where Tony had stashed 200 tons of high-quality dope.

 

The story came as now surprise to the agents who interviewed Restall, even though marijuana is not the main cash crop in this region, otherwise known as the "Golden Triangle." This is heroin country. About half the heroin sold on American streets originates in the opium fields of Laos, Burma (Myanmar) and Thailand. The triangle extends south through Bangkok and to the Malaysian border, with the Andaman and South China seas used as the gateways to regional markets. What’s more, because Thailand is a traditional cash economy, billions of dollars are easily laundered through banks, stocks and property.

 

There is sufficient evidence to maintain the claim that authorities in Thailand, Laos and most recently Vietnam have regularly turned a blind eye to the traffickers because they’ve paid handsome amounts of much-needed hard currency for the service. In some instances, men like Daniels, and certainly, Tony the Thai, have gotten into bed with those government officials. They are partners, having apportioned shares in the action to command their allegiance, along with the loyalty of local warlords, police chiefs and provincial governors. Marijuana coming out of Thailand and Laos, crossing Vietnam and shipped from Da Nang gets waved through every checkpoint as long as it bears the right label.

 

At the US Department of Justice, they read "Passed Inspection" to mean, everyone will get a slice.

 

The military is in on it, too. One shipment to the Shaffers was guarded by a uniformed Vietnamese Army detail during the off-loading in the Gulf of Tonkin.

*****

 

 

The money rolled in and the brothers set themselves up in several places around LA. They hung out in Malibu but rented houses all over town. Two of Bill's pals from his New Jersey days were Ed and Eileen Brown. She produced porn films and called herself Summer. At Bill's request, the Browns rented a big house in the North Helena section of fashionable Brentwood so that the Shaffers had a place to count their money. The Browns also rented a second house in the Hollywood hills, far enough away from the counting house, so that the Shaffers had a place to hide their money.

 

As wholesalers, Bill and Chris limited their dealings to two distribution groups, one in California, the other in New York. The LA distributors were an odd couple who came to be known as Greater and Lesser. Greater was a husky, ex-football player named Kenneth Tarlow. Lesser was his more diminutive pal named Dennis Specht. In New York, their client was known simply as Sonny. At the time, no one knew anything more about him than that.

 

The was Bill Shaffer saw it, doing business with Greater, Lesser and Sonny was no reason to trust them. So, whenever a payment was due, he sent his own people to pick it up, and mapped out for them deliberately complicated routes for the trip back to Brentwood with the money. Counted and boxed there, it was driven on another tortuous itinerary to the safe house in the hills. When enough boxes were piled high, the Shaffers would ask friends like the Browns to take the money to Switzerland.

 

Characteristically, Bill planned and compartmentalized everything down to the most minute details. People who worked for him knew only what they had to know to get their job done.

 

On October 20, 1986, he personally packed a motor home with 40 cartons from the safe house, containing $20 million in cash, and drove it to Salt Lake City, Utah where he was met by a small group of friends, including the Browns, in a chartered Gulfstream II jet.

 

He'd already gone to the trouble of forming a shell company called Bi-Continental Computers and printing business cards, complete with official titles, for each of those friends. He also handed out tiny lapel pins, which looked like company logos, so that no one could show up at the last minute and claim they'd been invited along.

 

Each of the 40 cartons was labeled "Computer Related Equipment," and the pilot's manifest reflected that. The next morning, when Shaffer's friends landed in Zurich, the pilot passed his manifest along to Swiss Customs. The boxes were taken off the plane and one of them was randomly opened.

 

To the utter horror of the Swiss authorities, instead of computer related equipment, they found neatly tied stacks of $20 and $50 bills. The officer in charge went wild, summoned the pilot and screamed, "You've declared computer equipment and we've find that your cargo is banknotes. Why did you make a false declaration?"

 

The pilot had no answer, so the officer in charge turned to the passengers and accused them of filing a false declaration. There was little the Browns could do but admit that they'd lied.

 

At which point the Customs officer explained, "We don't have any problem with bank notes but we do have a problem with computer equipment. Never, ever, ever file a false declaration again."

 

In a state of shock, the Browns and the others promised never to do it again.

 

Satisfied that they wouldn’t, the officer in charge allowed them to pile the cartons into a van and leave with it, as planned, for Liechtenstein.

*****

 

 

The DEA was looking the wrong way. When the Shaffers didn’t land their dope in Mexico, the case against them ground to a halt. Anyway, Annunziata had plenty of other bad guys to deal with, in particular, Brian Daniels.

 

It was two years later, during the Daniels investigation, when Annunziata discovered that the Shaffers had beaten the DEA with an end run. That 42 tons of marijuana had been off-loaded in Bellingham. In spite of the fact that the dope had since left the Bellingham area, and so had most of the suspects, an incensed Annunziata went to Assistant US Attorney Mark Bartlett, determined to reopen the case.

 

Then in his early 30s, the 5 foot 10 inch, dark haired, weight-lifting Bartlett was not what cops call "an ivory tower lawyer." He didn't hide in his plush office. He went on busts. He got his hands dirty. When Annunziata told him how much he wanted the Shaffers, Bartlett said okay and assigned it OCDEF status, creating an Organized Crime Drug Enforcement task force. To run it, Bartlett brought in Fran Dyer.

 

At 48, Dyer had already been in law enforcement 25 years. Boston born, with blond hair, about the same height as Bartlett but slimmer, he'd served with the US Air Force in counter-intelligence during Vietnam. He then spent five years as a Seattle detective before joining the Internal Revenue Service, Criminal Investigation Division.

 

Because they didn't have any of the smuggled goods to use as evidence, Bartlett and Dyer, and Gary Annunziata until he was transferred to Malaysia, needed to put together what the textbooks call "a no-dope conspiracy" case. To secure convictions, they'd have to build everything on testimony and support it with documents.

 

In textbooks, it's easy.

 

In the real world, it took more than three years.

*****

 

 

For the Shaffers, this adventure was turning out to be a very good one. Their 1987 operation netted them in excess of $35 million. In all, they'd earned somewhere around $60 million. And they'd managed to get most of it out of the country.

 

After the Zurich episode in October 1986, Bill arranged the flights to Switzerland in a different manner. The one constant being that neither Bill nor Chris ever flew with the money.

 

He’d met a fellow named Alex Major who ran a small chartered jet operation, and used Major to make the runs to Europe. On November 9, 1987, Major took one of his own planes with $11 million to Zurich. On December 8, he flew another of his own planes to Switzerland, this time with $8 million. Changing the routine, on January 24, 1988, Major leased a Canadair 600 jet to ferry $6 million to Zurich on a seven-day charter. Five friends accepted Bill's offer to eat, drink and be merry on the $130,000 jaunt. Just their in-flight food bill for caviar, smoked salmon and champagne came to $18,000. Major's fourth trip to Switzerland, on February 27, was to transport $6 million more.

 

The Shaffers had used brokers to set up shell companies in Liechtenstein and Switzerland, so whenever money arrived it was delivered to those brokers. The brokers made the actual deposits because Bill had decreed that neither he nor Chris should ever go to the banks themselves. Through those brokers, the brothers operated at least 17 different shell companies in Liechtenstein alone, with accounts in seven different banks. Other accounts were eventually located in England, France, Germany, Switzerland, Ireland and Austria.

 

Once the money was bedded down inside those companies, the brokers took instructions from the Shaffers to pay for stocks and shares and a mansion that Bill bought in Santa Barbara, California. The brokers paid for their art and their jewelry and the sports cars that they started racing around Europe. The brokers paid for the property they owned in England and to cover the walls inside those homes with Picassos and Warhols. Bill also bought himself an ocean-going yacht, for $1.2 million, through a shell company set up in the Isle of Man.

 

Spending the money was the greatest adventure of all.

 

Ironically, the boat was named for a pirate, the Henry Morgan.

*****

 

 

With the Shaffers living high on the hog in Europe, Dyer, Annunziata and Bartlett got together for the first time, 8000 miles away in Seattle, in November 1989.

 

After sorting through the mound of information that the DEA had already compiled, Dyer and Annunziata decided to begin at the bottom. They started rolling over the little guys, going after the boat crews, slowly but surely working their way up the ladder. It was six months before they felt they had enough on the Shaffers that Bartlett could take the fledgling case to a grand jury.

 

In April 1990, an indictment came back, charging Bill and Chris Shaffer, plus 27 others, including Terry Restall and the Browns, with conspiracy to import marijuana, the importation of marijuana and conspiracy to distribute marijuana. Bartlett also resurrected an earlier indictment in northern California that implicated Chris in a 1983 marijuana shipment. The Shaffers were now officially fugitives from justice.

 

Within a couple of months, Bartlett returned to the grand jury, adding more names to the list. By the end of 1990, he'd indicted a total of 47 people. At that point, he received a phone call from lawyers in Boston indicating that they were under instructions from two Shaffer associates, one of them being Restall, to strike a deal.

 

At this point, Dyer and Bartlett were convinced that they had a highly prosecutable case against the Shaffers, but getting Restall to testify would be a major bonus. So the negotiations began. Restall surrendered to Fran Dyer in January 1991 and, on the strength of the testimony that he was willing to provide, Bartlett agreed to ask the courts for a minimum of five but not more than ten years. Restall took the deal, knowing that, without it, he was facing 25 years.

 

Dyer and Bartlett now closed in on the others.

 

Passionate about cars, Dennis "Lesser" Specht drove a very special turbo-charged Ferrari Testarosa. One of only three ever made, it appeared on the cover of Road and Track Magazine. When it did, a source recognized it and Dyer was able to trace him through the magazine. Once he'd found Specht, it was easy to get Kenneth "Greater" Tarlow.

 

Dyer then learned that Sonny, a man in his mid-to-late 50s, once confessed to a Shaffer messenger that he’d always wanted to be in the movies. He said he never could make it in Hollywood, but had come close because a girlfriend who worked for an ad agency had gotten him a job acting in a television commercial. Dyer found out what the product was, contacted the company and discovered that Sonny's real name was Irwin Kletter. A warrant for his arrest was issued immediately.

 

The Shaffers didn't know it yet, but their days were definitely numbered.

*****

 

 

When CBS News went to Geneva in April 1987 to cover the Sotheby’s sale of the Duchess of Windsor's jewels, they interviewed some of the people present. At one point they turned their cameras on a blond guy in an expensive suit, drinking champagne with a gorgeous woman. When they asked his name, he seemed startled, and replied, "Bill Ryan." When they asked him if he was going to buy something, he told them "There are times when you just have to go for it."

 

Bill Ryan, of course, was Bill Shaffer.

 

And it turned out that both Bill and Chris were going for it in London. Now carrying several different passports, one of their British passports was in the name of an individual who'd passed away. Another was stolen. A third, this one German, was purchased by Bill, in broad daylight, for $50,000 cash, over lunch at the Serpentine Restaurant in the middle of Hyde Park from a self-proclaimed CIA operative.

*****

 

 

The instant he had reason to believe that there might be a UK connection, Fran Dyer turned for help to Scotland Yard.

 

Working through the Justice Department Attache at the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square, Dyer was put in touch with the Metropolitan Police International and Organized Crimes Branch in April 1990. Within a matter of hours, Detective Sergeants Rick Reynolds and Graham Saltmarsh were on the case. And for much of the next three years, the London-Seattle phone connection was in use for several hours every day.

 

It was Reynolds and Saltmarsh who tracked down and seized Terry Restall's assets, among them, an English country estate in Hampshire. It was Reynolds and Saltmarsh who went to see Bill Shaffer at his house in Alexander Square in South Kensington, only to find it empty. It was Reynolds and Saltmarsh who came within hours of arresting Shaffer less than half a mile from Scotland Yard.

 

In March 1991, Shaffer checked into a suite at Dukes Hotel, in the heart of Mayfair, using the name Alan Abill. Typically, playing the big spender, he was flashing a lot of money. Foolishly, for a fugitive on the run, his money was attracting attention. One afternoon, he asked the concierge to put $800 worth of roses in his suite. The concierge accommodated him. That night, Shaffer returned to the hotel with a fairly well-known British actress on his arm.

 

Suspicious that their client might not be who he said he was, someone in hotel security decided to make a discreet phone call to a friend at Scotland Yard. But the officer was on a stake-out and didn't return the call for two days. By that time, Shaffer had checked out.

 

By now, Reynolds and Saltmarsh had proof that false passports were involved. To help identify the names in those false passports, they turned to a BBC television program called "Crimewatch". Until then, the show had concentrated almost exclusively on British bad guys. But on Thursday evening, September 12, 1991, the Crimewatch presenters asked a huge viewing public for help in locating a pair of American bad guys and showed the country photos of the Shaffers. More than 70 people rang with varying degrees of information.

 

Ten of the calls made some sense. Two of the ten came from the continent. One of those two placed Bill Shaffer in Germany.

 

Although Bill now claims that life as a fugitive was a terrible experience, the search for him lasted another four months. It ended on January 15, 1992, in the bar of the Sheraton Hotel near Frankfurt Airport, where he was arrested by the Bavarian state police. When they grabbed him, he shrugged, "Congratulations. Today is your lucky day. You've won the big one."

 

Dyer and Bartlett hoped that they could bring him back to Seattle within a week. Except that Shaffer had other plans. He hired a local lawyer to fight his extradition, or at least somehow to delay extradition long enough to strike a deal. But neither Bartlett nor Dyer were in the mood to haggle. Shaffer held out as long as he could and wound up spending the next nine months under maximum security in a filthy, outmoded German prison. He was confined to his cell 23 hours a day. The single hour out was for recreation in a garbage-filled courtyard. The window to his cell was barred and there was no glass, which allowed in both the weather and odors from the courtyard. A single, 25-watt lightbulb burned continuously day and night.

 

When his appeals ran out, the Germans bundled Bill onto a plane, accompanied by US marshals. On the evening of September 16, 1992, the plane set down at Seattle's Sea-Tac International Airport. Dyer met him and tucked him safely away in tatty red coveralls at the Kent Corrections Facility, near Seattle.

 

He and Bartlett had indicted more than 45 people and had already obtained more than 40 convictions, most of them on guilty pleas. Now, they went after Chris.

 

Scotland Yard had tracked him to Ireland. The Garda were asked to arrest him but by the time they got to the house where he was believed to be staying, he’d fled to France. That’s about the time Dyer learned that that the Browns were in Paris, living just off the Luxembourg Gardens. Convinced they were in touch with Chris, he asked the French police to arrest them.

 

At 9 o'clock one morning, a police officer dressed as a workman knocked on the Brown's front door. Summer couldn't figure out what he wanted, so she turned to her husband. At that very moment Ed was on the phone with Chris. Ed said to Summer, "Let me get it," told Chris, "I'll call you right back," hung up and went to the door. As soon as he opened it, the workman stepped in, followed by several armed officers. The Browns were handcuffed and the police began a thorough search of the apartment.

 

Hiding in a small hotel five blocks away, Chris grew impatient waiting for Ed to call him back, so he dialed the flat. Aware that Bill was in custody, Chris later admitted, that he lived in a constant state of panic, changing his address every few days, forever looking over his shoulder. For whatever reason, the police chose not to answer the phone, which totally unnerved Chris. Immediately, he checked out of his hotel.

 

Stressed beyond breaking point, Chris soon got in touch with an attorney in the States and asked him to negotiate a surrender. Dyer and Bartlett agreed in principle to work out a plea bargain with him. And on December 16, 1992, almost three months to the day after his older brother was taken into custody, Chris made his way to Amsterdam and then on to Seattle where he too surrendered to Dyer.

 

Under the agreement, both brothers pleaded guilty to all charges. They also agreed to make a full and honest accounting of all the currency and assets they possessed or controlled, which would then be forfeited. In exchange, Bartlett promised to ask for a sentence of no more than 15 years for Bill and no more than 13 years for Chris.

 

But there were still matters that need to be cleaned up. To everyone's enormous chagrin, despite four years of work, 550 interviews, 15,000 man hours and the cooperation of law enforcement agencies in eight countries, the task force confiscated only around $12 million of the Shaffers' assets.

 

The Shaffers insisted there was no more. Dyer has warned them that if there was more, he would find it. And Bartlett has warned them that if more was ever found, the deal was off. That’s the way it would be, even after they get out. That could have wound up serving 25-30 years. But no one found any more, and they only served around seven.

 

Forever philosophical, when they pleaded guilty, Bill and Chris both claimed that they would still be young enough when they got out to lead fruitful lives.

 

Equally philosophical, Dyer couldn’t help but feel that if money was hidden away, if they washed it so clean that no one could find it, and if the money was still there when they got out, then they might well reckon the adventure was not over, just unavoidably postponed.

 

Since then, Dyer retired and the brothers moved to Malibu. They reportedly sold the film rights to their story and even though there is no sign that the movie ever happened, nevertheless, they are allegedly living off the big payment they are said to have received for those film rights.

 

 

 

*****