O’Donnell’s office was on the fourteenth floor of the Federal Building on Michigan Avenue in the city. It was the antithesis of the offices I’d seen at Titan: small and crowded with file cabinets and cardboard boxes, two computer monitor screens flickering and a small flat-screen TV with a continual cable news flow, the sound muted. Still, no SportsCenter.
Mounted on the walls were pictures of felons, critical reports and updates from Washington D.C., Quantico and other field offices. And there were the requisite framed photos of the FBI’s director and the president of the United States.
“Love what you’ve done with the place,” I said, looking around.
“Shut up and sit down.” She edged past a stack of cardboard boxes and sat behind her OfficeMax metal desk.
“Yes, ma’am.”
We sized each other up for a few seconds. I smiled. She, not so much. Then O’Donnell sighed. “You stuck your head into a hornet’s nest and I’m not sure if I like it there.” She took a moment before picking up her phone and punching three buttons. “Dan?” she said. “My office.”
Ten seconds later a young, lanky white guy entered O’Donnell’s office. He was in short sleeves, his shirt collar unbuttoned and tie loosened.
“Mr. Snow, this is Special Agent Dan Cicatello,” O’Donnell said. “Dan, you may have gathered Mr. Snow is the pain-in-my-ass I’ve occasionally referred to in our morning briefings. He’s the one who gave us the head’s up about Titan’s ‘amusement park.’”
Dan thanked me for the tidbit on Titan’s computer system.
“You have access to a guy named Donell Avalon McKinney,” he said. Apparently he saw the blank look on my face. “Skittles.”
I’d never known Skittles by his legal name.
“Hacker legend,” Dan said with no small amount of admiration. “Guy really, truly knows his stuff. Elegant, innovative, insidious. I mean he’s really—God—he’s—”
“Dan,” O’Donnell said calmly. “Focus.”
“Right, right, right,” Dan said quickly. “Sorry.”
O’Donnell asked him to give me a high-level—read as “redacted”—download on Titan’s computer systems and how it related to their investigation.
Because of the information Skittles had provided that I’d passed on to O’Donnell, Dan and two of his cybercrimes cohorts were able to redirect their infiltration efforts and dig deeper into Titan’s IT systems. What they found was what Skittles had suspected: there was seriously encrypted code running deep in the bowels of Titan’s system with Ukrainian and Romanian digital fingerprints all over it. Fingerprints that had been seen in bits and pieces in the IT systems of small private wealth management firms in New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Nashville.
“A few of these fingerprints first appeared in 2006 at some of the bigger Wall Street investment firms,” Dan said.
“The 2008 financial collapse wasn’t exclusively tied to an over-leveraged mortgage market, Mr. Snow,” O’Donnell said. “In the wreckage the Bureau started finding bits of coding shrapnel from very organized foreign hacking nests. It took us five years to fit the pieces of shrapnel together. It’s only been this past year we’ve been able to create a partial picture of who, what, when, where and why.” O’Donnell leaned forward and folded her hands on a pile of papers on her desk. “If you think Americans were panicked by the financial carnage we brought on ourselves in 2008, just think how they would react knowing our banking system collapsed in part because of well-organized, well-funded hacking cells out of Chechnya, Bulgaria, and possibly state-sponsored Iran.”
While O’Donnell persisted in scaring the economic bejeezus out of me, I thought of the decades of money my mom had tithed to the Catholic Church and how much of that ended up in the pockets of crooked priests and the Mafia.
“We now believe,” Dan chimed in, “that 2008 was something of a stress-test through the establishment of well-seeded shell and shelf corporations by these hackers. A way to determine the amount of infiltration a banking system could take before the intrusion became detectable. I don’t think they expected the system to crash as badly as it did. In fact, I don’t think they tried to crash it at all. I think they were just looking for banks they could turn.”
“With the end game being?” I said.
“Using medium and small banks to nest offshore money in the world’s largest economy. Hiding in plain sight,” O’Donnell said. “You name it. Drug money, terrorist money, gun running, extortion and illegal gambling profits. All of it housed and protected for nominal fees, dues, and percentages. America’s the new offshore, Mr. Snow. No more midnight dead drops in bus station bathrooms. No more undocumented shipping containers arriving in Port Everglades or Savannah. You need money to blow up a bridge, church, synagogue, mosque, office building, or federal building? You want to launder a hundred mil in drug money? Just head to your local mom-and-pop pretend bank. All banks are nothing more than giant washing machines, Mr. Snow. But now there’s a fifty/fifty chance Granny Sinclair’s financial bloomers are churning in the same dirty water as money from the Italian mob, the Albanian mob, the Jamaican mob, Chechen separatists, al Qaeda, Islamic State and God-only-knows who else.”
We all sat quietly for a moment. O’Donnell and Dan Cicatello were looking at me, watching me take in their download.
“What’s any of this got to do with Eleanor Paget’s death?” I finally said.
O’Donnell’s brow furrowed. “Absolutely nothing. Save for the fact that your investigation into her death has made a lot of people at Titan very nervous. The phone chatter is the most we’ve heard since this investigation started three years ago in Boston.”
“What phone chatter?”
“Accelerated acquisition schedules. Suspicious executive shuffles. Nothing illegal, but all since you’ve stuck your nose in this whole business.”
“Each private wealth management bank that’s been turned has employed a consultant or consultants,” Dan said. “Nothing unusual considering most financial consulting firms and hedge fund companies out there are cloaked in secrecy. But this is different. We haven’t been able to ascertain who these consultants are or flow chart where they stand in the overall management structure. What we are beginning to see are some of the same acquisition patterns.”
“This is the closest we’ve been to finding the consultant,” O’Donnell said. “Which brings us to you, Mr. Snow.”
O’Donnell gave Dan a look. Dan stood, shook my hand and said it was nice to meet me. Then he left the room, closing the door behind him.
“To begin with, if you talk about any of this outside of this office, I will have you publically hanged before throwing your corpse in a federal prison,” O’Donnell said calmly. She waited until I nodded that I understood. “Next, I’d like to thank you for your unsolicited help. Your bumbling around has yielded more info than you can possibly imagine. Lastly, I do believe Eleanor Paget was murdered. Just like I believe Mariana Spiegelman was physically assaulted by someone associated with this case.”
“Why?” I said, already knowing the answer. Sometimes it’s just nice to have your ingenuity confirmed by someone other than yourself.
“To move her husband out of the CFO position at Titan,” she said, “so Atchison could bring in someone hand-picked by the consultant. A nice move to completely control the board of directors and thus the entire bank.”
I sat quietly for a minute, trying to organize everything O’Donnell had revealed to me in her cramped, seemingly disorganized office. I also tried to figure out what my next move was. Or if there was a next move. I had inadvertently positioned myself between the FBI and mostly invisible bad guys who would kill one woman and put another in the hospital to motivate her husband to quit his job.
And then there was the Detroit Police Department.
Even with the department’s endless internecine wars, one thing seemed to unite them in the cause of vendetta: Me.
Any move I made that shook the DPD tree would come under very special, very heated scrutiny from the department and possibly the mayor since I’d pocketed several million dollars of their money. Prosecution. Jail time. Vindication for the department and the city that had destroyed my career. It was all on the table. And my new amigos at the FBI would simply watch from the sidelines, quietly thankful for my help with their case and eternally grateful I was gone.
“You need to do something for me,” I finally said.
O’Donnell said stoically, “Nothing I can do.”
“Oh, I think when you hear what I’m about to offer, you’ll want to do everything you can to make me happy,” I said. I told her what I was proposing and that I wanted an agreement in writing and signed by her director.
Gradually, O’Donnell’s impassive face changed. She looked very interested.