18

TRUE TO HIS word, Arney devotes considerable attention to the wagon over the next several days. He and Skinhead rebuild and install the front suspension; lacking a compressor to squeeze the coil springs, they rig a floor jack to some nylon webbing and somehow manage to compress the springs and bolt them in place without maiming themselves. They install the cleaned and repainted rear axle and differential. Skinhead undertakes the tedious business of hand-scrubbing the engine and transmission housing. With two or three days’ labor, Arney figures, they’ll have the chassis ready for the body drop. They have only to run the brake and fuel lines, install a new radiator, and swap out the leaf springs.

But he decides not to rush into those tasks. It makes no sense to get too far ahead of Painter Paul, who’s still mired in the El Camino project; even when that’s finished, he still faces a day or two of sanding and painting the wagon before he’ll have the car’s top ready to mate with its bottom. If he and Skinhead wait, Arney says, everyone will be working on the Chevy at the same time, which he views as the right way to tackle the job. He’s confident that Paul will complete the El Camino within the week.

Early one morning a week later, a fellow in an SUV stops in front of Arney’s house, raps on the door, and receiving no answer, hollers over to Paul, who is fiddling with a lawn mower in his yard: Do you know if Tommy’s up? Paul detects something in the man’s appearance and manner that advertises cop. He answers that he has no idea. After the stranger leaves, he describes him to Skinhead, who recognizes in the description the same fed who served his subpoena to the grand jury—Andrew C. Bowers, a criminal investigator with the Internal Revenue Service. Skinhead calls Bowers to ask whether he’s looking for Tommy. Bowers confirms that he is, and later in the day hands Arney a letter signed by Assistant U.S. Attorney Melissa E. O’Boyle.

It is what lawyers call a “target letter,” and amounts to a declaration of war in any federal criminal case; it’s in such documents that the “subject” of a federal probe is notified that he’s about to become a “defendant.” O’Boyle wastes few words: “As a result of information gathered by the Federal Bureau of Investigation” and others, her letter opens, “this office has sufficient evidence to present a multi-count indictment to a grand jury charging you with violations of federal criminal law including, but not limited to conspiracy to commit bank fraud in violation of 18 U.S.C. 1349 and bank fraud in violation of 18 U.S.C. 1344.”

O’Boyle then offers to discuss a plea deal with Arney, should a “pre-indictment resolution of these charges” interest him. He has a few days to think it over; if she doesn’t hear from him, “we will assume that you have no interest,” she writes, “and will proceed accordingly.”

Arney has no interest, as he makes plain when he gets a call from a fed a couple of days later. Arney’s recollection of the exchange: “He says, ‘Mr. Arney, this is Special Agent Whatever-the-fuck-his-name-was, and I saw that you gave Agent Bowers your business card. I viewed that as maybe you reaching out to us.’ And I said: ‘No, I don’t think so.’ So he says, ‘Well, we wanted to reach out to you. It would be good for you to talk with us.’ And I told him: ‘I don’t have anything to say.’ And when I hung up I said: ‘Thank you. Have a great day.’ ”

He’s somewhat more emphatic than that in his conversations with me. “I wouldn’t talk to those motherfuckers if they called my lawyer and promised that every one of them was going to give me a blow job and a million dollars,” he says a few days after the deadline has passed. “I would rather die than speak to those motherfuckers.” Receiving a target letter isn’t the same as actually being indicted, he points out. Why on earth would he want to plead guilty to something with which he hasn’t even been charged? And an indictment isn’t the same as a conviction. “I’ll take my chance with a jury,” he says.

Later that same afternoon he haggles with a customer over the price of a 1963 Pontiac Catalina,^* loses the sale, then strolls north across the lot. An apocalyptic storm is sweeping our way from across the state line, bolts of ice-white strobing against a mountainous black thunderhead, but for the moment, Moyock is sunny, hot, and still; I join him in the lot’s one dab of shade, on the rusty back bumper of a 1957 Chevy Suburban.

He’ll do nothing to help the feds, he vows again. They’re immoral. They’re willing to twist the truth and bend the facts until they’re about to break in pursuit of what they have the nerve to call justice. “They’re the lowest form of human beings on earth, simply because they manipulate,” he says. “They take what people say and turn it around so they make the jury think whatever they want it to think.”

He will offer variations on this complaint any number of times in the coming weeks. And on this one: “A grand jury is set up so they eat with the prosecutors, hang around with the prosecutors, talk and joke with the prosecutors,” he says. “If I could go in there and eat lunch with the jurors and shoot the shit with them, they’d fucking fall in love with me.”

I watch, uneasy, as the storm swallows the sun. The lot plunges into twilight with a low snarl of thunder. Wind materializes, its gusts strong and surprisingly cold. Arney seems oblivious. He makes a final point to which he’ll often return. He can’t see how he’s done anything wrong—or, rather, he certainly didn’t know he was doing wrong, if he did.

Now dust devils whirl in the lot. Nylon tarps draped over open engine compartments snap like bullwhips. At last Arney stands, and we make a slow retreat across the lot toward the Quonset. The waiting, the wondering about what happens next—that’s a new experience, he says; typically, he’s confronted trouble before it arrived, preempted any attack he sensed was imminent. He tells me a story, by way of illustration: Back when he was barely out of his teens, he was gassing up his wrecker when he was approached by a panhandler. Arney told the man he couldn’t help him. The fellow remained a couple of feet away.

Partner, Arney told him, I said I can’t help you. You can move along now.

Still, the man didn’t move. Instead, he looked Arney in the eye and smiled.

Arney whipped the pump nozzle from the wrecker and doused him head to foot with gasoline. The man bolted, shrieking.

“I was going to set him on fire,” he tells me. “I mean it. If he hadn’t run off screaming, I was going to set the motherfucker on fire. I thought he had a gun. When he smiled, I really thought he was going to pull a gun on me.

“I was going to set him on fire. Does that make me crazy?”

The morning after this conversation—June 26, 2012—Skinhead is alone at Moyock Muscle, moving cars around the lot with the wrecker, when a Crown Vic pulls onto the property. A bald fellow in sunglasses steps out and strides toward him. Damn, Skinhead mutters. It’s the sheriff.

The lawman is not entirely unexpected. Despite Arney’s growing unease over the disposition of his fine, he has failed to write a five-thousand-dollar check to Currituck County; he’s opted, instead, to wait until someone in officialdom explicitly grants or refuses his request, now more than five months old, that the fine be forgiven.

Here comes his answer. The sheriff carries a paper holding him accountable not for $5,000, but for the original fine of $78,800, plus $120 in court costs—and placing a levy against certain of his real estate until the debt is paid, to wit: 373 and 383 Caratoke Highway, the southernmost two of the four tracts that make up Moyock Muscle, and including the Quonset. If he fails to produce the cash, the sheriff could be back to padlock the gate.

When word of the levy reaches Arney, he is spurred, at long last, to confront all he must do to satisfy the county. His deadline for making the improvements is Friday, July 13, less than three weeks away—and those improvements include rearranging hundreds of cars, removing the Jersey barrier from most of the lot’s Route 168 frontage, erecting several hundred feet of chain-link fence, and excavating a large drainage pond on the property’s eastern edge, back by the railroad track. In that he’s made few friends at the courthouse, it’s safe to assume that he’ll get no breaks if he blows the deadline.

So within hours of the sheriff’s visit, all other business at the lot is dropped. Skinhead races around the property in a wrecker, moving the inoperable cars away from the highway. Paul leaves the El Camino to build fences, which will shield the inoperable inventory from view. Arney recruits his brother Billy and Bobby Tippit’s teenage sons, Bob Jr. and Anthony, as additional muscle, and hires a fellow with a dump truck to help create the thirty-by-120-foot lagoon.

Stifling, triple-digit temperatures settle over the borderlands. Thunderstorms rake the lot several afternoons straight but offer no relief; they only provoke an explosion in the mosquito population. The new hole out back fills with muddy water; the ground around it turns to stinking, slippery bog. The crew works through whatever discomfort the days bring, from early mornings to well after the late midsummer sunsets; its members take few breaks, even for water; working shirtless, they turn deep and salt-caked brown.

Arney spends an increasing amount of his time elsewhere, talking to lawyers and accountants about his situation with the feds, and with another lawyer about Currituck County. The meetings seem to pay off: The county softens its position. If he meets the deadline, he’ll have to pay only the five thousand dollars, after all. He’s pretty confident he can make it.

Then, early on Thursday, July 12, Skinhead steps out his back door and into the yard, just in time to see a caravan of late-model sedans and SUVs speed up the street and stop in front of Painter Paul’s house. A phalanx of men approaches the front door. Several wear guns.

Oh shit, Skinhead mutters. Here it comes.

ACROSS TOWN LATER that morning, reporters gather on the steps of the Walter E. Hoffman U.S. Courthouse to hear federal investigators announce that four Bank of the Commonwealth officers and two “friends of the bank” are in custody and will be prosecuted for their roles in a massive fraud that toppled the bank and contributed to the lingering U.S. economic crisis.

Arney’s part in the scheme, according to the fifty-one-page indictment, was to repeatedly take loans from the bank that he used to pay down earlier loans on which he’d fallen behind; in so doing, he helped the bank hide the fact that it was carrying millions of dollars in bad debt—and helped keep the secret until the debt grew so big and heavy that it pulled the whole operation under. He also obtained loans to buy bank-owned properties, which enabled the bank to convert inert real estate into interest income, at least in theory; the purchases further obscured the bank’s shaky health, and Arney took out additional loans to cover his resulting payments.

The feds also charge that when he no longer qualified for loans himself, Arney asked others to borrow money in his place—then used the proceeds to make good on his other debts. These “nominee borrowers” include two whom the indictment identifies only by their initials—“R.A.” and “A.A.”

While the lawmen host their news conference, agents are going room by room through each of the Arney Compound’s four houses, cataloging their contents—because should Arney be convicted, said houses and contents are likely to become the property of the United States. Agents descend on Moyock Muscle, too: By the time Skinhead arrives, fresh from showing investigators through the compound, a dozen or more of them are on the lot. They eyeball the stock. They throw ladders against the buildings and climb to their roofs to take photographs of the cars. They shoot video.

They choose, from among the 308 vehicles on the property, thirty-three that will be forfeited to the government, no question about it, if Arney is convicted. They hand Skinhead a restraining order informing him and other employees that they are “RESTRAINED, ENJOINED AND PROHIBITED” from any action that would affect the availability or value of the vehicles.

The implication is that they judge these thirty-three the most valuable on the premises. If that’s the case, the feds don’t know much about cars. How else to explain the presence on that list of an electrically crippled ’98 Trans Am, a worn Cadillac limousine, or a Chrysler PT Cruiser? A wrecked ’02 Thunderbird? A Ford Focus? “Just random,” Skinhead says as he shows me the roster. “Trucks with blown head gaskets and bad transmissions.” He shakes his head.

They make some choices that are impossible to miss—e.g., the unfinished ’69 Camaro convertible that remains under a tarp in Painter Paul’s body shop. It lacks an engine, interior, and top, but its body is flawless, its paint fresh. A fifth grader would recognize its worth. But a fifth grader might be more savvy in assigning a value to the car. The feds lowball the Camaro at $10,000. It’s worth twice, if not three times, as much. They do the same with a 1981 Excalibur, a big, fast, faux-thirties roadster that’s modern under its hand-built fiberglass skin; the agents judge the car worth $8,000 to $10,000, which Skinhead reckons is something like twenty cents on the dollar. You fellows might want to do some research, he tells them.

That afternoon, Arney and his five codefendants make their first appearance in court. One at a time, they’re asked to stand with their lawyers while Magistrate Judge Tommy Miller instructs them on the conditions of their bond: They’re to restrict their travel to Virginia, open no new lines of credit, commit no criminal acts, and so on.

When Arney’s turn comes, the lead prosecutor—slim, dark-haired, and pretty, her manner crisp—notes that he stands apart from the other defendants: He has a “substantial criminal history, including a history of violence,” Katherine Lee Martin tells the judge, noting that he also works across the state line. “We have no objection, your honor, to his going to his business,” she says. “That’s his means of employment. But we’d ask that electronic monitoring be imposed.” Judge Miller waves off the suggestion. “Moyock is a lot closer to here than Richmond” and most of Virginia, he observes. He won’t make Arney wear an ankle bracelet.

Arney leaves the courthouse and walks to Havana. It will be weeks before he tells me what he thought about as he stood in the courtroom, peering at Katherine Lee Martin and, sitting behind her, prosecutor Melissa E. O’Boyle, and at the FBI agents in the gallery, many of them women: that for the first time in his life, his fate was “in the hands of females,” and that these particular females were “going to fuck me,” and not in the manner to which he was accustomed; that the females were “digging it,” too, “because they were trained to have no emotion, to not trust anyone, and to destroy motherfuckers’ lives.” That he was one of the motherfuckers in question. That some terrible karmic leveling might be afoot.

But on the day of his indictment, he’s not so downbeat. It’s been as good a day as it could possibly be, he tells me at the restaurant. Everyone at the courthouse was kind to him.

And truly, the day is not without positive turns. When Slick calls Ben Woody and explains that Arney and the crew have been dealing with the feds all day, and thus won’t make the next day’s deadline for improving the car lot, Woody is understanding and extends it to the following week.

There’s this sliver of luck, too: The Chevy is safe, at least for the moment. Had the restoration not been stalled by one frustrating distraction after another—were the wagon’s body bolted back to its frame, as should have happened months ago—the federal agents, whatever their shortcomings as automotive appraisers, would have tagged it for forfeiture.

But the frame is in the Quonset, the body still on the rotisserie one hundred yards away, and the fenders, hood, and doors in another building still. The agents, it seems, don’t even recognize it as a car.

FOUR DAYS LATER, a Tuesday, the car lot has been transformed. The gravel in front of Pop’s house is empty, the Jersey wall removed. New wire fence, wrapped in black fabric, corrals most of the inventory. The spoils from the lagoon excavation have been trucked away. Dragonflies and lethal-looking red wasps zigzag over the hole’s now-greenish water. The county has given Arney until midweek to put the place in order, and as he eats lunch in the office with his brother Billy, Skinhead, and Paul, it appears he’ll pull it off.

Though it hasn’t been easy. The crew raised fences through the weekend and well into the last three nights, despite relentless heat, hunger, and a collective shortage of cash for lunch, snacks, and cigarettes: At one point, I witnessed Billy Arney, age fifty-four, bum a smoke from Bobby Tippit’s fourteen-year-old son, Anthony. “The fucking boss man is fucking broke,” Paul lamented to me one afternoon. “Working for a motherfucker who’s broke: We’re some stupid motherfuckers.”

Arney reports as he eats that “teeny” Brad Schuler called this morning to say he’ll be inspecting the place at eleven the next morning; Arney says he told him that he won’t be around—he has to be in court. You don’t have to be there, Schuler told him.

“So I said, ‘Skinhead will be there,’ ” Arney tells the crew. “ ‘If you have any concerns or need us to make any changes, we’ll do it in a day or two.’ ”

“What did he say to that?” Skinhead wants to know.

“He didn’t fucking say anything,” Arney says. “He hung up on me.”

“He did?” Skinhead asks, incredulous.

Arney chews for a moment. “I guess he had said what he needed to say,” he offers, in a tone so mild it seems that it couldn’t possibly be coming from Tommy Arney. He adds, as if to explain himself: “They have been very nice to me, I have to say. Which surprises me.”

“You have to watch out,” Skinhead warns. “Whenever they’re nice, it means they have something up their sleeves.”

“You might be right, Skinhead,” Arney says. “They know I’m going to be in court tomorrow.” A customer approaches the office to ask about a ’62 Pontiac Tempest outside. “Yes, sir,” Arney says, leaning back in his chair. “A nice car. I bought that from the original owner. He was a Filipino man.” The price: $4,500.

The man asks about two GTOs on the lot. Arney says he’ll part with one for $5,000, and the other for $4,500. The man stands there blinking at the numbers for a second, then asks about another Pontiac parked out near the highway, “a ’68 or ’69.”

“A ’70,” Arney corrects him. “That’s a ’70. I’d take four thousand for it.”

The man thanks him and leaves. Arney clasps his hands on top of his head. “I think they’re going to love that fence,” he says of the county. “Don’t you, Skinhead?”

“They better fucking love it.”

Painter Paul agrees: “They better love it.”

Skinhead: “They’ll either love it or they can lump it.”

“It ain’t bad,” Billy grunts, “for a junkyard fence.”

He barely gets the sentence out before Skinhead pounces: “It ain’t a fucking junkyard.” By then, Arney is spinning in his chair to face his brother, a fearsome scowl on his face. “Don’t ever use that term again,” he says, his volume rising with each word. “Do you hear me, you fucking piece of shit?”

Everyone else in the room seems to hold his breath, half expecting Billy to make a smart-aleck remark—which, given the pressure the boss has been under, and the irritation the “junkyard” label provokes in him, might spark a stern fraternal pounding. But Billy hangs his head and doesn’t so much as smirk as Arney adds: “This isn’t a junkyard. It’s a classic car lot.”

Billy nods. Arney peers at him for a moment, ensuring that the point’s taken, then turns back to Skinhead and the coming inspection. “I don’t think they’re going to be fucking dickheads,” he predicts. “But if they are, you be fucking nice to them.”

Paul voices doubt: “You expect Skinhead to be nice?”

“Skinhead knows how to be nice to dickheads,” Arney assures him. “Don’t you, Skin?”

Skinhead looks Arney in the eye. “I certainly do.”

IN COURT THE next morning, prosecutors announce that all of their evidence has been made available to the defendants—including more than a half-million documents that have been digitized and stored in a government database. Each of the accused is called before the judge. All plead not guilty. All ask for trial by jury. Arney is the last. The judge asks him, as he has the others, how old he is. “Fifty-six years old,” Arney replies.

“And how much schooling have you completed?” the judge asks. Another standard question. “Fifth grade,” Arney says.

The judge’s head jerks up. “Fifth grade?” he repeats, clearly surprised.

“Yes, sir,” Arney says.

The session ends a minute later, having taken a total of seventeen.

Twenty-six miles to the south, the crew is slouched in the office, drained by a three-hour push to finish the back fence under an already-blistering sun, when a white Ford pickup pulls into the lot. Out step Brad Schuler and two other county officials. Schuler walks the property, snapping pictures with a small digital camera and every so often consulting a folded copy of the site plan. He roams past the lagoon, out by the paint shed, along the newly fenced northern property line, back to the Quonset. His one remark to the crew comes as he finishes: “All right. We’ll give Tom a call.” The visit has taken about as long as the court session.

Most of Arney’s waking hours for the next five weeks are outgrowths of these brief proceedings. The county gets back to him to say that it’s generally pleased with the progress he’s made, but requires a fence on the south property line and a few additional refinements. The crew thus extends its long string of days spent in the high grass, brutal heat, and swarming mosquitoes along the fence line. Spirits sink even further. No one knows how Arney’s indictment will affect his little company, but all can guess the fallout won’t be good. No one has money. On some afternoons, Skinhead has to haul scrap metal to a local junkyard just for the cash to feed everyone lunch.

Arney, scrambling to keep his little empire from collapse, isn’t around much—and when he is, he does little to bolster the crew’s mood. Of the conditions under which he must live as a defendant, one of the most noxious is that he can involve himself in no transaction in which one thousand dollars or more changes hands, without first notifying (and, by implication, receiving permission from) his federal probation officer. This all but freezes his assets, including the accounts from which he pays his employees; he negotiates over several days for the latitude he needs to keep his waitstaff at Havana. But no tweaking of the conditions will alter the overriding reality of his new existence: For the first time in his adult life, Tommy Arney has to answer to someone. He is no longer his own boss.

Gone is his freewheeling style. Gone are the days of thumbing a fat wad of cash girded in a rubber band and pulled from the pocket of his jeans. Scores of times I’ve seen him slip off the band, open the folded cash, peel away bills to pay for hay, auto parts, lunch at Subway. After his indictment, I no longer see the wad.

And as if his finances weren’t in sufficient distress, he learns that the Hells Angels are taking him to court. The club’s bosses are seeking $25,000 in damages for his renting them an uninhabitable building. I learn this from Skinhead, who is utterly disgusted, if not insulted, by the development: “The Hells Angels, fucking suing somebody,” he mutters, shaking his head. “Can you believe that Mickey Mouse shit?

“Whatever happened to firebombings?” he asks me. “What is this world coming to?”

For all of this, whenever I see him Arney talks about finishing the Chevy. With the fence finished, Paul is going to jump back on the El Camino, he tells me, and as soon as he’s done—and he doesn’t have much left to do—he’ll be getting the wagon ready for the body drop. Not much to that, either: a day’s sanding, a day’s painting the interior, a third day’s “cutting in” the paint on the door sills, dashboard, firewall, and around the rear hatch. Then the reunion of body and frame, after which Paul can get to the rest of the paint.

He can’t afford not to get the car squared away. He has, by his own estimate, between $38,000 and $40,000 in the car at this point; that includes his initial payment to Bobby Dowdy, maybe $16,000 in parts and materials, and Paul’s pay for seven months of full-time attention. If he tries to sell the car as is, he’ll get only a fraction of that, and the entire project will have been a voracious suck of time and money. If he leaves the car unfinished and the feds seize it, it’ll auction for even less.

Mind you, getting more for the car will mean spending more. Six thousand for new carpeting, headliner, upholstery, door panels. Another three thousand to have the chrome redipped and replaced. New glass all around, including the expensive, curved windows that wrap around the cargo bay—yet another three; and three more to cover odds and ends—lights, lenses, tires, rims, and whatnot. Throw in Paul’s additional time and paint, and Arney’s investment in a fully restored wagon will approach $55,000.

But he’ll spend what he needs to spend, he promises, and he’ll do it soon, because time is short. He’s scheduled to stand trial in six months. He seems resolved to finish the job. “I’m going to drive this motherfucker,” he tells me.

Over the same period, Arney’s understanding of just how much trouble he’s in seems to sharpen. “It’s tough to work all your life, and to work sixteen- to eighteen-hour days, and to find that these motherfuckers can come along and take it all away,” he tells me one night as we stand on the sidewalk outside Havana. “And they’re going to do it. They’re going to take everything.

“Cancer doesn’t compare to these motherfuckers. I did Stage Four chemo and two months of radiation, and I’d take both of them again instead of dealing with these people,” he says. “Cancer, in all reality, changed my life to make me a better person. This won’t do that.”

He also seems to develop an ever-clearer view of his bank codefendants, whom he so long viewed as his friends, even mentors. “You become friends with the community bank, and you get comfortable,” he tells me. “And they’re able to use you in ways you don’t realize they’re using you.” Did he take the loans the feds say he did? Yes, I hear him tell a friend on the phone one afternoon, but he did not know the loans were illegal; no one at the bank ever told him so, even as they were encouraging him to take them. “If they had called me and told me: ‘Tommy, we want to loan you money so you can get current, but it’s illegal,’ I would have said, ‘Fuck you. Forget about it. I’ll let the payments go overdue,’ ” he says.

By late August, an air of inevitability has crept into his discussion of the case. “They have unlimited resources. They have power that’s just unreal,” he says of the feds. All the time and money they need. Mountains of evidence. When he hires a monolithic refrigeration specialist nicknamed “Tiny” to repair a restaurant cooler, and notices that the fellow (who, quite talkative, informs me that he holds “a master’s in five areas of expertise” and can “propagate the words with the best of them”) has bandaged lower legs covering childhood burns that have never properly healed, Arney takes me aside. “You see his feet? That’s some fucked-up shit, there,” he says. “It reminds me of how lucky I am to have been indicted, instead of having to deal with something like that every day.

“Hell,” he says, “I’ll just go away for a little while.”

One more thing: His promises that he’ll never talk to the feds, never cooperate? He stops making them. Instead, in mid-August, comes this: “If I were younger I would fight this motherfucker, and do it to the end, because I don’t think I’m wrong.

“But if you’re in a fight with a giant,” he tells me, “sometimes it makes sense to let him take a slap at you and not get up.”