Diego Riva was a handsome man who claimed, falsely, to be the grandson of Cesar Romero. He wore the resentful expression of a man whose substance is less than his looks.
He found sharing nearly impossible and it pained him to see others enjoying nice things.
He was particularly resentful of the comfortable house Don Ernesto had provided for the widow of Jesús Villarreal. The house and the funds provided for Señora Villarreal had not passed through the agency of Diego Riva and he had no chance to wet his beak.
A visit to Señora Villarreal after Jesús’s death was unprofitable. He pointed out the justice of his receiving a fee and she was unmoved, sitting in her nice surroundings and cosseted by domestic help, while her fierce sister supported her with acid commentary from a seat in the corner.
Back in his office after the visit, Diego Riva sat stewing through most of the afternoon, his neck pulled down into his collar and his eyes going from corner to corner of the room.
He had altered the diagrams and instructions Jesús provided on how to open the vault in Miami, but he was not sure Don Ernesto would pay him to correct them. And if Don Ernesto did not pay and obtain the corrections, there would be a very loud noise in Miami Beach and no one left to pay him anything.
A little research revealed that the biggest whistleblower reward payout by the U.S. government last year was $104 million. Rewards on recovered valuables ran between ten and thirty percent. Making his calculation with a short golf pencil, he found that on $25 million in gold his reward would be, at a minimum, $2.5 million directly into his pocket.
He decided to rat Don Ernesto out.
His call to the Office of the Whistleblower, Securities and Exchange Commission, Washington, D.C., bounced through a few switchboards before it reached the very friendly voice of a woman at the Department of Homeland Security.
She felt around for his resentments, being accustomed to dealing with disgruntled bank employees and sour corporate underlings. She assured Diego Riva that he was doing the right and righteous thing. The terms she used were “correcting a bad situation” and “seeing that justice is served.” She referred to informants as “relators.”
She was recording her talk with Diego Riva without the statutory warning beeps. The recorder stood beside a small sign on her desk that read wham, bam, qui tam!
There is a certain amount of cooperation among the sundry whistleblower programs operated by the IRS, the SEC, the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security. The custom is, whoever answers the cold call from a whistleblower encourages and pumps the caller and the matter is referred to the proper authority later.
The agent assured Diego Riva that, even if he had given information to another agency already, the SEC would pay off for 120 days after the earlier disclosure.
Diego Riva said he would require written confirmation of a reward and that his information would result in the recovery of a lot of explosives as well as gold in the continental United States.
The DHS agent told him that might require a few hours. Diego Riva said he could provide no more information until the paper was in his hand. He sat by his telephone and his fax machine.
An agent reassigned on short notice from Homeland Security’s Container Security Initiative in Cartagena watched Riva’s house until relieved in the evening by an ICE agent from Bogotá.