On The 41st Anniversary Of The Fall Of Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City)-Vietnam At The End- Yet Another Time To Try Men's Souls- The Detroit Vietnam Winter Soldier Investigations-1971

On The 42rd Anniversary Of The Fall Of Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City)-Vietnam At The End- Yet Another Time To Try Men's Souls- The Detroit Vietnam Winter Soldier Investigations-1971

 

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Sometimes a picture is in fact better than one thousand words. In this case the famous, or infamous depending on one’s view, photograph of the last American “refugees” being evacuated by helicopter from the American Embassy rooftop in Saigon (now, mercifully, Ho Chi Minh City) tells more about that episode of American imperial hubris that most books. That clinging mass of blurry figures dragging, fighting, pushing to get that last out before the NVA swooped down in a flash and closed down the old shop. Books that spent thousands of words talking about “domino theories, red menaces, communist hegemony, and sticking it to the Soviets by a little proxy war in far off rice fields.

Recently I reviewed Frank Snepp’s book about Vietnam at the end of the war, Indecent Interval , where I noted “as is the case with this little gem of a book, ex- CIA man Frank Snepp’s insider account of that fall from the American side, it is nice to have some serious analytical companionship to that photo [helicopter rescues off the Embassy rooftop].  Moreover, a book that gives numerous details about what happened to who in those last days in a little over five hundred pages. Naming names about who the good guys and bad guys really were (from the American imperial perspective). Especially now, as two or three later generations only see Vietnam through the hoary eyes of old veterans, both military and radical anti-war, from that period like me (a veteran in both senses) to tell the tale.”

And such histories, memoirs and remembrances help to get a fix on that Vietnam episode in the lives of many of the young in that time. Sometimes though the story of war, about what happened before the whole edifice came crashing down, can be told another way, in a more personal way. Who knows in one hundred years the book below may present the more important story.

Yet Another Time To Try Men's Souls- The Detroit Winter Soldier Investigations-1971

DVD Review

Winter Soldier, various soldier witnesses, Winterfest Productions, 1972

I am rather fond of invoking, especially in writing of the American Revolution that we have just again celebrated, Tom Paine’s little propaganda piece in defense of that revolution which hails the winter soldiers of 1776 for staying at their posts when others either ran away or became faint-hearted at the prospects of defeating the bloody English. It is those efforts by those long ago winter soldiers that other leftists and I have honored in the past and continue to honor today. We will leave the hollow holiday rhetoric and mindless flag waving to the sunshine patriots. Needless to say, given the title of the film under review, I am not the only one who appreciates that description and the producers here, I believe, have caught the essence of the spirit of those long ago winter soldiers in this documentary about the rank and file soldier-driven investigation in 1971 into the atrocities and horrors produced by the American military in the Vietnam War.

It is an old hoary truism, if not now something of a cliché, that war does not bring out humankind’s nobler instincts. For a very recent example one need look no further back than at the newspaper headlines of the past few years concerning various atrocities and acts of torture committed by the American military in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, Iraq and Afghanistan are hardly the first time that the American military has been exposed acting in less than its self-proclaimed ‘agent of liberation’ role in its various imperial adventures. If one rolls the film of history back to the last generation, for those who have forgotten or were not around, Vietnam presents that same story. As against prior wars two things made awareness that something had gone horribly wrong possible in Vietnam. First, Vietnam was the first televised war and at some point it became impossible for the military to hide everything that it was doing. Secondly, a small critical mass of American military personnel, mainly those rank and file personnel who actually carried out military policy, wanted to clear the air of their complicity in that policy.

Needless to say, an investigation into atrocities and torture is not something that the American military establishment wished to have aired in public (and as the fate of this film indicates raised hell to successfully keep it out of the major media markets of the time). That establishment was much more comfortable with internal governmental investigations or whitewashes of their actions as occurred, ultimately, in the case of My Lai. However the traumatic reaction of a significant element of the rank and file soldiery in Vietnam caused this 'unofficial' investigation to take place. For those who grew up, like this reviewer, believing something of Lincoln’s expression that the American democratic experience was the ‘last, best hope for mankind’ this was not pretty viewing. For one, also like the reviewer, who was a soldier during the Vietnam War period and who had friends and ‘buddies’ just like those that populate this documentary AND DID SOME OF THE SAME THINGS it was doubly hard. But, dear reader, for the most part what the citizen-soldiers- our brothers, sons and other relatives- have to say here needed to be said.

Naturally in a documentary that films an investigation into atrocities, torture and military standard operating procedure (SOP) during the Vietnam War the interviewees are going to be a little more articulate, a little more remorseful and a lot more angry than the average soldier who went through Vietnam came home and tried to forget the experience. These soldiers had an agenda- and that agenda was to get their buddies- the troops still in Vietnam- home. Nevertheless one must be impressed by the way they expressed themselves –sometimes haltingly, sometimes inarticulately, sometimes from some depth that we have no understanding of. Moreover, their testimony has the ring of truth. Not the SOP military truth but this truth- humankind has a long way to go before it can, without embarrassment, use the word civilized to describe itself. No, my friends, these were not our soldiers but, they were our people-these were the winter soldiers of the Vietnam War.

A View From The Left-From the Archives of the Spartacist League-Cuba and Marxist Theory

Workers Vanguard No. 1087	8 April 2016

From the Archives of the Spartacist League-Cuba and Marxist Theory

The development of a genuinely Marxist, i.e., Trotskyist, analysis of the Cuban Revolution and the nature of the state that developed out of it was a key question in the formation of the Spartacist League, which was founded nearly 50 years ago in September 1966. The forebears of the SL, the Revolutionary Tendency (RT), waged a political struggle in the early 1960s within the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) against that party’s abandonment of the fight to forge a proletarian party aimed at carrying out a socialist revolution.

The RT’s fight began over the question of Cuba, when the SWP uncritically embraced non-proletarian class forces in the form of the petty-bourgeois guerrillas led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, which took power in Havana in 1959 and expropriated the capitalist class in the fall of 1960. The RT also fought the degeneration of the SWP on the domestic terrain, when, during the tumultuous struggles of the civil rights movement, the party leadership capitulated to black nationalism and abstained from the necessary struggle to recruit young black activists to Trotskyism. (The SL’s seminal document on the fight against black oppression, “Black and Red,” is reprinted in WV Nos. 1084 and 1085, 26 February and 11 March.) The SWP leadership bureaucratically expelled the RT for its political views in 1963.

In abandoning Trotskyism over Cuba, the SWP embraced the political revisionism that had swept the Fourth International a decade previously. The leader of the Fourth International after World War II, Michel Pablo, concluded from the Stalinist-led overturn of capitalism in several countries in East and Central Europe and later in China, North Korea and North Vietnam that Stalinist parties could be “roughly outlining a revolutionary orientation.” This amounted to a rejection of Trotsky’s understanding that the Stalinist bureaucracy was an obstacle to the necessary international extension of socialist revolution. While standing for the unconditional military defense of the USSR, Trotskyists fought for proletarian political revolution to sweep away the Stalinist bureaucracy and to re-establish organs of workers democracy and a revolutionary internationalist regime. This Trotskyist program also applied to the deformed workers states, which were qualitatively similar to the Soviet Union.

Pablo’s conclusion was to jettison the construction of revolutionary Trotskyist parties, leading to the destruction of the Fourth International in 1951-53. The SWP and its leader, James Cannon, fought against Pabloite revisionism, but belatedly and partially. In 1953, the SWP and other anti-Pabloite forces internationally, including notably the Socialist Labour League of Gerry Healy in Britain, split from Pablo and formed the International Committee (see “Genesis of Pabloism,” Spartacist No. 21, Fall 1972).

With the unfolding of the Cuban Revolution, the SWP carried out a “reunification” with Pablo’s protégés in 1963, claiming that peasant-based guerrilla warfare would be the means to overthrow capitalism. In fact, the ability of a petty-bourgeois guerrilla group to seize power and establish a deformed workers state by expropriating the capitalist class, as happened in Cuba, was a consequence of exceptional historical circumstances.

These circumstances were described by SL founding co-leader James Robertson in remarks to the April 1966 conference of the International Committee, which the Spartacist tendency had been in political solidarity with since 1961:

“Two decisive elements have been common to the whole series of upheavals under Stalinist-type leaderships, as in Yugoslavia, China, Cuba, Vietnam: (1) a civil war of the peasant-guerrilla variety, which first wrenches the peasant movement from the immediate control of imperialism and substitutes a petty-bourgeois leadership; and then, if victorious, seizes the urban centers and on its own momentum smashes capitalist property relations, nationalizing industry under the newly consolidating Bonapartist leadership; (2) the absence of the working class as a contender for social power, in particular, the absence of its revolutionary vanguard: this permits an exceptionally independent role for the petty-bourgeois sections of society which are thus denied the polarization which occurred in the October Revolution, in which the most militant petty-bourgeois sections were drawn into the wake of the revolutionary working class.”

Space for such a transformation was provided by the Soviet Union’s existence as a military and economic counterweight to the capitalist-imperialist powers. With the restoration of capitalism in the USSR in 1991-92, that historic window was closed.

On paper, Healy’s International Committee appeared to uphold the Trotskyist program of permanent revolution and the construction of proletarian vanguard parties, even though Healy insisted that Cuba was still a capitalist state. In the course of the 1966 conference at which comrade Robertson delivered the remarks quoted above, it became clear that Healy was a bureaucrat and megalomaniac. Unwilling to tolerate the slightest dissent within his supposed international, he expelled the Spartacist delegation from the conference. We decisively broke with Healy’s tendency (represented in the U.S. by his lapdog Tim Wohlforth) the following year when it embraced the Maoist “Cultural Revolution”—an unusually degrading and violent falling out between sections of the Chinese Stalinist bureaucracy—and adopted a totally classless concept of an “Arab Revolution” consisting of despotic Arab nationalist regimes.

We reprint below the 1973 addition to the preface of Marxist Bulletin No. 8, “Cuba and Marxist Theory.” That bulletin, first published in 1966, contains a selection of documents illustrating the development of the SL’s line on Cuba as well as comrade Robertson’s remarks on Cuba at the International Committee conference.

---

Preface to Marxist Bulletin No. 8, August 1973

With the passage of time, a slow drift in the appreciation of old events occurs in the Marxist movement, leading at certain points to sharp departures from what had been previously taken for granted. Sometimes what is in essence a higher and more comprehensive synthesis is arrived at with only incidental loss of particular detail known in an earlier period; and sometimes an essential grasp of reality is dissipated. Which predominates depends on considerations larger than and sometimes remote from the event under consideration.

Haston/Vern Thesis

Certainly the massive enthusing over Fidel Castro by those with pretensions to revolutionary Marxism has been today largely dispelled, or more generally, displaced. But the explanations, rationalizations and substitutes of all the centrist, revisionist and reformist currents have been no improvement. For example, miscellaneous leftist elements presently or recently in the Socialist Workers Party have lately rediscovered in old SWP bulletins the writings on Eastern Europe from the early 1950’s of the Vern-Ryan tendency, a faction in Los Angeles long since dissolved into Max Shachtman’s Independent Socialist League (itself long since dissolved into the Socialist Party/Social-Democratic Federation). Dennis Vern had in turn borrowed the core of his outlook from the British Trotskyist Revolutionary Communist Party’s majority faction led by Jock Haston, until the Hastonites liquidated essentially into right-wing Labourism. What is not necessarily appreciated today is that the Haston/Vern thesis—that wherever the Red Army arrived at the end of World War II, by that fact that piece of land was a deformed workers state—was a felt liquidation of Trotskyism, not as logic would indicate to the Stalinists, weak in Britain and the U.S., but ultimately into the reformist reflections of one’s own bourgeois order.

But Haston and Vern did see one aspect of the social transformation in Eastern Europe which was largely lost on the perplexed Trotskyist theoreticians of the time, such as Hansen and Germain-Mandel—namely that account must be taken of the existent armed force as an elementary consideration in seeking to understand what process is going on. But Haston and Vern stopped at only the beginning of wisdom. And they skewed that piece of wisdom besides. The given class character of the state until or unless overthrown certainly determines the direction of social development within the society which that state protects. However, in Eastern Europe the core of the state was a Russian army, agent of the Russian Stalinist degenerated workers state.

In the short run the Russian Stalinist leadership could and did exercise choice (choice not freely arrived at) as to the social outcome—hence the elementary error in the Haston/Vern syllogism “class character of the state equals domination of that class in the society” when the state (army) is Russian and the society is, for example, Austrian or Hungarian. The Russians evacuated the areas they controlled in Austria and Iran but directed the transformation of the bulk of Eastern Europe into social and political counterparts of the Soviet Union—i.e., consolidation in the wake of Russian conquest.

An exception was the particular but at the time not obviously noted case of Yugoslavia, whose social transformation was essentially internally arrived at. Despite the Tito-Stalin split the significance of Yugoslavia only became fully clear in the light of the Chinese and also the Cuban revolutions.

Wohlforth

The Yugoslav, Chinese and Cuban revolutions can in no way be explained in terms of a direct imposition of Russian rule—by anybody to the left of the John Birch Society, that is, with the exception of Tim Wohlforth of the Workers League/“International (Healyite) Committee.” And even Wohlforth’s tortured dogmas—that trivial parody of Marxism entitled “The Theory of Structural Assimilation” (a Bulletin publication of 1964)—manifestly collapsed with the author’s inability to incorporate Cuba in his schema. As Wohlforth noted in his preface:

“In the summer of 1961 I wrote a preliminary draft document on the nature of the Cuban state and the theoretical implications flowing therefrom [“Cuba and Marxist Theory” (reprinted in Marxist Bulletin #8)—SL note]. The first discussions of this document immediately convinced me that I was utterly and totally on the wrong track. Like the SWP leadership itself, I was simply throwing together scraps of theory to ‘explain’ an impression of reality in Cuba and to justify a political conclusion—one of course far more critical of the Cuban leadership than that of the SWP majority. If I was to get to first base in understanding Cuba it became clear that I had to fit Cuba into a general theoretical understanding of postwar developments as a whole. Thus first I had to wrestle with the theoretical problems raised by East Europe, Yugoslavia and China before I could expect to get anywhere on more current developments. Ironically, the more I reached an understanding of these events the less I found them related to Cuba. So a document, which started out as an analysis of Cuba, does not even deal directly with that question. We are issuing an analysis of Cuba separately.”

Wohlforth’s “theory” boils down to the following: first, absorption of adjacent states into the Russian degenerated workers state; second, social transformation of the newly acquired region; third and finally, its release as a separate deformed workers state—all because of a “defensive expansionist” drive by the Russian Stalinist bureaucracy in response to the urgent threat from capitalist imperialism. Wohlforth even explained North Vietnam’s becoming a deformed workers state by his own version of the “domino theory”: first China was absorbed by Russia and regurgitated, then North Vietnam likewise by China.

But looking at his map Wohlforth noticed that Cuba is rather distant from Russia and an island to boot! Thus was Wohlforth left holding the position which the Workers League still, more or less shamefacedly, advances today—that the Cuban state led by Fidel Castro is capitalist. And this is presumably why the so prolific Wohlforth has left us still waiting in 1973 for the promised “separate analysis of Cuba.” (Come to think of it we haven’t noticed any recent reprinting of “The Theory of Structural Assimilation” either.)

*   *   *

In opposing the SWP Majority’s revisionism, our original tendency came into existence and fought for three main programmatic points in orienting to the Cuban revolution and its defense: insistence on the Permanent Revolution, i.e., the view that no essential task of the revolution could be achieved short of the victory and consolidation of a workers state; and, correspondingly, insistence on the struggle for hegemony of the working class in the revolution; together with the necessity for a conscious Trotskyist party as the proletarian vanguard to lead that struggle.

“Transitional State”?

As noted in our earlier preface, in 1961 Shane Mage—with the agreement of Wohlforth and with the disciplined support of others in our then common tendency—had advanced a politically principled but theoretically yet vague and indefensible position: that the Cuban state had no yet defined class character, that it was a “transitional state.” This viewpoint, together with the way it was imposed upon the tendency, was one of the early frictions in what finally resulted a year and a half later in the split of Wohlforth from what became the Spartacist tendency. Mage’s 1961 resolution on the Cuban question was brought, previously entirely uncirculated among the tendency, into one New York tendency meeting with the statement by Wohlforth that in any case it had to be submitted to the SWP internal bulletin the following morning. Since a possible majority of the tendency in New York and nationally considered that Cuba had already become a deformed workers state, many of us went along only out of a strong sense of tendency discipline demanded by the programmatic struggle in the SWP.

For the next immediate period the disputed question of what was presently the class character of the Cuban state—Mage’s “transitional state,” the bulk of the tendency’s “deformed workers state,” or (after leaving Mage’s position and a brief fling with the tendency majority’s view) Wohlforth’s “capitalist state”—tended to leave certain theoretical aspects in the shadows, in particular a precise analysis, chronologically specific, of the earlier periods of the Cuban revolution. These differing interpretations, while all conjuncturally consistent with our common programmatic basis, were nonetheless a source of tension within the tendency.

Then in November 1962 Wohlforth, abetted by A. Phillips and Gerry Healy, split from the tendency essentially over whether to seek a bloc with the SWP Majority to head off its threatened unification with the European Pabloists—a policy which Wohlforth/Healy sought to foist on the tendency in the guise of a debate on the nature of the SWP (see Marxist Bulletin #2). Our political struggle around the issues raised for the SWP’s 1963 Convention and our unsuccessful fight against expulsion from the SWP (precipitated by Wohlforth’s fabricated “revelations” about us to the Majority) preoccupied our tendency for a year.

In 1964 extensive oral discussion in the New York section of the tendency led to Mage’s pretty much vacating his position and to an arrival by consensus at the following central proposition: Cuba became a deformed workers state with the pervasive nationalizations in the summer and fall of 1960, which liquidated the bourgeoisie as a class.

Since most of our argumentation was directed against the SWP majority, which saw Cuba as evolved from “a workers and peasants government” into a “healthy” workers state “though not yet possessing the forms of workers democracy” and led by “the unconscious Marxist, Fidel Castro” (the Joseph Hansen position), most of our verification centered upon the qualitatively deformed, i.e., Stalinist, character of the Cuban worker’s state: the compulsion for Castro to discover and declare that he was a “Marxist-Leninist” and for the Fidelistas to fuse with the pre-existing Cuban Stalinist party while purging it of its loyalty to the Russian bureaucracy; the existence of a powerful state apparatus of repression, and separate from the masses, as revealed in the massive (and quite justified) incarceration of suspect sections of Cuban society during the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion; the self-admitted bonapartist role of Fidel Castro personally in arriving at the crucial decisions in the missile crisis, a life or death matter for the whole Cuban people.

A Petty-Bourgeois Government

We took it as incontestable that the Cuban armed rebels who had originally come ashore from the Granma were in every way a petty-bourgeois formation. Their militarily marginal struggle was the last straw for the Batista regime, which was hated by the masses, increasingly isolated from the upper layers of Cuban society and finally abandoned by Yankee imperialism. The rebel army which occupied Havana on 1 January 1959 continued as a politically heterogeneous petty-bourgeois formation possessing massive popular support.

Its initial coalition government with authentic liberal-bourgeois politicians took place in the context of a shattered old bourgeois state apparatus. In the course of the earlier guerilla struggle—a species of civil war—the commanders of that rebel army had had their previous direct connections with oppositional bourgeois-liberal elements broken and had become episodically autonomous from their class (and in many cases biological) fathers, the Cuban bourgeoisie. After taking power, they were confronted by U.S. imperialism’s clumsy and mounting attempts to bring them to heel through brute economic pressure upon Cuba without corresponding attempts by the contemptuous Eisenhower administration to create the conditions and connections to reknit the new rulers to the old social fabric in order to facilitate accommodation to the brutal demands of the imperialists.

No less crucial than the estrangement created by the civil war conditions between the petty-bourgeois guerilla fighters and the bourgeois order was the absence of a class-conscious combative proletariat which would invariably have polarized these petty-bourgeois militants, drawing some to the workers’ side and repelling others back into the arms of the bourgeois order. Hence the exceptional latitude available to this petty-bourgeois government in the face of the escalating tit-for-tat economic struggle with the American government in that period and under the enormous popular, patriotic upsurge of the undifferentiated Cuban masses.

Deformed Workers State

But when the end was reached with the economic liquidation of the Cuban bourgeoisie (far more systematic and complete than the Chinese Maoists have instituted to this day—even including nationalizing the street ice cream vendors), this petty-bourgeois government even under these most favorable conditions was unable to find a third way between labor and capital to characteristically organize a society, and by virtue of its newly acquired social position—holding a political monopoly at the head of a nationalized economy—was compelled to embrace that ersatz Marxism which is the necessary ideological reflection of a Stalinist bureaucracy, however newly fledged.

To be sure, the existence of the Russian degenerated workers state presented the encouragement of a model and, more important, the material support which made the outcome a practicality. But in no way did the Russians or their domestic enthusiasts directly create the actual process within Cuba itself. The alliance with the Russians was an outcome of, not the precondition to, the formation of a deformed workers state in Cuba.

At no point was there a classless “transitional state” in Cuba. To repeat, in the intervening period between the shattering of the old capitalist Batista state, the compradors of American imperialism, and the consolidation of a deformed workers state, there was a petty-bourgeois government—not a class-neutral one—with the core of its power being the petty-bourgeois Rebel Army. This regime had temporarily become autonomous from the bourgeois order through the violent polarization of the guerilla struggle, moving through a period of great popular (not specifically proletarian) mass upsurge, but as yet not locked upon a nationalized economy. Moreover its existence episodically apart from the fundamental social classes—the bourgeoisie and the proletariat—was made possible by the failure of the working class to itself pose a challenge to capitalist rule.

Hence this regime possessed the indeterminacy in outcome and tension of either the potential to regenerate and consolidate a capitalist state or for a section of that regime to lock on to the form of nationalized property and thus verify through a living process the validity of the earlier Trotskyist characterization that, viewed from a most general standpoint, the Russian Stalinist bureaucracy is in one of its central contradictory aspects—i.e., the transmission belt for the pressure of the world bourgeois order on a workers state—a petty-bourgeois formation. The decisive section of the Castroites could make the transition to the leadership of a deformed workers state because in the absence of the egalitarianism and proletarian democracy of a state directly won by the working people, they never had to transcend or fundamentally alter their own radical petty-bourgeois social appetites, but only to transform and redirect them. And parenthetically, in this is both the decisive significance and the necessity of the political revolution, approached from the Cuban experience, i.e., from a different aspect than that of the long, losing rearguard action that Trotsky fought in Russia in the 1920’s.

In Boston- UP-COMING COMMITTEE FOR INTERNATIONAL LABOR DEFENSE (C-ILD) SUPPORTED EVENTS -May Day Celebration Sunday May 1st

In Boston- UP-COMING COMMITTEE FOR INTERNATIONAL LABOR DEFENSE (C-ILD) SUPPORTED EVENTS  

 

 

C-ILD will have a table at this year’s Boston Socialist Unity Project-“Building Socialism, Building Our Movements”-Saturday April 30^th-9:00 AM -4:00 PM, Old South Church, 645 Boylston St., Boston. Stop by and talk to us. For more information about the conference-check out- bostonsocialistunity.org        

The Committee for International Labor Defense is proud to endorse this year’s May Day event in Boston:

May 1st is celebrated around the world as International Workers Day to honor the struggle for workers’ rights.

This year’s celebration comes as workers and families of all backgrounds face unprecedented political challenges on issues ranging from budget cuts and the fight for unions to housing justice and the struggle for undocumented workers.

Workers across the globe are standing together to unite all of our struggles because an injury to one, is an injury to all

Join us Sunday May 1^st -

Gather at Chelsea City Hall at 2:30PM-March to Piers Park at 3PM

 95 Marginal St. East Boston-Rally at 5PM

Sponsored by the May 1st Coalition   

Monthly C-ILD Business/Educational Meeting-Wednesday May 11^th-

Business Meeting (all are invited) 6:30-7:00; Educational 7:00-8:00-Update and Discussion on heroic Wiki-leak whistle-blower and political prisoner Chelsea Manning’s case as the sixth anniversary of her incarceration approaches. Speaker Al Johnson, Chelsea Manning Support Network-with contributions by Susan McLucas         

Chelsea Manning Solidarity Rally-Saturday May 21^st –Park Street Station- Downtown Boston- 1:00 PM     

 

 

C-ILD is proud to endorse the Chelsea Manning Solidarity Rally to commemorate and publicize the case of this heroic political prisoner who on May 27^th will have been incarcerated by the American government for six years and who is now serving an unconscionable 35 years sentence at the Army prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Join the Boston Chelsea Manning Support Network, the Committee for Peace and Human Rights, Veterans for Peace and others to honor Chelsea. We will not leave our sister behind. For more information on the case check out -https://www.chelseamanning.org/ 

The Evening to Celebrate Ten Years of Encuentro Cinco (E5) and raise funds for an important center in downtown Boston for social activists to work in originally scheduled for May has been postponed to a later date. More information as it becomes available.      

Finally-the original ILD (1925-1946) which we model C-ILD on provided financial aid support various events like the May Day celebration and Manning rally, to support adequate defense for political prisoners awaiting trial, and provide stipends for the class-war prisoners behind the walls. In the future we plan to raise funds via fund-raising events and social media in order in to continue those traditions. Look for those events in this space and consider making a contribution to help further our work.     

 

Once Again, Fraud, My Sweet-The Case Of Internet Love-A Detective Phillip Larkin Now Expanded Tale

Once Again, Fraud, My Sweet-The Case Of Internet Love-A Detective Phillip Larkin Now Expanded Tale

 

 

For this story it was hard to find a Wikipedia entry or YouTube film clip to accompany the piece, to do it justice but the more I thought about Tom Clary's situation the more I thought about schoolboy stuff. Hence Frankie and the boys

 

By Zack James

[The first time a few months ago I had my say about a case I was working on, Tom Clary’s case, make that Attorney Tom Clary’s case, and not one in which he was the lawyer but one in which he was so to speak “defending himself” just to rub it in a little, throw some well-placed salt in the wound, Zack James complained that I had not properly introduced myself in the beginning to let people know who and what I was about. You might as well know right now that Tom Clary is not his real name and if there is a Tom Clary on the Board of Bar Overseers’ active list this is not him so don’t get ticked off if you have that name because this is a purely fictionalized use of a name and everybody should know that from the get-go and know too that all the facts of the case are real so the poor bugger of a lawyer needed to have an alias in the worst way).

Zack, kind of a stickler for form like that, said I just dived into the story like I was sitting in some ill-lighted barroom sipping my tenth low-shelf scotch, telling some cronies, bar-flies really, telling anybody who would listen, “war stories” and not the great unwashed public who would not be familiar with my career, my professional as a long-time private investigator, private eye, you know a detective for hire by the hour or day just like in some other professions. Wouldn’t know that I am well-known as a great advocate of “exposing” this whole cult of the hard-bitten, shoulder to the wheel, crusader after truth and justice, chaser of windmills, don’t mind taking a bump or two, a slug or seven in the cause and sex magnet of pulp crime novel and splashy cinematic private detectives.

Well I hope Zack is satisfied, hope the reader is satisfied that I now have my credentials in order and that I can tell a real detective story with the best of them and that at the end of Tom Clary’s case (as far as it is ever going to end since every time I think it is nailed down tight some ill-begotten ghost) and that you will have seen for yourselves why I speak the truth no matter how bitter. See you at the end. Okay Zack.]           

 

A while back I told you a short story about this sex-bedazzled attorney from Massachusetts whom I called Tom Clary who like a lot of guys who have been around for a while was looking for, well looking for something in all the wrong places. Well maybe it wasn’t so much about a wrong place as about him. See Tom had wound up “meeting” some young dishy dame on an Internet sex site who took him “for a ride,” a cyber-ride thus far since until this very day he has not actually met, real met, her (that’s the “looking for something” here, sex, okay, as any guy over the age of twelve might have figured when I mentioned “looking for something” and “all the wrong places” in the same sentence). As a result of a few false notes, meaning that he had finally wised up to something a twelve year old guy would have wised up to after the second e-mail, Tom had actually asked me to help him when he finally figured out that the dame was nothing but a scam artist, or an alternative theory that he had was that she was crazy as a loon. Figures for him as a “theory” so he could defend her even longer. Crazy like a fox more like it.

Any way you want to cut it she took him for a ride. I, in the end, or what we thought was the end couldn’t help him because she had either never came back to America (from the Philippines to be explained more fully below) or if she had come back had kept a low enough profile that she had not been arrested. Yeah, it was that kind of dizzy case that we finally figured was no longer worth pursuing and Tom  let the matter drop, although I am sure he brooded over the damn thing for a while after we gave up the ghost on the thing. Then she re-surfaced, or rather, e-mailed him with some cock and bull story about being kidnapped by some desperate political types or crazed dope dealers, I don’t know all the details of that cock and bull story since I stopped listening at the kidnap part because no way this cookie was kidnapped by anybody in their right minds for any purpose whatsoever. Hit over the head with a gong, yes, kidnap no. So I am wound up on the case to see if I could find her, see if I could find what rock, what beautiful rock if Tom reads this I could find her under. But the way don’t worry your head about whether I could have found her the second time is only prelude since she would re-surface again like some evil monster out of the Greek calends and who knows someday might again.     

[This is what that stickler Zack James wanted me to start with like I mentioned above so here it is again just in case you were too preoccupied or something to get the gist of what I was talking about the first time.] You know I, I Phil Larkin, Private Investigator (not that silly detective business that Zack James put in the title of this piece) like I told you in that first part of what now will be a three- part story have done plenty of work for lawyers, private lawyers not those public prosecutors who couldn’t defend a case if they had the gun handed to them two seconds after some sicko killed his wife because she decided she would rather play with some hard dick than his stub, over my twenty plus years in the profession. Early on it was mostly divorce work, what unkind people call key-hole peeping, to get the goods on some adulterer, male or female what did I care as long as somebody paid the freight, when the divorce laws were a lot tougher on people trying to get out from under a bad marriage anyway they could. Lately though mainly missing persons cases for a whole lot of reasons, a whole lot of reasons why they went missing. An occasional looking for an heir about to inherit in a will not trying to go missing. Maybe some investigative work in a criminal case where a defense attorney has a client with enough dough to buy an alibi. Stuff like that. Stuff that sounds good, sounds good enough to write about to inform the public about what is what in real investigative work until you realize to the average reader it would be their hum-drum lives which they have in their own ho-hum lives had their fill of.  

In what is now the first part of  the Internet Love caper though the lawyer, Tom Clary, working out of Lowell, Jack Kerouac’s old town, Jack the self-proclaimed “king of the beats” from what I heard, they have a little memorial park near the old mills near the Merrimack that says that exact thing, an old mill town that still has seen better days no matter what hype they put on the publicity charts needed my help to get out from under some silly fraud thing he had gotten himself into when his “member” (okay, we are all adults, his cock, his woody, penis whatever) did his thinking for him and not his brain. And the second twist shaped up to be another version, part two, of that same bummer from the look of things at the time-the way Tom spent every waking minute it seemed trying to soft-soap his part in the caper and had also been thinking about six different ways to finally “meet” her if I am any judge of aging sex-addled guys. Probably despite the later part three of the caper still is putting paid to my judgment about aging sex-addled guys.     

That first caper was just another example of how whatever you read in the detective pulp magazines, in the high gloss hardcover novels that you can barely read through once, can barely follow they are so full of silly scientific stuff that defies logic and good sense, at twenty plus bucks a copy, or watch on television or the movies real life private investigator is absolutely nothing like that-even when sex is involved, or the dream of sex as here. Usually I lay out the story that I get from my client (naturally discounted about fifty percent for lies even from lawyers, maybe especially for lawyers since they go to school for that kind of stuff) and then tell the good reader how I used my skill and experience to work out the case, sometimes successfully, sometimes no so good just like in real life.

On Tom Clary’s case though I wanted to start out with the last e-mail he sent the bimbo to let you know how he let it get all out of hand in a short time, how he almost lost his ticket, his license to practice, for that silly cock instead of brain reason. Let you too wonder whether the days of snail mail were so bad after all when dealing with sex, or anything important. Here goes:    

“Katerina sweetie I will have to pass on helping you financially with your rent and living expenses problem since I am, no, we are in some trouble around the previous help I tried to give you paying for that life insurance premium to cash in on the policy which I will describe below.

“As you may know, or maybe you don’t know since you seem kind of naïve or not knowledgeable about a lot of things, lawyers when they are in trouble or need legal advice will not depend on their own understandings of the law but seek opinions from other lawyers. You might have heard the expression about how ‘any lawyer who defends himself has a fool for a lawyer.’ That is what I am talking about. So lawyers use another lawyer as their lawyer when they need serious legal advice. So what I am about to tell you is done under advice from my lawyer who has told me that I have had to do the following based on my situation.

Since you have not been able to provide me with receipts, the front page of the insurance policy and a copy of your mother’s death certificate for that policy you said you were supposed to collect on and for which I loaned you one thousand dollars in United States currency via Western Union money transfer to the Philippines I have had to protect my law practice and myself by having a warrant sworn for your arrest when, and if, you come back inside the jurisdiction of the United States. I did this Monday April 4, 2016 with Assistant United States Attorney Emma Wright for the Federal District Court of New Hampshire in Concord as you told me your home town and last known address was in Manchester which falls under that court’s jurisdiction charging you with Internet fraud (18 U.S. Code, section 1030 fraud using a computer, four counts, the drug bill, the hospital bill, the funeral expenses and the insurance premium payment)  and telecommunications fraud (using Western Union for the money transfers which is regulated under the Federal Communications Commission and a violation of 18 U.S. Code, section 1343, five counts, the previous four on section 1030 plus an additional count on the insurance payment when I had to re-sent at your request after the first time it “bounced.” I let the later ‘attempted” frauds slide since we have enough on you with the actual acts of fraud-you can thank me for that anyway.).

“You can do what you want when you come back to the United States but you should probably get in touch with Assistant United Attorney Wright who is handling the case to tell your side of the story, if any. You should be aware though that the “feds” don’t issue warrants without some pretty good reason, enough for some judge to rule favorably on going forward. In your case it was more the number of occasions you allegedly committed fraud and the ways you did it that gave them enough reason to pursue the case further. I assume you still will be out of the United States when you receive this e-mail so if you have trouble at U.S. Customs upon trying to re-enter the country and are detained then please call meet at 781-247-8236 and I will contact Attorney Wright and we will come to where you are being detained and can settle the matter there. Or at least figure out what to do with you.  

“All of this is not as terrible as it sounds and we, you and I, will be able to get out from under this problem if you are more forthcoming than you have been in the past about the fate of that insurance premium and the others. Restitution or arrangements for restitution of the three thousand three hundred dollars I lent you over the four valid money transfers could settle the matter although not if the “feds” want to make an example of you. What triggered all of this legal necessity was when I put the money that I borrowed for you (the one thousand dollars for the funeral expenses and then the insurance premiums) back into the office funds without explaining how or why it had been taken out and why it had been returned without explanation. My accountant informed that what I had done was both legally wrong and a violation of my legal responsibilities as a professional lawyer which would trigger an investigation from the Massachusetts Board of Bar Overseers, the organization that regulates lawyers in this state. My accountant said I would at least be, no question, in some kind of legal trouble from them.   

“Since I acted in good faith with you and I need to keep my professional standing as a lawyer to earn a living for some time longer I have had to do the above action to show that I acted in good faith and that you did not. I have had to “throw you under the wheels of a bus” to use a current expression. That arranging for a warrant for your arrest will clear me, hopefully. I am sorry that I had to take this action but since I don’t really know you and whatever has motivated you through all of this I have had to think of myself.

“Sweetie I don’t know if it will do any good, do any damn good at all but I want to explain why I have had to do what I have had to do whatever your reasons for not coming clean with me. Want to give you an idea of the bad feeling I get about this situation whatever I think about you. Hell I don’t half know how explain it to myself let alone to you but here goes because we are both in trouble, both sitting under the gallows if you want to be dramatic about it. Which you are often enough when you want something want something from me and get all school-girlish and “pretty please” about it which I have learned to pick up from the tone of your e-mails when you want something. All that “can’t wait until we can get together” in some distant non-specified futures stuff and I am supposed to drop everything and jump through hoops for you. Yeah, I bought into that come hither in the distant future bit for a while until I realized, remember that e-mail I sent about us going our separate ways and forgetting whatever was driving us together, you and I were never going to meet. That I had played the fool for you. Maybe I liked you and maybe you liked me as cyber-pals and me as the ever ready dough guy but that was it.

“Well, the way things look now which is not what you or I thought was going to be the future as little as a few weeks ago when you sprang that whole life insurance business on me and that was going to be your ticket to a better life, if you get a good break, you'll be out of Danbury in six years ...and you can come back to me then. I’ll promise to be waiting.  

 

“I hope they don't throw the whole book at you, sweetie, take all that sweet and innocent face of yours and turn it kind of rough, give you that prison pallor some of my tougher clients have developed from repeated incarceration. Have some bull dyke turning you off men, turning you into some girl toy. Yes, sweetie, I'm going to send you over.

The chances are you'll get off with that six years on concurrent sentences since you are probably a first-time offender and if not then you had better have a fast-talking lawyer. If you're a good girl, you'll be out in four or five years. You’ll be a ripe old thirty-something, the time when women look their best. If they let me visit you I will come down as often as I can. If not I'll be waiting for you. If they tact on the sentences for each count consecutively well then I'll always remember you. But believe me you are taking the fall, taking the big step-off on this one.

 

“Now I know you’re going to say that I have been playing with you, pretending I cared about you, trying to trap and maybe I have a little.

Get this though through your pretty little head-I will not play the sap, the sucker, the mark, the fall guy for you. You have never played it square with me once since I “met” you going back to that silly fake sex website “come on” that brought us together a few months ago. Right now I don’t care who likes or doesn’t like who I won’t be your fall guy. I will not walk in I don’t know how many other guy’s footsteps-you probably have been playing this same foul game since you were about sixteen, since you “graduated” from a high school that didn’t exist at the time. Jesus I should have dropped you then when I had that sneaking suspicion that you weren’t on the level if you weren’t on the level about your freaking high school. A freaking throw-way thing like that which you didn’t have to fake. You played me for a sucker and you are going over for it. 

 

“Ah, hell, why am I wasting my time trying to explain what you didn’t given a damn about anyway once the money dried up. I know this won’t do any good, any more than trying to explain what was happening to me and my health and other concerns in those six million e-mails you purposely always took what you want from, what served your evil purposes. You’ll never understand me but I’ll try once and then give it up.

 

“When a man seeks a woman, no matter how, where, or why they met and she knives him in the back for no good reason, for nothing other than her own whims and pleasures he is supposed to do something. That goes double for lawyers because we are supposed to be wise to the ways of the world, supposed to automatically discount fifty percent of what we hear and see. Even from friends and family, yeah, maybe especially then. It makes no difference what you think of yourself, or what others think of you. You have to do something to get that rock off your back, that rock that will crash your career, leave you in the office alone and desolate doing cross-word puzzles and drinking low-rent gin from a desk bottom drawer.  Like I say especially lawyers who have to appear pure and simple. When a lawyer, any lawyer not just me, gets stabbed in the back by a piece of fluff he has to do something about that. It’s bad business frankly to let the dame get away with it, bad for the lawyer, bad for the profession.

 

“I know you are going to say that is not enough of a reason to send you over. Get this through that pretty head though. I have no earthy reason to think I can trust you. If I forget this, forget that you played me more than a couple of times, and let you get away with it, you’ll have something on me that you can use whenever you want. Since I have this massive amount of material on you I couldn’t ever be sure you wouldn’t cook something else up again in that evil mind of yours. Maybe have somebody put me out of the way, one of those of courier, bagman, “mule,” “cousins” of yours you kept trying to have me sent dough to you through for some ill-spoken reason, if I know you. Find myself in some funny dark corner somewhere. Hey, I am a lawyer so let’s put all those things on one side like I do when I am trying to argue a case. Okay maybe some of them are not important, I won’t argue that. But look at the number.  What have we got on the other side? Maybe you like me, and maybe I like you. You’ll say maybe I do know if I do like you and maybe I do. Sure I will have some sleepless nights about what I have done after I sent you over but that will pass. Believe me that will pass.

 

“If all I have said doesn’t mean anything to you then forget it and let us make it just this: I won’t, because all of me wants to regardless of consequences … and you counted on that….the same as you have probably counted on that with all the others you have deceived. Don’t be so sure I am as addled as I am supposed to be, acting kind of cock-simple, but such an aura helps in bringing in clients, dough and making it easier to deal with opponents. But me having more dough, especially the last bonanza Washington case I told you about can be just added to the wrong side of the equation. And that is that. So long sweetie and good luck.”  

         

Jesus, you can imagine my snicker when I saw this little tidbit. Saw he was under the influence of Bogie as Sam Spade to Mary Astor in The Maltese Falcon including a few straight rip-off lines. This fluff of Tom’s would have Mary Astor for lunch and have time for a swim after. What Attorney Clary, who I had worked for before on a couple of missing persons cases that went nowhere (that nowhere the result of the clients running out of dough, interest, or reason to pursue the person further) needed as much background information on the bimbo as I could find since he, as we shall see, in his love bug state neglected to find out much about her except a few saucy and raw nude photographs (like I said cock over brains). He knew my work, knew I could help him out-on the quiet. But I needed the story-the whole story minus the fifty percent bullshit I expected from lawyers and everybody else if I was to help get him out from under his rock in one piece. Needed to find out why a guy who was just horny which a lot of guys are, me included, had to send an e-mail telling some honey she could wind up in the federal slammer as some bull-dyke’s girlfriend for cooking up some two-bit scheme to defraud a love-addled attorney. To make him look less stupid over some young sweet fluff than he really was if you wanted to know the truth.

So he gave me this run-down before giving me my marching orders and what little information he knew about Katerina.              

Tom Clary like a lot of fifty something guys, me too, had been unlucky in love, had had three marriages ending in three divorces and plenty of alimony and child support checks (me, two marriages, two divorces and ditto on the checks), had given up on love as a no-win investment. Had girlfriends and live-ins for various periods once he figured out that it was cheaper that way than marrying them like some Podunk Catholic schoolboy. However of late, the last couple of live-ins according to what Tom told me that night at Jimmy’s Tavern on Merrimac Street where we sipped a couple while he was telling his story had been “no-go” on the sex issue. Nice to be with but had had it with sex and its discomforts (and pleasures he added). So he started, as he had done periodically in the past, looking at the sex sites to see if he could find a sex partner. And not any old sex partner but, as he said if he was going to go to the time and expense of joining one of those sites, a younger woman to make him feel young again. Not a bad idea if you can keep it up.      

Now this sex site thing with its million fake “come hither” “come ons” and women ready to jump into bed with you at the click of an icon is tricky, is mainly stuff to lure guys with some kind of unspoken loneliness and sadness into buying all kinds of stuff but mostly dreams and cash drain for no action. I had looked at them at one point myself after my last divorce and kind of joined one site for “free” which meant nothing since any “action” required a buy-in to some credit card plan for X amount of months. I was saved from knowing a lot more about this racket by a thirty-something blonde gal who came into my office looking for help to find her missing teenage daughter who had run off with some carny grifter and she didn’t mind spending a “little money” trying to find the daughter. When the little money she really did have  ran out she persuaded me to continue for a little while longer with a barter offer I couldn’t refuse. Eventually, while she was a wild one in the sack and worth the barter, that trade-off didn’t get the daughter back, and I never did find her, but that romp with the worried mother solved my immediate sex problem and so I never had to get deeper into the sex site racket.         

Tom did, did get onto one of those well-known sites where everybody is married (at least they say they are as Tom did and I suppose you could say with three marriages he was married, if not currently) and just on the site to have a fling or short affair. No foul, no harm. He didn’t have much luck to begin with until he scrolled onto a profile (this site stuff is all about profiles and half a million lies connected with the profiles some for good reason on anonymous sites, some just pure bullshit) without a photograph (a sure sign that whoever is not up to showing herself in a photograph is some kind of Methuselah at best). But her “come on,” Katerina’s come on was that you could contact her directly by figuring out her email address which was in her greeting (it wasn’t hard and as Tom found out and I could have told him that ruse is used by rival sex sites or “independent” sex workers to either lure business to their sites or connect with guys for paid sex-all this stuff where I say guys goes for gals too if they are looking for sex okay).

So he did and Katerina responded quickly. They did the usual asking this and that question including her telling him she was a cam model ( a sex worker on video who does whatever the viewer asks for sexually-for a price is the best way I can put it-one of the wonders of the Internet). This is when she asked him to go to another sex site and this is how he learned first-hand about the raiding of sex sites by rivals. Except that the front of this sex site was so amateurish that even horny Tom could see it was a scam (most sex sites even if they don’t deliver real sex or sex dreams at least are “legitimate” sites and not total credit card or identity theft rip-offs whatever their sexual dream shortcomings or ethics if for no other reason than to stay in business and keep those credit payments rolling in when people don’t opt out which is in small print on the application page-nice rip-off right). That should have tipped him off-and it did for a while. Did until a few days later (after he had blown Katerina off as a stooge for some nefarious sex fraud bandits) she asked where he had been. That started another “conversation” which was actually progressing, Tom said, to the stage of meeting. (Meeting at a hotel somewhere outside of Nashua, New Hampshire since he was from Lowell and she was from Nashua.) Then the axe fell.  

Katerina from that point to the point of that e-mail I showed you that Tom showed me which got his wise finally (I think, you never know with guys who have the “rut” on) ran her “script” pretty straightforwardly and intensely. This is the play. She had received word from a cousin that her mother in the Philippines was sick and because she was poor (although naturally good-hearted whore Katerina was sending dough along to help out) the mother couldn’t afford the medicines necessary to save her. (This gag as smart as Tom is as a lawyer has been pulled a million times-although not always with the mother dying in the Philippines.) She pretty please asked Tom to “lend” her five hundred dollars U.S. to help out until next pay-day when Katerina would pay him back (that one has been played a billion times including in the Philippines). This of course while they were making “arrangements” for their assignation. So Tom bit. Sent the dough to the cousin via Western Union (a money transfer that he had never done before which was interesting-the first time). Done, and he figured that he was on the way to great blow-jobs and whatever she had in her bag of sexual tricks.      

The day before the big assignation (remember that five hundred smackers was already sent along) Katerina e-mailed that the cousin had informed her that her mother had died. RIP. The next thing he knew, the next time he heard from her Katerina was on an airplane heading for the Philippines to give her mother a final send-off (and Tom was holding his sore cock, sore since he had taken some sex aid medication as a prelude to that big “date”). Told Tom not to worry she would grease his skids when she got back after the funeral.

End of story-right. Wrong. A few days later Katerina send an e-mail about how she could not claim her mother’s body until the hospital where she had been treated and had expired at was paid for its services. The bill-eight hundred dollars. Could Tom “pretty please” sent the dough to get her mother out of the deep freeze and into the ground. I am just giving you the highlights here there was more to it but the reader can get the drift. The drift here being another Western Union money transfer to her in her name for eight big ones. (That money transfer process not so interesting this time.)   

Now end of story-right. No, still wrong. Of course the mother needed a funeral and there was no money to do so. Again a lot of back and forth and promises that this was the last hit (and subtly mixed in promises by her about all she would do for him when she got back to America) but in the end he did the Western Union money transfer (a total bummer as to process this time but he was horny, he was love-bugged even though he had never actually talked to her on the phone or seen more than some nice, and some raw, photographs of her sent via e-mail) for, ouch, twelve hundred  smackeroos. Hell if it was that easy I would have liked to have gotten on Tom’s gravy train myself.    

Now finished. Well not quite because she put the bite on him for a thousand bucks to pay some insurance premiums that the mother had not paid and were overdue on a fifty-thousand dollar life insurance policy that all of a sudden after the funeral had surfaced and which would have left Katerina and her brother on “easy street” for a while anyway. Except Tom as a lawyer who knew about life insurance policies and the fact that those cold-hearted bastard insurance companies don’t like to pay out penny one if they don’t have to knew something was wrong about this set-up if not exactly what (to speak nothing of how all of a sudden a daughter who was living in the mother’s old apartment “found” the policy which would have taken care of everything Tom already paid for if it had been “discovered” earlier). Hence the stinging e-mail and hence my employment.

Hence too after checking out that the address Katerina had given him in Nashua and found it was bogus and few other facts that surfaced as I looked into matters that I was not able to produce much about her. In any case by the end of round one she had not surfaced in America or if she had she has not come forward to clear her name-and probably never will. So like I said forget about those smart lawyers on television and in the bookstores and remember Tom Clary’s saga-that’s your average lawyer, very average.

Here’s part two which Zack James has called A Con Artist Conned-With Katrina, The Girl With The Sparkling Eyes, In Mind but I just call cock where the brain should be-finally. Since Zack James the “king of the sticklers” bitched and moaned about not introducing myself properly when I told you guys the first part of Attorney Tom Clary’s case I am repeating it here for “literary effect” as they say. Here goes: 

Hey, Phil Larkin, P.I. private eye to you here to give you the low-done, oops low-down, pardon me for being a little cynical but that must have been a Freudian slip as they say, on my lawyer friend , Tom Clary, (and a guy whom I have worked for on a contract basis for several years in the interest of full disclosure investigating people’s troubles for him in order to get a little rough justice in this wicked old world as he likes to put it on his more liberal and expansive days), who has as usual let himself get in way over his head with a dame, a young dame to boot, who has been leading him by the nose (or another more private part if you ask me) for a few months now.

Usually I like to make some commentary about the cases I am trying to tell you about, to set you straight about what real cases in the private detection business are about not that tripe, hell, that crap you get on television or the movies, get in lurid half-dressed babe covered  crime novels. This time I will just let Tom bask in his glory, his maybe glory,  since apparently this time, this “one last time” as the dame, Katrina, has said right along every time she put the bite on him he has finally got everything right-right for now anyway. This is the way he told me the story one night at Nick’s on Merrimack Street in Lowell where he has his one-man law office in the seen better days Orley Building when we were discussing the details of another case (a missing person’s case where the wife was looking for the left suddenly husband for alimony and child support whom I never found at least under that name and social security number. That is the way of such cases. Usually a client could save his or her money by filing a “missing person’s report” with the public cops and be done with it for all the good getting a private detective to do the work since people who seriously go missing, go for a reason, and go deep down in the crevices). If I have something to say, or the narrative needs a little explanation I will put what I have to say in brackets. Hey Tom, good luck brother-and forget about anymore “one last time” with this one, with this Katrina fox:   

[If you can believe this, although maybe today with all the social media, social networking I think they call it, maybe it isn’t so unbelievable, Tom and this Katrina have never met in the flesh. Have not for reasons that shall not detain us here even talked on the cellphone. All of their communications has been through a few hundred more or less short and almost business-like e-mails. So what Tom was telling over drinks that night at Nick’s was about the details of an e-mail that he had sent her after she had sent him yet another “request” for dough, for money, this time to get her out of a hospital, Saint Tomas’ in Manila, that’s in the Philippines. [The same hospital that he had “lent” this frail to get her mother out of deep freeze and into the ground earlier in their “relationship.” He had read the dispatch to her composed on his word processor on his computer that he had brought with him so he could do some work at home.]       

“Sweetie- some days it is great to be a lawyer, to actual help somebody, to help a damsel in distress, you okay, and today is one of them. Yeah, to actually help somebody without having to crush somebody else which is the usual case in our adversarial legal system where in court one side wins and the other side loses most of the time.  Most days are like that, dog eat dog, not at all like they tried to play with your head with in law school about justice being blind and everybody is equal under the law.

“And it is not just the court system that is screwed up but I remember back when I was doing more criminal cases starting out like a lot of young hungry lawyers looking to get a start in the business and some guy, usually they were guys, was in court on a drug charge, maybe trafficking, maybe possession of too much dope to not be prosecuted like for kilos or something who would get up on the stand and act all innocent (like I told him to do) and then the prosecutor starts talking about a couple of prior convictions for the same offenses that had been “continued without a finding” (meaning they would go away if the guy kept his nose, literally his nose in cocaine cases, clean for a period long enough to say he was rehabilitated). Of course he never told me that little piece of information when I had asked him about ‘priors’ so naturally I looked like a fool when I went to the bench and asked for some kind of plea bargain rather than the “not guilty” I was looking for. Or the time a guy in all honesty (he was a little simple-minded but not as much as he pretended) thought he had some kind of constitutional right to have a pistol in his hand when he displayed it in a 7/11 store in Dracut and the clerk, scared out of her mind, though it was an armed robbery as she handed over the money. It was, the guy had about six “priors,” for various armed and unarmed robberies.  Had a million cases like that.       

“Hell later the civil case clients would still goof with me sometimes like when I did a few divorce cases before I gave that up as too scary once I realized that I would rather defend the low-rent criminals who at least were half honest when they would lie, male or female it didn’t matter, about why they wanted a divorce. Worse when it came to dividing up the property. Christ they fought tooth and nail over a television set or some foolish piece of furniture. I won’t even go into the “civil wars” when there were lawsuits between two unrelated parties about ownership of land, or chattels. Worse when there were personal injury cases (although “win or lose” I made good money on those cases I will admit) and one party would almost ask the judge for the death penalty beside money damages in the case for some car dent or whiplash back deal. Jesus.   

“You will appreciate this one. I have to chuckle every time I think about Harry’s case, or rather cases. Harry was from up your way, up in Bedford if I recall, who had a small printing business in Lowell over on Merrimack Street by the river in the Taylor Building (now converted to condos at some outrageous price just because they had a river view but they were poorly constructed and I wouldn’t live in one if you paid me). He was always coming to me to “negotiate” with some customer who was not paying his or her bills. One time a big customer, an independent book publisher, got behind on his payments, had as it turned out made a bunch of bad decisions about what books would sell in the consumers’ market, and got so far behind in his bills that Harry took him to court, rightfully so. When Harry got up on the stand to say his piece he, on his own, started talking about putting the poor guy in now non-existent debtor’s prison like something out of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations which you probably read in school.  Like Harry had never heard of bankruptcy laws (that the guy finally had to go to which was sad in a way because he had in his younger days published some very good if not exactly best-seller books which is always worthwhile). When I asked you about your situation in the hospital and whether you could leave or were being held before you explained everything to my satisfaction I thought of you as a Harry’s case for real.       

[I remember Harry, Harry Argos, a good guy but had been as an immigrant too trusting of what he had heard told to him in those classes he took to become a citizen and so thought justice was on the side of the little guy. Got all riled up when some “native” tried to pull the wool over his eyes and so wound up in Tim’s office half the time for no reason that any court of law could, or would, do anything about.]   

“You know even this big deal case from Washington I am working on now that I keep telling you I am busy on is a “one side wins, the other side loses” situation (except me because I am getting paid, paid a lot, or I should say I shall get paid a lot since I am working by the hour on the thing and so not dependent on winning like in some cases I have had, some cases when I put a lot of time in and got nothing for it when the client lost). It is about land, or really land use which people come to me about since I won a case a while back, a big case in Massachusetts, on appeal about who owned the land. Not a big case like the U.S. Supreme Court case in Miranda, the give you your rights case, or Lawrence, the gay civil rights case, but a big land use case that lawyers still refer to when they have what are called “adverse possession” cases. What that means in laymen’s terms is that one guy used land for a long time, over twenty years, thinking it was his but on the land deed it was really another guy’s. That other guy showed no proof of active ownership so the first guy got possession. What was important to the first guy, my guy, was that he have that land to sell because a huge condo developer wanted the land but only if he could have all of it undisputed. That is what the D.C. case is all about but the land use size is much bigger, the developer wants to put 160 condos/townhouses up but needs a disputed strip for a street between sections. Without that-no go.

“But enough of these law court ‘war stories’ let’s get to why you should be happy that I feel good to be a lawyer today. [I agree-why the hell is he telling some bimbo who could care less except maybe for the dollar signs lure that might be brought in about these old and new cases. Like she gave a fuck except for her own capers, her own screwball antics.] Last night I was talking to my accountant about your situation, about the blizzard of e-mails we had sent back and forth earlier in the day in order to made a plan to move forward and get you out of ‘jail,’ about what had been happening to you over the past couple of weeks since you paid off that late insurance premium on your mother’s life insurance policy. See I need his authorization from the law office accounts, especially for a large sum like $2100. I have been keeping him ‘out of the loop’ on those bank transfer things that didn’t work because they were being drawn off my credit cards which he doesn’t have control over (meaning he doesn’t have to authorize use although he does need the monthly statements for tax purposes, Christ, he always as you know wants some damn receipt for every little thing).

[Of course this whole “imaginary’ conversation with his accountant, with Sal Manning, who really has kept Tim out of more trouble with more authorities than you can shake a stick at, and that is exactly what it was, had been nothing but a lie. A lie for a lie. See Tim had finally figured out that Katrina, if that was even her real name, had been “scamming” him, had been leading him on a classic scam build-up which at this point involved the idea that Tim was supposed to send dough, a couple of thousand dollars, United States Dollars, to her bank in the Philippine, the Banco de Oro, BOD, to get her out of the hospital she had entered the night before she was supposed to go to an insurance company, Sun Life, and collect about fifty thousand dollars from a life insurance policy her recently deceased mother had left for her and her brother. Tim by the way had paid the “late” premium on that policy otherwise the policy would have lapsed. As I tell you these details you can see what our Katrina was all about and why I said that nasty remark about Tim being led by something more than his nose. The deal she was putting was down at that point was that she needed dough to pay the hospital bills, and her back rent. That hospital part was the key-supposedly she couldn’t leave the hospital until she paid her bill and so couldn’t get to the insurance company to pick up that sweet fifty thousand-in cash. She needed “babe,” her term of endearment for him, to “one last time” help her out. And Jesus he was still ready to.]            

“By the way when I told him [Sal Manning, the accountant] about the failed bank transfers from my bank, Bank of America (hereafter B of A), to your bank, Banco de Or, especially from Xoom which he uses all the time and likes and which you said you were not in favor of using he had the problem solved in a jiffy. That paperwork BOD (Banco de Oro) wanted you to sign was because you had a savings account and not a checking account. According to him there was no way Xoom or Bank of America (I mean B of A) could transfer money from my bank account to yours because you didn’t have a routing number. So what that local branch of BOD (Banco de Ora, okay) would have wanted from you if you could have contacted them was to sign off on paperwork to allow international bank transfers into your savings account. That was all.

[This, again for the gullible or easily misled, was all a lie as mentioned in the previous brackets. Never let it be said that once Tim got on his own high horse that he could lie with the best of them, tell a tale as good as he received. Hell he was born on the hard-edged working class section of Riverdale about twenty miles away from Lowell so he was no stranger to the “lie,” the non-professional lie once he saw the light. He did say that night at Nick’s that he had gotten “rusty,” had not seen the tell-tale signs of the scam. I already made my statement about why that was, what he was being led by.]                              

“But that wasn’t the reason he, my accountant, called me, although while I had him the line I told him about your situation. You know about you being in the hospital for stomach ulcers since you had not been eating, or had been fasting for some reason, I don’t remember off-hand which it was, the former I think, but basically not taking care of yourself because you had no dough to live on until you cashed in on the $50,000 (sorry I don’t know how many pesos, Philippine pesos that was, about 2,000,000 if I remember the conversion rate correctly) insurance policy we had paid the premium on. That you had gone to the hospital, taken I think by your brother and two cousins, Rufus, no, Ricky, and Jonathan the night before you were supposed to get the big insurance pay-out you were entitled too. Damn getting sick just when you were going to get financially well. (Did you ever tell me your brother’s name I know he is a student and is about seventeen, right?). They had taken you to the same hospital, Saint Tomas, where your mother had been taken to before she passed away and which we had had to buy off for $800 USD (United States dollars, 35,000 pesos right) in medical bills before they would let you give her a proper burial.

“My accountant asked about which wing of the hospital you were being held at, the low-rent charity ward or the “plush suites,” his terms since he knew the hospital from trips to Manila on business, and I told him because we had pieced off the place in your  mother’s case with that 800 clams (35,000 peso clams) before they let you be treated with the Mayfair swells, you know the upper crust, in the nicer section (his saying “being held at” like you were a prisoner which is as you know I thought until just yesterday when you straightened me out and so I did the same for him about your wanting to do everything by the book, legally).

“Like I said the real reason my accountant called was because he had received an e-mail by some parish priest from that Quinpo (sorry if I misspelt it) church your mother belonged to thanking me for sending the five years Mass Card who although not familiar with your mother’s name, didn’t know her from Adam or Eve from what my accountant said, was pleased that I had thought of her, one of God’s children,  and that of course on her death anniversary day they would do their duty to her by saying a Mass in her name. (I gave February 27^th as her death date since that was the day you left I think and if that is not right then that will still count for her as her remembrance time anyway.) Of course you know I only did that out of respect for you (and indirectly your brother whose name I don’t know, is it Angel, maybe you did tell me). I have mentioned my feelings as an old-time sinner myself about the Church before and I don’t want to get started on that because that is not what this message to you is about. About great news not ancient Catholic childhood mental wounds that have never properly healed. But just be aware that as for your mother somebody is looking out for her when you are away elsewhere.

[Again why the big build up, why would she give a fuck about his traumatic rigid and distorting Catholic that she, we, had suffered through.]                 

“Of course since I have known my accountant for a long time and except when he goes crazy over receipts and invoices he and I get along, and he has after all kept me out of trouble, out of serious trouble anyway, he felt free to make his usual “pussy-whipped” comment after I told him about your sad ass tale and your various post insurance premium- related capers. You remember I hope that e-mail I sent you one time about his comment about “thinking with cock, not my brain,” in dealing with you once he saw how pretty you were and how nice too. Here is a copy just in case you forgot what with your other worries and stuff:

“Hi Sweetie-hope things are going well with you-thanks for the revealing photos of you. They certainly had my woodie getting hard just thinking about those beautiful tits of yours (“Woodie” that’s your word for cock right-I remember you calling it that once time when we were talking before you left for the Philippines). Of course I would have to have a closer inspection, a much closer inspection in order to confirm how nice they are.

[Now you finally in detail get what I am talking about in this “relationship” between an older man and a younger woman-right. Forget all the “business’ stuff this is the hard-core truth coming out. The stuff that should half make you think Tim, however innocent, deserved all he got from this vixen. I told him so many times so I am not telling and tales out of school.]  

“Now that the business stuff is over let me tell you a story about why I was asking for revealing photos of you. During this last insurance premium go-round my accountant said I was thinking with “my cock and not my brain” in dealing with you what with all the zigzags we went through.  He didn’t exactly put it that way but you know how guys talk about good-looking women and their desire for them  what he meant was that I was pussy-whipped, “cyber-pussy-whipped” by you because every little request by you for anything and I was calling him up day and night to see if it could be done without getting into trouble. That got me to thinking back to the previous photos that you had sent me of you before you went away. I was thinking that if I was pussy-whipped (which you and I know I am not but rather just trying to help a damsel in distress and will in the future too if necessary and we will work out some kind of thing that will be okay for both of us so we are on the same page) then I might as well have a look at the pussy I am being whipped by. Sometime when you get a chance I would not mind a little photo like that. This would be just between us but I would be able to laugh every time he [Sam Manning] went on and on about stuff like that. You could do that for me sweetie I hope.          

“As usual when I have gone to Washington I always get behind and so I have been working today to get caught up on an interesting case I will tell you about sometime. I also jogged this morning before the rain started here. If you can believe this and this is no April Fools’ joke tomorrow and the day after (Sunday and Monday here) it is supposed to snow-not much but what the heck it is April. I am also finishing up an interesting novel by Ernest Hemingway-do you know who he is-or remember reading anything by him in high school-about Paris in the 1920s during the Jazz Age. I would like to go Paris this year in the fall so I am reading stuff like that to get motivated to go –Of course Paris is a place you don’t want to go alone if you know what I mean.    

“I often think about what you are reading about, what you are doing over there while you are waiting for your fortunes to change. Tell me some stuff like that, what kind of food do they have there, did you go any place of interest. You know stuff like that so we can “reconnect.” 

“I have learned the basics of sexting (oops) texting but it takes me a long time to put a message together. I haven’t got all the symbols and shorthand down. As you can tell it is much easier (and faster) for me to write a bunch of stuff in an e-mail-Let me hear from you and what you are up to and remember I will continue to be your amigo as things go forward-Later.” 

Then I sent you another e-mail which went like this:  

 “Hi sweetie- thanks for note- I sent you a note about sending your photos to g-mail address but that can wait until you have a phone-Will you have a phone before you leave the Philippines or wait until you get back to America. I sure would like to have a voice to put with that lovely face. I hope you don't mind me being a little sexy with you- all I know is that “woodie” was pretty hard when I saw those photos-kind of got hard just like that but I am sure you know that would happen when I saw them and I hope you are glad about it-I don't think you do mind about the little sexy stuff but everything I say is just between us.

[Need I say more.]

“As far as my accountant goes if he had seen those photos of you and the ones you sent before he would have the same reaction I did. Then who would be cyber-pussy-whipped. He's a good guy and like I said he has kept me out of trouble for a while and so that is good but he would never understand why I like a nice younger woman like you and have gone out of my way to help you even though we haven't met in person. But accountants are like that-never take a risk because it might throw their balance sheets off. You know the only sheets I am worrying about taking off-I hope.              

“It is funny when you say you would never let me down because all through this business stuff whatever was going on I think in the back of my mind I had a feeling you would not, you just seemed to be that way. Maybe it was our both growing up kind of poor, kind of from the wrong side of the tracks as they say that made me feel that way. We can take about that some other time but we should talk about it.

“You know you might know that guy Hemingway although not his name did you ever read about a story called the Old Man and the Sea where this old-time Cuban fisherman is out by himself and sees a huge fish that will put him on easy street if he can catch it and bring it back to port and sell it. He catches the fish but along the way back to port about seven things happen and when he gets to port there is nothing to sell, the fish is nothing but bones. So much for easy street…” 

You had such a great response-remember. If not here’s the way that went:

“Hello babe thank you so much again I’m glad you like my photos! I know Woodie will like it too xoxoxo! Don't mind your accountant once we meet in person we will both show him and laugh in him for calling you that way! I know you're not that kind of guy he's just bitter because you will be with a fine lady and he won't! I appreciated all your good deeds for me babe and I promise I will never let you down! Speaking of down I can show you my down stairs of course but right after I get a phone with camera xoxo! Lol really? No I don't know that person but I love to read what you been writing! We will both go to the place I wanted so much and see the still constructing church together!! I've been reading a lot of space lately just bunch of random facts about universe and galaxy! I have never been to any nice place here since I don’t have money yet I have been eating more of Philippine foods and I kind of like it its call tinolang manok and pork sisig! Lol I’m glad you learning how to text if you can you can shoot me one sometimes and I will reply back! I only have less than $10 to survive the week and I hope I can get the money by this coming week or next week once I do I will let you know and will keeping you update of my comeback! I miss talking stuff like this with you!” 

Remember too how my accountant went crazy looking for that Sun Life insurance premium invoice or there was going to be hell for me to pay (and you bailed me out by sending the copy which was hard for you do to do when you were hospital and which I haven’t forgotten about, believe me I haven’t forgotten). Here’s a refresher:

“Desperate situation-HELP

Sweetie this is why the situation is desperate and I need your help. I, you maybe, we, are in trouble about that money I loaned you out of my pocket to pay your insurance premium of $1000 or whatever it was. I told my accountant who handles both the law office and my personal financial accounts about my sending you the WU money transfer and when I told him I had lent you from my pocket (what he called “behind his back”) he flipped out-again. Said didn’t I realize that lending the dough for the insurance premiums on top of paying the medical bills and funeral expenses made it look like I had an interest in the insurance money. Make it look like I was in with you on the insurance deal since I am the guy who sent the WU money transfers. In any case lawyers involved with client’s (that was the way the previous medical and funeral expenses went on the books in the law office ) is a big no-no-not legal, not ethical and he will be forced to report that to the Massachusetts Board Of Bar Overseers-the people who make sure lawyers don’t do stuff like that. Where you could be in trouble is that you knew I was a lawyer, knew the money for the medical expenses and funeral expenses and that first time I tried to send you the insurance money where I made a mistake on the name-remember was coming from a lawyer.           

“He is not going to lose HIS job or get in trouble with the CPA (Certified Public Accountants) guys who license him so I need to get that damn insurance receipt and fast to show that I just loaned you the money to help you out. Otherwise he will be forced to turn his information over to the Bar Overseers and who knows what will happen. They do not like and there are plenty of cases about it seeing lawyers even looking like they are benefitting from third-party (you) insurance claim. I need to keep my license clean in order to practice law (and help you in the future when you get back to America and your nursing career or whatever else you want to do.

“So sweetie can you please, please, please find another computer place there must be more than one in Manila to scan that receipt and send it quickly-very quickly. You can do that sweetie right-I have stood by you and done the best I could by you but now, right now, I need you to help me out.    

“After that is done, after we can show that the insurance premium money was just a personal loan, then everything will look right and I can help you with the other stuff like the rent and all and it will just be personal and all right. You can do that for me sweetie-yes. After we get this behind us then I will help you to the best of my ability. “And you know that’s true because I have a track record of helping you that you can depend on.       

“Right now though nothing else matters but that receipt so let’s get to that. My lawyer said I shouldn’t even be communicating with you except to ask for the receipt but I felt I had to tell what I was up against so you would know how serious the situation is. I will abide by what he says though-no communication- until I get that receipt- I will be glad when this is behind us-su amigo” [Jesus.]

All of this rehashing of e-mails has a purpose though, a purpose that will make you realize what a good guy my accountant really is, how much you and I owe him, and why I am happy to be a lawyer today. I mentioned to my accountant as we were talking last night that because you were, in effect, under house arrest you couldn’t leave the hospital under penalty of arrest and incarceration in a real slammer (jail) and so couldn’t get to your bank to take care of that international money transfer issue that I mentioned above that he had solved for us by cluing us in about what BOD (Banco de Oro) wanted from you. Also that your relationship with Sun Life was thwarted when you got sick the night before you were to complete the deal and couldn’t get over to their offices to get your hands on what I then thought before you straightened me out otherwise was an insurance check you could deposit in your BOD (Banco de Oro) savings account. After you had told me that Sun Life only deals in cash pay-outs on insurance policies, even large ones like $50,000 USD (United States dollars and about 2,000, 000 Philippine pesos) I told him the same thing,

Told him that was why you couldn’t draw the dough out since you had to go there in person. That because you were in gaol (jail) you needed my help for one last time to pay off your jailers (they really are when you think about it since you, trying to act legally, can’t leave except under severe penalty). Needed me to sent you $2100 USD (United States dollars, around 9000 or 10,000 pesos right?) via Moneygram in care of your cousin Rickey, no, Jonathan, Jonathan Mateo because Rickey had either lost his driver’s license or had failed to renew it (that’s right isn’t it, lost it for speeding or something-did he, Ricky, ever get it back).

That’s when my accountant “flipped” out but also when he came back to earth and “saved” us. He told me and I quote, “ What are you crazy, didn’t you know that Moneygram  had been involved in settling a big fraud claims case a few months ago where they had let scammers use their site for illegal actions?” I said no, and that I wasn’t until recently in dealing with you up to speed on all this electronic money transfer stuff. He answered, “I wouldn’t use Moneygram in a million years.” Period.

When he settled down, after I asked him, pretty please, asked him how was I to help you if that avenue was closed off, he, once again, came up with the solution. Here is where it is good to know a few people in key places. See, as you might expect of a business accountant who works for lawyers, he deals with insurance companies all the time, so he knows, Sam Larkin, the Vice-President for International Affairs at Sun Life in America, which Sun Life in the Philippines is a subsidiary of. My accountant called Sam this morning and told him my/your/our story. No problem. Sam has ordered an agent in the Philippines, Tomas Ramos, to go to you at Saint Tomas  Monday or any day you want if Monday is no good and on giving him your insurance policy and premium invoice do whatever you need done. If you want cash or a check, done. He will arrange it. Sam suggested a check because $50, 000 USD (United States dollars, or what did I say before a couple of million Philippines pesos) is a lot of money to be carrying around the Philippines these days and he is right I think from what you have said about not going out at night or just being around that dangerous drug-infested neighborhood you live in with the batos locos hanging out right on that street you live on doing their dirty deeds just like in Manchester [the town that when Tim and Katrina first “met” on a sex site Katrina claimed she lived in ] or Lowell. Damn. If you need a ride to your bank, done. Anything you need to get you right just tell me what day and what time you want Tomas Ramos to come and take care of business I will call Tomas direct and it is done.

[Remember please that all the above is all bullshit, all set up to eventually “catch” Katrina out, or if necessary bring some kindof legal action against her knowing Tim’s wont in such matters. More likely if Katrina ever comes back to America, and that is iffy, I will be “contracted” to find her and bring her to “justice.” The less said about that possibility right now in theory the better.]     

So you can see why I like being a lawyer today. You win, I win, Angel (I think that is his name now that I think about it) wins, Jonathan and Ricky win.  My accountant, a good guy right, wins. Great news-right.              

[You now know why Tom is “on a mission,” or will be once I explain that Katrina told Tom that it was “impossible” for her to meet with Tomas Ramos, the representative from Sun Life in the Philippines that Sam Manning had arranged to meet Katrina in the hospital, no fuss, no muss because the hospital would not “let him in” where she was being held pending payment of her mounting hospital bills, brought on not by continuing care for whatever condition, unknown and never revealed to Tom, but in Catch-22 fashion be her inability to pay. That refusal, a “last straw” for Tom, since no hospital is going to refuse to let an agent in who is going to bring dough to pay them off if nothing else prompted another “lie” feast by him to finally “blow her off” pending whatever else legally or via my investigative prowess he might deem appropriate.]     

Sweetie-I hate to write a note like this but I am really up against it, or could be. I hate to ask for money from anybody since I usually have my own resources but like I said in my last e-mail I am in immediate trouble. I particularly hate to ask girls for money but I figure that we are beyond that, you are my best friend of late and I hope I am yours so it is okay. I know you would never let me down if you could help it and you already know I have not let you down when the deal when down. Another reason I don’t like asking you for money is because I don’t want you to get the idea that I am just hanging around you because you have that $50, 000 USD (United States Dollars, okay, which is what, about two million Philippine pesos, right) just sitting there waiting to be spent or invested (we can talk about that investing later which is a good idea even if like with me it ties up dough so you can’t get to it quickly sometimes).  But I figure there is no harm in trying to see if you can help me since I am the guy that got you the dough to pay the life insurance premium on your late mother’s, RIP, policy in the first place. 

[Tom had the day before written a “distressing” short e-mail about his own mounting bills which had to be paid and which thus made it impossible for him to send that couple of thousand, $2100 USD, United States Dollars, Katrina “needed” to pay out the hospital bills and the back rent. Her response “could he sent say $1500 USD.” Jesus what a vulture.] 

Here is the score and remember this stuff is only something I am telling you about to try to have you do something about to help if other things don’t work out. On May 1^st (our time, May 2^nd your time), or really May 2^nd (May 3^rd your time, right) since May 1^st falls on a Sunday this year my yearly health insurance premium of $4462. 53 USD (United States Dollars, about two hundred thousand Philippine pesos, right) is due. Yeah, I know I should pay by the month like everybody else but stuff like that, stuff that you have to pay anyway, I like to pay in one lump sum. What happens is that Harvard Pilgrim takes that out automatically from my checking account (the one I control but which my accountant monitors for tax purposes and the never-ending freaking receipts and invoices that you know he is crazy for, that makes his day for crying out loud even if he is a good guy otherwise).

The problem like I told you earlier is that with one thing and another I only have about two thousand ($2015 USD, United States Dollars, about a hundred thousand Philippine pesos, right) in the bank as of today, and that includes the one thousand bucks ($1000 USD, United States Dollars) you are not supposed to go below or they whack you with a penalty. So I am short, way short and if some dough I am expecting doesn’t come in from the various accounts (as you know, or maybe you don’t know but I will tell you now, we sent out invoices on monthly billing on the 15^th of the month [our time, the 16^th your time]) I am cooked because that bill will bounce from here to China, or maybe the Philippines anyway.

You know with my recent health problems which means I better have health insurance or go directly to the poor farm and the requirements of the Affordable Health Care Act to keep health insured (you might know that Act as Obamacare but that is the official name, okay) I cannot afford to let my health insurance lapse-even short term-since they double whack you with a premium hike and a penalty on your state/federal taxes. So I need to make sure I have dough to cover to be on the safe side by Friday April 29^th (Saturday April 30^th your time). That is why I need your help. That is why I know you will not let me down, no way, you are not built that way.  I know that already.                

Here’s the way out, here is the caper that depends on you and your help. I know you are in that dirty dungeon of a hospital, (where are you being held now - in the charity wards with the geeks and “lost souls” –damn those bastards holding you like this was the 19^th century and you were in some debtor’s prison out of a Charles Dickens novel). I know too that you have no dough to pay off your freaking mounting hospital bills since you can’t get over to Sun Life to get your hands on that real dough, that $45,000 USD in cash (United States Dollars) that will set you, your brother, your cousins Rudy and Jonathan and ME too up for a while. I know too because you told me and because you are a young woman who is both responsible enough to want to pay her bills as best she can and do stuff legally you don’t want to just “jail break” out of that hellhole. But this is what I want you to do first thing Monday morning your time (Sunday our time)-and it is perfectly legal-just go to the hospital administrator or the head of the billing/accounting department and tell them your story. Tell them (and show them that paid up invoice and the insurance policy too) you need to get out to do business with Sun Life. Let them have somebody go with you if they say they don’t trust you to come back. Tell them you will have dough, cash, dollars to pay off that hospital bill in full (don’t get pesos because as I will tell you in a minute how much I need they don’t help me in the United States, okay). Cry, flirt, go into a fit of despair, threaten them with a lawsuit, mention you have a lawyer (me) who will get to the bottom of this sordid business but make them do the right (and smart for them) thing.

With that done (with or without some escort-does it really matter to you, I hope not because you are up against it and I am too remember) and with your money safely in that BOD savings account (Banco de Oro) you can sent me say $1500 USD (United States Dollars, please), maybe $2000 USD (you know what that USD means now, right) by the best available method. A thousand ($1000 USD) might be enough if a check for $2500 USD comes in from a guy I did work for last month but figure the two numbers I quoted you-okay. You know more about all the aspects of international money transfers than I do so that is up to you-you know my name and address I think and if not I will sent it to you after you do this wonderful deed. I know you are a good girl and that you can do this for me, please. But I need it by Friday okay. You can do this, I know you can and if for some reason I don’t need the dough I will let you know before Friday because like I said I don’t like the idea that you might get the idea that I am just looking for a hand-out since right now you have a ton of dough just waiting to help you out and I am up against it.                     

If there is a snag on this perfectly reasonable plan for some reason here is what I ask you to do. Doesn’t your cousin Rudy, no, Ricky owe me five hundred buck ($500 USD) from back a couple of months ago when I sent him dough from Washington to cover a speeding ticket or some problem he had. Tell him I will settle for say $250 or $300 USD and forget the rest. Your cousin Jonathan sounds like a helpful guy can you hit him up for say another $250-300 USD (maybe he and Ricky have to do it in Philippine pesos but that is okay I will take that and convert it here). How about your brother, I forget his name but I think it was Angel, or maybe I hope he is an angel, he must have few bucks saved up somewhere, say maybe $100 USD (or the peso equivalent). Maybe they can sell some books, or a television or something. Of course with Johnathan and our angel brother I will pay them back-asap-you know that, right. Let’s say they can put together $1000 USD together- that would help. Like I say you know all the money transfer routes so I will leave it up to you what way you sent it but please do so by Friday-okay.

I know you can do that first plan sweetie-do it for your good friend okay and when you get back to America believe me you won’t regret it-no at all.

**************

Lawyer Timothy Clary, despite due diligence and the hire of a private investigator, me,  to “track her down like a dog” as he put it to me after, long after he got wise to what she was pulling on him, never heard about or from her again after that e-mail. Surprise-surprise.  Good riddance-that’s me, Phil Larkin talking.