dontravis.com
blog post #330
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| Artist: Maria Fanning |
I’m constantly
getting surprised by the blog world. I’ve told you of 3,000+ page-view hits from
Israel and 1,500 hits from Russia and 1000+ hits from Brazil. Last month, I got
almost 4,000 hits from Hong Kong, and on the twenty-fifth of this month, 4,480 hits from Israel again. I’ve tried to analyze the key words from the posts that
generated such interest and cannot find a pattern. Maybe someone can explain it
to me.
In January of
this year, I gave you a look at the opening of my sixth book in the BJ Vinson
mystery series called THE VOXLIGHTNER
SCANDAL. I now have a cover for the novel and should have a publication date
soon. In order to show off the book cover, I am compelled to share more
of the novel with you. The excerpt below opens Chapter 2. The characters “on stage” are BJ Vinson and Lt. Gene Enriquez of
the Albuquerque Police Department.
*****
THEVOXLIGHTNER
SCANDAL
I managed to pry Gene away
from APD headquarters to have lunch the next day at the Courthouse Café. As
usual he was rushed until I prevailed upon him to sit back and take a deep
breath.
“Okay. Now what?” he demanded.
“Now eat a lunch without
gulping it down and take time to smell the roses.”
“Grease,” he grumped. “BJ, all
I smell in here is grease.”
I knew exactly what was riding
his back. “They still pressing you to move up?”
He nodded and snorted
simultaneously. “Yeah. I’m not gonna accept it.”
“Are you thinking of yourself,
or are you thinking of Glenda and the kids?”
He bristled. “I make a decent
living. Take care of them okay.”
“Face it, Gene, you’re already
an administrator. When was the last time you went out and worked a case?”
“That case we worked together last
year. What did you call it?”
“Abaddon’s Locusts.” I eyed my
former APD partner. “You’re avoiding the issue. What are your options. You turn
down a promotion, you slam a lid on your career. You’ve got in your twenty, so
you can put in your papers. Or you can accept what they’re offering and
continue to build on what you have.”
He scratched his chin before
dry washing his face. “What the hell would I do if I retired? Go crazy, that’s
what I’d do. Six months tops.”
“Charlie and I talked it over.
You can join us. Vinson, Weeks and Enriquez. How does that sound?”
“Not bad.”
"It’s there if you want it, but
personally, I think you’re too much of a cop to be happy outside the
department.”
“I hear you and Paul met with
Roy Guerra on the Belhaven thing.”
“Yep. Have you called it yet?”
“Homicide. Autopsy showed he
was hit in the head with a blunt object before he caught fire. No smoke in his
lungs. He was dead before he lit up.”
“Will you have any heartburn
if Paul and I work with Guerra?”
“Naw. He’s new to his shield
and can use the help.”
“Do I read anything into the
fact he doesn’t have a partner?”
“Roy’s a quart in a pint pot.
He’s going to turn out to be a good detective. We’ll get him a seasoned partner
as soon as I find a good match.”
“He and Paul both believe
Belhaven’s killing ties into his promise to reveal the killer in the
Voxlightner debacle.”
“What’s your take?” he asked.
“Things point in that
direction, but I try to keep an open mind. Refresh my memory. Wasn’t Everett
Kent murdered while looking into the scandal because his law partner Zachary
Greystone was involved in incorporating the venture?”
“Not only did Greystone handle
the paperwork incorporating the company, he was promoting it big time,” Gene
said. “Had a hand in setting up the list of initial investors.”
“How was Kent killed?” I
asked.
“Shot to death in his office
on the fourth floor of the Central New Mexico Bank Building. Working late alone
in the office.”
“Must have been someone he
trusted if he admitted his killer after hours. When was this?”
Gene stretched to ease his
back. “End of February or beginning of March 2004.”
“Not long before Voxlightner
and Stabler took a powder,” I noted.
While munching on tacos, we
reconstructed as much of the old scandal as we could recall. In the remembering
it was dry, boring stuff, but when bits and pieces had screamed headlines in
successive editions of the Albuquerque
Journal like some Hollywood serial, the scandalous affair gripped all of
New Mexico and half of Arizona in its thrall.
The whole thing began when a
Nevada mining engineer named Dr. Walther Stabler claimed copper tailings just
across the Arizona border in the Morenci district contained gold. Marshal
Voxlightner’s son Barron hauled a ton of dirt to the New Mexico Institute of
Mining & Technology for a series of fire assays. The tests consistently
showed commercial amounts of gold and silver. Especially appealing was the fact
the material did not have to be extracted from the ground because the ore was
pre-mined copper tailings.
The mine owners realized the
dumps possibly contained commercially valuable trace minerals, but they also
faced local pressure to get rid of some five million tons—and growing—of ugly
piles of dirt. Therefore they were willing to sell the material for $1.00 a
ton, the cost of removal and transportation to be borne by the purchaser.
After a month of positive
assays—some of which were performed on samples selected by prospective
investors at random from the seemingly unending piles of dirt—Marshall Voxlightner,
the retired oilman with a solid reputation—put in $250,000 seed money and
agreed to lend his family name to the project. His son promptly incorporated
the Voxlightner Precious Metals Recovery Corporation and put his team together.
He and his group matched the old man’s $250,000, and the venture was off and
running.
“How far did they get with the
actual project?” I asked.
“After the initial offering
sold out, they bought all five million tons of copper tailings,” Gene said. “At
the same time a couple of guys—Greystone and Pillsner, if I remember right—were
working on permits for the mill to be located down in the Socorro area.”
“Pillsner? I forgot Wick was
involved.” Hardwick Pillsner, a local businessman, made his living—and a pile
of money—as a promoter. He’d facilitated the buying and selling of various
local businesses. Putting together the Voxlightner operation would have been
right up his alley. “Was he an officer?” I asked.
“He’s the one who introduced Stabler
to Voxlightner. Helped put it all together. But he wasn’t even a board member.
He had a policy against taking a hand in operating anything he helped form. He
just took a stock position for his efforts in this one, I understand,” Gene
said.
“So Wick lost potential, not
money.”
“He’d disagree. He considers
time as money.”
“Can’t argue with the logic,”
I said. “My time is all I have to sell. How much was the initial offering?”
As Gene looked at me through
tired brown eyes, it occurred to me why we worked so well together. What he
couldn’t remember, I could. And our memories stretched back a long way. “What
happened to the tailings after the company folded?”
He assumed a thoughtful look. “As
I recall the Greystone firm attempted to get the company’s money back and were
met with a suit to remove the dumps as agreed under the sales contract. Greystone
eventually settled for getting back something like a quarter for every dollar.”
“So the investors recovered a
million and a quarter of their money. Funny. I don’t recall shareholders getting
anything back.”
“The recovery was used to pay
off other obligations of the corporation under bankruptcy proceedings.
Investors got nothing.” Gene glanced my way. “Did you lose a bundle?”
“A bundle to me at the time. I
was an APD cop, remember?”
“With a few mil in the bank.”
“I never touched any of the
trust money. The VPMR investment just ruined me personally for a couple of
years.”
Over the dregs of our meal we
continued to reconstruct the scandal… the crime, really. In early 2004 VPMR’s
problems came to light when board members expressed concern over the rapid rate
of heavy expenditures. Money was flowing like oil from one of Marshall
Voxlightner’s gushers, and red flags began to wave. The trucking company moving
ore from Arizona halted work because of nonpayment. The School of Mines lab
wasn’t paid for the last batch of assays. Wick Pillsner complained of unpaid
rent for the building he rented the corporation on East Lomas.
Kent Everett dealt the
nastiest blow when he filched some of the copper tailing material and took it
to an independent lab for assay. Traces of gold and silver and even platinum
showed up, but not in commercial quantities. He then filed suit in District
court—as a stockholder—for a complete accounting by an independent arbitrator.
Within a week, he was shot in the back of the head in his office.
But the damage was done. An
investigation was under way and couldn’t be stopped. Then Barron Voxlightner
and Dr. Walther Stabler vanished without a trace. They were last seen huddling
together over a conference table in corporate headquarters on a Monday night in
March 2004. The next day the Journal’s headline
screamed something over $40,000,000 of the company funds were missing. Some was
traced to the payment of phony accounts, some to bank transfers overseas and a
series of cash withdrawals. In retrospect suspicious activity reports should
have been filed by the bank, but the principals backing the company were highly
respected men with proven business acumen. No such reports were filed.
The FBI moved quickly after
the disappearances, arresting company COO John Hightower, and casting suspicion
over the other officers and members of the company’s board of directors.
Eventually Hightower was revealed as a dupe and never prosecuted. His
responsibilities were for operations not finances. Doubtless he was lax in the
performance of his duties but not criminally so. His reputation in shreds, he
moved out of state, no doubt carefully watched by the feds wherever he went.
After the disappearances,
authorities concentrated on the search for Voxlightner and Stabler. The locals pursued
the murderer of Everett Kent with just about as much success as with the rest
of the mess. Despite a massive manhunt for the missing men, the investigation
went nowhere. The courts took over the dissolution of the bankrupt corporation,
and eventually things died out. To the best of our recollection the whole thing
from start to finish lasted just over six months—from early September 2003 to
mid-March 2004. Just like that, some $50,000,000 had been sucked out of the
fragile economy of New Mexico.
*****
I
know this was a little long, but I hope you stuck with me to this point. I also
hope you found it interesting.
Abaddon’s Locusts,
the
fifth in the BJ Vinson mystery series, received several positive reviews. I
hope you’ll consider buying a copy. If you do, please post a review of the book
on Amazon. Each one helps… as do letters to the publisher.
My
mantra: Keep on reading. Keep on writing.
You have something to say… so say it.
My
personal links:
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www.facebook.com/donald.travis.982
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@dontravis3
Buy
links to Abaddon’s Locusts:
See
you next week.
Don
New Posts are
published at 6:00 a.m. each Thursday.
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