Chapter 8

We spent the next two days getting ready for the trip west. Pete and Doug did not have much to do to get ready, so they left us with a promise to call every couple of days to tell us of their progress.

Before they left, Doug had called the woman he knew who was the computer wizard. She agreed to visit our condo to discuss possible employment. Currently, she was employed by a bank as an IT (Information Technology) specialist, but the job was no challenge and she would like to find something more interesting.

The woman showed up and talked first with Alice with me out of the room. I could hear what they were saying, but I pretended that the conversation was private. Alice called me in, and I told her what we wanted her to do: attack the computers of the Russian Mafia to bring them down. Another job was to help us get our gold converted into cash and safely stowed out of the country so that we could finance our attack on the Russian Mafia. She was especially intrigued when I told her that the gold was stolen from the New England branch of the Russian Mafia, and most of them did not know that it was missing, yet.

Agnes Warren was not married or otherwise attached, so she was clear from that aspect. She was all for a bit of adventure that looked to be safe, so she joined us. She was also to be paid $1,500 per month with no benefits, but the IRS would know nothing about her new job. She had her own computer at home and it was a top of the line rig that she had assembled herself from components. Well, actually, it was one step behind the latest from Intel, so she was ecstatic when I offered to let her build what she dreamed of as long as it was done in this condo. Frankly, until I knew her better, I was reluctant to let her take the Mafia records out of my sight. If she were careless with them, we could all wind up dead very quickly.

That was settled very quickly, and Agnes resigned her job at the bank. She told them that she had a personal emergency that required her to relocate to San Diego. That was an adequate excuse, and she left the bank on good terms. Agnes started immediately to accumulate the parts she needed for her new computer. The total cost ran over $5,000, but that was a drop in the bucket of our resources, and worth every penny if she could do what I hoped to the Mafia computers.

The first thing I asked her to do was to take a look at the computer we took from Alexei's office to see if there was any more of his money that we could steal. Agnes found about $11million in a Barbados bank that she thought that she could filch. The necessary passwords were stored on the computer with the deposit records. What I needed to do was to travel to Ottawa to open an account for a few thousand dollars. The next step was to transfer it to an account in Freeport, Grand Bahama. Once that account was established and the necessary protocols arranged so that we could access them by computer, Agnes could begin transferring the funds. The actual transfer would only take a few seconds after our account was established. I promised to get started on that right away.

Three days later, I returned from Ottawa with the account established and the information Agnes needed to start transferring the money. Only seconds later, we were $11million richer. Damn, aren't computers a wonder?

This still did not solve the problem of what to do with all of the gold we had on hand. I decided to move it to Freeport and sell it there. The money could be deposited in another account in our bank there. Agnes, Alice, and I settled down to brainstorm the details of how to move the gold to Freeport.

We came up with a simple plan, but it had a lot of parts. The first thing I needed to do was to form a company, Sunshine Enterprises, Inc. Purely from a convenience point of view, I would form the corporation in Massachusetts. Alice, Agnes, Doug, Pete, and I would be the necessary officers. To celebrate the formation of the new company, we would have an excursion to Freeport. I would rent a couple of suites in a fancy hotel in Freeport, and we would have a ball. Of course, I would use some of our week in Freeport to take care of the gold business.

Such an excursion would require that I hire a private plane to ferry us to Freeport and back. We, especially the women, would have gobs of baggage. However, each piece of baggage would contain some of our gold. A 40-pound limit in each suitcase would require something like 12 suitcases. Allowing two for each man, that would mean only three suitcases for each woman. No woman of means was going on such a trip with only three suitcases, so we should have no problem getting $10million worth of gold moved in one pass.

Okay, that was the basic plan, but it would have to wait until Doug and Pete returned from California. That might run as long as a month, but that was soon enough to make the scheme work. I contacted a lawyer I knew and had the paperwork started on forming Sunshine Enterprises, Inc. I was going to be CEO, Alice would be CFO, Agnes would be Chief of IT, and we would find suitable jobs for Doug and Pete when they returned. Unless plans changed, Sunshine Enterprises, Inc. was only going to last less than a year before going belly-up from poor management.

We managed to keep busy for the six weeks it took for Doug and Pete to return to Boston. We held a little party at a local restaurant to welcome Hank Johnson and Gus Kilgore to our crusade. Following dinner and a few drinks, we adjourned to the condo for a general planning session.

The subject of the gold came up, and we discussed the trip to Grand Bahama. Gus pointed out that he had no objection to taking a vacation in Freeport, but he wondered if we really wanted to move the gold out of the country. If our group was formed to fight crime, weren't we being hypocritical to try to hide our money from the government? With over $20million on hand and more expected, it seemed to him that we could afford to pay the corporate or even the individual taxes and still have plenty left over.

That thought brought all conversation to a halt while we realized that Gus had a valid point. Dammit, it had been so much fun to scheme away at hiding the gold, but we were no better than the people we were fighting if we did not scrupulously obey the law. Okay, we would declare the gold as corporate income, along with the money we managed to steal from the crooks. There was no problem with the cash, but we wondered how we were going to handle the gold. We agreed that I, as CEO (Chief Executive Officer) of Sunshine Enterprises, Inc; Alice as CFO (Chief Financial Officer); and Gus as GC (General Counselor) would visit our lawyer friend and have him advise us on what to do with the gold. I called his answering service immediately for an appointment.

The next morning when I talked over the phone with the lawyer, he said that the incorporation papers were ready for our signature, and we could cover everything with a meeting in his office at 3:30 that afternoon. Though all of our signatures were not required, all seven of us showed up for the signing and creation of our corporation. While there, we talked about the gold problem. To our surprise, all we had to do was to sell the gold to whomever would buy it and deposit the money in a bank. From then on, it was just money owned by the corporation.

Therefore, the next morning, Alice called Monex to fined out how much gold they would take off our hands and what they would pay for it. Monex agreed to buy everything we had at the current price for gold and would send a courier to pick it up. Hell, that was so easy that it was almost an anticlimax.

That afternoon, an armored truck showed up, and six armed guards took the money from our closet to the Monex office. We donated the chests to make transportation easier. When everything was taken care of, we had sold $8,640,972 in bulk gold. We kept the Krugerrands in case something unusual came up.

We transferred the approximately $11million we had in Freeport to the same bank in Boston and wound up with a total of $19,047,776 in our corporate account. We were expecting a hell of a tax bill to the state and federal government, but our consciences were clear, and that was what counted!