The Wanted and The Unwanted
By Roger Harrison
On April 19, 2001, a man named Alyn Waage was arrested at the airport in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, with $4.5 million in his briefcase. Waage had boarded the Learjet intending to fly to Belize to pick up an employee who worked at the mail forwarding office there, then fly on to Vallarta where his company, the Tri-West Investment Club, was based, and then to Latvia where he intended to buy a bank he dealt with. The first two steps of this schedule he completed, but he wanted to deposit some of the money in the bank himself so he took a few million and stuffed it in his luggage. When the jet landed and the customs officials asked to look through his bags, the jig was up. Within two weeks the FBI, the Mexican federal police, Interpol, the Costa Rican justice department, the Canadian RCMP and several other commercial crime divisions had all come to the same conclusion that Tri-West, of which I was an employee, was in reality nothing but a pyramid scheme.
Tri-West offered what we called prime bank debentures on our website.
In addition to the one-hundred-and-twenty-percent return on investors money which we offered, paid monthly, we also gave each investor fifteen percent of whatever their referrals invested, plus fifteen percent of their referrals dividends as well. With incentives like that we didnt need to sell a thing ourselves, as people were out spreading the word to their friends and neighbors from Australia to Zimbabwe in order to help them out and get a piece of the action at the same time. Some members had only put in a thousand or so of their own money but had brought in hundreds of thousands of dollars in referrals. That got them into trouble when the club was shut down after Waages arrest and the authorities checked into exactly who was selling these imaginary securities. While some people made a killing with us, others lost their lifes savings.
I was at Waages estate in Costa Rica on the day he was arrested, having spent that morning with him and another man counting the days take. It amounted to around $1.2 million. The amount of money that we made as posted on the US Department of Justice website (www.usdoj.gov/criminal/cybercrime/triwest1.htm) was $60 million US, but that seems pretty low to me. If anybody were to ask me how much I think we really made, and by the way nobody ever has, Id put it much higher than that; more than a hundred million at least, and some people I worked with estimated it to be double that. Either way, we made a lot of money. And it showed.
Our lifestyle was crazy, really. When we went out for dinner, Waages sister would come out of the accounting office where she worked and look around the room to see how many people wanted to come along. She was short like her brother, a real firecracker and a lot of fun to be with. Shed hold her thumb and forefinger apart a little ways, judging how much cash to take out of the safe. This much, I think, shed say. When you talk about money in terms of how high the stack of bills is for a night on the town, you know youre in a different world. She traded her Japanese SUV in for a Lincoln Navigator because her golf clubs wouldnt fit in the back of the former. Last I heard, she was no longer wanted by the FBI, but Im sure they wouldnt mind a chat with her if she decided to pay them a visit.
About two weeks after I arrived in Mexico, Alyn took us all on a shopping trip to Guadalajara. There were about twelve of us, so half flew there in the Learjet and half flew back. The others chose one of several vehicles that were always around our property manager, hired to look after staffing and maintenance of all the houses and condos Alyn owned, also owned a car rental business and waiting at the hotel were three Suburban limousines to chauffeur us around. On our first night there we all met up in his suite for a mixer, where we admired the view from the rooftop. I hadnt been paid yet, and he knew that. He took me aside and said, If you see anything you like, let me know and Ill get it for you. We can work out the details later.
He was a decent chef, and entertained us on more than one occasion. Hed dismiss the cook and house staff and set about steaming an enormous platter of Alaskan king crab legs which he had flown in just for him. Wed sit around the dinner table drinking and watching the sun set over the ocean and talking about the beach, his yacht, the properties in Costa Rica he was buying, or the next adventure. Sometimes wed catch up on the news about Edmonton, Alberta, the city where most of us were from.
You may ask why we were from the same city, and youd be in good company. I wondered the same thing myself when I arrived. I mean, how do you get a job like this anyway? One of the questions that hopeful expats-to-be are faced with more than any other is, How am I going to support myself overseas? And if you happen to be in possession of a portable talent such as, say, massage therapy, you can hang your shingle anywhere and meet your bills. If you have an ear always tuned a little bit to the unique, however, the opportunity youre looking for may just drop into your lap regardless of what you do. In my case, I was housesitting for my mother and her husband when his brother called. We caught up on each others news, and when he heard that I was in a deep depression over the loss of my girlfriend and unemployed to boot, he immediately suggested that I join him at a secret but lucrative job in Mexico. He didnt need to offer twice because it didnt matter much to me what the job was anyway. A change of pace and scenery was exactly what the doctor would have ordered.
This touches on one of the reasons why most of us never fully believed that Tri-West was a fraudulent operation until we saw it in the papers: If you were to run a mega-million-dollar con in a faraway tropical city, would you hire a complete stranger to help you run it? Probably not. The number of people involved in scamming from the Enrons and Worldcoms and Tycos is actually fairly small. You want to keep your illegalities unknown. Even though I was a referral, there were still two degrees of separation between myself and Alyn so he didnt know exactly who I was, who he was getting. Not only that, I thought we were fairly easy to find, and any serious investigation wouldnt have needed very much time to shut us down. Investors sent their money to Belize, from where it was couriered to us in Puerto Vallarta. So, all an investigator had to do would be to show up at the Belize address and slip a few bills to the right person to find out where the envelopes were sent to. Once that was established, it would be easy to hop a flight to PV and wait for our messenger at the couriers office and, once she arrived, to follow her up to Alyns house, the 15,000-square-foot mansion which we called the Shack. And that never happened.
It isnt as though none of us had our suspicions, though. We all talked about how strange the whole situation was. Alyn threw money around like there was no tomorrow and took good care of his employees, but we were never allowed to invest in the Club and we werent allowed to refer anybody in. There were a lot of things that didnt look quite right, but that in itself wasnt proof of anything. On my first day of work we had a chat up on the patio where he said, Ive been told that you asked if this is a scam. Thats right, I answered. Well, whats a scam? he asked me, which was an evasive but legitimate question. A scam, in the vernacular anyway, conjures up pictures of people expecting a return and getting none, but it didnt take long before I learned how hard we worked to pay our members on time. That was, of course, the secret to our success.
After a time I was promoted to run my own project. Alyn wanted an office in Costa Rica to take advantage of a better banking and business climate there, so he bought himself an estate outside the capital, San Jose, and set about acquiring real estate for us employees as well. At about this time we began to switch from paying our members by check to paying them by Visa debit cards linked to bank accounts in Costa Rica, and this is what I was put in charge of. I processed the Visa applications, liaised with the Costa Rica office which coordinated the cards, and gave reports to our accounting staff regarding who had elected to be paid by Visa and who still wanted a check. We wanted to move away from the paper, because for every check issued, there was a total of twenty dollars worth of service fees. We would eat half that cost and the members absorbed the other half, but that still meant that investors who had put in a thousand dollars and who were expecting a hundred dollars a month return were only getting ninety. By switching to a Visa card, the members could spend their dividends twenty-four hours after they went live in the bank account, and without the service fees. Of course, none of that mattered after the evening of April 19, 2001. Following the initial arrests, we were left wondering what was going to happen to us. We had been told that TW invested its money in turn with a group in Panama which did the actual trading, so none of us really believed that what Alyn had been jailed for had any connection with it. At first, the newspapers printed a story saying theyd arrested a drug kingpin, and we knew that wasnt the case. Then they printed another story saying that our club was a front for a money-laundering operation, something we found equally amusing. Finally, however, a story in the Guadalajara Reporter which I read over morning coffee at my favorite café in Vallarta brought home the truth. Tri-West was a pyramid scheme, a simple but illegal scenario where newer investors money is used to pay off others who bought in earlier under the pretense that the money in question is a dividend on their investment. Now it was every man for himself. There was supposed to be a second-in-command among us but he did not step up to the plate, not disappearing but not offering any leadership either. We later heard that the reason was because he already had outstanding warrants against him for some unrelated offences in the States and figured he was attracting enough attention to himself already. Some of us scattered into hotels, convinced (with good reason) that our houses were being watched. Some ran down to Costa Rica. Personally, I did the opposite at first. I came up from Costa Rica back to Mexico to find some fellow newly-ex-employees at the airport trying to find a flight to somewhere innocuous. Too scared to stay in their respective homes, they were renting hotel rooms and wondering what to do. Their nervousness was infectious. It reached a peak when I took a cab ride with a driver who had his newspaper open to a story about Tri-West which featured a picture of Alyn and mentioned the name of my house. Like many large residences there, its name was painted on a tile set beside the gate. Thankfully the driver didnt notice it when he dropped me off, or he hadnt read the article yet, or both. Nevertheless, it was obvious that my house was known to the police and it would only be a matter of time before they came to have a chat with me. I ducked in to pack, then flew back to Costa Rica via Los Angeles and Guatemala City to lie low for a while and figure out what to do next. The mercenary truth is that none of us wanted the ride to stop just yet, at least as long as the possibility existed that our boss might be released in the near future and that we could resume business as usual or, failing that, finally hear the truth from Alyn himself and say goodbye. We were a small group and had bonded if for no other reason than the uniqueness of our small and secret elite, though on a personal level in any other situation most of us wouldnt have cared for each others company. I spent a few weeks tooling around the Costa Rican countryside and decided to return to PV to see if I could make a go of it there, but in the end I dropped the whole idea and came back to my house in rural Alberta. For some time after I left, I followed the comments of various investors on discussion boards on the internet. Some of the conspiracy theories and conclusions drawn by people who had no real idea what we were all about amused me, although I took issue with those who felt that they had been intentionally conned by those who had referred them in. If they had stopped to think for one minute, they would have realized that if Alyn had been arrested a month later than he was, those very same people would have had time to refer others in, and now they would be the ones accused. The events that happened after the April arrests are worthy of another book in themselves. I touch on these events on my website, www.thewantednovel.com, but they really deserve deep investigation by a good journalist to make them come to life. And even though this all happened a few years ago, as of March of this year the Mexican police were still arresting people who had no real culpability in the scam at all. My suspicion is that their intentions are somewhat different than simply bringing alleged criminals to justice, but I suppose time will tell. I know the people they picked up, and I think theyre wasting their time. This tale has all the makings of a hit movie palm trees, mansions by the sea, underground millions, even a haunting love story. Living an adventure is something you will never forget, and it can happen totally unexpectedly. It creeps up and envelopes you and tentatively helps itself to the air around you, and before you know it you are somewhere else, someone else, and the life you have left behind seems so far away that to return to it feels as though you would somehow upset the delicate balance of the universe and yet to stay seems a bit too much of a stretch of who you are. So you find yourself in limbo, living in a strange land, grasping onto what you can with both hands, easing yourself in but knowing theres no such thing as easing yourself into a life youve already agreed to jump into with both feet. When your overseas employment offer comes in, I give you my congratulations. Maybe it will turn out to be even more exciting than you thought.
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The Tri-West Investment Club was one of the largest internet frauds ever perpetrated, taking in more than $60 million from 15,000 people in 60 countries around the world. Roger Harrison is the author of The Wanted and the Unwanted, a fictionalized account of his days working for the infamous Tri-West Investment Club.
www.thewantednovel.com
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Happy Hunting.
PI
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