Ring Of Deceit: Inside the Biggest Sports and Banking Scandal in History by Bruce Henderson & Dean Allison

Author:Bruce Henderson & Dean Allison [Henderson, Bruce]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FICTION/General
Publisher: BruceHendersonBooks
Published: 2014-02-03T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Ben Lewis could not remember ever being so sick. He had caught a cold toward the end of October, and within a couple of weeks it had gone into his chest. The busy traveling schedule—working all week and sleeping on the plane Friday and Saturday nights en route from one fight to another—had taken its toll. The morning after the Norton-Cobb fight in Texas, they had flown from San Antonio to Detroit for the Kenty-Fernandez bout, and he had been so tired when they arrived that he went to his room and slept right through the fight. It was the same almost every week. Each Sunday night he returned from the weekend trip exhausted, and then his alarm would go off at 5:30 a.m. on Monday morning for the start of another nerve-wracking week at the bank.

Finally, he started running a temperature in the low hundreds and went to the doctor, who told him he was “burning the candle at both ends.” The doctor ordered bed rest, but Ben told him that was impossible. He had to go to work. The doctor had heard that before; a lot of his patients were workaholics. Then Ben developed pneumonia. That did put him in bed, flat on his back. There he got little rest for worrying. He knew that somehow he had to get to the bank in time to pass the necessary branch settlement entries to keep the embezzlement going. And he was the only one who could do it.

More money than ever before was being siphoned from Wells Fargo in order to fatten the MAPS accounts for the show at Madison Square Garden. Harold was giving Lewis regular updates on the fighters who had agreed to sign and how much money he needed to conclude each deal. Sometimes he required cash—once, when Beverly Drive was short, Smith had sent a limo around to various Wells Fargo branches to collect sacks full of greenbacks. The deposits to the various accounts had been nonstop, as had the expenses. Just the other day, for example, Lewis had sent the required deposit to the Waldorf-Astoria to rent a ballroom for the Lewis and Smith Enterprises dinner show featuring Tony Orlando that was to precede the big fight. The new money for the upcoming card already totaled in the millions. Ben saw the “This Is It” card as his big chance—maybe the last—to clear the books and become legit again. Sick or not, there could be no stopping now.

After missing an entire week of work, he had no choice but to drag himself down to the bank Friday evening. His timing had to be perfect. He couldn’t be seen by Brian Feeley or anyone else in operations. It would look suspicious. They usually went home between 6:15 and 6:30 p.m. on Fridays. He had to show up after that but before the 7 p.m. armored car pickup, which took interbranch mail as well as cash and other negotiables. That left him precious few minutes to encode the latest batch of branch settlement tickets and stuff them into the outgoing-mail bag.

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