Sedona Law 6 by Dave Daren (best non fiction books of all time .TXT) 📗

“We worked with a lot of cargo companies,” he said. “We had a freight company we worked with a lot. Our job was to accept and load the materials into containers and get them out by rail usually. It was a good job, I liked it.”

“And how did you get involved with Mr. Levinson?” she asked.

“I never met Mr. Levinson,” he said. “I have heard of him. But, I usually worked…”

He hesitated and squirmed in his seat and looked at me pleadingly.

“The man I worked with was local,” he rephrased.

I raised an eyebrow. He wasn’t going to get away with not naming names, but I found it interesting that he thought he could.

“Two years ago,” he said, “I got into some pretty bad debt. I owed a lot of people a lot of money.”

“And what was the nature of this debt?”

Everyone in the room could tell exactly what the nature of this debt was, and I wasn’t about to let him admit it.

“That’s not relevant,” I said.

“Yeah,” Tony squirmed in his seat. “So, I didn’t have the money, and I thought the guys I owed money to were going to kill me. They tied me down and they almost cut off my toe, but they didn’t. They said instead, I could work off my debt by doing a job for a client.”

“And who was this client, do you know?” Winslow asked.

“They didn’t tell me at first,” Tony said. “They said I would be approached by a man soon. Then they let me go. Two days later, I was in a bar, and I was approached by…”

He looked like he was going to be sick.

“Do I have to do this?” Tony turned to me.

“Unless you want to go to jail,” I said.

He turned to Agent Winslow and looked her dead in the eye.

“Roy Oberland,” he spat out. “Roy told me that he needed me to pick up a crate, and make sure it didn’t go through inspection before it went out. He gave the address and that was it.”

“Did you know what was in the shipment?” Winslow asked.

“Not in the beginning,” he said. “I went to the address he gave me, it was at Irwin Montague’s house. Irwin said it was an art piece, and then he told me to load it and get it out. I didn’t think it was that big of a deal. So, I loaded it, and made sure it bypassed the inspection and then got the shipment out. And I thought that it was over.”

“So you did additional shipments then?” Agent Winslow asked.

“Many,” he admitted. “A few weeks later, Roy came to me and said that the shipment had made it to the client, and Irwin was pleased. Then Roy handed me an envelope with five thousand dollars. He said it was to pick up another shipment, and that I would get five thousand more once the shipment was complete. So, I did another one, and another one, and another one.”

“How many shipments did you do for Roy Oberland?” Agent Winslow asked.

“It’s hard to say,” Tony answered. “After a few months, Roy said that Irwin’s name was getting hot, and so he wanted me to pick up items and create shipments, and get them past the inspection point. That was a lot harder. So I started picking up jewels, and elephant tusks, and a lot of other things. I would load them in a crate and get them to the address.”

“Drugs?” Agent Winslow asked.

“No,” Tony shook his head. “Never drugs. Sometimes it was antique items that I knew were stolen, but it was never drugs for some reason.”

“And did you know what was being done with these things?” Agent Winslow asked.

“They were being shipped to clients for a long time,” he said. “But, then it started changing about a year ago. I was told that all the shipments were going to some rich guy’s house in Mexico.”

“Mr. Levinson?” Agent Winslow said.

“Yeah,” he said. “He had a house in Cancun. We started shipping the packages out there.”

“Do you know who Kelsi Matthews is?” Agent Winslow asked.

Tony sighed long. “Fuck.”

He rubbed his face. “Yeah, I know Kelsi. That was Roy’s girl.”

“But she was married to James Matthews,” Agent Winslow prompted.

Tony snorted. “Not the way Roy saw it. He thought she should be with him, and so he was going to get her back. That’s why he...that’s why he got involved with Brent Levinson in California. He was going to become a millionaire, by screwing over her husband.”

“How was he going to do that?” Agent Winslow asked.

“He created a contract with James Matthews,” Tony said. “That would bind him to James for five years. Then, he got involved with this Brent guy, and made a lot of money. He told James he was going to make him famous, and got him the deal with Brent’s record company, La Vista. But Brent was crooked, so Roy made sure his name wasn’t anywhere on anything.”

“So the contract was with James only?” Agent Winslow asked.

“Yeah,” Tony said.

“We have a copy of that contract,” I said as I pulled it up on my phone. “We can verify that Mr. Matthews’ name was exclusively on the contract.

Agent Winslow nodded. “I’ll see that when you’re ready. Go ahead Mr. Sanchez. Then what happened?”

“It was a great idea, really,” Tony said. “So, Roy turned the band into a smuggling front, without any trace of being involved. And as soon as Roy made millions off it, he was going to turn them all in. Then, he and Kelsi would live happily ever after.”

I pulled up the contract and showed it to Agent Winslow, who made a note of it and handed it back to me.

“There was only one