No Rules, Ridge King [the snowy day read aloud TXT] 📗

Miguel. My face might be fucked up, OK?—but I’m keeping my ass in shape.”

* * *

Severo made his way to the main office of the Cambio Xtra operation at the corner of Red Road and Okeechobee Road in Hialeah and parked in one of the four reserved spaces around back. He took his valise and went in through the back door.

They had a two-floor operation headquartered here and the place fairly buzzed with activity.

No sleepy Cubans drinking daiquiris here, thought Severo with a smile as his ears took in the noises of an operation running at full tilt. If Cambio Xtra had been a ship, they’d be churning ahead at full speed.

He took the stairs to the second floor two at a time and shortly found his way into Vanessa Campos’s office. She was on the phone ordering supplies. She hung up.

“Ah, Severo! There you are.”

“Here I am,” he smiled, lifting the valise and placing it gently on her desk. “And here’s something to keep the girls busy for a while.”

Most of the employees at Cambio Xtra (as well as there numerous other fronts) had no idea the Oyebanjos were involved in schemes to defraud the U.S. of millions of dollars. Some of them could add 2+2, of course, but to them what the Oyebanjos were doing was simple Medicare fraud. Miami was the center of this kind of illegal activity, and everybody working for Cambio Xtra or MediClínica, in whatever capacity, knew someone or had a relative or friend who was engaged in the same activity. Just not on the grand scale pursued and perfected by the Oyebanjos.

But Vanessa was one of them. She’d been in Miami for about ten years and had been assigned to the Oyebanjo operation by Fernando Pozo himself.

“The money’s piling up again, Severo,” said Vanessa, shaking her head like having stacks of cash was the worst possible thing that could happen to someone.

“It’s OK, Vanessa. “I’ll come get a load as soon as the office closes and get it out of here. We have a guy taking $27 million to the Bahamas next week or two.”

“Well, get them to hurry. At this rate, we’ll have another $20 million in two months.”

“Don’t worry—we’ll get it out of here. We met these guys Howard and Derek took us to and they’re going to handle it.”

“OK.”

“I’ve got to go.”

“OK. We’ll process these checks over the next couple of days.”

As Severo went back to his car, he thought the system was working quite smoothly.  One business generating massive amounts of fraudulent revenue had to have a place to process the checks received (or money wired into its account). If that business can go to another business owned by someone doing the same thing, the dirty money gets cleaned and you end up with piles of cash.

Run the scam for six months to a year, shut it down and open the same operation under a different name.

Repeat.

Repeat.

Repeat.

The difference between some small time hustler bringing in $50,000 or $100,000 a year and the Oyebanjos’ operation was scale. They had 50 companies open at the same time they were shutting down another 50 companies. Keeping everything unsettled, moving, one step ahead of the inept Federal regulators and “enforcement officers.”

Severo got into his Ford Explorer and drove south through Miami Springs and into the small town of Virginia Gardens, nestled against the northern perimeter of the Miami Airport. He drew into the deserted parking lot of the Matamoros Funeral Home & Crematorium and parked near the back door. He got a little package from the glove compartment and put it in his back pocket.

He punched the doorbell and listened to birds chirping in the tall palm trees lining the parking lot.

The door opened.

“Hello, Severo.”

“Hello, Grisel.”

He took a step up and gave her a kiss on the cheek, following her into the empty building, past a formal chapel, two reception rooms that could be made into one by sliding a temporary panel aside in the event you had a very large funeral. The place had a closed-in, musty smell as if the windows hadn’t been opened in 20 years.

“Nobody here?”

“Real quiet. We have a client downstairs. The funeral’s tomorrow.”

He followed her into her office and took a chair opposite her desk.

Grisel Matamoros was a stately woman, about 63 or 65, Severo guessed, but she had expensive tastes for someone living in Virginia Gardens. She commonly bought expensive jewelry across the causeway up in the Bal Harbour Shops and went to the pricey Carpaccio for lunch once a week.

Severo had set up this operation himself. At a funeral for one of the Cambio Xtra workers about three years earlier, Grisel had complained that business was slow. Severo listened. A newer crematorium had opened up just five miles away, out west of the Palmetto Expressway, and undercut her rates. Grisel had pretty much had the market in West Dade to herself for 20 years until the other company moved in. (Other funeral homes without a crematorium sent the business to her. She burned the bodies and gave them back the ashes to return to loved ones for ultimate disposal.)

Once Severo felt her out enough to know she’d be a player, he told her to cut her rates to cremate bodies well below the competitor. That way, her business would soar.

“But how will I make money?”

It took him a while to bring her over, but basically, he said:

“I will pay you $250 for the personal details of every one of the bodies you process.”

They were in business from that point on.

After one year, the other crematorium closed down permanently.

Grisel opened a credenza behind her desk and pulled out a box brimming with paperwork.

“Here you are, Severo. Copies of everything.”

“Thank you, Grisel. What have