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 didn’t 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 Waage’s arrest and the authorities checked into exactly who was selling these imaginary securities.  While some people made a killing with us, others lost their life’s savings.

I was at Waage’s estate in Costa Rica on the day he was arrested, having spent that morning with him and another man counting the day’s 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, I’d 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, Waage’s 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.  She’d hold her thumb and forefinger apart a little ways, judging how much cash to take out of the safe.  “This much, I think,” she’d say.  When you talk about money in terms of how high the stack of bills is for a night on the town, you know you’re in a different world.  She traded her Japanese SUV in for a Lincoln Navigator because her golf clubs wouldn’t fit in the back of the former.  Last I heard, she was no longer wanted by the FBI, but I’m sure they wouldn’t 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 hadn’t been paid yet, and he knew that.  He took me aside and said, “If you see anything you like, let me know and I’ll get it for you.  We can work out the details later.”

He was a decent chef, and entertained us on more than one occasion.  He’d 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.  We’d 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 we’d 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 you’d 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 you’re 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 other’s 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 didn’t need to offer twice because it didn’t 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 didn’t know exactly who I was, who he was getting.  Not only that, I thought we were fairly easy to find, and any serious investigation wouldn’t 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 courier’s office and, once she arrived, to follow her up to Alyn’s house, the 15,000-square-foot mansion which we called the Shack.  And that never happened.

It isn’t 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 weren’t allowed to refer anybody in.  There were a lot of things that didn’t look quite right, but that in itself wasn’t proof of anything.  On my first day of work we had a chat up on the patio where he said, “I’ve been told that you asked if this is a scam.”  “That’s right,” I answered.  “Well, what’s 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 didn’t take long before I learned how hard we worked to pay our members on time.  That was, of course, the secret to our success.