I went still.
Thomas Sterling.
Uncle Tommy.
He wasn’t related to us by blood.
He was an old fraternity friend of my father’s, a disgraced businessman who had declared bankruptcy twice and lost his real estate license for unethical conduct.
For years, he had survived partly through my father’s occasional financial assistance.
He was precisely the kind of desperate intermediary someone might recruit to front a fraudulent business.
“Where is the money going after it hits Northstar’s accounts, Marcus? Walk me through the wash,” I commanded, my palms slick with sweat.
Marcus displayed a complicated flowchart.
“It bounces through two offshore LLCs based in the Caymans—standard layering tactic to break the paper trail. Then, it gets repatriated and lands in a domestic blind trust operating out of Delaware. The beneficiaries of the trust are heavily shielded by corporate privacy laws, but we subpoenaed the banking records through the board’s legal authority. The primary signatories drawing from the trust, pulling out hundreds of thousands a month in ‘management dividends,’ are Richard and Eleanor.”
