My banker - Page 9
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 22: MoneySexPower
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Wayne McLennan
WHAT I HAD LEARNED, WAS THAT he had had a helicopter business in Nicaragua, and worked exclusively for the dictator Anastasio Somoza. I knew he had been jailed as a spy by the Marxist Sandinista junta when it came to power, and finally repatriated to Costa Rica. I also knew that he had a wife to kill for. I have, since the fall of our empire, learned other details: Luis Enrique de Jesus Villalobos was born Catholic, the third of six children to campesino parents in rural Costa Rica in 1940. He had indeed been married and had fathered three children before divorcing his first wife to marry his Romanian one in 1997.
Enrique studied in military academies in Guatemala and Nicaragua, although who paid for this I never learned. Later he studied aviation and mechanics in the United States.
Enrique once made a statement claiming that the US Embassy was instrumental in helping him get back his helicopters that had been confiscated by the Sandinistas.
Reliable sources working within the Contras, an anti-Sandinista organisation operating out of Honduras that blossomed after the Marxist takeover, have insisted he was aiding the CIA by using a currency exchange business he had set up, to funnel money donated illegally by Americans to the Contras. When the US press attaché Marcia Bosshardt was asked about this, she answered, ‘There does not appear to be a connection.'
The same source also said that when Eden Pastora, better known as Commandante Zero, a disillusioned Sandinista junta member and principled man, started his own Contra group in southern Nicaragua, Enrique became his dollar exchange man. It is known that Enrique mortgaged his house to facilitate a personal loan to aid Pastora when the US Congress cut funding to the Contras in 1984. And that he sought continued finance for the group.
Pastora recorded his gratitude in a 2002 interview with The Tico Times: ‘He gave us a good exchange rate – profiting practically nothing from the commission. When we couldn't pay him back the eighty thousand dollars (house mortgage) he was practically left out on the street.'
Enrique was present when Eden Pastora's fellow commanders tried to blow him up at a secret meeting at La Penca, Costa Rica in 1985, because he refused to work under American leadership in Honduras. Pastora survived, but others were killed and injured. In May 1995, there was an attempt on Enrique's life by an unknown armed group. A bystander was killed. It was not a robbery attempt.
So, this was my banker.
PAT AND I SPOKE LESS AND LESS about the Brothers over the years, but anybody who has ever taken a drink with an old mate knows that at some point a discussion will arise over the climactic periods of their friendship. And who was behind the Brothers' demise always came up, because somebody was.
According to Pat when we met up in Costa Rica in 2006, there were differing opinions amongst the investors. Some believed that the Banco Central de Costa Rica was behind it, because Enrique was just too much competition. And Costa Rican banks have a dubious ethical reputation: in 1994, the Banco Anglo Costarricense, formerly the country's oldest state bank, was closed by presidential decree after accumulating fifty-four million dollars worth of debt. Just last year, seven former executives were found guilty of embezzlement.
Others thought it was Abel Pacheco, the serving president, or some of his cabinet. After all, we are talking about a lot of money here. Still others thought it was as simple as the Americans wanting to close down any unregulated financial institutions after September 11. These days, the Americans see opportunities for malice in toothpaste tubes and aftershave lotion. Strange though – as the CIA bankrolled Enrique in the first place. Still, they'd bankrolled Saddam Hussein, hadn't they? The IRS theory also had its supporters. ‘The sons of bitches want their pound of flesh. Kiss my ass.' Did anyone have proof? No, just imagination and grievance.
The money's gone. Some will say that the interest offered was so extraordinary that only fools or the unprincipled would throw their lot in with such people – that we deserved our fate.
I could defend that by reminding people that Villalobos paid twenty years of interest, never missed a payment, never disappointing a single investor. That, although we never knew his methods – and Villalobos himself denied it – we more than suspected he worked with foreign currency, participated in various international businesses, provided loans to the personal sector. Not licensed to do so? Well, somebody overlooked that point for twenty years – how important was that?
Enrique himself said in an interview: ‘It is possible to pay significantly higher than market interest rates. Many Costa Rican banks charge 3.4 per cent monthly interest rates on credit card accounts in US dollars. With these charges it would be possible to pay dollar investors the 2.8 per cent monthly interest with money left over.'
Perhaps. All we are certain of as investors is that he allowed us to live like kings. And that there was nothing evil about the business. All I am certain of is that I liked and trusted Luis Enrique de Jesus Villalobos, and that he never let me down. The legal case is still unresolved.
ONE AUGUST MORNING IN 2006, an old friend – a Villalobos investor fallen on hard times – forwarded me an email. I read it quickly, almost abstractly, as if it were for somebody else, glancing at the same time towards a framed photo that stood on my work desk, beside my computer in Amsterdam, like an award of success. It had been taken years earlier, after my return to Estonia with sixty thousand dollars in cash. I was leaning against the floor-to-ceiling wood stove that heated our house, puffing on a large cigar, cheeks red from the brandy I had just drunk, holding wads and wads of money in each hand. My lips were stretched around the cigar in a victorious smile.
It had been tough finding enough cash to live on after the fall of the Brothers. Although, as I have said, I never thought of myself as rich, their money had spoiled me. Any talents I might have possessed had been diluted by the comfort the Brothers lavished on me. But necessity brings out your best and, like Pat, I was a worker. I did alright. I was now comfortable, my wife had forgiven me. That was a big loss.
I turned towards the email once again, this time reading it more slowly, taking it in word for word: ‘Maybe our luck is changing for the better ... There was an article in La Nacion from the Villalobos, saying he is going to pay back ... with interest until 2002, after that just capital. In February there is going to be a trial, so let's see how it will go.'
How odd: there were also new presidential elections. And so it continues.
In May 2007 Oswaldo Villalobos was convicted of fraud and illegal financial intermediation and was sentenced to eighteen years' prison. He is appealing. The whereabouts of Luis Enrique de Jesus Villalobos is still unknown. ♦