In Her Own Words

In early 2004, in an effort to keep my mother busy while I held her captive in my home, I had her write narratives from a disorganized mess of notes jotted down in haste during phone calls from scam artists. My intention was to pass this information on to the FBI in a more useful form than the notes on the little snippets of yellow paper everywhere. What follows is excerpted from a narrative inexplicably started in 2003 at the request of Claude, one of the scam artists. Lola said he was high up in the Canadian government and needed this information . She continued work on it at my house, and I gave a copy to the FBI.

Canadian Sweepstakes Group

This is an account of the beginning of a call from a Quebec Canada gentleman (Steve Mercer) of Dorval, Quebec, who I believe was a customs agent. He advised me that I had won a sweepstakes from some organization and his office, I believe it was Canadian Customs and they would be handling the paperwork and delivery when all the fees were taken care of and he would be back in touch, however, he did say winnings was a check for $125,000. A few days or weeks he called back and advised the winnings were two checks of $125,000 each and the fees had to be sent via Western Union to various people at several different locations. Below is the list of amounts, names, fee charges, etc. and dates. [All transmissions were to Dorval, Quebec, Canada and incurred $139 each in Western Union fees]

8/20/2003 $2,560 to Katherine Winslow,
8/21/2003 $2,990 to Steve Mercer,
8/22/2003 $2885 to Howard Sands,
8/28/2003 $2640 to James Gray
9/12/2003 $2430 to Gary White
9/15/2003 $2400 to Alfred Kennedy
10/9/2003 $2740 to George Grant
10/9/2003 $2760 to Arthur Wellington

Some of the customs agents out of Canada were quite difficult and rude to talk to. Here is a list if it would help you any. Robert Garcia was supposed to be Canadian. [I have several lists, but I'm not sure which one goes with this particular narrative.]

This doesn't sound like vast sums of money, but it's a drop in the bucket of Lola's total losses. I stopped counting at around $260,000 lost to fraud in the 18 months prior to the guardianship. It hurt too much to keep looking at those bank statements and checks. My lawyer said her case was the worst that he had heard of.

It is not a coincidence that one of the recipients of her wire transfers was "named" James Gray. That was my father's name. The name Gray turns up frequently in the lists of people who called her.

Collecting evidence

Where was my mother in all this? Well, she didn't know I was in town, so when my sister and I showed up at the house on Friday just before the lawyer appointment, she was so taken aback that she cooperated, initially anyway. She produced a hefty stack of wire transfer receipts totaling over $53,000 during the prior six months, all of them to numerous individuals in Costa Rica. Of course I had to tell her that the FBI needed them in order to get her to hand them over. But when I tried to persuade her to let me take over her finances voluntarily, she became extremely agitated and angrily refused, so we had to leave her in that state and move on.

After the emergency court hearing, our lawyer advised us to visit her banks immediately and freeze her accounts. Once again, we had to go to the house. Again, she was so surprised that she named without hesitation the three banks where she had accounts. Three banks? Why three banks? I only knew about two.

The day the FBI called

On Thursday, January 15, 2004, my cell phone rang in my office. I answered my sister's call, and thus began a long and trying tale of intrigue, greed, grief, deception, and madness. By 5:00 pm that day, I was three hours away from my home in Fayetteville, sitting in my sister's living room. We listened raptly while an FBI agent described in shocking detail the unhappy fate of $80,000 that my mother had transmitted via check and wire to Canada during the previous one and a half years. Just that week, the transmissions had escalated into thousands of dollars each day to Costa Rica with the help of her friend and accomplice Bill. I knew I needed a lawyer fast. By noon the next day, my sister and I were in the lawyer's office with $53,000 worth of wire transfer receipts to Costa Rica. Within two hours, I had an emergency court order granting me guardianship of my mother's person and estate for 90 days. This from the reputedly "meanest" judge in Little Rock who had never before been known to grant emergency guardianship in such a case. The evidence was compelling.