CHAPTER TWELVE
It’s funny….Albert’s timing, God’s timing. It couldn’t have been any better. I was done with the drugs, the alcohol, the fights, the sex, all of it, and I knew I needed help if I wanted it all to change.
I told him I was ready.
That same night, Albert helped me check into a rehab center. During the initial interview, I poured out my story to the doctor: I was unhappy from the loss of my mother, that I was self-medicating, using other things to try to fill the empty space inside me. I really didn’t want to die, but just wanted the pain to end so that I could be happy again.
So, they admitted me. They cleaned me up, inside and out. I learned that I was not alone when it came to suffering; that we all carry some type of burden. Mine was the abuse my dad inflicted on me and mom and my losing her. Albert’s was the loss of his daughter.
Albert gave me some really good advice that I took to heart. He said that when he thought of his daughter, Carrie, he only saw her laughing and smiling, and he imagined that she watched over him, like a guardian angel. Cheering for him. Wanting him to do well and to be happy. He said that everything he does was to make her proud and to please God.
During my time in rehab, I thought about that a lot.
It took some time, but I started to heal. My desire during that time was to make my mother proud. During group discussions, I admitted to womanizing and drug and alcohol abuse, to the pain I liked to inflict and receive. In all of those discussions though, I never mentioned stealing. I didn’t feel that it was wrong. It was my profession.
Albert and his current wife, Christina, visited me every week while I was in rehab and I got to know both of them pretty well. When I was through with the program, they helped me to get a job. Passing out flyers door-to-door for an alarm company. A brother of Albert’s from his church, Manny Ruiz, owned the security alarm company and was glad to give me the job.
So, I knocked on doors, handed out flyers, and spoke to people about the benefits of having a home security system. If any of those people were interested, I would write down their information and give it to Mr. Ruiz’s secretary. From there, a salesman would follow up and go to those people to make a sales pitch.
At first, things were slow. I think I was too eager to sell. I’m sure they felt the pressure and desperation on my part, so after realizing that I was moving too fast, I told myself to slow down, to relax, to go back to what I did when I was selling cell phones at the mall. Talking and listening. Letting the customers come to me.
I also decided to increase my odds. How? Well, I had the supply, so to speak, but the demand was kind of low, so in order to sell more, there needed to be more demand, more need. In order for there to be more need, People had to have a reason, a reason to buy security alarms.
A reason like, protecting homes from burglars because their neighborhoods were being targeted by thieves.
So, during the days I went quickly through sub-divisions, putting flyers on doors. As I did this, I made mental notes. I would jiggle the door knobs and listen for dogs. I looked for tree lines, wooded areas, access and cover and entry and exit points of the neighborhoods. This was really tedious because I rode a bike and by the end of the day, I would be exhausted.
Now, I didn’t ride the bike just for the exercise, although it certainly got me into pretty good shape. I rode it out of necessity. I had no money. I’d sold my car many months before for drugs, so, I was completely broke.
But things were about to turn around for me.
I had already moved from the shelter to a half-way house and then to living in a spare room at Albert and Christina’s house. This was all within a few months of meeting Albert. He and Christina wanted me to open up and share more about myself. They wanted to get know me better, but I wasn’t going to let that happen.
Don’t get me wrong, I really appreciate their help, but their ways weren’t my ways. The preached love, and they really believed it because they also showed it.
My father and mother hated church and religion. They said it was full of phonies and hypocrites. I’d never gone to church, but I had noticed the people I had come across down through the years that claimed to be God-fearing Christians were actually no different than anyone else. They went to church on Sunday, and maybe Wednesday, then went back to their normal activities. I thought this was the case with all Christians until I met Albert and Christina.
They didn’t try to make me go to church, but they invited me each time they went. They didn’t try to force their beliefs on me, but they did tell me their stories and how they had come to know Christ and how he had changed them. Albert also tried to get me to help out at the shelter with him. Each time, I would politely decline his invitation, that I didn’t feel comfortable with that.
And you know, that was enough for him. He never tried to pressure me or guilt me into going. Even though I didn’t go to church with him, Albert still continued to be kind to me.
He took his own money and got me a motorcycle a few days after I had told him I could ride. It really shocked me when he showed it to me in the driveway one morning before I was to leave for work and handed me the keys. I’d never had anyone be that generous to me before.
So now, I had a nice quiet cruiser to get around on. It was a five year old Honda Rebel that was used and a little beat up, but beggars can’t be choosers, as the saying goes. I was really grateful for it.
With my transportation problem solved, it was time to get back to making some real money. It only took me a month after I got the motorcycle to get everything lined up. I moved out of Albert’s house and got my own place, a beat up old trailer on a couple acres of land out in the middle of nowhere. I paid a flat monthly fee and it covered everything: water, electricity, etc….
Albert and Christina felt it might have been too soon for me to move out, that I still needed their love and support, but I convinced them I was ok. I knew that I couldn’t do what I was about to do while I was living with them. They would slow me down, and it would have just been a matter of time before they started questioning my income.
After I moved, I visited them often, then after a few months, I whittled that down to once or twice a week. I explained to them that I was much better, thanks to them. I constantly reassured them that I was coping with the loss of my mother and would never relapse. They were happy for me, but sorry to see me go. Before I left, I showed the new membership I had at the gym, showing them I was committed to rebuilding my body from the mess that the drugs had left it in.
I worked out like a fiend and stole a lot too. Soon, I was able to add the gold dust back into my diet, and Malefic was back. I was new and improved. I vowed to never let anyone into my heart again. Never. My heart was stone now. The pain was finally gone and I felt like a beast. Unstoppable.
Between my alarm job during the day, the gym, and the burglaries at night, I had no free time. Like I expected, my alarm referrals went through the roof. It’s amazing what a few burglarized homes could do to boost sales. And you know, I made a commission for each sale.
After a while, Manny the owner of the company decided to give me a chance at actually selling the systems and I accepted the opportunity. I did things a little differently than most however; instead sharing my commission with a door knocker/referral finder, like my old work, I passed out the flyer, knocked on doors, and installed systems myself.
In no time at all, the money was rolling in. I was getting into a flow. At least a third of my sales were to people whose homes I had already burglarized. As part of my sales pitch, I would question them about details of their break-ins, finding out if they had heard anything of value to me. In all of the homes, I got variations of the same answer, the police were running down leads and canvassing the area for witnesses. Basically, they had no clues.
Before I had gotten started, I had also reconnected with Julio and he got together the connections for me to sell the goods I would be picking up.
Of course, I still held onto all the gold I collected. I would take out the diamonds and other gems and put them into a storage container, then, I would melt the gold down and separate it and purify it for my later ingestion.
Another thing I did was familiarize myself with antiques and art. I learned to distinguish the real stuff from fakes. That knowledge could come in handy, I figured.
Shortly after I got back into the business, I was getting two, sometimes three cars per week. The vehicles of choice were still pickup trucks, Hondas, and Toyotas, so I didn’t have to learn any new skills on that front.
Occasionally, I would get a request for a specific kind of car; Mercedes, BMW, SAAB, etc…. My buyer would have a wrecked car, listed as totaled or completely damaged. If I could find them a similar car, he would repair the damaged car with all of the stolen car’s parts then turn around and sell it legally, making a pretty decent profit.
Julio told me about a cousin of his named Caesar who was into buying and selling guns. I’d come across guns all the time during my burglaries, but had always left them alone, not having anywhere to sell them quickly.
After talking with Caesar about the details (on the phone of course, to limit my exposure to others who could possibly identify me.) I found that he wasn’t a joke like Julio. In fact, while we were talking, Caesar told me how much of a joke his cousin was. We had quite a laugh over some of the stupid things Julio had done in the past.
He also told me that he had heard about some of the jobs I had done and how impressed he was by the way I handled my business. He then asked me about why I had gone ‘off the deep end.’ I guess he wanted to find out whether he could count on me or not. After I told him the reason and assured him nothing like that would happen again, he said he understood, and I got the distinct impression that he really did. I’d learned that the Latinos don’t play around when it comes to family, especially their mothers. He said he liked me and would like to do business with me.
Caesar told me to keep Julio out of the loop on any of our dealings and not to tell him we were doing any business at all. He said that he loved his cousin, but that he was an idiot with a big mouth. Not a rat, but that he just had a runaway mouth.
The plan was that when I amassed enough guns to fill a car trunk, I would drive the car to a parking garage and leave it there, then bring Caesar an inventory list and the parking garage ticket. I would wait with him until one of his guys got to the garage and verified the inventory, then he would pay me. Of course, this made it necessary that we meet, but I was ok with that.
For my protection, I made sure to always place the guns in a stolen vehicle, and that the vehicle was always from a distant city, with clean plates on them. I found my old license plate maker in the same pawn shop I had sold it to the previous year, so that was easy.
The guns that I was taking from homes were usually there for home protection, and the money I made from a trunk-load was around fifteen to twenty thousand dollars. Occasionally, I would come upon a special weapon and receive a nice little bonus.
By my twenty-third birthday, I was taking in a little over one-hundred thousand dollars a month. My alarm sales alone were netting me about ten thousand. I was making as much money as most Fortune 500 CEO’s.
I continued to educate myself. My knowledge of antiques, art, and weapons continued to grow. At one point, I realized that Caesar had gotten over on me several times on our gun deals. I found in my researches that some of the weapons I’d gotten for him were worth a lot more than he’d claimed.
I didn’t complain about these past deals, but after I found out the values of those weapons, I made sure to give explicit details about how much money I expected for certain types of weapons.
When I started over with my work, everyone I dealt with in that capacity knew me only as Malefic. No one knew my real name or where I lived. Even my land-lady only knew me by an assumed name, and I had all of the fake credentials to back it up.
My land-lady, Mrs. Johnson, who was elderly and took care of her disabled husband, came by once a month to collect from me. I made sure that my trailer and the property were always clean in order to prevent any problems or unexpected visits.
I offered to install an alarm system in the trailer and in her house for free and pay for the monitoring, and Mrs. Johnson graciously accepted. She also allowed me to build a shed on the property and put up a fence. I told her that I wanted to keep my motorcycle out of the rain and also get a dog.
She was hesitant at first, but the thing that clinched the deal for me was when I told her I would pay for the shed and fence and would leave them on the property whenever I moved. She looked at me suspiciously at first, but in the end, her greed won out. I had a two-year lease at a fixed rate, but I’m sure she figured out that she could increase the rent after I left.
I offered to pay her a pet deposit, but she declined it. She probably wanted to give me the impression that she was doing me a favor. I played it up, telling her how much I really appreciated her hospitality and generosity. I laid it on thick.
When I built the fence, I put a double gate on the part that intersected with the road and also in the back. I wanted a wide enough opening to drive a car through.
Once everything was finished, I went out and found two dogs. One was a German Shepherd, the other a Pit Bull.
Both dogs were black. The German Shepherd, who I named Samson, had streaks of tan and white on his front legs. The Pit Bull I called Hungry, because he was always looking at people as if he were going to eat them.
They were both very loving and good to me. I had them trained as watch/guard dogs and they were always very good at their jobs. As I look back, I really regret not spending more time with them, caring for them better. I gave them shelter and food, and not much more.
My problem was that I was focused on one thing, and that was making, then protecting, my money. That’s why I got the dogs. I had placed a large lockbox in the concrete foundation I had poured for the shed, then built the shed over and around it.
A large, thick stainless steel plate with special locks secured the box. I put paver stones on top of it to hide its’ presence, and on top of those, I built a large shelf attached to two of the shed walls so that it could not be moved. It took me fifteen minutes to get to the box every time I needed to. I figured the harder it was to get to, the harder it would be for anyone looking for it to find.
I filled the shed with yard tools and various other things in addition to my motorcycle. The shed was made of filled concrete blocks, with a thick steel door on it, and I used a thick pad lock to secure it. I also had small closed circuit video cameras set up, watching and recording any activity outside the trailer and around the shed.
All these precautions, including the dogs, were designed to deter common thieves and keep neighborhood kids out. I knew that if someone ever discovered what I was doing and tracked me back to the trailer, they would eventually find my stash, but it would take them quite a bit of time and effort.