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163  10 Jim’s Busy Period Bertolt Brecht used to say that robbing a bank is a crime but the greater crime is to found one. —Eduardo Galeano, Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World Jim’s apparent disinterest in the Tres Hermanos acquisition coincided with a very busy, you might even say chaotic, chapter in his life. He had his hands full: he was engineering his divorce, hiding his wealth from his estranged wife, feeding his raging alcoholism, managing his deepening partnership with Ed Roski, Jr., and staying on top of a bid-rigging and kickback scheme that brought him more phony checks than he knew what to do with. If that were not enough, somewhere in the middle of a jumbled three-year period beginning in 1977, he began indulging in even more grandiose schemes, playing the city’s political kingmaker and launching his own bank—a pursuit that, perhaps unwittingly, soon became the focal point of his criminal enterprise. According to Jane, her husband had given her plenty of reasons to divorce him. But by 1977, after thirty-five years of marriage, his behavior had worsened. His violent outbursts and heavy drinking drove her to seek marriage counseling from a doctor the FBI’s records identify as Dr. Gerty, a physician at Huntington Hospital in Pasadena. The doctor advised her to take assertiveness training courses to help her stand up to Jim and to bring him to one of her counseling sessions. But as Jane later told the FBI, the doctor rescinded his advice when Jim “went into one of his rages . . . during a counseling session which left both [Jane] and Dr. Gerty frozen with fear.” Dr. Gerty diagnosed Jim as “paranoid” and flatly told Jane to leave her husband if she cared about her physical safety.1 164 city of industry Meanwhile, the tension at home had escalated. Jane said that Jim began carrying a shotgun and shells in his car. She recalled one incident in early 1979 that left her dazed and terrified, when “she and her daughter and sonin -law were watching the New Year’s Day parades on television in the den of their Whittier home when Jim walked in with his shotgun. . . . He made a comment that a gopher was in the backyard and suddenly opened the door and fired a round from the shotgun from inside the doorway without warning anyone.” Jim had discharged his gun only a few feet behind his wife. Her ears, she told the FBI, “rang for weeks afterwards.” Shocked and horrified, she thought Jim had become “mentally deranged.”2 His drinking had also worsened. During the waning days of the summer of 1979, he began to suffer classic blackout symptoms, remembering nothing of what he had done before passing out.3 Jane also, however, recognized his attempts to dissemble. Before their separation, she found a forty-two-page document “in one of her husband’s sweaters” giving detailed instructions for “depositing money in foreign bank accounts.” He had circled a section titled “How to Hide Money from Your Spouse.” She tried to use the discovery to bargain for a greater share of her husband’s assets, but her lack of knowledge left her at a disadvantage . Over the years, Jim had told her very little about his business partnerships and investments, and she had no idea about what her cut of their estate might really be worth. She only knew, from overhearing his telephone conversations, that when he talked about money, the figures were “always in ‘millions of dollars.’” She also heard enough to understand that “her husband was ‘playing a shell game’” with those millions.4 Of course, this is her version of events, one that implicitly casts her in the victim’s role. To break Jim’s information stranglehold, Jane pestered him to write a will. She hoped, perhaps naïvely, that love of his children or even plain guilt would move him to fully disclose his assets before she could haul him into court. But the will he made, dated September 29, 1978, and prepared by a partner in Graham Ritchie’s law firm, did not estimate the value of their estate; it simply listed his executors and trustees and explained how the estate would be divided. His son Stephen and his business partners Gary Bryce and Ed Roski, Jr., were named as trustees and executors of the estate. The will granted them the power to nominate their replacements...

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