Chapter 7 - The Account Named Fourth Street
The account contained $3.2 million.
Not Crestview money.
At least not originally.
Name:
Fourth Street Reserve.
I recognized the reference instantly.
Our first office had been on Fourth Street.
The account was opened twenty-seven years earlier.
One year after our wedding.
Deposits began small.
$4,000.
$7,500.
$12,000.
Over decades, they accumulated.
Source:
Crestview vendor rebates.
Referral fees.
Land-option commissions.
Some legitimate.
Some questionable.
Mark controlled it.
But he wasn't the only authorized signer.
Manuel Alvarez.
My father.
My stomach dropped again.
Was Dad involved?
Cynthia traced early records.
Fourth Street began legitimately.
Dad created it as an emergency reserve during Crestview’s first financial crisis.
Why hidden from me?
It wasn’t.
At first.
I had forgotten.
In 1998, while pregnant with Daniel, I stepped away from bookkeeping for six months.
Dad and Mark created the reserve to manage construction overruns.
When I returned, Mark told me it had been closed.
It hadn’t.
Dad remained signer until his death.
Did he know Mark kept using it?
Records showed Dad stopped authorizing transactions twelve years before he died.
Then he wrote three letters demanding Mark close the account.
Mark ignored him.
Dad threatened to tell me.
Why didn’t he?
Because two weeks later, my mother Teresa suffered a stroke.
Dad became her full-time caregiver.
The conflict disappeared beneath a larger tragedy.
Then he died years later without revisiting it.
Mark had counted on life becoming busy enough to bury wrongdoing.
Often it does.
But Fourth Street contained something even more important.
Payments to Ofelia.
$6,000 every month for eleven years.
I confronted her.
She looked devastated.
“Mark said it was Manuel’s arrangement.”
Dad had supposedly created a lifetime support fund for her because of their old relationship.
False.
Mark was paying his mother from a hidden company reserve.
Why?
Partly affection.
Partly silence.
Ofelia knew about Blue Cedar.
Schedule C.
Dad’s concerns.
The payments kept her comfortable and cooperative.
“Did you know it was company money?”
“No.”
I believed her.
She should have asked.
But she had not orchestrated it.
Then Brenda revealed why she knew about Fourth Street.
Mark had promised to use it to buy her a condominium after he divorced me.
There had been a planned divorce?
“Yes.”
“When?”
“After the Crestview sale.”
I looked at Mark.
He denied it.
Brenda produced messages.
MARK:
Once Victor closes, I can finally make changes.
BRENDA:
Including Laura?
MARK:
Especially Laura.
That was enough.
Then another message.
BRENDA:
What happens to her shares?
MARK:
By then they won't matter.
I stared.
My forty-nine percent.
Why wouldn't they matter?
Because Mark planned to issue new Crestview shares immediately before Victor’s acquisition.
My stake would be diluted from 49 percent to 18 percent.
Recipients of new shares?
Two executives.
A Northline affiliate.
And an employee benefit trust Mark controlled.
Was it legal?
Not without proper board and shareholder approvals.
Mark had prepared approvals.
One bore my signature.
I had never seen it.
This time, unlike the financing document, the signature itself was fake.
We now had fraud.
And Mark knew it.
He stopped talking.
Then Andrew, who had been helping investigators map Brenda’s copied records, called me.
“I found something weird.”
“What?”
“One of the Fourth Street payments doesn't go to Ofelia or Mark.”
“Who?”
“Your daughter.”
Sophie.
$250,000.
Transferred two years earlier.
I called her.
May you like
She started crying.
“Mom, I can explain.”
