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Wolf Pack Part II Baiting The Wolf Pack

A Surprise Attack Can Convert Hearsay Into Self-Incrimination When we left off, at the end of Part 1 of this story in the October issue, Larry Fresno, owner of the 17-route Neighborhood Vending Co., was drained and exhausted physically, but even more so emotionally. He knew the nightmare he found himself in with a Wolf Pack of nine dishonest employees stealing together for over a year was the greatest threat to his business, and his legacy to his family he had ever faced. He also knew there was no way h...

December 8, 2019 | Mark Manney

A Surprise Attack Can Convert Hearsay Into Self-Incrimination

When we left off, at the end of Part 1 of this story in the October issue, Larry Fresno, owner of the 17-route Neighborhood Vending Co., was drained and exhausted physically, but even more so emotionally. He knew the nightmare he found himself in with a Wolf Pack of nine dishonest employees stealing together for over a year was the greatest threat to his business, and his legacy to his family he had ever faced. He also knew there was no way he could lose all nine employees of the Wolf Pack at once without losing enough business … to maybe lose his entire business.

The shocking pieces of the yearlong rising cost of goods puzzle had unexpectedly fit together like a blinding flash of the now repulsively ugly obvious. The chronic company losses fueled by a conspiracy that he had never imagined, in his most paranoid operator moments, could potentially drive him into bankruptcy. Fresno had dealt with theft before, but never on a scale remotely approaching this.

Between all the price increases his suppliers were bombarding him with and the new (incredibly expensive) software system installed at the beginning of the year (crashing like the stock market in 2008), he had been left groping in the cutting-edge technology dark while being systematically plundered by seven of his own employees.

The trapped operator was caught between the devil banker and the deep blue technology loan sea. Fresno was damned if he did – cut me loose to take all seven out and leaving him with a third of his workforce dragged under by their own crimes, terminated and or arrested … and damned if he didn't, leaving the pack of wolves to suck the financial life out of him like the ungrateful Benedict Arnold leeches they were. If all nine were arrested, or some were arrested and the rest quit out of fear of being busted, his cash flow could be reduced to a trickle, pushing the business dominoes over…one onto the other, and starting a new chapter in his life…Chapter 11 or maybe even Chapter 7!

Then there was the wild card he had never imagined in his worst business nightmare: hard drugs. Evidently most of the Wolf Pack were not only thieves but drug addicts to boot, and two (to Fresno's horror) were drug dealers selling off of his trucks! To add another scene to the nightmare, in his state, any vehicle used in the commission of a felony crime could be confiscated by the police!

Evidentially, the use and sale of drugs (especially by Joe) was a currency the Wolf Pack traded like the stolen energy drinks they ripped off by the case and drank by the quart to get started at o'dark-thirty. To make matters even worse (if that was conceivable), he had two substantial new accounts on the cusp of signing, which would compel him to immediately hire two more route drivers – not lose five, plus a warehouse manager and one of two of his midmanagement CSMs.

Fresno had a hard-earned inner toughness that he reached deep down into. The owner bucked up. Sensing his best defense was an offense, and I was the man to lead the charge, Larry Fresno did what he had to do to save the company he had built from nothing: he fought.

WILD EMPLOYEES RUN AMOK

Christmas was a week away. All of the schools that made up the bulk of Fresno's business would be closed for the long holiday break. Fresno was convinced that this was the time to take out the leaders of the Wolf Pack and wrap a tight tourniquet on the slashed financial artery. He had no choice; he had to end the out-ofcontrol conspiracy both financially and emotionally.

I knew when I got onsite it would be a decisive search-and destroy mission. Knowing Fresno's business realities, he and I didn't want to get it reversed. After a conference call with Fresno and his general manager, I laid out a hasty investigative plan that was launched and focused for the week before I could get onsite: a tactical machine-level investigation of the route driver on whom they had the most intel, the one who had bragged to his girlfriend that he had figured out the High School Candy Box Scam and the DEX Coin Tube Scam. The route driver who had taught all the other drivers how both scams worked: Joe.

I knew some … any … evidence was needed. Even if it was just an investigative molehill, I could make an interrogation mountain out of it. That was the plan I laid out. I intended to jam Joe up and flip him over to turn in the rest of the employees gone wild, and throw down a short-term psych to buy Fresno precious time to restructure the bleeding Neighborhood Vending Company.

All we had so far was Heather hearsay, and 95% of the details she gave were on her ex Joe, but we had pulled other useful information from the bitter young woman. I had a favorite saying I always told impatient owners: "the interrogation is made in the investigation," not the other way around. But this was an unusual case and there simply was no time for a real in-depth investigation. So plan B was looming. With the bleeding that was going on, Fresno couldn't afford the normal process, but he also couldn't afford to eliminate all of the Wolf Pack, or even scare them off all at once, otherwise the cure might kill the patients. The Rubiks Cube that Fresno and I had to figure out was how take out the leaders, but not terminate, or arrest, or even scare off most of the pack; buy some time; and hire and train new, honest employees, reverse the cash drain back to cashflow, and then eliminate the remaining bloodsuckers, one after another.

I flew in and, with Fresno, immediately met Heather, the pretty, rail-thin, tattooed, pierced, twitchy, 20-something who had been promised more c-notes for this meeting. I grilled and tape recorded her for two hours. She was obviously telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the repulsive truth. As a subject-matter expert trained and experienced in behavioral analysis interviewing and body language reactions to stress, I crosscut through human facades (almost instinctively … kind of like an idiot savant interrogator, more of a reflexive gift than a conscious talent), deftly probing, slicing and dicing as the jilted girlfriend poured out details of four major scams Joe had bragged to her about. She was asked the same questions six ways from Sunday, and her answers always matched.

Her dead eyes were unblinking as the unemotional rote numbness of her snitch explained the worst year the Neighborhood Vending Company had experienced in the last 25:

• The High School Candy Box Scam
• The Dex Coin Tube Scam
• Massive warehouse product theft
• Non-DEXed machine thefts

Joe had crowed to Heather time and time again that he had invented, perfected, and then trained most of the other route drivers in the High School Candy Box Scam and the Coin Tube Scam, and that all the players were intentionally sabotaging DEX (the new computer program), stealing product, creating meter "noise" in non-DEXed machines, exchanging keys (none were locked down on rings), stealing an occasional key, stealing fuel, goofing off for hours, and howling with glee every time the new "Star Wars" audit software exploded like the Deathstar at the end of the first movie. They knew their thefts were not being tracked.

GOOD GUYS VS. BAD

Fresno and I had a dozen phone conversations during the week before I flew in to help the desperate owner confront and end the massive betrayal in one fell swoop, without imploding the company. I was a little frayed around the edges from constant travel and had a two-week holiday break planned, but this wasn't a consulting engagement, it was a potentially explosive fight for the business survival of an owner I knew and liked: a dynamic entrepreneur who found himself trapped in a nightmare betrayal on a scale that infuriated my sense of justice. In the simplistic confines of my own mind, I often find some things in life black and white. This was one. Fresno was an entrepreneur, a builder, a creator of jobs, prosperity and livelihoods. A bootstrap American success story…a Good Guy.

The members of the Wolf Pack were self-absorbed parasites who were thieves and drug-addicted destroyers disguised as employees, and if left unchecked or handled wrong would suck the life out of the goose that laid everyone's golden eggs, and bring ruin to the Good Guy. I knew the American employment system was now rigged to protect the Bad Guys. The cops were often useless in an Alice-in-Wonderland entitlement society that had gone over the progressive liberal common-sense cliff when it came to protecting workers who were viciously gnawing off the hand that fed them. The government inmates had taken over the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and labor board asylum; everybody was seen as a potential victim – except the small-business operators who drove the economic engine of the country. I knew I had to be careful, razor sharp and double tough.

This wasn't a traditional opening client visit, an assessment to analyze and customize the interconnected Training, Technologies, Tools and Tactics while slowly increasing the bottom line, month after month, and slowly changing the culture. This was intense, stress-filled, mind-to-mind combat with a pack of street-smart thugs with nothing to go on but a jilted girlfriend's drug-craving rantings, and one week's worth of successful machine-level pre- and post-audit investigations on only one of the nine Bad Guys. Thin investigative gruel to sip from.

Proverbs 10:9 crossed my mind…it was fitting. "Whoever walks in integrity walks securely, but he who makes his ways crooked will be found out.

As I thought about the situation, my eyes narrowed, my breathing quickened, and I found myself tightly smiling. I always smiled when I heard the bell of the opening loss-prevention round. No way to deny it

… I loved a good fight against punks, thieves and parasites. Bring it on!

PLANTING THE SEED

CSM Roger Woody walked into the conference room with the GM and I greeted him immediately, introducing myself with a firm handshake and a friendly smile. I told "Woody" (as he was called) that I was an outside consultant brought in to help senior management solve some operational problems. I motioned the perplexed middle manager to sit down, and soon had the CSM relaxed and talking. I poured on the charm.

The setting was not in the usual interrogation "room setting" I would use when I owned hard evidence and sat directly across from the subject, with very little space in-between us, our knees almost touching. Woody sat at the tip of a long oval table bracketed by me and the GM, as this conversation was being initially sold as an overture to a key member of middle management for insight. But it was really a carefully choreographed verbal dance … a misdirection wrapped in a sharp psych …followed by a series of sucker punches!

Disinformation was a powerful physiological seed that, once planted, can bloom overnight into the tree of consuming guilt. In conspiracies, the interrogations are interconnected, flowing like poison in the bloodstream. I knew from decades of interrogation trench warfare that a verbal bayonet charge can break the enemy's will, and there was no truism truer than the fact that there is absolutely subzero honor among thieves.

I had a bayonet up my sleeve from the Heather hearsay on Woody, the 30-something corrupt CSM who was on the fringe of the Wolf Pack. The well-known self-absorbed CSM was not popular; matter of fact everyone seemed to dislike him. He was not the most active thief, and according to Heather, not trusted by Joe; but he was the highest-ranking crook. I intended to eliminate the management cog in the theft machine. Woody was not leaving the room with his job, and at the same time I intended to use the CSM's termination to plant the seed of consuming fear and guilt overnight within the pack with what he had told us …no matter what he actually told us.

Fifteen minutes into the discussion, I suddenly shifted the tone and the intent of the conversation as it suddenly became a verbal surprise attack! I described to the CSM, with a hard glare and a confident air, the realities of the Wolf Pack's specific activities and how it all had been carefully investigated and meticulously documented. My fin cut through the water as the theme music from Jaws began playing in my head.

Woody's eyelids fluttered, his eyes flared as he looked inward swallowing twice. In an inner conversation with himself, he fought back panic. Then he hardened, grit his teeth, clenched his hands tightly in his lap, and for the next 10 minutes manufactured one phony denial after another. I realized Woody was not a bright man, but when denials are linked together and you have no real evidence on an individual, there is a point to say "hey diddle diddle, right up the middle"… bite him hard and drag him under. The stubborn but scared CSM was repeatedly verbally attacked by me, my tone vicious, my eyes glaring into his. The shocked manager stuttered, stumbled, then hanged himself with his own tongue.

Heather had told me and Fresno that the CSM had a stolen vending machine he kept on his back porch filled with Coke, his drink of choice, and that he stole a case a week from the warehouse. It was a hearsay accusation that the ambushed CSM turned into hard evidence with his own admission of having done both – from Woody's lips to my recorder.

At the abrupt end of the interrogation, the CSM was past astonished when I left the room and a police officer entered, curtly demanding to see his driver's license, took down his information, and issued him a prepared written criminal trespass warning, then escorted him to his car.

Woody was driving home aimlessly trying to grapple with the fact that he had just been terminated…but not arrested. The fact that I had told him that the disposition of "The Case" and his role in it would be decided soon, as there were others in the company who soon would be answering for their well-documented multiple felony crimes, had Woody so scared that his hands were shaking on the wheel as he drove home to get the Coke machine off his porch and hide it someplace.

THE HOTEL HUDDLE

Fresno and I sat in the hotel that night talking over the first interrogation with Woody and the plan to bring it all to a head the next day. We'd let the pack absorb one of them being interrogated and escorted out by a cop. I made sure everyone in the vending operation saw me after Woody left as I stalked around the building, giving everyone hard glares and stares. I was dressed all in black and, with my Soprano looks and Jersey accent, the company was buzzing with rumors.

The stress was mirrored on Fresno's face, as the first day with the direct attack on the CSM had been a mixed success. Fresno thought the CSM was the most likely dog out of the pack to howl with fear, and he had when it came to his own chronic theft of having stolen weekly cases of Coke, whimpering about how old the machine was. But he had refused to give anything up about the rest of the Pack – the High School Candy Box Scam, the Coin Tube Scam, the massive warehouse theft, the Non-DEX Machine Scam. We knew from Heather that he was in on the fringes of it all. What he had given up on himself was more than enough to terminate the manager who had stolen product for years and looked the other way while the Neighborhood Vending Company had been plundered. Most important of all, he was led out by a police officer, and cancerous disinformation had been planted within him to throw the rest of the pack into a terminal panic.

It was a gamble, but the whole plan was a gamble. The next day, I was going to go after Joe, the only one I had real evidence against from those hasty pre- and post-audits I had Fresno and the GM do just before I got there. Everything else was just hearsay from Heather the crackhead.

The GM had been stunned by the relentless intensity of my interrogation of Woody. I discovered he had known Woody many years and had even brought him into the company from a past life in which they worked together. The GM didn't want to sit through what he suspected was about to happen with Joe, as it was obvious to him that I was gearing up for a cut-throat attack on Joe. He wasn't opposed to that, as his realization of the scope of the betrayal by a fourth of the company's employees had left his stomach in knots, and he was lighting each of his cigarettes from the stub of the last one. It wasn't that he didn't want this to end, that he wasn't horrified by the scope of the thefts and the threat to his own livelihood; but he had never sat through anything this ugly, gut wrenching and stressful. He told Fresno and me that he didn't want to be the witness at Joe's interrogation; and Fresno, who knew his GM well, understood his saying he was a non-confrontational guy who really didn't have the grit for these ugly face-to face accusations. Fresno decided to sit in as the management witness himself. Hindsight being 20-20, it was an unplanned but rock-solid pivotal move.

I had a hard time getting to sleep that night, as everything was set for the morning and it was going to be show time with the Wolf Pack ringleader and resident bad boy Joe – the DEX Coin Tube and School Candy Box scam inventor and trainer of the rest of the pack … a crackhead, a con man, and an experienced route driver who was personally responsible for the near destruction of Larry Fresno life's work and his legacy to his family.

I was seething with righteous indignation towards this street punk who thought he was a slick tough guy, and I intended to find out exactly how tough Joe really was.

To be continued….

The final episode of The Wolf Pack saga will appear on vendingtimes.com following publication of this article.

MARK MANNEY was NAMA's security and loss prevention know ledge source partner from 2004 to 2010. He has been featured in leading industry publications over the years, including VENDING TIMES and Sunbelt Vending & OCS. At the suggestion of Sunbelt's publisher, the late Ben Ginsberg, Manney authored this series of what are, in effect, detective stories based on his real-life experiences in working with vending and foodservice operations.