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Wolf Pack Part III: Jam’em Up and Flip’em Over

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 that he had ever faced.

January 23, 2020 | Mark Manney

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 that 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, a conspiracy that 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, the new (and incredibly expensive) software system that had been installed at the beginning of the year (crashing like the stock market in 2008) had left him groping in the cutting-edge technology dark while being systematically plundered by nine of his own employees.

The trapped operator was caught in between the devil banker and the deep blue technology loan sea. Fresno was damned if he cut me loose to take all nine out and he ended up with a third of his workforce dragged under by their own crimes, terminated and or arrested…and damned if he didn’t and the pack of thieves continued to suck the financial life out of him like the ungrateful Benedict Arnold leeches they were. If all nine were arrested or some 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 is that in his state, any vehicle used in the commission of a felony crime could be confiscated by the police!

This wasn’t a nightmare; it was Dante’s Vending Inferno!

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 new significant accounts on the cusp of signing needing to immediately hire two more route drivers, not lose seven, plus a warehouse manager, and one of two of his mid-management 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 Gone Insane

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 now 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-of-control conspiracy both financially and emotionally.

I knew when I got onsite that it would be a decisive search-and-destroy mission. I just didn’t want to get it reversed. Knowing Fresno’s business realities, I didn’t want to blow up the company! 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 on the route driver who they had the most intel on, the route driver who had bragged to his girlfriend 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 mole hill, 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 give up 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 there was other useful information pulled from the bitter young woman. I had a favorite saying I always told impatient owners: the investigation is made in the fact-finding interviews and then the interrogation(s) -- 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 all of the Wolf Pack to be eliminated or even scared off all at once; otherwise, the cure might kill the patent.

The Rubik Cube Fresno and I had to figure out was how to take out the leaders, but not terminate or have arrested or even scare off most of the pack, buy some time, hire and train new honest employees, reverse the cash drain back to cash flow, then eliminate the remaining blood suckers one after another…all while making them STOP STEALING AND SELLING DRUGS!

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…kinda like an idiot savant interrogator, more of a reflexive gift than a conscience 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, her answers always matching.

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 on 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 software exploded like the death star at the end of the first movie. They knew their thefts were not being tracked individually.

The Good Guys vs. the 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 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 EEOC and labor board asylum; everybody was 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 month after month slowly increasing the bottom line, and slowly changing the culture. This was intense, no quarter, 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 investigation 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. Bang a gong…let’s get it on! Just before I left, I exhausted myself on the heavy bag in my garage…to get into the right frame of body and mind.

Planting the Seed

CSM Roger Woody walked into the conference room with the GM and was immediately greeted by me as I introduced 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 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 was really a carefully choreographed verbal dance…a misdirection wrapped in a sharp psych…followed by a series of rapid sucker punches!

Disinformation was a powerful physiological seed that once planted could bloom overnight into the tree of consuming guilt. In conspiracies, the interrogations are interconnected, flowing like poison in the blood stream. I knew from decades of trench interrogation warfare 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 seem 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! Announcing to the CSM with a hard glare and a confidant air the realities of the Wolf Pack’s specific activities and how it all had been carefully investigated and meticulously documented (I lied through my shark teeth). 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, an inner conversation with himself 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!

I repeatedly verbally attacked the stubborn but scared CSM, my tone vicious, my eyes glaring into him. The shocked manager stuttered, stumbled, then hung himself with his own tongue.

Heather had told me and Fresno 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 slumped and broken CSM was past astonished when I left the room and a police officer entered with me curtly demanding to see his driver’s license, took down his information, and issued him a prepared written criminal trespass warning never to come back or he would be arrested for criminal trespass, and his locker contents would be mailed to him. Then the officer 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 that would be answering soon for their well-documented multiple FELONY crimes.

Woody was so scared 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 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 harder stares. I was dressed all in black and with my New Jersey (Exit 9) 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 to me 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 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, and we knew from Heather he was in on the fringes of it all.

What he did give 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 was that he was led out by a police officer and cancerous disinformation had been planted with him to throw the rest of the pack into what I hoped was 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 hasty pre- and post- audits I had had Fresno and the GM do just before I got there.

The GM had been stunned by the relentless intensity of my vicious interrogation of Woody. I discovered he had known Woody many years and had even brought him into the company from a past life where 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 I was gearing up for an attack on Joe past cut throat. He wasn’t opposed to it as the realization of the scope of the betrayal from a fourth of the company’s employees had left his stomach in knots, and he was lighting 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 was a soft-spoken man; this gut-wrenching confrontation was too much for him. He told Fresno and me he didn’t want to be the witness at Joe’s interrogation. And Fresno, who knew his GM well understood, saying he was a non-confrontational guy, decided to sit in as the management witness himself.

Hindsight being 20-20, it was an unplanned but rock-solid pivotal move.

Jam’Em Up and Flip’Em Over
 

When Joe walked into the conference room, he could feel his heart beating in his chest as a sudden acid reflux threatened to erupt. He had hit the crack pipe at lunch -- he had to -- and that was the only reason he was able to bop into the room with a cocky bravado, knowing he could be walking into an arrest for more felonies than he could remember or count. He knew that Woody was fired yesterday by the same investigator he now faced, and was escorted out by a cop…but not arrested…yet? There was some kind of investigation going on for months! He didn’t trust and wasn’t sure what Woody had really told the investigator who everyone was buzzing about and some thought was a Yankee mobster.

What deal had Woody cut with him? The entire pack had bombarded Woody all night with phone calls (as I hoped) including Joe, but the whiny manager nobody really trusted or liked had sworn he hadn’t given anyone up? Joe didn’t know what to believe, his lunchtime tokes smoothing out the giant speed bumps looming out of nowhere that his racing mind ran over.

There was electricity in the air when Joe bopped into the conference room with a forced nonchalant coolness…but I could sense a collective Wolf Pack whimper in the invisible loss prevention time warp continuum, and the theme music from Jaws started building its familiar menacing beat in my mind.

The disinformation seedling I had planted with Woody the Weasel (his behind- the-back nickname) was raging out of control in Joe’s fear-filled guilty conscience. I had never met Joe before, but once I locked eyes and took the measure of the man I knew I was sitting across from a tough guy with a cracking façade (every drug pun intended).

A puffed-up but secretly scared street punk. Yeah, his pupils were dilated so he was probably gliding on the pipe…but I could still sense and smell the spastic fear no drug could mask…and I had the critical, foundational and formidable ingredient needed in every interrogation: evidence. It wasn’t much, only a misdemeanor and only gathered over the past week, but Joe the papier-mâché tough guy didn’t know that, and on top of that, I had something Joe wanted, fantasized about, but really couldn’t conceptualize…Land Shark killer instinct.

There was no verbal foreplay in my introduction like with Woody, no opening monologue, just a drilled-down, hard accusation. I quickly escorted Joe into the shadowed realm of his darkest fears, yet dangled hope that would guarantee the dishonest route driver walked out of the room without being arrested by the two police officers I announced were waiting in the next office…if he told the truth.

Joe knew the cops were really there as he had seen their black-and-white parked outside when he drove into the yard. In reality, they were two uniformed props I had arranged to be waiting, both thinking they were there because a potentially violent employee was being terminated. Just like yesterday with Woody the Weasel.

I then plumbed the depths of the drug dealer/addict’s deepest criminal fears when I whispered the location of where he bought most of his drugs (told to me by his former girlfriend), dismissing it with a wave of my hand and a side glance at the door that led to the office where the two cops lurked. I whispered softly my only real desire was to settle vending issues, and hopefully only between the three of us, as long as Joe didn’t insult our intelligence and force our hand with turning over what we knew to the cops.

Joe’s voice cracked with his first admission of theft…he knew he was drowning unconsciously, deciding to admit to minor theft, stuttering out low-dollar admissions…while qualifying how many others were doing it. Then out of the blue and in spite of my instructions on just listening, the owner, Larry Fresno, erupted like a massive volcano!

The owner slammed his fist down on the conference table again and again, cursed repeatedly, pointed a cocked finger of accusation at the stunned route driver and screamed curses over and over. Joe and I were both caught completely by surprise! The usual mild-mannered owner couldn’t take it anymore as his eyes bulged out of his head like in a cartoon character, and the anger poured out of him like flooding lava. The enraged owner threatened the route driver as slivers of spittle added airborne explanation marks to his righteous rage. This vicious outburst was so uncharacteristic and unexpected from Fresno’s normal easygoing, jovial, velvet personality. Joe was past rattled. He was scared into an escalating blurting and detailed confession.

I quickly regained control of the interrogation as the now terrified Joe stared at the bulging eyed, snorting owner…folding like a cardboard box in a hurricane rain. I immediately flipped into a good cop role restraining the owner, and Joe gave up every scam in vivid detail and every dirty trick of every dirty dog in the Wolf Pack. Joe was jammed up by guilt, fears, rumors, a no-nonsense interrogation, and then hit by a sudden explosive emotional sucker punch thrown by a fed-up, rage-filled owner. Joe, the mastermind Wolf Pack alpha thief flipped over on everyone…including himself.

The Transformation

Exactly as Fresno and I had hoped, two more of the Wolf Pack were terminated and escorted out, but only given criminal trespass warnings by the police. For now, we held back Joe’s recorded snitch on the rest. After a masterly performance at a company meeting at the end of the longest day in his operator life, Fresno convinced the rest of the pack they were all safe and the investigation was over. Six of the nine mongrels who were left filed out of the meeting with their tails between their legs, nervous darting eyes obviously greatly relieved. The daily, massive, yearlong theft came to an immediate screeching halt, yet there were enough employees left to keep the company running.

An amazing coincidence happened the day after Joe’s interrogation. It was discovered an experienced vending warehouse manager, who had been downsized because of two local competitors merging, was working as a route driver in training to fill that critical slot, and two former route drivers who had left a year earlier for greener pastures, and were considered honest hard workers suddenly materialized looking for their old jobs back! I grinned when these three desperately needed, honest employees popped up out of nowhere. Three more pack members were soon terminated. One by one as more replacements were hired and trained, the rest of the Wolf Pack were quickly managed out as well. The next full accounting month, the bleeding red ink had turned black.

Epilogue

Three months later, after multiple visits, the Neighborhood Vending Company had completed more positive change than most of my clients experienced in a year. Productivity skyrocketed as control after control was built into the day-to-day operating culture of the Neighborhood Vending Company, and Larry Fresno’s amazing entrepreneurial success story turned the page into a new chapter.

I love happy endings…and I love euthanizing dishonest employee Wolf Packs!

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.