He’d systematically shortchanged or stiffed hundreds of clients, holding on to far more than the promised forty percent contingency. Borrowing from Ponzi-type schemes, he’d mollified some complainants by paying them from the proceeds of other people’s lawsuits.
When that logjammed, attempts to collect were met with stalls, legalistic filings to delay, or outright silence.
It might’ve gone on unchecked but Kevin Van Osler had come across a filing by a Fresno attorney suing Alberts and gotten curious. The son of two judges and a cousin of the governor, Van Osler viewed his job as the anteroom to a political career, and nothingprimes a political career better than a high-level case with heroic overtones.
Faced with the charges, Darren Alberts took the obvious route: declaring bankruptcy. Van Osler’s army of federal agents and LAPD detectives set about searching for Alberts’s assets and discovered that the San Marino estate, a house on Carbon Beach in Malibu, and a chalet in Aspen were mortgaged to the hilt.
A fleet of luxury cars turned out to be leased with payments due. Including a three-million-dollar Bugatti whose total mileage of one hundred thirty-five came from filmed drives to and from the offices of theContessaproducers.
Designer clothing reaped chump change at resale, furniture in all three houses consisted of cheap copies of signature pieces, and the Albertses’ art collection heralded in the show’s pilot episode was all cheesy reproduction.
No bank accounts or Wall Street investments surfaced. Tiana’s jewelry was confiscated, revealing a few serious pieces but mostly costume junk. That was reputed to enrage the Contessa, who framed herself as another of Darren Alberts’s victims and filed for divorce.
Van Osler, chastened by failure to produce headline fodder, continued to press the criminal case against Alberts. Years of delaying motions were no longer necessary when Alberts was judged mentally unfit to stand trial.
Just as he’d avoided the courtroom as a plaintiff, the master thief had slipped by as a defendant.
Sole defendant. I searched for other indictees but no charges seemed to have been leveled against anyone but the boss. Meaning either that Alberts had concealed the thefts from his employees or that they’d been incentivized by the government to turn against the boss.
Ratting on a grade-A psychopath could be dangerous, so maybe Michael Heck had been onto something.
I jotted down a timetable.
Kevin Van Osler had filed charges seven years ago, meaning he’d begun investigating earlier. Eight or more years ago.
Michael Heck had left Alberts’s firm five years ago. Sticking around for two years during the initial prosecution.
Heck had claimed ignorance of the scam but his position—managing expenses—made me wonder. Perhaps he’d been vulnerable because hewasdirty and had stayed on as Van Osler’s plant.
During some of that time, Darren Alberts had been cognitively intact, not showing signs of dementia until a year after Heck quit.
More than able to plot revenge.
What better way to discredit a potential witness than by setting up a phony murder scenario?
But the timeline didn’t work.
If Alberts had tried to silence Heck, he’d have done it years ago. Sometimes revenge is a dish best eaten cold but Alberts was well past the point of cooking up anything.
I ran an image search on him.
Smallish, inevitably smiling man nearing seventy. Spray-tanned, shaved pate as shiny as his yellow Bijan tie.
In every shot, he was flanked by movie stars, producers, directors, and elected officials. In most of them, he stood dwarfed by Tiana, tall, blond, busty, skin ironed smooth as a hotel bedsheet.
In every shot, Alberts came across looking his age but energetic and vital.
Now he was “vegetative.”
The legal system had failed to stem Alberts’s felonies but his own brain had finally voiced an opinion.
I don’t believe in karma but in this case it’s hard to escape.
Chapter
15
I got a cup of coffee and texted Milo:Sophie unlikely related to Heck’s work for Alberts.
