The next two months were just me trying to settle into life in a city I wasn’t crazy about, doing work I was good at but didn’t find compelling. The things that kept me going were the time I spent mentoring Wilkie, who far exceeded my expectations, and the days Hopeton spent in country, teaching me the ropes of managing his money changing network and helping me to keep Mundo from doing anything stupid.
But it was obvious that Olmando was not in the mood to be compliant.
Like I’d suspected, a paperwork game was being played and Mundo was in on it with his contractors. A lot of budgeted money was shifting around, which made it hard for me to accurately track progress. I’d ask Wilkie to request actuals from his counterpart on the construction company side and, when he’d do an audit, it’d show that either the dollar amount or the materials inventory didn’t match up with the budget we’d initially been given.
“I’m going to set up a review session with Mr. Henriques to go over spreadsheets, and I’d like you to walk us through your budget breakdowns,” I told Wilkie.
It killed me to have to call Mundo “Mr. Henriques,” but it was what it was.
I set the meeting up American style, sending out a notice via Microsoft Outlook. As soon as he received it, Doe pulled me aside and asked me what the meeting was about.
“Didn’t you read the invite?” I asked him. “I included an agenda. You should know exactly what the meeting’s about.”
I could tell Doe was nervous, even though he was doing his best to hide it. I clocked his “tell.” Mundo was tapping the toe of his right foot while his left foot remained motionless.
“Why are you involving Wilkie?”
He knew why. He just couldn’t believe I was pretending this was a real job. And that was killing him.
“Because he’s the project coordinator, Olmando,” I explained, as if to a five-year-old. “I asked him to pull actuals. He’s the one who has a handle on the spend, and where the discrepancies are.”
“Come on, Pierre- you know how it’s played here,” Doe said. “You build out the budget and then you move the money around so it goes where it’s really needed. And sometimes you need to break someone off a little something to keep shit moving.”
“Look, Doe,” I replied, “You’re fucking with your father’s money, which is kinda weird to me because by extension, it’s your money. What’s really going on here? Are you skimming off your own projects?”
Mundo refused to give me a straight answer, so I had to read between the lines. He was in collusion with all of the construction company owners. They were falsifying paperwork submitted to the government, in order to get bigger subsidies and on top of that, they were skimming money off the budgets. All of this was going directly into their pockets.
I kept the meeting with Mundo. And I made Wilkie walk us through each discrepancy, step by step. I went through the charade partially to show Mundo how easy it was to unravel his weak attempt at covering up financial fraud, but mainly to teach Wilkie that it was best to stay far, far away from the type of business Doe was conducting.
And yeah, I did run to Mr. Henriques and tell him what Olmando was up to. And once that was taken care of, I washed my hands of the whole thing. There was a chance that Mr. Henriques didn’t even really give a fuck but if an audit ever went down, I wanted to be on the record as having let him know. And I didn’t care if Mundo got upset about it. I was here as a paid consultant, not as his errand boy or janitor. At some point he’d have to learn that play time was over.
My next step was to sit down with Hopeton and see how he felt about our bringing Wilkie into our Panama operation.
I had to wait awhile, but that conversation eventually took place- back in Brooklyn, at Panamanian Star.
