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 News from Around Banderas Bay | February 2007 
'Can't Anyone Help Me?'
 Charles Rusnell - CanWest News
| | Roger Harrison tells the story of the Tri-West Investment Club Scam - the largest internet investment fraud case ever. The book is available for purchase at wantedunwanted.com and major online bookselling sites. |
The Mexican federal police could have simply arrested Brenda Martin at her Puerto Vallarta house but it seems the officers desired something more dramatic.
So when Ms. Martin, a caterer and personal chef, agreed to meet a man on Feb. 17, 2006, to review the menu for what she thought was a small party for his mother, he grabbed her wrist. Within minutes, she had been hustled - "screaming bloody blue murder" - into a waiting vehicle by four federal agents and was off to jail.
Since then, the 50-year-old Toronto native has been caught in a legal nightmare in which she says Mexican authorities have repeatedly thwarted her attempts to prove she is not, as they allege, a money launderer and member of a criminal gang.
She says her only "crime" was being the chef for an eccentric Edmonton man who ran a US$60-million Ponzi fraud scheme from his palatial cliffside Mexican mansion.
Jailed in the teeming Puente Grande women's prison in a suburb of Guadalajara for the past year, Ms. Martin's declining physical condition - she now weighs less than 100 lbs. - and emotional despair at the seeming hopelessness of her situation have driven her to make several suicide attempts.
"I don't know how much longer I can go on. I am going to die in here," Ms. Martin said in a recent telephone interview in which she sobbed hysterically. "They just keep running me around. I don't understand why the Canadian government won't help me. I don't have any rights, and I can't get a fair trial."
Ms. Martin was jailed nearly five years after her former employer, Edmontonian Alyn Richard Waage, was arrested at the Puerto Vallarta airport on a chartered Lear Jet from Belize City, Belize. With Waage was his bodyguard, Puerto Vallarta's former deputy police chief, Gonzalo Cuevas Perez, another Albertan, Jerry Elder - and a bag containing US$4.5-million in cheques and money orders made out to one of Waage's companies.
Waage and several other Canadians and Americans were indicted in California for operating what was believed to be the largest Internet-based fraud scheme in history.
Between 1999 and 2001, Waage and his crew pulled in an estimated US$60-million from 15,000 investors around the world through the Tri-West Investment Club. The club was a front for a sophisticated Ponzi scheme in which money from later investors is used to pay earlier investors.
Waage operated the scheme from a 15,538-square-foot, cliffside mansion in the exclusive cobble-stoned enclave of Conchas Chinas, high in the hills above Puerto Vallarta. An alcoholic egomaniac, Waage bought the mansion on a drunken whim for its asking price of US$2.2- million.
He filled the mansion with computers and phone lines and hired a small army of people to operate the scheme.
Ms. Martin, who had lived in Puerto Vallarta for three years before she met Waage, was hired at US$500 a week as a chef and general household manager.
Although Waage's culinary tastes initially ran to macaroni with stewed tomatoes, Ms. Martin said he soon developed a taste for US$500 bottles of wine, which he bought three cases at a time, and King Crab flown in fresh from Alaska.
"Our liquor bill was US$2,000 a week - minimum," Ms. Martin said previously.
Ms. Martin said she placed one order for 80 kilograms of crab and then sent a mozo (houseboy) out to buy two new freezers to hold it all.
"He wanted only the best and I got it for him," she said.
"He was very generous, and I had carte blanche with money. If I went to him and said I needed some money to get groceries or whatever provisions, he would say to me, 'How much do you need, this much?' "she said, miming Waage holding his index finger and thumb about two inches apart.
" 'Or do you need this much?' " she said, moving her fingers about four inches apart. "Then he would reach into the safe where he kept the cash and take a wad of money out and just give it to me. Sometimes he never even counted it."
Part of Ms. Martin's fluid job description also involved taking Waage's elderly mother on shopping trips in downtown Puerto Vallarta, where the octogenarian would drop thousands of dollars on gold and silver jewellery. By several accounts, the elder Mrs. Waage was a difficult, demanding woman. One day Ms. Martin, who had a serious drinking problem of her own, lost her temper and swore crudely at the elderly woman.
Although Waage liked Ms. Martin, his mother insisted he fire her. He did, but gave her one year severance of US$26,000.
Like many others in Puerto Vallarta and elsewhere, Ms. Martin - without Waage's knowledge - invested in Tri-West. When Waage, after his arrest, learned Ms. Martin had invested US$10,000 in his failing scheme, he arranged for it to be refunded. Ms. Martin told all this to federal police officers in two formal statements made voluntarily in 2002.
Mexican authorities had cut a deal with the Americans to arrest and extradite anyone involved in the scheme. Waage, his son Cary, from Vancouver, Keith Nordick, from a small town in Saskatchewan, and American Michael Webb, all pleaded guilty in Sacramento, Calif.
Waage and Webb received 10- year sentences and the younger Waage and Nordick each got five years. Others are still being sought by U.S. authorities.
Ms. Martin went back to her life in Puerto Vallarta and thought the matter was behind her until she was inexplicably arrested last year.
Her elderly mother in Trenton, Ont., and several friends in Puerto Vallarta cobbled together US$8,000 to hire a Guadalajara lawyer. Ms. Martin fully expected to be out of jail in a few days because Waage's bodyguard, the former Puerto Vallarta deputy police chief, was released after only five days in jail even though he was directly involved in the scheme's operation.
But Ms. Martin said the Guadalajara lawyer took the money and did nothing, visiting only four times in six months.
"He was supposed to make some representations on my behalf to the court but just didn't show up," she said.
In August, 2006, Ms. Martin was given a public defender by the Mexican government. A human rights group provided a translator.
At a hearing that same month, Ms. Martin said she told the court that Waage was prepared to swear an affidavit in which he would say she had nothing to do with the scheme and had no knowledge of it. Waage, who is being held in a federal hospital prison in Butner, North Carolina, swore the affadavit before a prison notary, a copy of which has been obtained by the National Post.
But what followed was months of mix-ups and delays by Mexican authorities. Last week, after Ms. Martin again demanded to know what was happening, she was again visited by a Mexican official who told her there had been another error and they had not received the necessary documentation.
Worse, Ms. Martin was told her case was now being linked to that of Rebecca Roth, an American who had been arrested at the same time as Ms. Martin.
Ms. Roth was directly involved in Waage's financial operation. In fact, Waage had given her signing authority for his bank accounts after he had been arrested.
"Rebecca has testified that I had nothing to do with the scheme; that I was just the chef," Ms. Martin said. "But now I am being dragged through hell and am being linked with her case when I had nothing to do with her."
Two Albertans who were directly involved in the operation of the scheme told the National Post last week that Ms. Martin had nothing to do with it. One of them, who now lives in Calgary, helped Waage establish and operate the scheme.
He had a falling out with Waage and became a witness for the RCMP and FBI in return for immunity from prosecution.
"Look it, I was there from the beginning and [Ms. Martin] was just a cook," said the man, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "She got the groceries and she had authority to buy stuff for the household. That's it."
"She was there cooking for the gang. We never told her anything because she was a drunk, and she was always downtown in the bars running her mouth."
Another Alberta man, who worked directly on the scheme dealing with investors, said, "All I know is that she was a terrible cook because she was drunk all the time and that she had no interest in what we were doing."
Ms. Martin has another hearing on Monday.
"I did nothing illegal but a year later I am stuck in this s***hole, sleeping next to a woman who killed two of her children with dull scissors."
"I don't have any money, my mother doesn't have any money left. I don't want to live anymore. Jesus, can't anyone help me?" |
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