It was early morning…sometime before Regis and I was slowly waking up when the phone rang. Things had not been good….maybe it was spring of 2000. Yes. Something told me to carefully pick up the phone next to my bed and not breathe into it… hold the mouthpiece way up high.
“Did you get her !&$** money!?”
“NO. And she is not going to let me to “invest” because she says she doesn’t believe in doing business with relatives….she is smart and she is not going to give it to me…maybe you should just split things now…but I like her and she isn’t like Penny”.
“Well, just get her to do it anyway you can since you both went to U Of Oregon she has a soft spot for your humor.”
“It’s Barclay she likes (son and student body pres of the u at the time) so just forget it.”
Sept 2001 at 9a.m. Pebble Beach, CA time. Time for all the rich snobs (not me) to be down at the Beach Club doing their pilots……………er pilates. That’s right, I’d been the flight attendant…way before that little squirt knew me….the phone rings. I was in the kitchen with Voodoo and Bonzai having coffee. “It’s Mom,” she says. “Deb, are you watching the news?” I was puzzled “Yeah, how come you are calling so early?”
“Well, you’d better sit down and listen, there is something terrible on the front page of this morning’s “Oregonian” And it was terrible – I picked up the paper and the headline was… Jefferey Grayson, of Capitol Consultants…indicted in the biggest Ponzi scheme in the United States history.
“What is a Ponzi Scheme and does it involve investment money?”
“Well, it says that he and his son are perpetrators of the thievery of 1 billion of investors money and $350 million of the pension OF LONG SHOREMAN”S PENSION FUND… they’ve taken and lost their and other investors money and the feds have got them. Oh this is terrible…does Marvin know?” My first thought was NOT Barclay! And then I thought that Marvin must know, but just not THAT WAY.
So there began the biggest scandal of the West’s most small and conservative town. With me being married to Jeff’s cousin, it made things hard. Two years later with Bonzai killed, me filing for divorce, Portland, Oregon falling apart, people wanting to know why is Jeff not dead in the Willamette river with cement blocks … I was wondering do I get outta here , go to SF??? OSLO??? But we played the game as my ex hid what he could and I called the feds to tell what I knew. I told the truth and as a result some of the $$$ came back to the “investors” first…like my husband Marvin. He was ticked that I did what I did, because I would get some of it in the end.
April 2002 at 9am at the morning hearing to indict and sentence Jeff and son Barclay in the courthouse as Jeff is getting sentenced I couldn’t help but think - Jeff is known as the most conspicuous consumer in Portland…the biggest fundraiser for the University of Oregon and this is what was behind it all. Jeff, who also it is important to know had MS, came to the FED Portland courthouse with his electric wheelchair, clad in his ever worn brown crocodile shoes and the brown croc carryall in the basket by the handlebars, had a major stroke just as he was being sentenced. The town and papers went crazy.
In the spring of 2009, I was at Jan Deneau’s place up the hill from my house just about to play chess (he’d taught me when we were just about to make his jazz cd at my house) when all this was going on about Bernie Madoff. I went NUTS recounting the whole story to Jan, my divorce, dead Bonzai, the money all those people lost and reliving the fear, pain, sorrow. Jeff was still alive and Barclay took a two year mail fraud wrap for his dad. I was SOOOOOOOOOOOO affected by this news that while having coffee and waiting for the final answer for Jeopardy, I write on a scrap of paper, the lyrics to “Stressed, depressed, and foreclosed”. Jan said “Are you finally writing a song???” I answered “yes and it is killing me because I want to laugh and cry and kill Madoff at the same time!” Jan: “Madoff now? Does it EVER END for you?” So I wrote the song because the economy was the pits, Bernie had screwed everyone and made me relive this all, Dr. Phil needed a one time “Will the world get it together?” hour.
I was in Pebble Beach going crazy and now divorcing and SCARED TO DEATH. God only knows what my husband really back from his ‘investments’ but on Black Friday of this past 2009, I got up at my mom’s to have coffee here in Portland..and there were the headlines: Jeff Grayson of Capitol Consultants dead. Jeff had lived on life support for over 8 years. He wasn’t someone to cry over, but I cried anyway…for EVERYONE.
