A Basket of Deplorables (Part 3)

An imbroglio of deception, jealousy, revenge, and murder

Of course, getting her husband to understand and accept the nuances of our arrangement wasn't an interest that either of us had. And obviously he felt slighted, humiliated, and otherwise belittled to such an extent that he decided to play his deuce. A play, which I expected, just not in the way that he played it. Because he didn't go to the investors—at least, not the venture capitalists.

Instead, he went to my father-in-law and principal business partner, Dennis Melin, a man who was very interested to learn that my intention was to complete the IPO, but in the process of doing so transfer my ownership shares of the company to an offshore entity that would effectually extricate those assets from any kind of litigation or divorce proceedings in the US. How did Chris Miguel know this? I imagine that Lisa or any of my principal partners in our tech company could have mentioned it. I didn't exactly hide the fact that Dennis’ daughter was unwilling to grant me a divorce and that I was attempting to maneuver myself accordingly.

The result was that Dennis became frantic. He was about to fall into bankruptcy, and he desperately needed the financial payout of our company’s finder’s fee to stay afloat, and the news that Lisa's husband delivered was very much like hearing a torpedo in the water.

Dennis Melin, photo courtesy of Linkedin

I had originally intended to give Dennis his half of the finder’s fee, but that was conditioned on him not using his leverage against me in divorce proceedings to benefit his daughter. But when it became clear to me that he was going to take her side, I saw no reason to broker a multi-million dollar finder’s fee through our company. After all, the venture capital was coming through my contacts not his. And that was a play that would prove fatal to his financial picture, but was also a play that proved a moot point because the investor suddenly backed out for other reasons.

The main investor informed me that he and his group were backing out of our deal because of some disqualifying information they had discovered through their own efforts of due diligence on the partners. The information was related to the criminal histories of two of the main partners that not only wasn't disclosed, but was also of the nature that caused the investors to question their personal integrity and character. I had hoped that I could rescue the deal, even attempting to personally guarantee some of their investment, but all of my efforts were to no avail.

The challenge that this development created for our company was catastrophic. As a company we had already made major cash outlays on expanding our office space and workforce for the purpose of achieving our business plan objectives so as to position ourselves for the coveted IPO. But without the influx of venture capital we would fall into the red within thirty days. And though all of us would stand to lose, the principal partners were primed to lose even private assets like their homes if we couldn't figure out a way to rescue the deal.

It is important to understand that I was baptized into the craft of salesmanship by Wall Street veterans who had taught me to cold call whales and close deals over the phone. I was trained to never hear or interpret the word “no” to mean anything other than, “from what you've told me so far I can't say yes—at least not yet.” And I had no illusions about the lives and livelihoods hanging in the balance that depended on my ability to rescue our company by finding the replacement venture capital that we needed within the timeframe that we needed it.

Granted, initially there was a fair amount of finger pointing around the circle of principal partners. But I didn’t need to be reminded that I had been the impetus behind our company’s merger and expansion. Just as I didn't need to be reminded that the investors were my whales and ultimately my responsibility to manage.

That being said, while I focussed on rescuing our company, I wasn't noticing Lisa's husband as the potential threat that he was. I had long ago discounted him as a zero to the left of the decimal point that didn't deserve even the most minimal consideration. A slip that proved fatal.

Because although I had forgotten about Chris Miguel, he most certainly hadn't forgotten about me and my role in his constant and ongoing marital humiliations. Lisa had been brutal in her emasculating attacks against him as a man, a lover, and husband. Relentlessness never had a better disciple, because she didn't just want all the houses, the cash, custody of their daughters, and alimony. She also wanted every friend in their Protestant community, and any other friend or associate to know that he was an awful lover, coward, cheating husband, and overall loser. And though I rarely saw Lisa at that point, and never encouraged her stratagems of warfare, I doubt that her husband ever saw me as anything other than her accomplice, given the fact that I was providing her with the monthly allowance that permitted her war of attrition.

I never considered that the one I had dubbed “a zero to the left of the decimal point,” who never had more than a deuce up his sleeve, could somehow play his deuce and wipe me out. In fact, he was much more intuitive to the nuances of warfare than anyone gave him credit.

Chris Miguel didn't go for the juggler (the investors), and he would never have been successful approaching the principal partners of our tech company, but he understood fatherhood, which was why approaching my father-in-law proved to be such a masterful stroke of brilliance.

Dennis Melin struggled for legitimacy as a father in the eyes of his three children because he had been the unfaithful, cheating spouse to their mother. For years he had maintained a secret love affair with his high school sweetheart and current spouse. A choice that had relegated him to the periphery of his children's lives, a forced exile that he was barely beginning to crawl back from.

Which meant that Chris Miguel had an easy and emphatic audience in Dennis, bringing us to yet another miscalculation I made. Because I never considered that that Dennis valued his children more than his money. Everything that I knew about him, said that “business is business and everything else is secondary” (his words, not mine). Which meant, that, not only did I not see Chris Miguel's play with Dennis, but in my distractions with the business, I also didn't see Dennis convincing my allies and partners in our tech company that I was on the verge of committing a multi-million dollar fraud scheme against them.

Which helps explain what I discovered when I walked into my Scottsdale condo days later, after having spent days with investors trying to rescue our company, I found my place ransacked and burglarized. And when I contacted my business partners and friends to inform them as to what I had just walked into, not only did I learn that they never expected me to reappear in the country, much less my residence, because apparently they had been informed by Dennis that I had fled the country with millions from investors that should have gone to our company.

Why were they willing to believe that false narrative? Because I wasn't answering calls for two days while I was on a yacht with potential investors and had no cell service, which I had previously informed them would be the case. But, when Dennis told them that he had information and reason to believe that I was maneuvering offshore assets they interpreted that movement as an artifice of war and believed the convenient narrative being presented to them.

The problem, however, was that when they ransacked my residence in search of evidence of fraud they didn't find anything. Then, when I resurfaced days later, just as I had said that I would, my reappearance completely obliterated their narrative.

There I was trying to rescue a company that was far more theirs than mine, and not only were my friends and partners ransacking and burglarizing the sanctity of my home, they had also lost their nerve and taken sides with my enemies. So instead of delivering to them the good news that I had found some stopgap funding to keep us out of the red until we could regroup and secure new investors, I delivered a much more succinct message: Fuck you!

Or rather, “fuck you, I'm out, and as a minor shareholder this company is no longer my concern!”

Of course, I was going to lose, but I was going to lose small and they were going to lose everything. And “everything” certainly seemed like a suitable price for their betrayal—and a dish best served cold.

But as the days progressed my anger dissipated. I wasn't willing to re-capitulate on my intent to leave them high and dry, but I was soon able to see that my business partners weren’t the earthquake or the tsunami crashing over our lives. For days I had been ignoring calls and messages from Lisa, mostly because I knew the role her husband had played and couldn't see any point of being drawn back into her web. But, she was insistent and the content of her message piqued my curiosity.

When I finally called her she informed me that Dennis (father-in-law) and my partners were hosting meetings where the objective was to figure out how to recover their losses at my expense. They invited Lisa and Chris with the assumption that Lisa was begrudged due to our separation, and because she had finally returned to her marriage. The latter, of course, was only because I had terminated her monthly stipend and her options were either get a job or return to Chris.

Lisa informed me that I needed to be very careful because “nothing is out of bounds for these people. And they are determined to make you pay them for everything they've lost.”

In fact, I already knew that I needed to negotiate. Not only did they have a lot of personal and valuable items of mine (from the burglary), they also had a cache of encrypted files that I needed in order to access my offshore assets. But negotiations were obviously strained so long as they were collectively incensed enough to make open threats against my life—which they did.

The anger wasn't so much from the my tech partners and ex-friends, it was from Dennis and Chris. It was never clear to me what Chris had hoped to gain, perhaps he saw his dignity at the end of the tunnel. Dennis, on the other hand, hoped to extort enough money to rescue himself from his other business and real estate bloopers that had nothing to do with me, and he intended to achieve his agenda on the coattails of a divorce settlement with his daughter where I had zero intention of complying. And I made it very clear to all involved parties, that I was amenable to helping my former tech associates absorb some of their losses in the short-term if it meant being able to sell my minority stake of shares down the road once the company had recovered. But, I was only amenable if Dennis was sent away from the negotiating table. And, they agreed.

Now was when the threats from Dennis began to escalate. I had already left Arizona so as to put some distance between us, but that proved ineffective because I soon noticed that I was being followed. Which brings us to why I felt the immediate need to have protection, and why I reached out to Eloy Montaño who I believed was my friend.

Eloy Montaño, photo courtesy of Mugshot.com

But, my movements were predictable. Dennis had met Eloy, and knew me well enough to know that I would ask my old friend for protection. He also knew or suspected, probably from having met Eloy, that Eloy was not my friend.

It's hard to know what role Lisa's husband Chris played at that point. But, what is clear, is that Eloy was contracted by someone identified only as a “concerned business partner” to place me in a compromised position that would make me amenable to conceding to their demands. Of course, they contracted a mentally unstable moron to carry out their nefarious plan and a man was killed. Was that their intent?

What we do know is that the victim’s wallet made a cameo appearance with Dennis Melin after I was arrested. An accidental appearance that placed the wallet in the hands of the authorities and spooked Dennis enough to take a “planned” emergency trip out of the country, even though he was on the verge of bankruptcy.

We also know that a very interesting article was published on inman.com by an obscure writer named Glenn Roberts Jr. (now deceased) hours after my arrest. The content of his article was a word for word reconstruction of the file Lisa's husband had used to blackmail me. And, Roberts was a writer devoted exclusively to science and science fiction. What would encourage a writer in California to publish a smut piece hours after the subject of that piece just so happens to be arrested for murder in New Mexico?

Obviously, Glenn Roberts, Jr. was doing a favor. For whom we can't know because he is no longer alive. But the fact that Chris Miguel’s dossier was the basis of Robert’s article shines a suspicious light on someone with a very strong motive for revenge.

Even more interesting was Lisa's reaction to me contacting her a few years ago in search of any helpful information she might be willing to offer. Below is both the messages I sent to her and her response:

What is immediately apparent to anyone who knows Lisa personally is that her response to my inquiry message is one born from fear. Here was a woman who had traveled to New Mexico when I was arrested, swore her undying love to me, and insisted that she was prepared to help me in anyway she could. She even went so far as to tell me that she had already informed Chris of her intentions to help me and that he had no choice but to accept her decision, which I'm sure he absorbed much like the kick-in-the-balls he had so eagerly delivered to yours truly.

But, despite the desperate nature of my predicament, I couldn't accept her help. I knew that she would interpret that acceptance as a doorway and pathway back to us.

I admit, it was an emotional visit sitting there in front of her in an orange jumpsuit. I couldn't deny the bond we had forged through a series of misdeeds and adventures, but in that moment it also became clear that our bond had never been forged by loved. And, she responded by telling my family that no matter what she would always be there for me if I ever needed her.

Chris Miguel never appeared to be someone who would knowingly agree to kill an innocent bystander so as to serve someone a cold dish of revenge. But it stands to reason that with so many moving parts in a macabre plot that there were going to be mistakes. And once those mistakes were made, there was no way to unmake them, and therefore self-preservation superseded ethicality and here I am.

Which brings us back to where we began. Wisdom tells us that there is a price to be paid—karmic or otherwise—for everything we do, and for many that means a long road ahead. Or, maybe life is a zero-sum game where everything must balance out.

I have never held myself up to the world as a saint. By some estimations I may not even be a good person. I have definitely made decisions that have proven painful to others, and you may even agree that Chris Miguel was justified in serving me a very cold dish—a revenge that nearly two decades later is still a tsunami wave breaking over my life. You might even be of the opinion that had I not asked his wife out for a drink at Mountainside Fitness, and had I not accepted her invitation to desecrate their marriage, then not only would I have not lost millions of dollars in earnings, not have lost my opportunity to experience fatherhood, not have put my family through the travesty of a murder trial, but most importantly a man by the name of Garland Taylor would not have been killed as collateral damage in a series of events that had nothing to do with him. And if these are your thoughts, you are not wrong.

However, the general wisdom of “they” says a lot of things. Such as, “all is fair in love and war.” We may even have repeated this proverb over the span of our lifetimes, but whether or not we have taken it upon ourselves to weigh its veracity in our own hands, with our own lives, is something altogether different from just regurgitating platitudes as punchlines in conversations equally as banal.

Which is why by the end of the Dumas classic when Edmund Dantés finally achieves the position of advantage over everyone of his enemies and begins to effectually strike them down, I found that I was no longer cheering him on. The moral challenge that I ran into wasn't whether or not his enemies deserved the tragedies unraveling the very fibers of their lives. The question that needed to be answered was whether our vengeance is so justified as to collaterally harm others.

Nations do it all the time. America did it to the Middle East and the world at large in response to the tragedy of 9/11. The justice system does it every time it hands down a conviction and a sentence. Our religious doctrines continue to serve as the basis for more conflict and war than any other reason under the sun, but the cycles of vendettas continues.

I am not suggesting that nations shouldn't respond when attacked. I am not suggesting that judges and courts should stop convicting or handing down sentences. And I am also not suggesting that a fervent religious conviction burning in someone’s soul as righteousness should be ignored.

What I am suggesting is that we own whatever actions fervently burns within us as righteous. If it is worth repeating, and acting out the maxim that “revenge is a dish best served cold,” then do so while owning it. Edmund Dantés found redemption in my eyes, because by the end of it all he made amends and used his power to right the collateral wrongs of his own actions. He was willing to place himself on the scales of justice, and even more so willing to give his life for the righteousness of that higher cause that perpetually hovers over all our lives.

I don't doubt that there is a price to be paid for the choices made when I was young, ambitious, and generally ambivalent to my responsibilities of decency towards others. I also don’t doubt that I am the man I am today precisely because I have lived this tragedy. And I also don't doubt that there exists some higher purpose that may or may not be revealed to me in this lifetime.

What matters isn't whether or not I receive justice from the United States Court of Appeals, currently deliberating on my life, but whether or not I am up to the task of accepting with joy in my heart whatever the outcome may be. I hope to be up to the task of accepting with equal amounts of joy the guillotine of denial or the sceptre of freedom.

I hope that Chris and Lisa Miguel, Dennis Melin, Eloy Montaño and anyone else associated with their machinations of serving me a cold dish of revenge have achieved some sense of relief and satisfaction for their schemes and efforts. Because I would be very disappointed to learn that every morsel of life they have ingested, ever since, has been nothing more than ashes in their mouths as they anxiously wait for the check, knowing that when it does arrive their method of payment won't be accepted. Because that's the irony of revenge, whatever satisfaction it may give us in the aftermath of our successful schemes, whether we realize it or not, the harm we cause in our pursuits gets added to our own accounts.

When I asked for anyone with knowledge or information about this case to come forward. I do so, not because my life deserves to be rescued, but because justice only exists if we the people sustain it with both our choices and actions. Otherwise, terms like justice and due process are just ink on parchment.

And as for Lisa, some might be of the opinion that this article is revenge for her ambivalence and unwillingness to come forward with the truth. And, actually, I have hesitated on writing this article for years, because of the general decency that sustains me in not wanting to harm others. Until it finally occurred to me that I don't owe her any such consideration given both her actions and inactions as they relate to the hidden truths that could set me free. But, justice and freedom are not the sum total of what has compelled me to write this after so many years.

Earlier I mentioned that the truth of my and Lisa's bond had been revealed to me as not having been forged by love, and I promised to explain how it was that I came to know this.

I know this because love found me in the last place I ever thought I would find myself. Prison is a harsh and vindictive reality where you come to expect everything but love to reveal itself. It is a place where common sense is ignored, empathy and kindness are more often than not interpreted as weakness, and weakness is what makes victims. And yet, it is within these walls, eight years ago now, that I met my love in the form of Anabel.

Anabel Gómez-Chávez, photo courtesy of FB

The first time we met we literally sat and spoke for three hours. And within those three hours the truth of what we each instinctively understood to be taking place revealed itself to us as clearer as day.

Of course, what we didn't understand at that time was the price tag that life would demand from each of us for the love we found in the last place we ever thought we would find it. Love is not easy, and the demands it places upon us can seem impossible. Because it demands no less than the entirety of our souls, where anything less is sifted away as unworthy of calling itself love.

More times than I can care to admit I have tried to convince myself that I have every reason to love someone, only to find that love isn't interested in my rationalizations or hopes. Love simply chooses to reveal itself on a whim, and then steps back and waits for each of us to answer the question. The question being: are you willing to live both the good and the bad, at their polar opposites of extreme, to have this experience called love?

Most of us think we are up to the task because we have no idea what the “bad” means, and we certainly don't know that it will potentially endure longer than we can possibly imagine. We don't yet know what it's like to have hopes crushed and dreams washed away. And somewhere along the line we fall into the misbelief that love in itself is a panacea for all of life's challenges, and maybe it is but then there is the price to be paid.

A price that cannot be paid with money, or promises, or anything less than the entirety of one's heart and soul.

I didn't understand any of this when I first married after college, and I certainly didn't understand it when I met many a Lisa throughout my life. I only ever thought that love was something we said and repeated when we shared a connection with someone—despite the nefarious nature of what that connection might be based on—and quite possibly my opinion on that would never have changed had it not been for a three hour conversation, that, according to rules and regulations, should never have been possible. Then there were the weeks, months, and years of disappointments that have sifted through our love like wheat as a price to be paid for the temerity we showed.

When I look at the price I have paid (and continue to pay) for the choices I made related to business and marital infidelities I’m the first to admit that I was playing a game out of my league. I didn't know what I was up against, any more than a fly appreciates the urgent ultimatum of the flyswatter.

A friend recently asked, after having listened to the related story, what I would have done differently. I reflected on this question for weeks, unable to formulate the words that should otherwise have been an obvious answer: avoid Lisa. But then I realized that I can't and won't place my decisions on her doorstep.

The simple truth is that we were two people who, despite our previous commitments and other life entanglements, confused love for a brief blip of passion that created an affair (earthquakes) that proved to be the starting point for the tsunami that would later destroy lives. But I couldn't then and can't now bring myself to say that I regret any of the moments that we shared and lived, because as cause-and-effect goes, without those choices and consequences I wouldn't have discovered Anabel.

Which brings us to another question, is Anabel worth all the deprivations, torments, and loss of the last two decades? A question I will answer by stating what I believe to be an indelible truth: if love isn't worth everything then it's not love.

I can't see the future and therefore can’t predict whether or not this will claim my life and never lead to that. I no longer make predictions or promises on what life has in store for me. I just take the days as they come, pursue the opportunities as they present themselves, and trust that this is all going to make sense at some point—without knowing how or when.

As it relates to the notorious dish best served cold that is revenge, I genuinely feel empathy and sorrow for anyone who pursues it. Because there is no peace to be found through its doors, just as there is no love to be found in empty words without there first existing two hearts willing to traverse the fires of hell to be together. I am living through revenge and it has introduced me to love, and both have me walking through hell, but, I'm still walking—I’m still walking.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: For readers who are interested in more aspects of this story be sure to read these two articles.

No Sweetheart You Can’t Go In There

Breaking the Olive Branch