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OPPORTUNITIES

It was another betrayal. Max took the news with eerie calm, interrogating her about every detail: What drugs was she on when she cheated on him? What sexual positions did they use? He wanted to hear her ask for his forgiveness—he’d have given it to her in a heartbeat. But that wasn’t what she was asking for. She wanted a divorce. “I don’t know if you even think about the future anymore,” she said.

In search of closure, Kimi caught a flight to California and drove to Taft, where she sat nervously in the waiting room, her eyes playing over a wall of posters depicting Wackenhut’s network of hivelike prisons around the country. When Max was brought in, he took his place across the stainless steel picnic table in the visiting room and launched into an appeal. He did think of the future, he told her, and he’d been making plans in the joint.

“I’ve been talking to some people,” he said, lowering his voice to a hush. “People I think I could work with.”

Jeffrey James Norminton was at the tail end of a twenty-seven-month stretch when Max met him in Taft. At thirty-four, Norminton had the stolid physical presence of a brawler, thick necked with an oversized forehead and a Kirk Douglas cleft in his chin. An alcoholic and an accomplished con man, he was a financial wizard who did his best work half-sober. He’d start chain-chugging Coors Lights as soon as he rolled out of bed, and by the end of the day he’d be useless, but in that sweet spot between the morning’s sobriety and the blurriness of midafternoon, Norminton was a master of the high-stakes con—a criminal rainmaker who could produce seven-figure sums from thin air.

Norminton’s latest caper had required little more than a telephone and a fax machine. The target had been the Entrust Group, a Pennsylvania investment brokerage house. On a summer day in 1997, Norminton picked up the phone and called a vice president at Entrust, adopting the persona of an investment manager at Highland Federal Bank, a real bank in Santa Monica, California.