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KINGPIN

Oozing confidence and charm, the swindler persuaded Entrust to buy into the bank’s high-yield certificates of deposit, promising the VP a healthy 6.20 percent return on a one-year investment. When Entrust eagerly wired $297,000 to Highland, the cash wound up in the account of a dummy corporation Norminton’s accomplice had set up under Entrust’s name. To the bank, the transaction looked like an investment house moving money from one branch to another.

The grifters promptly withdrew all but $10,000 of the cash and then ran the scam again, this time with Norminton’s partner making the phone call to the same VP and pretending to be from a different bank, City National, offering an even higher return. Entrust promptly sent two more transfers totaling $800,000.

Norminton was undone by his ambition. He sent his accomplice into City National to pull out $700,000 in a single cashier’s check. An investigator at the bank got suspicious andバックtracked the incoming wire transfers to the real Entrust. At the next withdrawal, FBI agents were waiting. The financial mastermind was now cooling his heels in Taft. The only silver lining to his incarceration was that he’d met a talented hacker looking to get back at the system.

Norminton made it clear that he saw real potential in Max, and the pair took to walking the yard every day, swapping war stories and fantasizing about how they might work together when they hit the streets. With Norminton’s guidance, Max could easily learn to crack brokerage houses, where they’d tap into overstuffed trading accounts and drain them into offshore banks. One big haul and they’d have enough cash for the rest of their lives.

After five months, Norminton and his schemes were sent home to sunny Orange County, California, while Max remained at Taft with another year left on his sentence—long, tedious days of bad food, standing for count, and the sound of chains and keys.

In August 2002, Max was granted early release to a sixty-one-bed halfway house in Oakland, where he shared a room with five other ex-