The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The St. Kitts Connection by Alan E Tonks

Episode Date: March 16, 2025

The St. Kitts Connection by Alan E Tonks Authoralantonks.com Amazon.com A young commercial banker gets fired from his job as Vice Chairman at a Florida bank. In his search for employment, he meets a couple of Canadian real estate developers who offer him a job managing all of their real estate holdings including an offshore bank in St. Kitts. He soon finds himself in the middle of a major international drug smuggling and weapons trading conspiracy and before he can walk away, federal agencies close down the US operation and charge the Canadians for their crimes. Two years later he is dragged back into a situation where drug trafficking and international political issues, brokered in St. Kitts, affect the outcome of a general election in India and the ultimate assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, India's former Prime Minister. Story is based on actual events that includes a bank failure, murder and illegal financial activities.

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I'm the one who's the best. I'm the one who's the best. I'm the one who's the best. I'm the one who's the best. I'm the one who's the best. I, all those crazy places in it. Opinions expressed by guests on the podcast are solely their own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the host or the Chris Voss Show. Some guests to the show may be advertising on the podcast, but it is not an endorsement or review of any kind. Today we have an amazing young man on the show, Alan E. Tonks joins us on the show. His latest book was recently updated December 1st, 2024, called The Saint Kitts Connection. Welcome to the show, Alan. How are you? Alan Tuckes Thank you. I'm doing good. Thank you very much.

Pete Slauson Thank you for coming. Give us a.coms or wherever you want people to find out more about you on the interwebs. Alan Tuckes Okay. I can find, people can find more about me at authorallantalks.com, my website, also my, I'm lost for words here, the link to my website is maximum at gmail.com. Pete Okay. Dr. Kidd Okay. Dr. Kidd And should be able to get me easily. Pete You can check it out. So, give us a 30,000 area what's in this book, The Saint Kitts Connection.

Okay. The book is primarily a true story. I've had to call it a novel because there's some enhancements to the book to make it more interesting. I can go over the book with you as it's reflected in the treatment part of the pitch to investors for a movie. Oh, okay. In 1991, while he was campaigning for president of India in upcoming elections, Prime Minister

Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated. He had made a campaign stop in Madras when a young girl carrying a sandalwood garland stepped out from a crowd of supporters and detonated a bomb as she knelt in front of him. Two years earlier, a young commercial banker, Terry Downs, seeking to further his career, is recruited away from a conservative bank in Delaware to join a much more liberal bank in South Florida. After getting fired for failure to agree to the owner's legal practices, he finds himself searching for another job. He meets two wealthy Canadian real estate developers who owned an offshore bank in St. Kitts. After a lengthy

reviewing process which included a meeting with lawyers and visiting the bank in St. Kitts, he agrees to an employment contract that includes managing all of their holdings. Two years later, and thinking it was all behind him, he receives calls from two international newspaper reporters requesting confirmation of a numbered account in the St. Kitts Bank purportedly owned by Downs or opened by Downs. Both reporters had received a fax by an anonymous source of an account in the name of a politician running against Gandhi in the election. It was obviously a setup. After refusing comment, Downs contacts the manager of the bank to find out who had forged his name.

Anticipating his call, the bank manager had arranged for Downs to travel to Toronto to meet some influential people to get some answers. Not satisfied with the answers and eager to get to the bottom of why his name was being used to affect the outcome of the Indian elections, he travels to St. Kitts with a newspaper reporter. In St. Kitts he soon finds himself in the middle of an international conspiracy to trade drugs for weapons that were bound for the liberation of Tamil Tigers of Elam, a terrorist

group in Sri Lanka. When Gandhi announced that he was prepared to send Indian forces into Sri Lanka to prevent the terrorists from achieving their goal panic erupted in St. Kitts murder, kidnapping, extortion, and a US bank failure occur prior to Gandhi's assassination, which includes some unlikely characters. Yeah, that sounds like a wild ride, people going on there. Wild ride. So, evidently this book was originally put out in 2011 and you've done some updating to it. Do I understand that correctly?

Yeah. I wrote the book and got it published and I had a bad experience with a publisher and I decided to revisit it several years later. It was in 2024, I decided to pick it up and rewrite it. So I did and it's been met with favorable comments. That's awesome. I mean, something that you just get to renew and make fun again. Tell us a little bit about yourself, your

history. How did you grow up? When did you know you were a writer? All that sort of thing. John Lennon Oh, I don't know whether I can tell you when I became a writer. I was born and raised in Birmingham, England, 1943, in the middle of the war. I was an average student in school. At the age of 17, a friend of mine asked me if I'd be interested in visiting the US. He had a relative in Baltimore. So we applied for the green card, took us a while, several interviews with the embassy and all. But we finally got a green card and we stayed there for about four months. We got jobs here and there, one job that was working in an amusement park and went back to England and I worked my way back on a merchant marine ship to pay for my way because I couldn't

make enough money to pay for the plane fare. So I went back to England and after realizing the United States was the place where I would really like to live and maybe get married and raise a family. So I emigrated permanently in 1964. I was 21 years old. I got a job as a teller in a big commercial bank in Baltimore and went to night school, spending classes at Johns Hopkins just to get enough credits for an accounting certificate and so forth. But I made vice president in 1972, so after being in the U.S. eight years as a, as a greenhorn, and I was fortunate enough to achieve a

top management position, I left the bank in, in 76 and became senior vice president at a bank in Delaware. And after about four or five years, I was recruited away to join a bank in South Florida as vice chairman of the board and chief operating officer. In 83, after spending two miserable years at this bank, I left and formed my own consulting company and started to do some leverage buyouts, cash flow leverage buyout situations where I'd buy trouble companies, dress them up and sell them. And then in 88, I met two Canadian guys and they offered me a job managing all of their

real estate. They owned an offshore bank in St. Kitts and I thought, geez, you know, this is really interesting. It's something that I didn't have any experience in, but I did have experience in leadership and management tactics. They offered me the job. I accepted the job after I did my due diligence and so forth. And about four weeks after being on the job, the office that I was in was raided by the FBI and the DEA. Oh, no. So we got, and they also loaded in their interpol. Oh, wow.

So it was a major deal. I was told, everybody was told to leave the offices. They were confiscating everything. They put a lien on all the properties and testified in front of a federal grand jury in San Diego and they were, I was given 15 to 20 years. And as the book, as the book or as the, uh, as the movie states, the other guy gets fascinated with a car bomb in Toronto. I spent a few years just sort of wondering what in the world I was going to do.

And I decided to pick up my notes of this transaction and look it over and see, see if I'd made any mistakes. And the big mistake I think I made was not being able to judge the character of these two guys. And what happened, I was sitting in my office in West Palm Beach and I get a phone call from a newspaper reporter in Delhi. And he said, you know, Mr. Tonks, you know, we have in our possession a numbered account here that you opened in your bank in St. Kitts.

And I said, my bank, I've only been there once and I just shook hands with the guy that was managing the bank. He said, oh, no, we've got your signature on a numbered account and it belongs to a guy that's running against Gandhi in the Indian elections. And there's $50 million in this account. And we want you to confirm that you opened the account. And of course I wouldn't do it for obvious reasons, not the least of which is I wasn't an officer of the bank. So I hung up the phone and about two hours later, I get another call from a, from a

reporter and from the observer in London. Oh wow. Telling, asking me the same thing. You said, I've got a fax here from an anonymous source that says you opened up an account for this guy who's an Indian politician running in the elections against Gandhi. And it's got $50 million in the account. We want you to confirm it. And I said, look, you know, I'm not answering any questions.

The same kids who have got above everything it's got strict privacy laws associated with their financial institutions. So I hung up the phone, of course, called my lawyer, and I decided to go back down to St. Kitts to find out what was going on. And of course, the rest I'll leave to your readers. And it's quite a story. It's almost a true story then. Yeah.

Yeah, for sure. I had to, I had to sort of exaggerate it a little because of the, it had to be interesting, you know, just like any other true story, the endings are usually not interesting enough to make a good book. So I call it a novel, of course. Yeah. Give it that pop, if you will. You've got your book out. What do you hope people gather from your book as they read it? What do you hope they come away with? I think that the experience that I had and the way I've written the book, I would expect people to

written the book, I would expect people to understand that the kinds of things that go on behind the scenes, the things that the normal Joe, so to speak, is never aware of. And it can happen to anybody what happened to me. And what I would like people to get out of the book in addition to it being I think a great story is an awareness factor where to be aware that you might have a lot of money, you may have a small amount of money deposited in a commercial bank and you have to be aware of what the banks can be involved in, legal activities and so forth. Yeah. Picked the wrong bank and you know, yeah, that's why I always use Swiss bank accounts. No, I'm just...

You know, I tell you, you know, the U S commercial banks, of course, are insured for $250,000, but that seems to be a minuscule amount today in the eyes of a lot of people. Yeah, it doesn't go very far. And although it's 250 per account, you know, people that come into a lot of money automatically put it in a commercial bank without thinking of asking without thinking of asking questions about the bank and you know, I was involved in in auditing in the commercial banks and and Geez, who is there? There are so many things that can happen

So I'd like I'd like people to walk away from reading this book with somewhat of an awareness You know that things can go haywire without you knowing about it. Things can go bad folks. Got to be careful. Got to watch your six, make sure you understand what's going on with your life. Ah, yada, yada, yada. Is there any future sort of things going on with the, any future, maybe more books in a series?

Yeah. As a matter of fact, I'm working on a sequel that involves the same principal or protagonist that's in the same kid's connection. But I kind of liked writing a novel. It's something new to me. Of course, I'm a little old in the tooth to make it a career, but certainly I'm going to do the best I can. Yeah. And yeah, I'm working on a sequel. You can write till you die. That's the beautiful part of it. Yeah, indeed.

Thank you very much for coming to the show. We really appreciate it. It's been fun and insightful and I think readers will look forward to not only this book, but the next book. And, you know, making a series of these characters is always compelling to readers. I mean, readers love these types of series and stuff. So yeah. Peter Boudreau I was going to mention that one of the questions you had on your list was who I would select as a movie actor for the protagonist. And I've always liked the Bourne

series. And Jason Bourne and with Matt Damon, that seemed to me to be a good fit. And I liked the directors that directed that movie or that series. So I, and I think that the guys that I would like to take the part of Terry Downs, who was the protagonist, would be a guy like, what's his name? The British actor. Anyway, you would know who I'm talking about too. Also like Matt Damon kind of character. So give us your dot coms, your contacts, wherever you want people to find you on the interwebs as we go.

Yeah. And it's, it's author Alan Tonks.com. As I mentioned earlier, it's maximum at Tonks.com. As I mentioned earlier, it's Maximum at gmail.com. You can reach me through my website. Certainly you can buy the books through Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Of course, I'd prefer you buy them through the website, but yeah, that's how you can read. Well, thank you very much for coming on.

It's been fun and insightful. Thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks, Ron's how you can read. Well, thank you very much for coming on. It's been fun and insightful. Thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks, your audience, for tuning in. Go to Goodreads.com, Fortesys, Chris Foss, LinkedIn.com, Fortesys, Chris Foss, Chris Foss 1, the TikTokity, and all those crazy places on the internet. Order the book where our fine books are sold, The Saint Kitts Connection, out December 1st, 2024, by Alan E. Tonks. Thanks, your audience, for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you next time.