True Crime Campfire - Episode 29: Trouble 0-7: A Wannabe Spy and the Con Man Who Loved Him, Pt. 1

Episode Date: January 17, 2020

Greed can be an unstoppable force. For some, money can become an addiction, just as insidious as the gnawing need for heroin or crack—and just as liable to send the addict into a headspace where nothing and no one else matters. Today we bring you the story of two greedy men. They were greedy for money, for sure. But for these guys, the money was just the beginning. Just the fuel they needed to keep their main obsession going: A fantasy life in which two losery schlubs got to play solider and spy. These guys wanted—NEEDED—to play “Top Gun.” Just like a couple of kids on the playground. The only difference was, these guys were playing with real airplanes. And millions of dollars of stolen money. Sources:CNBC's "American Greed," Episode "Top Gun of Fraud"https://smithct.org/about-the-trust/may-and-stanley-smithhttps://www.courthousenews.com/13-years-for-52m-milking-of-widows-trust/https://www.justice.gov/usao-ak/pr/former-anchorage-prosecutor-sentenced-over-13-years-prison-massive-wire-fraud-and-moneyhttps://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/SAN-FRANCISCO-Wealth-prestige-gone-a-lawyer-2588112.phpFollow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfireFacebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail] a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello, campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie and I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. Greed can be an unstoppable force. For some, money can become an addiction, just as insidious as the gnawing need for heroin. or crack, and just as liable to send the addict into a headspace where nothing and no one else matters. Today, we bring you the story of two greedy men. They were greedy for money, sure, but for these guys, the money was just the beginning, just the fuel they needed to keep their main obsession going. A fantasy life in which two losery slubs got to play soldier and spy. These guys wanted, needed, to play Top Gun. Just like a couple of kids in the playground.

The only difference was these guys were playing with real airplanes. And millions of dollars of stolen money. This is Trouble 7, a wannabe spy and the con man who loved him. So campers, in 2006, in Nassau, Bahamas, an 83-year-old woman named May Wong-Smith was suffering from Alzheimer's and in need of full-time care from a cadre of caregivers, medical professionals and household staff. She'd been on a slow decline since the 1990s, and it was sad for those who loved and admired her. May had devoted a large part of her life to philanthropy for decades. and she could afford to. Her late husband, who died in 1968, was Stanley Smith, one of the wealthiest men in the world at the time. But they hadn't started out that way. Stanley was born

to a middle-class family in Australia in 1907, and although he was smart enough to get a scholarship to a great school, he didn't have much interest in formal education, which you hear all the time about these fabulously wealthy, like people like the Vanderbiltz and the Huguenes from the 1930s in four. Like, it's always, he didn't, you know, he didn't finish the fifth grade, and then he went on to make 40 gillion dollars and own half of the United States at the time. It's like, what am I doing here with my student loans? Right. Come on. So he was right in line with that. And he left school to become a jackaroo, which is apparently like an Aussie cowboy, basically. Amazing. Which is like, did they? ride kangaroos? Oh, I hope so. Surely not, right? Like, you can't ride a kangaroo, although I do love the image of that. But, like, we're kangaroos involved is what I want to know, because there's the word roo is in there. Right. And wallaroo, kangaroo. Cowboy is a boy that hangs out with a cow. Yeah, exactly. So, like, if rue is in the word, surely there are roos involved. And by the way,

I got to pet a wallaroo a couple of summers ago at the zoo, and it remains one of the highlights of my life. He was super cute and soft behind his big ears and I loved him. He was a good boy. I can't remember his name now and that's weird for me because I would think I would remember that forever, but I remember his sweet little face. Yes, he was very sweet. So anyway, he was a he was a jackaroo and he did that for a while and then eventually ended up in advertising. So not what you'd call a lateral move, but there you go, from dingoes to jingles. Well, well, sorry, it was the best I could come up with under pressure, okay? They can't all be little gems. So in the 1940s, Stanley was recruited to work for the British Ministry of Information as part of their propaganda campaign against the

Japanese in World War II. And while he was there, he met May Wong, who was working as an editorial assistant. Now, May was from China, from a prominent family. She'd gone to boarding school, but she hadn't had at all cushy, though. In the 30s, while she was at school, the Japanese began a bombing campaign against Nan Chang, and May went through some serious shit. food shortages, overcrowding, panic, disease epidemics, and I'm sure that kind of experience changes people. And for May, it seems to have given her a desire to do good in the world. And Stanley seems to have had the same drive. Their backgrounds were really different, but May was fluent in English, so there was no language barrier, and they hit it off big time.

They were separated for a couple of years while Stanley went back to Australia to start a business and May went to Scotland for graduate school, but in 1948 they came back together and they got. married. By then Stanley's new business venture had started to take off. After the war, he and his business partner cleaned up mining and selling iron ore. And based on what little info I was able to find about them online, they seemed to have been pretty progressive employers, especially for the time. They opened schools for their employees' kids, provided good health insurance and other benefits, and paid their workers well. They had a reputation for this. Which is always nice to hear, right? Yeah. So Stanley and May got richer and richer, and as their bank accounts grew, they got more and more involved in charity work. But here is the cool thing. A lot of wealthy

people donate to charity. Sometimes it is truly about philanthropy, but a lot of times seems to me it's more about good press and a nice tax write-off. But in Stanley and May Smith's case, it seems to have been a genuine desire to give back. They donated a lot of money, and they did so completely quietly behind the scenes with no fanfare whatsoever, because for them, it had nothing to do with getting credit. And Stanley's been quoted as saying, you know, you can't take money with you. The only real good purpose of money is to do good and to give back. And so, you know, he seems like he genuinely wanted and so did she to put that money to good use. Wow. Yeah, I mean, it's rare, right? So Stanley was into horticulture. He loved orchids in particular. And when

he started easing into retirement in the 50s, he spent more and more time with his orchids. And he in May established a couple of horticultural trusts. After Stanley died in 1968, May continued their charity work by establishing the May and Stanley Smith Trust. Stan's will had stipulated that the charitable trusts would get the bulk of his estate, $350 million. And that's in 60s money. That's a lot of scratch.

A lot of money. Yeah. And in addition to the horticultural trust, which eventually merged into one, the Smith Trust supported homeless kids, people with disabilities, and veterans. The rest of Smith's estate, which amounted to $100 million, was to be put aside for May's care. So, as you probably know, a trust fund needs a trustee or multiple trustees to sort of watch over and protect the money. And for years and years, the Smith trusts were safe in the hands of a group of three trustees.

May's money was as safe as it gets, put into U.S. Treasury, so essentially cash, so no risk whatsoever, the safest it gets. And the trustees made out like bandits. They made $400,000 a year for it would seem to the casual observer doing very little and got all kinds of perks. Basically, they could charge the trust whatever they felt like charging for any professional service they decided they were providing. So all of these guys were milking it for all it was worth. But, of course, there was plenty to go around because we're talking about like $450 million.

So one of these trustees was an attorney named Luther Avery. Luther had a son, Mark Avery, and Mark was a bit of a rolling stone in terms of his career ambitions. When he was growing up, it was clear that he wanted to do something first-respondery, so be in the military, be a cop, or a firefighter, or an EMT, but unfortunately for Mark, he'd injured his eye as a kid, and it was bad enough to disqualify him from all that stuff. So Mark ended up going to law school instead. For a while, he was a prosecutor in San Francisco, but he was let go because of a change in the political regime, which happens a lot in those kinds of jobs.

And in his mid-30s, he moved to Alaska. He was possibly thinking that this would finally give him the chance to sort of dive into the macho, adventuring type, Jack London-Londony lifestyle that he'd always wanted. But he just ended up being a prosecutor again. So he's in Alaska, but he's not like hunting grizzly bears. He's just being a prosecutor, just like he was doing in California. And eventually he quit law and tried his hand at entrepreneurship. And he was bad at it, campers. Pretty spectacularly bad, from what I can tell.

He had crappy business plans, he didn't have good follow-through, and all of his businesses flopped like fish. Just flopping around like a salmon on an Alaskan Riverbank, right? So by 2001, Mark was living with his wife and kids in dumpy little duplex, in a shitstorm of debt from real estate loans and credit cards and pretty much hate in his life. And then, his father died. And for some bizarre reason, this meant that Mark inherited Luther Avery's job as one of the trustees of the Smith trusts. Now, I've got to say about this, what the absolute hell is this?

What is this nonsense of inheriting your job? Like, I've never heard, like, what? Like, except for royalty, I've never heard of like, like, don't you want to, like, interview? interview people, you know, is that a wild idea? Go like find the best person for the job. No. Just give it to my failed businessman, want to be macho man, son. Got it. Great. I'm sure that's not going to end in tears for anybody, right? What the hell? Yeah, it'd be nice if you could just inherit a job. Yeah, I like to inherit a trusteeship. That pays you six figures. Please. So, as you can imagine, this changed everything for Mark Avery. He went from the low-rent lifestyle you mentioned a moment ago to making $600,000 a year

as a trustee. Damn. Damn. Yeah. So that's not, that's six figures, but well into the six figures. Yeah. Yeah. And this is like more than enough, right? Like, I think I could probably manage on 600K a year. I think I could, I think I could make it through. It was more money than anyone should ever need. Absolutely. It should have been more than enough to allow Mark to turn his life around. Yeah, he could have gone out and hunted the grizzly bears, no problem. Right.

For put sakes? I think it's like, that's like a crazy amount of money per month. It's like. Yeah, it's $50,000 a month. $50,000 a month. Yep. Something like that. Cananas.

Could he just one month give me? You know, can I just have that for one month? Yeah. Like, that's cheese and crap. Guy. Y'all are going to hate this guy. You have no idea what's coming. It's going to get worse and worse. So what he's going to do is he's going to pay off his debts and, you know, get a nicer house, but a modest house for his family that he can afford, right? Right. And he's going to put that in a nice interest-bearing account. And then, you know, put money away for his kids' college education. Of course, because he's a responsible adult and attorney.

This is going to go great, you guys. So, oh, Lord. Right away, this idiot starts spending himself into oblivion again. Because apparently $600,000 a year is enough for him. He's got to get into more debt buying toys. One of the things he bought was a fabulous new house. And in the process of doing that, he met his realtor son, a specimen by the name of Rob Kane. This guy, campers. Oh, this guy.

Oh, I can't decide who you're going to hate more, but this guy, so Rob Kane, like to talk. I'd say they're a package deal. Yeah. Yeah. It's, uh-huh. It's, uh-huh. It's, uh-huh. He was an FBI informant, he said. He was a former Navy SEAL. He worked undercover for the CIA, which next job staying covert, dingus. Did you make sure everyone knows or? Did you, did just guys you met through your dad's job? Okay. It is, there's a good chance there are some campers that have not listened to season one yet. You should. It was a fun season. Yeah, that's a shame if that's the case.

But in episode one of season one, if you remember campers, no one works for the CIA. No one. Not a single person. It is an empty building in Langley where they just store stuff. Like, that was episode one. That was one of the first little pearls of wisdom we dropped on you. Just anyone that goes out of their way to say, I work for the CIA. Yeah.

Is a liar. So this is the best part. He called himself Commander Kane. He claimed to have been a commander in the Philippine Coast Guard, which this guy is busy. I know, right? When does he have time to sleep? I don't know. He has a picture of himself in a uniform to, like, quote, quote, quote, prove this.

And it looks super Photoshop, by the way. Mm-hmm. He said he'd worked there undercover for the U.S. government, supposedly. Okay, so I'm sorry, Commander Kane, but a picture of you in a uniform proves pretty much a dilly shit. So nice try. Oh, God. So some people bought this stuff. Some people didn't.

and some people figured the truth lay somewhere between total horseshit and gospel truth. And it did, as a matter of fact. Kane had provided information to the government in the past, but he wasn't a CIA or FBI operative. He'd never been in the military, and he was known by the U.S. government and other governments as a liar, a con man, and totally untrustworthy. Yeah, and when we say he wasn't an FBI operative, what we mean is at that time.

Because, as you'll find out later, he actually did do some work for the FBI in a limited capacity years earlier. But we'll get into that later. So according to Assistant U.S. attorney Stephen Scrocky, who was interviewed about this case for a show called American Greed, he wasn't on the U.S. government's books as an undercover in any capacity. but he would just run around the world and try to collect information on people and sell it to anyone who would buy it. Just run around the world. Yeah. And collect information.

I love the way you put that. He'd just run around the world and try to collect information on people. Like I picture him just like behind a building, like peering around the corner, just eavesdropping on just random people. Yeah. And what's incredible about this is that I wasn't aware that the CIA allowed 1099 employees. 1099 spies Just walking off the street Like hey

Guess what These two guys were talking In the diner And I heard one of them say That he was going to sell some state secrets Money please Is he a paparazzi? Like what the hell?

It's so weird I don't actually understand it And I actually did do some digging into this And like I said We'll get into a little more detail About what he actually did do later But I'm still confused Even after reading all that

It doesn't make sense. Don't try to understand it. He's a dipship. So this whole shtick was catnip to Mark Avery, the soldier wannabe whose eye injury had always kept him locked out of that macho military world. And thus, a bromance began to take shape. And Mark Avery hero-worshipped his new friend, which I'm sure Rob Cain ate up like strawberry pie. Oh, you know he did. Rob Cain, immediately started filling his head with all this rasmataz about how he had connections with the U.S. government and with foreign governments. He had all kinds of experience with espionage. Blah, blah, bullshit. Yeah. And again, if someone tells you they're a spy, they are lying

to you. Oh, my God. Spies do not tell. Oh, I just, I can't with these people. Like, the people that I can't with the most are the people who buy it. Yeah. It's like, you think spies are just going up to you in a bar and saying, I'm the world's greatest secret agent. Come on, people. You're just walking right into these scams. Anyway, it frustrates me. It's very frustrating. And, of course, Rob Kane could not have missed the fact that Mark Avery was a guy with

access to large amounts of money. No, no, no. Not his $600,000 a year salary. the Smith trusts. Specifically, the $100 million set aside for May Smith. And by the spring of 2005, Mark Avery had managed to sink himself into $600,000 worth of debt. Unbelievable. Right. And he started eyeing that May Smith trust. He knew May was 82 in suffering from Alzheimer's, and it must have looked like free money to him and his buddy Rob, like one of those Halloween buckets that just say, please take one.

Right, except they were not going to just take one. No, no, no. So in May, Mark went to his fellow trustees with an idea. Hey, why don't we borrow $50 million against the May Smith Trust to buy a couple of Gulfstream jets? We can use them to go all around the world and check on the nonprofit organizations funded by the charitable trusts. Now, the trustee's first reaction was, uh, why? We can reserve a Learjet whenever we need one.

And Mark was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure we can. But if we had our own jets, we could rent them out as charters and for Medivac. Plus, we'd have access to our own private. jet whenever we wanted it. Yeah, I bet that did it. Yep, yep. That sold it. So, I mean, what group of wealthy man can resist the idea of tooling around in a

private jet? So despite the fact that this plan made about as much sense as a damn James Joyce novel, these idiots okayed this hairbrain bullshit. I hate these guys. I ate every last one of them. All the trustees can just kiss my ass, you stupid old morons. I don't know if they were old for some reason. I just picture them as like white-haired old men, but maybe they're not.

Yeah, in like an open-lined conference room. I just am angry because, you know, because they were ridiculous. They could take the jets on vacation and just say, oh, this was a professional charge. Oh, 100%. Absolutely. It was, this should never have happened in the first place. It was a ridiculous idea. And they just, again, they just let their greed.

like, ooh, private jet. Cool. I can brag about that at the club. Fuck you. Gross. Anyway, sorry. Right. So, side note, somebody, I don't remember, it's some hip-hop artist has given advice before that was, you don't want to buy a private jet. You want to make friends with the guy that has a private jet. I imagine they're quite expensive to operate. And upkeep. I have a, I have a friend. that he's a mechanic for a family that owns like two or three private jets and it's you have to pay you have to pay rent in the hangar you've got to pay for the jet you've got to have like three pilots on reserve at all times and you've got to pay their salaries if you don't want them to be you know flying other people around so it is bless these poor rich

people's hearts we really ought to be go you know let's set up a go fund me for them help and pay for all those. This sounds terrible. Yeah. Bless their little hearts. No wonder they don't want to pay their taxes. Anyway, sorry. So now Mark Avery and his bro, Rob Kane, have access to $50 million of May Smith's money. Oh, God. Fully half her trust.

Now, I'm sure they'll be super careful with it, right? a compulsive spender and a fake spy with whom the U.S. government describes as a con man? Yeah, like I said, it's going to go great. Mark Avery's little head is full of the spy and soldier stories his new buddy Rob has told him. And these two boys have big plans for this money. I love that you're calling them boys because that's really, let's be honest, what they were. And you see pictures of them and you're like, you did this? this wasn't like some 20 year old like off the street yeah you know normally you say that it would be funny

if it wasn't so sad in this case this would be sad if it wasn't it's so true the other way around morons so of course the first thing mark did was pay off his massive debt you know with the money that isn't his and then the party began He bought a 47-foot yacht for $230,000. Oh, God, that's just obscene. Oh, I hate it. And then he bought a moose boat, which is a type of patrol vessel used by Alaskan law enforcement. He bought a luxury RV for himself and one for Rob Kane.

He bought them both snowmobiles and ATVs. And then he and Rob put their heads together. and thought of a red-hot idea. Instead of buying a couple of jets, as he proposed to his fellow trustees, why not buy an aviation company? Oh. Because think, think about it. Think about it.

If two jets are good, wouldn't a whole bunch be better? Yeah. I mean, if less is more, think how much more, more would be. Right? More is always better. Uh-huh. So he didn't bother to run this by the other trustees, by the way. No need. He just went looking for a company that looked good to him. He found a company called Security Aviation, a long-established Alaskan Charter Company. The owner wanted $7 million.

Mark paid him eight just so they wouldn't have to negotiate. What? Wow. Yeah. God. It's not my money. Who gives a shit? Here, have an extra million dollars. That just physically hurts me. Why should he care? What baffles me about this is the guy probably would have been happy with seven. Why not I just paying seven? I know. For God's sake, that just physically hurts me to think of that. Oh, my God. He just wanted to be like, he wanted to, he wanted to have that big dick energy, but that's not really big dick energy, especially when it's not your money.

It's exactly the opposite of big dick energy, in my opinion. But many, many, many men seem to think that it is so like the literally the first thing i think when i see like those like middle-aged guys driving around their little crazy expensive sports cars you know the first thing i think is oh boy yeah what do we what do we compensate for it's ridiculous no you know what are we trying what are we trying to what are we did we did we did we not ever hear i'm proud of you from dad or what what is it it's something you know yeah shout out it would be sad if it wasn't so God, yeah. Shout out to, like, my dad drives a Chevy something, and he has a, he has a motorcycle, but it's like a really inexpensive motorcycle.

Bless him. But like, what was, you ask for seven? I'll give you eight. That's ridiculous. But see, and I'm notoriously, like, I don't like to spend a dollar if I don't have to, you know, I'm not like cheap exactly, especially. The only thing I, like, splurge on is I'll spoil the cat's rotten. Of course. And, like, presents for other people, but, like, I barely buy anything for myself except for episodes of true crime shows on Amazon. That's it. And I'll try and find them on YouTube first. So, anyway, so Mark and Rob descended on this poor, boring little airline charter company like a hurricane. And some of their employees were on that show American

Greed and described what it was like working for Mark Avery and Rob Kane. And by the way, can we pause for a moment and remind ourselves that Rob Kane was not one of the Smith trustees, was not in any way trained or qualified to run a business and was not a qualified pilot and neither was mark avery by the way yet for some reason he was mark avery's right-hand man at this aviation company and like one of the former employees is like i'm not sure what his formal role or title even was but he was clearly like second in command and again he insisted on being called commander cane and that should really tell you all you need to know about him jesus christ but because i want to roast him like a hot dog on a stick, I will tell you some more, even though you really already know

it all, because he wanted to be called Commander Kane. So he was a blowhard, he was always flapping his mouth about his alleged military service and covert work. And again, bless your heart, honey, real covert operatives do not talk about it to literally every jackass they meet, you absolute twat. Just please, if you only take one thing away from this show, let it be that. And former employees describe him as overbearing, intimidating. You know, if you rubbed in the wrong way, he would, like, loom over you because he's a big guy. And the former bookkeeper for the company, bless her, poor little heart, says that one of Rob Kane's tall tales was that he and his men had been chased through the jungle by men with machine guns and machetes. And he was always telling these fake-ass war stories.

It reminds you, doesn't it, of season one with Bill Bradfield and his Cuba bullshit about how he's grotting guards. And, like, it was all just... I think they watched too much apocalypse now. Yeah, you're hearing the helicopter blades and the music as you're listening to me, right? Yeah. God Almighty. So, Mark Avery clearly bought all of this hook, line, and sinker. He bought Rob a $700,000 house.

Oh, God. I know. Let it sink in. It's painful. Paid him a salary of $20,000 a month in cash at Rob's insistence. Because, you know, a spy has to be ready to bug out at any time. For God's sake. And he would say he needed to be, quote, off paper.

Fucking man, babies. I cannot with these dudes. Just grow up, you absolute twats. Just, I can't. Grow up. You have children. So the business plan was to provide medevac service all over Alaska. And according to former colleagues at security.

security aviation, it was a solid plan at the start. Mark and Rob started by buying the jets that they had need to accomplish it and all seemed to be going okay, but soon, the cheese started to slide off the cracker. You remember I said Mark Avery was a compulsive spender, right? Yeah, so they started buying stuff that they couldn't possibly justify needing, stuff like six helicopters, a PT-26 training plane from World War II. A P-51 Mustang bomber from World War II, a $1 million plane. Apparently, in the aviation world, this is like a Lamborghini or some shit, this P-51 Mustang bomber. One former colleague told American greed, quote, it was a rodeo every day. Every day was a circus. We'd come to work and say, What happened last night? What'd they buy today? It seemed like these two man children were busily

accumulating a small air force, all with May Smith's money, and all without the knowledge of Avery's fellow trustees, and obviously without the knowledge of May Smith, whose money it was. And then it got weirder. They started installing really high-level security systems and procedures, way more than a company like theirs should need, and then they put a sniper position on the roof facing the runways, a sniper on the roof of what's supposed to be a small charter medevac. aviation company. And in their downtown office, it got even weirder. They hired a bunch of dudes to

walk around dressed in military garb with rifles. Rifles. There was a whole room full of heavy-duty weapons, guns, ammo, freaking hand grenades, I shit you not. What is happening? Why are they doing this? This is, of course, what the employees were wondering, I'm sure. I mean, it must have been scary to have all these like stone-faced soldier boy looking dudes like striding around with weapons on their backs just going to work and there's these dudes in like fatigues and guns all these people wanted was to just go to work get some coffee in the break room get their paychecks and go home and this place is turned into a bad movie so we'll leave it there for part one campers but because we release both halves of an episode on the same day you can go right ahead and listen to part two now if you

want or save it for later whatever floats your boat but for For now, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe until we get together again around the true crime campfire. You can follow us on Twitter at TC Campfire, Instagram at True Crime Campfire, and be sure to like our Facebook page. If you want to support the show and get access to extras, please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com slash true crime campfire.