Busted in Butte
I have not spoken to my father in nearly ten years, and I’m just fine with it.
It’s his loss.
In last week’s installment, I wrote about an episode in the late 60’s while I was delivering papers for The San Diego Union, the morning edition of the local paper. It was around the time I was a paperboy that I started to read the paper front to back, skipping the Sports section. No, I didn’t read the entire paper but read the article’s headlines and the captions under the pictures. If there was an article that stood out, I’d read it. There were a few sections I always paid attention to though—the Comics, the Weather Page, Lost & Found, Obituaries and a section on local crime.
One morning sometime during the mid-80’s, I was reading the paper while eating breakfast, and imagine my surprise when I came across this gem:
Local man arrested in Butte, Montana.
Mitchell J. Lange, a San Diego businessman
was arrested in Butte, Montana where
he owns several commercial properties.
The short article continued with a few more details about my father’s arrest. After reading the article I made a frantic call to Bonnie, his second and current wife at the time, to get more information. He was charged with embezzlement, grand theft, forgery, and possibly one or two other crimes. I don’t recall all the charges against him.
For a number of years, my father (aka Matt, and NOT the Matt I congratulated a few weeks ago for 10-years of sobriety) had been embezzling money and forging the signature of his business partner, to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars—whispers and rumors had it over a million. Since his partner was the ‘brains’ behind the business, he turned over the day-to-day operations and handling of the administration to my father. Trusting Matt 100%, there was never an audit of the books until it was too late.
The money Matt took was not part of a lavish, cocaine and Cristal-fueled jet-setting lifestyle, but used to purchase several historic properties in the beginning stages of the Gaslamp Quarter’s existence. The Montrose Building, a former brothel, and The Llewellyn Building, which housed one of the last remaining and soon to be closed down Adult Bookstores with a ‘you-don’t-want-to-know-what’s-on-the-sticky-floor’ movie theater, were the buildings he bought.
The financing for the these buildings was through HUD (Housing and Urban Development) and as the construction was moving along, my father would submit the invoices from the contractor to HUD and they would pay the contractor. Matt also had a deal set up with the contractor to over-charge him for the work by 10%, then the contractor would send my father a ‘rebate’ check for that 10% difference.
Once he had these buildings up and running as SRO’s, or Single Room Occupancy hotels, he purchased and rehabilitated several buildings in Butte, Montana. While the rehabilitation of these various buildings was going on, Matt would forge his business partner’s name on company-owned stock certificates, selling them to pay for the construction work.
Along with the theft and embezzlement, my father sold limited partnerships to all of these properties to friends, business associates or anyone who had an interest. I believe there were a total of 32, but perhaps 64 partnerships sold at $16,000 each. When the fraud was uncovered, the partnership’s value became worthless.
Coming off the plane, Mary and I met my belly-chain handcuffed father at the San Diego airport as he was escorted through the terminal by a US Marshall and taken away to jail. After a few days and posting $15,000 bail, he was released from custody.
To avoid the expense and time a trial would take, my father hired Milton J. Silverman, a prominent San Diego defense attorney at the time, and together they decided Matt would plead guilty to one of two charges; grand theft or forgery. Either way, it was whatever would satisfy the prosecution but also carried the lightest sentence.
Matt was sentenced to four years in California Institution for Men - Chino, CA, but because he worked while behind bars, he was paroled after serving two years.
On my regular visits to Chino with Mary and occasionally with his wife Bonnie tagging along, we’d bring a picnic lunch (nothing says quality family time like sitting around a wooden table bolted to the ground and behind a secure 20’ chain-link fence with razor-wire on top and guard towers nearby). Along with the festive picnic basket, we’d bring postage stamps, envelopes, paper, cartons of cigarettes, homemade cookies and brownies—no knives, saw blades or other contraband was ever hidden inside. The food would be eaten during our brief visits, but the stamps and stationery was used for letter writing.
My father would write letters dictated by other prisoners to their family and loved ones in exchange for cigarettes. Cigarettes are common currency in prison, especially when you make only $.40/day while working. During his ‘state-sponsored vacation in a gated community,' my father worked in the laundry, and for two cigarettes, he would put ‘extra starch’ in an inmate’s prison garb, upon request.
At some point during his incarceration, he legally changed his name from Mitchell James Lange to Matt Donnelly, an entire story unto itself.
After Matt’s release, and while serving a 6-month parole in a downtown halfway house, he started driving a taxi in San Diego to earn a living. After his time in the halfway house was over, he divorced Bonnie and moved up to the Bay area where he worked in a Russian-owned business brokers office, selling small businesses.
It was during his time at the broker’s office that he was introduced to Tatiana, a Mail-Order Russian Bride still living in the Ukraine. After months of dealing with the INS and their mountains of bureaucratic paperwork, he succeeded in getting Tatiana into the US where she would live happily-ever-after married to my father. Shortly after her arrival in San Francisco, she found she disliked living in the US and wanted to go back home.
A few weeks before her planned return to the Ukraine, Tatiana was diagnosed with breast cancer. In one of the few noble gestures ever by my father, he married Tatiana and put her on his health insurance so she could have the cancer treatment here in the United States.
Despite the marriage, health insurance coverage, and cancer treatment, the marriage never took hold, and my father moved out from Wife #3. Since this particular M-O-R-B thing didn’t work out, he divorced Tatiana and began a years’ long online search for other MORB’s looking to ‘love, honor and cherish, ‘til death do they part,’ a horny 80+ y/o man with no money and few teeth of his own.
Sure, you consider the false teeth he eventually left in some restaurant as ‘his own,' since he paid for them, but they weren’t OEM.
There are lots of dating websites (or so I’ve been told, Mary), and I’m sure there are lots of international dating sites similar to the one my father frequented on a daily basis. Merry-Cherry.com – ‘a charming place to meet your Russian soulmate,' reads the Google tagline. It’s astonishing how many hot, sexy, and single 20- and 30-something Russian Playmates soulmates are out there looking for an American sucker, err . . . I mean, lonely gentleman, to take care of them.
I won’t go into all the details, but suffice it to say that my father spent $1000’s of dollars in search of his ‘soulmate’ just on the Merry-Cherry website alone. Once he narrowed the women-of-his-dreams search down to about seven possible candidates, he sent them all a questionnaire. Who knows what the questions were, but depending on how they answered, it narrowed the field down to a lucky two Ukrainian women.
Nothing says long-term love and romance like a True/False quiz.
Once these two women were in competition to be the fourth ex-Mrs. Donnelly, ne:Lange, the courtship scam began in earnest. Let me say that my father is a college graduate who majored in Journalism, and for 50+ years owned a number of businesses, including a newspaper. He was also a very practical man. However, as he got older, he apparently stopped using the brain in his head and began using the gland in his smaller head for decision making.
Now, I’m not putting my father in the same category as the sexual-harassing, naked selfie-sending, pussy-grabbing, or alleged child-molesting leaders working hard to Make America Great Again. And I’m not aware there was any requirement for women to sleep with him in order for them to climb the corporate ladder of his companies. He was just a desperate, horny, 80-something pervert looking for love, companionship and a sweet young thang to wipe his ass when he became too old to do it himself.
If Tinder had been around back then, he’d have worn out the ‘swipe right’ button.
After Matt’s release from prison, he bounced around from various cities, generally leaving behind an unusual and unsavory tale to tell after he moved on. While he was looking for Mrs. #4, he was living with my sister, Nancy and her husband, Robert, in New Jersey. As the search for a new MORB intensified, my father’s actions became quite concerning to both Nancy and Robert.
With Matt living under my sister’s roof, they shared the same internet provider. After much debate, many unanswered questions, but to be sure of our father’s safety, Nancy and Robert decided to take a look at Matt’s email account while he was out of the house, to see what he was doing or planning. While reading some of the emails, a sickening treasure trove of correspondence between my father and his possible MORB’s-to-be was uncovered.
Beyond all the ways these women promised on pleasuring my 80+-year old father who had a hard time getting up out of bed, let alone ‘getting it up,' they were also coming up with various ways to scam him out of his money.
“My granny needs an operation. Can you send me $400?”
“I was flying to see you but got stuck at JFK after I lost my wallet and airplane ticket. Can you send money to get me to out of here?”
“Winters are cold here and my boots are worn out. Can you spare some money so I can buy a new pair?”
As best as I can tell, no request was ever denied. After all, how can you say ‘No’ to true Q&A love?
At some point, Matt came up with the brilliant idea it would be far cheaper to live in the Ukraine with his young honey-bunny than have her immigrate to the US, so he decided to move to Kiev. After several of his attempts to save enough money failed but the desire to move remained, I spoke with my sisters and we decided that I’d cash in a handful of frequent-flier miles and send Matt off with a one-way ticket to his new Ukrainian bliss. I believe it was on a Wednesday when we bid our father adieu, thinking we’d never see him again.
HAH!!!
That next Saturday around 2:15 am, our phone rang, waking Mary and me up out of a deep sleep.
“Hello?” I answered in a groggy yet panicked way a middle of the night phone call can have on you.
“Get me out of here!” a familiar voice pleaded.
“What’s wrong?”
“I’m dying.”
“WHAT?!?!?”
“Please Andy, just get me out of here before I die. I’ll tell you everything when I get back. Oh, and you won’t recognize me when I get off the airplane.”
WTF??? I saw you four days ago, what could possibly have happened that would make me not recognize you? I thought to myself.
A frantic call to my sisters, at a far more decent hour, and it was again decided I would cash in more FF miles and bring him home, but with the stipulation that I would handle ALL of his finances upon his return. He agreed, but later when he reneged on the deal by removing my name from his bank accounts, Matt claimed he only agreed under duress—he had no choice but to go along. I guess he could have used the excuse he was minutes away from dying and therefore not in his right mind, too.
Anyway, stepping off the United flight, there was my ‘unrecognizable’ father, with a 4-day growth of beard as thick as someone his age can muster, but otherwise looking the same as he had. Apparently he arrived in Kiev and neither of his future soulmates were there to greet him.
Gee, what a surprise.
The Kiev hotel he stayed in had no heat, paper-thin blankets and walls, an uncomfortable bed, and he wasn’t able to communicate with anyone since he speaks no Russian and it’s doubtful they spoke much, if any English. As best as I could tell, this was what qualified my father as being at death’s doorstep. There were no paramedics carrying him off the plane in a stretcher, no saline or glucose bags hooked up to him as he shuffled through the terminal, and no doctor ordering weeks of bed rest that I ever saw or was made aware of.
Returning from this life-threatening, 4-day permanent relocation to Kiev, the search for MORB marital euphoria continued. Once Matt decided on which lucky Ukrainian lady would become his constant companion and chamber maid, a new thought occurred to him on where to spend the rest of his years. After minutes of deliberation, Ecuador became the latest and best place to set up his little love shack. So, a trip there was in order.
The idea of moving to South America came from his longtime friend Jean, who had spent quite a bit of time researching the best places in the world to retire since she was about to, and thought Ecuador might be on her list. Not wanting to look into it any further, my father packed up his meager belongings and headed south, joined by Jean who was on an exploratory trip to see if her research proved correct.
Remember, this is a 100% true story . . .
My sister did some research of her own and decided the flat areas of the town he was moving to was a better choice than up in the hills. Since Matt was in his 80’s and wasn’t too steady on his feet, climbing hills wasn’t a very good or safe idea.
Now, if you’ve been paying attention to this story so far, you probably can tell without reading any further where Matt moved to?
Winner!! Winner!! Chicken Dinner!! Yes, of course, the hilly area.
After a short and miserable stay in the hilly part of town, the house our father was staying at was broken into, and his cell phone, computer and his wallet or cash (or both?) were stolen. If my decaying memory serves me, when he was robbed his friend Jean had already flown back home, and he was in Ecuador alone and of course, spoke no Spanish. But, and I have no idea why Jean did this, she brought $10,000 in cash with her to Ecuador, and before she left entrusted it to my felonious father. I’d be extremely surprised if she was unaware of his 2-year stint in the slammer, can, big house, cooler, clink, etc., by the way.
Being the trustworthy man of his word he’d so far proven to be and having learned nothing after spending two years in prison, he was ready to start the next chapter of his sad life with a fresh and fat wad of someone else’s money. Matt bought a new phone and computer and decided Ecuador wasn’t to his liking after spending a few weeks there, so he packed his by-now well traveled Tumi bag and moved to Atlanta, GA.
I doubt he ever paid Jean back.
Now 93, he’s spending the remainder of his pitiful life in a group home for seniors, probably thinking how good life could have been if only one of those hot and sexy MORB’s came through.
Stay classy San Diego!