The Devil in the Deal

By Sheryle Bauer

At 18, Sheryle worked in a massage parlor on the outskirts of Wichita, Kansas. At 20, she traveled the Midwest and graduated to a job as a stripper shortly before marrying into the notorious Martin family. While working a family-owned placer goldmine in Montana, her husband, Jake, found a nugget the size of his fist!

But with mining debts of more than $40,000, the family high-tailed it out of Montana to engage in a more profitable endeavor. Sheryle helped build a multi-million-dollar company called Shaperite Concepts. During the company’s most vulnerable beginnings, the Securities and Exchange Commission investigated her father-in-law, Carl, for fraud. During the investigation, Carl’s partner turned up dead. A prime suspect, Carl ended up behind bars--but not for murder! Instead, the SEC found him guilty of stock and securities trading violations. Soon after his release from prison, he was kidnapped by a disgruntled investor and held for a $3.5 million ransom. An unexpected turn of events led to Carl’s escape while the kidnappers were apprehended.

Based on a true story, The Devil in the Deal portrays how a toxic mix of Mafia, money, murder, and scandal were just what Sheryle needed to make sense of an upside-down childhood. Her dubious introduction to adulthood comprised the threads so necessary to sew a patchwork of strength in the midst of one of the most scandalous white-collar crime sprees in America.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Elektra Press, LLC
• Release date: Aug 5, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386283805

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

TYCOON SENTENCED FOR KIDNAPPING

Special to the Deseret News

by Marianne Funk, Staff Writer, May 6, 1995

SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH - Utahn Carl Martin and Hong Kong millionaire John Wong met once 10 years ago for less than an hour. But their hatred has swollen with time, exploding into lawsuits, a kidnapping and, this week, possible extortion and ... fears of murder. Wong's rage has sent him to prison. Martin's hostility may spark an FBI investigation into ... extortion.

A federal judge Friday sentenced Wong, 56, to two years in a federal prison and a $250,000 fine for orchestrating and financing the December 1993 kidnapping of Martin. Six men, including Wong's nephew, kidnapped Martin from his office early on the morning of Dec. 21 and drove to Las Vegas, where he escaped that night. Wong ordered Martin kidnapped in a bid to collect $3.5 million Wong had invested a decade earlier, according to court records.

U.S. District Judge J. Thomas Greene on Friday ordered the FBI to investigate Martin, 62, after learning that Martin may have offered to write a favorable victim impact statement if Wong paid him $1.5 million. Ron Yengich, Wong's attorney, informed Greene of the proposal in court Friday ....

I think that's a possible obstruction of justice and a possible violation of the federal extortion statute. I'm trying to find out in my mind who is the victim here. [The judge] ordered the FBI to investigate Martin's offer.

Martin plans to sue Wong civilly for the kidnapping. His attorney, Mark Van Wagoner, gave Yengich a copy of the proposed lawsuit.

But the lawsuit may never be filed. Mr. Martin is afraid that if he files this lawsuit, Mr. Wong will have him killed. Mr. Martin is so afraid of Mr. Wong that he would not go to the sentencing today, Van Wagoner said.

Wong, on the other hand, fears that Martin will have him killed, Yengich said ....

The genesis of the men's hatred began in the early 1980s when Martin and partner Richard D. Brown created Goldcor out of a dormant Utah shell company. The two men put out the word that they had a revolutionary formula for extracting gold from the black sands of Costa Rica. Between 1985 and 1987, they floated 40 million shares of unregistered stock in the company. Wong invested $3.5 million.

The government caught on to the scam; it fell apart and the millions of dollars disappeared. The Securities and Exchange Commission filed criminal charges against Brown and Martin, accusing them of squirreling away $13 million for themselves.

Martin went to prison. Brown was gunned down in his home in Daytona Beach, FL, 48 hours before he was scheduled to testify about Goldcor before a federal grand jury.

His murder has never been solved. The millions of dollars are still missing.

* * *

This is me. This is who I am—or, rather, who I was. And the Martins? Well, they are the family I married into. And their story is my story—a tale of my life on the cusp. Of course, it wasn’t always that way. There was a time when I lived a life of innocence, of naivety and joy. That was before all hell broke loose.

Years later, while reading over the letters that my father-in-law had sent me from prison, I realized that he wasn’t all bad. Carl Martin was a criminal, sure, much like John Gotti. He did what he did in the name of love for his family. Or so I thought.

But that wasn’t the first time the family had pulled the mink over my eyes. I recall my husband confessing to me that he was an alcoholic. "No way, Jake. You don’t have a drinking problem. No way." What did I know? He thought he was dying from a drug overdose, so he confessed. To lots of things. My naivety took even him by surprise. One step forward, two steps back. In time, I began to blame myself for the drinking, the drugs, the indiscretions.

Jake’s mother, Karen, found solace in the millions of dollars that Carl had provided for his family. Provided for her. Everyone wanted a bite out of Carl’s profits. Or, rather, out of everybody else’s profits.

To this day, a huge portion of those profits remains unrecovered. Carl and his partner Richard split a pot of gold between them. Thirteen million dollars, to be exact. The money has never been found, and perhaps it never will be. Both Carl and Richard are dead. And buried right alongside them are those 13 million well-kept secrets.

PROLOGUE

Meet the Martins: Carl, Karen, Jake, and Jerry. The quintessential family. I guess you could say they had it all. Houses on a hill with a Mercedes in every stall; a private jet at their beck and call; credit cards with open-ended spending limits. It was all icing on the cake.

The men were chisel-jawed in tailored suits. They wore expensive cologne and smelled like rats. The women wore Dicker & Dicker® furs and stepped out of black limousines, never even scuffing a shoe. They hid their sins behind Gucci® sunglasses.

And where did I come in, a misfit young girl from Wichita, Kansas? I had a dollar in my G-string and drove a ‘69 Cougar. I danced in a strip-club. Innocence was my virtue. Naivety was my sin.

I walked into the Martin clan with my eyes wide open. They saw me coming, and they latched onto me like a new credit card. I felt like a Charlie Brown Christmas tree. Before I could say, What the fuck? I was one of them.

In the end, our integrity was washed down the drain. It all boiled down to the money. Lots and lots of money. And then, like a town that had just been blown over by a twister, it was gone. Just like that. At least that’s what Carl Martin wanted the Securities and Exchange Commission to believe. Gone. The Isle of Man—what’s that? A gold mine in Montana—give me a break. A carefully orchestrated kidnapping—what a set-up! Even murder—no one knew anything about it.

Fortunately for me, I’m the one who lived. Well, not the only one, of course. Not if you’re going to take the word literally. Let’s just say I’m the one who was able to walk away the least scathed, scarred, battered, and bruised. Which wasn’t easy, considering what a con artist and scammer Carl had been. And, perhaps, a murderer. Although the District Attorney could never quite make that one stick.

But, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me back up just a bit and tell you how it all began, starting at the very beginning.

ONE: NOTHING BEATS A GOOD CUPPA JOE!

It’s surprising how some of the most mundane things can take you back to a time you'd long since forgotten.

So, what exactly is your background? The voice of the techno-nerd installing my software upgrade snapped me back to reality. I’d been on the job for only a week. My co-workers mingled nearby.

Sales and customer service, I said, stumbling over my words like loose rocks. A look of studied indifference marked his face. I ignored it. I was in sales and customer service and took an early retirement seven years ago. Before that, well ... I felt my chest tighten as the words fell lifeless from my lips.

Oh, he said, punching a few keys. Service ... and ... He grabbed a disk and fitted it into a vacant drive.

That wasn't so bad, I thought to myself, and then I wondered, So why do I feel so stupid, so inadequate saying it? I felt as if I wanted to hide. Don’t ask me why. I mean, I was no doctor or lawyer or scientist. Never would be. So what was the big deal? What was wrong with sales and service?

Not that I didn’t have other talents. I was no Mozart, that's for sure, but I could compose music in my head, play it on the piano, and remember it without ever having to write it down. I should have been a concert pianist, one more genius of the black-and-whites. I could have been, too, had I made other choices; but there I was, stuck in Salt Lake City, toiling away in sales and service. Not that S&S is all that bad. It's just not what I wanted to be remembered for when I died:

Here she lies, born on this day and died on that. She had a great affinity for sales and service.

Was that what I wanted my great-great-grandchildren to think of me when they researched my past and discovered that I had been a customer sales-slash-service rep? There’s nothing wrong with taking care of customers. After all, that’s what I’d been doing for most of my adult life, although not necessarily the way you might think.

In many respects, my life had been a horror story, a movie script, a fantasy—more than I could ever have dreamed. Good and bad. Up and down. None of it was what I had expected. It had been so much more.

Who would have thought I would have ended up working in a massage parlor? Not this gal, that’s for sure!

It was 1974 and, thanks to Joltin’ Joe’s unabashed radio and TV endorsements, Mr. Coffee’s venerable thermal ME10 had just made a name for itself. And so had I. Every morning as I arrived at the massage parlor, the tantalizing scent of freshly ground Joe greeted me from the shelf in the hallway where the coffee was brewing. Ceramic mugs teetered atop each other beside a beaker of cream and a bowl of sugar. Quite fitting for a massage parlor in a secluded part of town, just outside the county line, where other people rarely ventured. Certainly, nobody on a family vacation came down our street. Not so much as a station wagon full of hollering kids or a pickup pulling a wobbly wheeled camper trailer for miles around. Not even on the hottest summer’s day.

So, there I waited while the coffee drip-drip-dripped its way to my quivering lips. Soon the doorbell would ring, and the other girls and I, usually three or four at a time, would line up in the hall.

I wrapped my hands around the warm mug with my upper lip curled over the rim, inhaling the rich aroma as I sipped my first cup of the morning.

Ironically enough, my parents never knew I had worked in a massage parlor. My family had moved to Memphis right about that time, and I had stayed on in Wichita, on my own, on a path down which I would never have dreamed of steering an eighteen-year-old girl.

To this day, I wake up mornings, shaking my head and thinking, Did I really do that? I mean, in a massage parlor of all places! Maybe it seemed okay because of the way I’d been raised. I had never had what I’d call a normal childhood. Nothing like other kids in the neighborhood had.

Manipulating a man's body through the tips of my fingers, I explained to the new girl, is a real rush. She sighed. I could tell she wasn’t going to last much longer. Just think of it as an art form. Trust me. It didn’t take me long to become desensitized to the reality of what we’re doing here.

I don’t know, she said. "I sort of thought it would be ... different."

Just imagine yourself on a white sandy beach. Palm trees. Blue water.

She wasn’t buying it, this new girl.

Think of it this way, I said. It’s the same psychology. Just like a drug addict builds a tolerance to heroin. The more massages you give, the less out-of-the-ordinary they’ll seem. Get it? Heroin and massages, they’re both the same.

I knew I was stretching the analogy a bit, although I did find part of my work addictive. Back-alley lingerie shops had become my habit. Whenever I sought out a new seductive outfit to lure in my prey, I hit the shops. I had a different outfit for each client. And, for the right price, I would wear nothing at all. There were no laws against being naked.

Most importantly, I continued, no bodily exchanges. Anything other than a massage is considered prostitution; so don’t be stupid. Be very careful about that. There’s a thin line between what’s legal and what’s not.

Well, how am I supposed to make any money?

I looked into two vacuous eyes. "By giving legal massages. We’re a respectable, tax-paying establishment. In the eyes of the law, I mean. I understand that ‘respectable’ isn’t the first word that comes to most people’s minds when they think about a massage parlor. But if it’s good enough for the law, it should be good enough for you."

Every day was the same. Three or four men at a time sat in the waiting room. They were mostly patient and made themselves comfortable in oversized beanbag chairs while watching TV. The lighting was dim, the shades were drawn. It was their hideout, their secret getaway where they'd drink coffee and smoke cigarettes while they waited for the next available girl. There was rarely conversation in the room. I suppose the men weren’t much in the mood for talking. We were a Vegas Strip sort of a place on the outskirts of Wichita. I learned soon enough that the whole process of satisfying my patrons was like acquiring a taste for coffee: the more I consumed, the more accustomed to it I became.

Half an hour, fifty bucks. A full hour is a hundred. If you want me to undress down to my panties, it’s an extra ten. Naked is two fifty.

Routinely, I'd escort my client to a dimly lit room and instruct him to remove all of his clothing and lie on the massage table. I'll be back in a minute, I'd say. Kind of like when you go to the doctor for a physical examination. You’re escorted to a room, asked to undress, and shown where the clean sheets are to cover yourself.

But our examining rooms were sanctuaries for secrets. An armoire shelved a variety of fragrant creams, lotions, scented candles, and soft towels. Not so different than the kind of setup you might see in a spa.

Lotion made my hands glide across each man's body unless, of course, the man had a hairy back. Nothing was worse than a hairy back because that meant that the front of him was going be hairy too. But I made the best of every situation and, over time, I became desensitized to those physical attributes I had previously considered grotesque.

Almond, coconut, banana, French vanilla, lemon, lime, or cherry?

Lemon, lime, or cherry what? he'd ask.

Oil, I'd reply. For your massage.

Oh. Cherry sounds nice.

Drip, drip, drip, a little at a time, like the ticking of a watch. The warm oil pooled in the crevices of the men’s bodies. I’d glide my hands over mountains of muscles that I’d imagined were like the rolling hills of Ohio. I'd very softly and very slowly rub the oil up and down the length of each man’s body, from his forehead all the way down to his toes. My job was to take something tense, which was the man lying on the table, and transform him into something relaxed, if only for an hour or two. It was as if I were doing nothing more than working with a slab of clay. It was just another normal day’s work for a not so normal eighteen-year-old girl.

We're here to please our customers as much as we possibly can. Within the limits of the law, of course, I told the girl. We listen to their problems. We respond to their questions. We speak to them in soft whispers. Got it? Or we just keep quiet. Either we are their everything, or we are their nothing.

You give head?

No head.

Can I touch you?

No touching.

No touching?

I touch you. You don't touch me. That's the rule. You break it, you're out the door.

After a while, I felt as if I didn’t know what was going on in the real world any more than a drug addict might know about what was going on outside his addiction. I was living in a fantasy world compared to that of other woman my age. I imagined that other women were attending college. They were getting smart. Smart enough to get out of Wichita. Aiming for something higher, like working on Wall Street, or moving to Chicago, or Salt Lake City, or anyplace other than where I was.  I imagined that some women were married and having babies. Raising families. Others were working in bars, setting drinks of vodka and tonic on sticky tables and stripping on stage to Fog Hat and Black Sabbath. Others still were probably working in banks in tall buildings with windows overlooking the busy streets of New York or San Francisco, making lots of money selling mortgages.

And then I thought about still other women, those who weren't so successful, but still made a better living than I, maybe serving steaks to truck drivers in a greasy diner. And the beautiful ones, selling expensive clothing in department stores on Rodeo Drive to movie stars and rich woman who were married to movie producers and Mafia men. My life seemed void by comparison. Which way was up? Which down? I witnessed ordinary women, lost souls abandoned eons ago to the evils of drugs and alcohol. I don't know how I did it, thinking back, how I survived when some of those other women didn't. I suppose it was because I was a massage parlor fantasy girl, and I had to do what I thought was necessary to support myself. I might as well have been working at the Mustang Ranch in Nevada. I would have made more money. I would have gone in a different direction. Maybe.

And maybe not.

So I quit the massage parlor and opted for a job as a stripper. And then I did the next best thing I could think of. I enrolled in college full time.

I spent my evenings stripping at the 9-O-9er, the Joker, the Gallery, the Town and Country Inn, the Phoenician Club, the list went on and on. I brought in twenty bucks a shift back in 1981, and that was a far cry from what I was making at the massage parlor.

I figured in time my college education would get me further along than my abilities to manipulate a man’s body with the tips of my fingers—or his mind with the rest of me. For now, spinning on my heels and throwing my hair back to Black Sabbath would pay my rent and my tuition.

Twenty bucks to dance for two hours. I'd put a token in the jukebox and dance three songs, break for two, dance for three more, and break for two. I had the time down so that I'd dance three sets an hour. As soon as I was finished, I stuffed my costumes back into my suitcase, threw my suit sack over my shoulder, and high-tailed it out of the bar to go on to the next. I never stuck around. I’d watched some of the other dancers hang around and get hooked up with bikers and bad guys. They fell into the arms of drugs and alcohol and cigarettes and low-life guys who were no good for them. I watched my friends tattoo their arms and pierce their bellies and sneak out back to snort a line or two and get a fix. They would be up all hours of the night, coming to work the next day with smudged black eyeliner, faded red lipstick, and tangled hair. The next night, I'd see the same girls hanging on for dear life on the back of a Harley as they zipped out of the parking lot beneath the shrill gaze of a street lamp.

Flutterby was her name. She had the kind of hair that reminded me of the women in those silent films back in the Charlie Chaplin days. She had that long, soft curly hair that you just wanted to cozy up to like you would a soft fluffy blanket right out of a warm dryer. Streams of ringlets danced around her blue eyes and long dark eyelashes. She was a mystical goddess in her long flowing robe and pink feathery slippers. Every man turned his head when she walked onto the stage. She was Cleopatra.

Her boyfriend found her dead in her apartment. Vince could have cared less. I couldn't believe how cold my boyfriend could be.

That’s awful! I can’t believe it!

Someone said she killed herself. Left a note on her bedroom dresser. Said she couldn't take the lifestyle anymore. He turned to me and waved his finger in my face. "I told you this job is nothing but trouble. Now, do you see how dangerous it is? What’s it going to take to get you out of here and find a real job?"

Maggie had been the first. She died in a car crash. She'd been the bartender at the 9-0-9er. The car she was driving flipped over on Main Street, and she was pronounced dead at the scene. Alcohol-related, someone said.

Patty and I were the only two dancers that I knew of who were going to school. She wanted to be a physical therapist. I wanted to be a psychologist. Go figure. I was convinced that one day I’d make it.

Patty reminded me of Goldie Hawn, the same face and same sense of humor. She had a cute little port-wine stain on her upper left cheek that looked like a heart. It was her trademark. Her moves on stage were like that of a thick chocolate milkshake being poured from a pitcher. The men were the cups.

No touching the dancers, the bartender said whenever a customer slipped a dollar bill between my skimpy sequined G-string and my warm flat belly. The guys always wanted to get an extra feel. Could you blame them?

We covered our nipples with pasties. It was the law. No nipples and no touching. Drove the guys nuts. One day when Tom, the bartender, wasn’t looking, I peeled one back. I ended up doubling my tips that night. Just enough to pay my overdraft at the bank. Life was tough, but I was determined to make it. Besides, what did a little flash of flesh hurt? Peeling back a little pasty for all those red-blooded American boys, fancy clean lawyers, smoky truck drivers, weather-beaten bikers, bone-weary subcontractors, butchers and bakers and maybe even a candlestick maker or two. I wouldn’t have been surprised if I’d seen the milkman in there, as well.

You get around, Patty said backstage one night. What's your favorite place to dance?

I didn't hesitate. "The Joker. Absolutely. The bartenders are friendly, and the dressing room is huge and ringed with mirrors."

She thought for a couple seconds. "Funny how everyone has