Sins of Our Fathers (9781571319128) Read online

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  © 2014, Text by Shawn Lawrence Otto

  Cover art is in the public domain.

  All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher: Milkweed Editions, 1011 Washington Avenue South, Suite 300, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55415.

  (800) 520-6455

  www.milkweed.org

  Published 2014 by Milkweed Editions

  Cover design by Mary Austin Speaker

  Cover photo/illustration is in the public domain.

  Author photo by Jeff Johnson

  141516171854321

  First Edition

  Milkweed Editions, an independent nonprofit publisher, gratefully acknowledges sustaining support from the Bush Foundation; the Patrick and Aimee Butler Foundation; the Driscoll Foundation; the Jerome Foundation; the Lindquist & Vennum Foundation; the McKnight Foundation; the National Endowment for the Arts; the Target Foundation; and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. Also, this activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and a grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation Minnesota. For a full listing of Milkweed Editions supporters, please visit www.milkweed.org.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Otto, Shawn Lawrence.

  Sins of our fathers / Shawn Lawrence Otto.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-57131-912-8

  Summary: “After embezzling funds to support his gambling addiction, an unscrupulous white banker in Minnesota is blackmailed by his boss into sabotaging the creation of a competing, Native American-owned bank. As the banker befriends the people he’s trying to frame, he struggles to escape from his past and do the right thing”-- Provided by publisher.

  1.Banks and banking--Fiction. 2.Extortion--Fiction. 3.Whites--Relations with Indians--Fiction. 4.Compulsive gamblers--Fiction. 5.Self-realization--Fiction.I. Title.

  PS3615.T95S56 2014

  813’.6—dc23

  2014024589

  Milkweed Editions is committed to ecological stewardship. We strive to align our book production practices with this principle, and to reduce the impact of our operations in the environment. We are a member of the Green Press Initiative, a nonprofit coalition of publishers, manufacturers, and authors working to protect the world’s endangered forests and conserve natural resources. Sins of Our Fathers was printed on acid-free 100% postconsumer-waste paper by the Friesens Corporation.

  To the underdogs

  Contents

  I: The Deal

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  II: The Hand

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  III: The Wagers

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  IV: The Play

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  V: The Payout

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Acknowledgments

  I

  THE DEAL

  1

  The first thing JW noticed when he walked into the Hiawatha room was how different it was from what he had expected. Its low-rise tiers of seating resembled an upscale college lecture hall more than a hotel conference room. And it was surprisingly full. The air was rich with the colognes and perfumes of suited bankers. They moved up the floral-swirled tiers like a herd of mountain sheep. Clumps of them murmured in side eddies, and others sat to open laptops or check cell phones. A pretty brown-haired woman in the front row smiled encouragingly at him. He thought he might remember her from the Bemidji branch.

  The setting was actually quite good, he decided, as he navigated between the long front table and the whiteboard. He was here to teach, after all, though his subject was a little different than the usual product introductions and regulatory claptrap people dozed through at these conferences: crashing on donut frosting and waiting for the next coffee break, then cordial and chummy at the lunch buffets before finally coming alive with free-flowing alcohol and the grind music of the last decade in the evenings. Unlike their more-buttoned-up CPA brethren, bankers tended to be party animals—not like the crazy excesses of the investment community, of course; no cocaine-tinged threesomes, no strippers—but edgy enough to be shocking to their customers nonetheless, were they to see them in the evenings at one of these conferences.

  In many ways, JW’s presentation appealed to this racier side of banking, because it dealt with danger, and not danger in the traditional sense, but existential danger, and its dramatic companion—opportunity. Instead of delivering the usual boring drone on the security features of the new hundred-dollar bill, he was here to talk about crime—specifically, redlining, and how to avoid being accused of it while still maximizing returns.

  The room was packed and abuzz with an expectant air. Bankers stole glances at him and then went back to their huddled conversations, their leaned-in, best-new-friends-since-last-night joke-telling, their texts and e-mails about how boring it all was to their honeys back home.

  He found a limp dongle of black cords emerging from a hole in the center of the table. He opened his briefcase and pulled out his laptop, unspooled and connected its cables. At forty, he was still in decent shape. He still had his hair, and it was still brown. He wore it swept back and a little to the side, though a few boyish sprigs always seemed to flop over the left edge of his forehead. He had a slight scar above his right eyebrow: a reminder of his teenage years training horses. It gave him a rugged air of adventure that contrasted nicely with his well-tailored banker’s suit and his crisp white shirt. An air of mystery, his wife Carol called it, which was appropriate for talking about crime and its avoidance, something she found sexy. He was quite presentable, all things considered, and to the extent that being a leader creates charisma, he had a special magic about him when he was on the circuit doing presentations. He stuck a USB clicker into the slot on his laptop, touched the room control screen to light the hotel projector, and brought up his presentation:

  BANKING IN INDIAN COUNTRY

  Presented by John White

  North Lake Bank, North Lake, Minnesota

  Midwest Community Banking Conference

  Dakota Grand Hotel, Minneapolis

  He glanced at the clock. It was still a minute early, and more bankers were shuffling in. He had forty minutes. He pulled out his cell phone and checked his e-mail, but his inbox held nothing new apart from the usual junk mail for online gaming sites and reduced-rate mortgages. He set the phone down and cast his blue-gray eyes—Finnish eyes, his mother had called them—out over the audience, waiting patiently and silen
tly as the stragglers found the few remaining seats. It was a full house.

  He noted the bankers’ suits from last season. Their briefcases’ pale worn edges. Their creased shoes. How some of the women—late thirties (mojito-drinking karaoke singers, no doubt)—unexpectedly carried needlepoint handbags against their polyester skirts, done in Norwegian or German designs. They were mostly small-town bankers, these clues told him. Rotarians. Lions. Deacons. Community leaders. He saw Charlie Weston from New Ulm, and Bill Heimlich from Redwood Falls, and Ann Wilson from Detroit Lakes, all presidents of small-town community banks. He had once capsized a fishing boat on Rainy Lake with Ken Iverson and his boss, Frank Jorgenson. The three of them were drunk silly on vodka gimlets, and laughed as they found their footing in chest-deep water next to the dock. But those days were long past. He waited until the last of the bankers settled into their seats before he began to speak.

  “When I first started in community banking, the only reason for people to visit an Indian reservation was to buy moccasins and blankets. Now, people flock to their casinos in droves, and they make money hand over fist. The playing field has changed, and we community bankers need to up our game. I know many of you have banks in communities near Indian reservations, so today I will show you some tools to help you up that game, while avoiding some of the most common legal pitfalls. But I’m also going to warn you: things are not always as they seem.”

  Over the years, JW had honed the drama of this opening with the air of a magician. When he did it well, it grabbed his audience’s attention from the first sentence. He sometimes felt he should have been a teacher, or perhaps a stage actor. He enjoyed playing an audience: reading them and molding the shape and rise of their emotions—these things came to him naturally, as if he were conducting a symphony. He walked along the whiteboard, stepping in and out of the Powerpoint with the confidence of a showman, one hand in his pocket as he changed it to a new slide:

  MANAGING RISK ON A RESERVATION

  He turned up the front lights enough to bathe himself in a milky wash, highlighting the whiteness of his shirt, his close shave, his shining eyes. The sun was brilliant outside, and it seeped in through the dark vertical blinds. With the audience in shadow, he felt as if he were a thespian under stage lights.

  “So who can tell me the biggest risk banks have when lending to Native Americans on a reservation?” As he waited for an answer he took a Styrofoam cup from a stack and poured coffee. Audiences always took their time with this one, which was an important part of his build. For all their raucous private partying, bankers were terrified of the discussion he was proposing, because it was public. They were happy to talk about race—guardedly, with known entities, and in small groups—but they didn’t know how to deal with it in a public forum. He tipped in some creamer and stirred, the black of his coffee going tan. He sipped and watched them adjust to the unnerving idea of discussing it in the open.

  One of the bankers in the second row finally shifted and looked around with a sort of cocksure grin. He had reddish tanned skin, gold chains, spiky hair, and a party-ready attitude. He reminded JW of a former high-school football star who had faded to pudge. His demeanor seemed to say “what the hell”: a monkey who found the cage door standing open and decided to plunge through.

  “They’re deadbeats?” he volunteered. He grinned and bobbed his head as he looked around for supporters. JW imagined him leading a conga line later, Hawaiian shirt open, his drink raised like a baton. A few of the bankers chuckled noncommittally as they glanced at JW to see how far he would let them go. This was code, a way of asking whether this sort of good-old-boy racism would be tolerated. The woman in the front row shot him an angry glare for even letting it get this far, then rolled her eyes and shook her head to signal her displeasure at the inappropriate remark.

  He set his coffee down. It always amazed him how this one question touched things off. Race was still a powder keg, and its frank discussion divided audiences with powerful, emotional reactions, which is of course why he used it. He had once read, when researching for a discussion with his daughter, Julie, who loved science, that much like humans, primates ostracize one another and commit violence and murder, particularly against other tribes. Exploring that impulse was his intent: to stir up these primal feelings and to present people with their own racism (for they all had it), and then to dig deeper and get past it. People didn’t know how to talk about race; there was no safe territory. It was buried under political correctness, as untouchable as a dead pharaoh, its brains pulled out and its body wrapped in cloth and then gold and then stone. Buried away. Long gone and desiccated under a pyramid of laws and regulations and social mores, brick by brick, that now generally forbade its discussion. But it lived still, underground, in small-group conversations, and even more openly now in Tea Party politics. Truth be told, many laws and regulations did go too far, and they created resentments, he thought, because they gave unfair advantages that could sometimes be dangerous to businesses, and to banks in particular. That’s why they were all here today. To work through all that. To separate race from business. To get their heads straight and to clarify intent, a word that contained a universe. He gestured toward the man and began to unwind the mummy.

  “That,” he told the audience, “is exactly the kind of thinking they use to outsmart us.”

  No one moved. The air conditioning came on, and the window blinds began to shift and clatter, letting in streaks of light that shot over him, then faded like an old movie. “We can no longer afford to underestimate these people,” he said. “They’re making way too much money. Let me give you an example.” He walked around to the front of the table. “I had this customer, a builder, who said to the Potawatomi band in Wisconsin, a hundred and fifty miles away, he said, ‘I will build you a bingo hall, for free. You don’t have to pay me a red cent. You just pay me out of cash flow when you get it up and running. I will finance it for ten percent annually on the outstanding balance and give you a ten-year loan. I will take all the risk. All of it.’ Well, we lent him the money to do it, and we lent it to him at eight percent. Going rate for commercial loans was six. So everybody’s set up to make good money. Right?” He surveyed the room. “Potawatomi win, builder wins, bank wins.”

  He studied them, a hand in his pocket, and went on to describe how hard the builder had to fight to get the permit because the local community was up in arms over the idea of Indians and gambling. There were political battles at the planning commission over a variance they needed for a new access road. The builder went through real heartache—expensive delays, his windshield damaged, his tires slashed—but the resort owners came to the rescue after JW visited the town. He simply made the point that the band wasn’t building a hotel, just a bingo hall, and people would need places to stay.

  JW pushed off the desk and watched his audience’s reaction. “So a year later, he finally got it built. Band had a grand opening, and you know how long it took them to pay it off? Three months. Three months to pay off the entire construction loan. Potawatomi won on that one. Now they got a hundred-and-forty room hotel.”

  He stood silently, watching them. Sipped his coffee. “Do they sound like deadbeats?” He paused and looked at the pudgy playboy, who shrugged. “Please avoid all the old chestnuts about race. I’m not interested in grinding whatever prejudices or opinions people may have about Native Americans, however valid or invalid they may be. This is about business. I’m strictly looking at banking risk, specific to lending to Native Americans living on a reservation.”

  He walked back to his laptop, where he underlined the words risk and on a reservation with his forefinger. Two yellow streaks arched across the projected slide behind him. He waited, but no one else seemed ready to engage.

  “The risk,” he said, “is the reservation itself. Let me give you another example.” He began walking, and then he looked up at his audience. “About a year ago, a fellow walked into my bank in North Lake, a Native fellow, Ojibwe, named Johnny Eagl
e. Tall, thin guy, good shape. Clean, well put together. Italian shoes, thousand-dollar suit. Turns out he’d been in there before to see my loan officer, Sam Schmeaker. Sam had turned him down for a loan, so he asked to see me. Ordinarily I don’t second-guess my loan officers’ decisions, you know how that goes, but he was Native. So it’s a riskier situation. Right? You know this.”

  Several bankers nodded and some shifted. Many of them managed banks near Indian reservations, and they knew the risks he was describing. EEOC risk. Compliance risk. The story was beginning to work its magic.

  “Receptionist showed him in, we shook hands, he sat down, and right off the bat, as I open the file, he says, ‘It’s a creditworthy application.’ So I knew he had some sort of banking knowledge, right? I found his credit report, high seven hundreds. He had good credit. This was starting to look like a problem for us. Then he told me, ‘I happen to know that my band has several million dollars on deposit with your bank, and yet you barely make any loans to us. Why is that?’ He was watching me closely, and suddenly I felt like I was in a chess game. This was getting dangerous from a regulatory point of view, I thought, and this guy could be setting me up, so I had to be careful. He might be accusing me of a crime.”

  “I looked him straight in the eye and I told him we love to make loans to his band. Love them. That’s how a bank makes money, I said, is on the spread between loan interest and deposit interest. He held up a hand and sat back in his chair. He told me I didn’t need to educate him about banking. He was talking about loans to his people, he said, not the band.”

  JW walked back along the front of the table. He leaned back against the desk.

  “He said to me, ‘Look, Mr. White, I’ll give it to you straight. Have you ever heard of an Indian car competition?’ And so I’ll ask you now. Have you?” JW paused and watched the audience, the sudden silence a sound all its own. No one raised a hand. “Come on, you people bank in Indian country!” He looked at the woman in front. “You?” She shook her head and looked down.