Chapter 6
Part 8: Unfinished Business
Six months after Sterling’s indictment, I received a notification from the federal victim notification system. Naomi’s annual financial disclosure from the federal prison in West Virginia had been flagged.
Because of the restitution order in our case, Naomi’s assets were subject to continuous monitoring. A routine audit of her pre-trial disclosures had revealed an anomaly: a dormant investment account under her mother’s maiden name had suddenly shown activity. A wire transfer of eighty-five thousand dollars had been initiated, directed to a legal defense fund in Chicago.
I called Lisa into my office and showed her the alert.
“She’s trying to fund an appeal,” I said. “The restitution order was supposed to freeze all her accounts, but she hid this one.”
Lisa sat down, her fingers already moving across her keyboard. “The account was opened twelve years ago, before she met you. It was listed as a minor trust, but she was the custodian. She never declared it during the annulment proceedings or the trial.”
“Can we freeze it?” I asked.
“If the funds are linked to the money she stole from my trust, yes,” Lisa said. “But we have to prove the source. If she opened the account twelve years ago, the initial deposit might be legitimate, but if she was depositing stolen trust money into it recently, it’s subject to forfeiture.”
Lisa spent the weekend tracing the transaction history of the hidden account. It was tedious work, requiring her to request historical microfiche records from a small regional bank in southern Indiana.
By Monday morning, she had the proof. Six months before her arrest, Naomi had transferred exactly eighty-five thousand dollars from Lisa’s education trust into a local checking account, then cashier’s-checked the exact amount into the dormant minor trust.
“She was layering the funds,” Lisa said, showing me the transaction sequence. “She thought the lapse of time and the maiden name would keep it off the federal registry.”
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We submitted the tracing analysis to the federal prosecutor overseeing Naomi’s restitution. Within forty-eight hours, a judge issued a restraining order on the Chicago legal fund, freezing the eighty-five thousand dollars and redirecting it back to Lisa’s restored trust.
A week later, I received a letter from the prison. It was from Naomi. I didn’t open it. I ran it through the office shredder, watching the pages turn into white ribbons. The past had no power over us anymore; its only function now was to fund the future we were building.
