Robert
White testified his office was in a remote part of the fourth floor of Petters
headquarters. In one of the tapes, Petters can
be heard comparing White to Quasimodo and the remote office to the Belfry.
It
was there that he would cut and paste his documents that fooled so many for so
long. His office was always a mess, he said,
with scraps of cut-up documents everywhere.
White said he always had papers at the ready to cover up the documents in case
someone wandered in. Among the documents he doctored: Petters' 2003 income taxes. They had been filed, but Petters
needed to present the taxes to a lender as proof of his income. White just
changed the income line from roughly $2 million
to $25 million.
In
the summer of 2008, White said, when Petters
needed letters from Sony and BJ's to prove there were deals in the works, he
asked Petters if he had any letterhead from those companies so he could use
that for his cut-and-paste
job. Petters emailed the CEO of Polaroid, Mary
Jeffries, asking her if she had any documents
from those companies. The document she e-mailed back didn't have a letterhead
on it, so White went to the Internet and found
the logos.
In
the dramatic tapes Deanna Coleman made between Sept. 8 and Sept. 24, White can
be heard arguing with Petters about possible ways out of the scheme. "Our
necks are on the line," he wrote to
Petters in an e-mail. White was convinced that if Petters was able to purchase a
legitimate business, perhaps Kodak, Petters could then raise enough funds to
pay off all the investors who were clamoring for their money. By then the size
of that debt to investors was in excess of $3
billion.
White
had spun off Zink,
a division of Polaroid. That division was
developing a technology involving a type of paper that could print pictures
without using ink; the ink was already in the
paper. White was convinced Zink would someday be worth millions, if not
billions. "Imagine," he told Deanna Coleman, "a real company making a real profit."
On
the tapes White is clearly overwhelmed by the stress of continuing to maintain
the fictitious work of PCI. Even Petters on the tapes can be heard saying, "We are all at a breaking point." But
Petters also has bouts of wild optimism on the tapes. He talks repeatedly
of trying to buy Value Vision and Circuit City. This will be "a way
out," Petters said. But White has the
demeanor of someone who knows there is no real way out.
Coleman,
on the other hand, could be nominated for an Oscar. Another reporter and I
marveled at her performance on the tapes. Never rushed, never sounding suspect,
all the time wearing the FBI wire.
