Forget CSI or Jack Bauer, Martin Kenney and his team in the British Virgin Islands employs real-life agents, hot-shot lawyers and forensic specialists to hunt down some of the most cunning villains on the planet, including Wall Street legend Bernie Madoff, in the process recovering millions for victims.

Overlooking Frigate Bay, St. Kitts ©Bert David

February 2004, an island in the Caribbean

A slow trickle of moisture ran down his neck. Derrick Fraites was working feverishly. The lawyers had been in, suited-up from court, sweating in the Caribbean heat. They seemed agitated. Their questions were all about "the red books, green books or books of any other colour": the same ledgers he was now parcelling with his friend and colleague, Denise, ready for dispatch to God-knows-where.

Nearly 16 large boxes had been filled. They were all that linked hundreds of investors, good Christians like himself, and millions of dollars of their cash, with the buildings in which the administrator now stood. An air freight form sat on a desk nearby. Derrick's boss – the tall, scruffy Englishman – barked out orders, snapping impatiently at one of the security guards, demanding he "clean out" and "bleach" the hard drives. No-one much liked the Englishman. He lost his temper when the guard shrugged and claimed he didn't know how.

"Are the other boxes still here?" the boss asked suddenly.

"Yes," replied Derrick.

"Why?" growled the manager. "Get them out of here now!"

"But where to..?"

"Anywhere!" came the curt answer.

Several hundred miles and months later, in the bustling capital port of Road Town on the British Virgin Islands, a solid figure in a pin-stripe suit sat beside a phone. Patting a giant Afghan hound, Martin Kenney awaited word from his private investigators. Travelling up from Arizona, they were shadowing their target in Las Vegas, USA. Roland Thomas, a notorious con-artist, had skipped the island state of St. Kitts and Nevis and taken millions of offshore investors’ cash with him. Not only that, he'd directly defied a court order and shipped all their financial records – documents that could prove their ownership of a failed luxury resort on the Caribbean island – to rogue elements in America's Internal Revenue Service (the IRS).

Kenney wiped tired eyes. His men – former FBI, Scotland Yard and US Secret Service agents working alongside a network of global lawyers – had been on the road for weeks, scouring the islands of the Caribbean, the backwoods of Montana and even digging up Mob connections in Chicago as they searched for witnesses to the Englishman’s crimes. Forcing his associates to the stand, secretly sequestering bank records and tracing laundered funds into far-flung corners of the world, they were finally nearing their quarry.

Kenney turned the paper over in his hands. "Roland," the email print-out read. "You have created quite a dilemma in St. Kitts, haven't you? How do you get out of the tight bind you have put yourself in? Suggest you follow 'the white rabbit' if you wish to get out of the deep deep rabbit hole. We can guide you 'out of wonderland' and into safe haven, and free you from this heavy burden you have gotten yourself into in St. Kitts. Trust the white rabbit."

The Lewis Carroll connection caused him to smile. For months one of their number had been holding a secret email conversation with the fraudster. Thomas had fallen foul of unsavoury characters in Las Vegas and they suspected he was desperate for cash. As Kenney's lawyers worked furiously to unleash a secret court order and seize the resort down in St. Kitts, undercover operatives were being sent in, posing as possible investors. They’d offered him a chance to deal. Now they would discover if he had taken the bait.

The phone rang once. "We're outside Caesar's Palace. He's here."

Top asset chaser

Paradise Beach today ©Bert David

The Financial Times has called him a “top international asset chaser”. Miami-based Offshore Alert has said that he is “one of the world’s leading authorities on the legal aspects of freezing and seizing assets in multiple jurisdictions”. Meanwhile, The Canadian Lawyer Magazine claims that he “…just may be – considering his Robin Hood reputation and his bulldog legal tactics – one of the most determined and trusted lawyers around”.

From the confines of one of Road Town's few modern office buildings, plumped on the luxury island of Tortola, Martin Kenney and his team of lawyers and investigators wage a war against some of the most ruthless criminals and con men in the world today. Surrounded by the hum of computers, faces scrunched over handheld Blackberries, the 17 staff and numerous freelance agents hail from across Britain, Ireland, the Americas and the Caribbean. Their targets are the charmers, the visionaries, those promising riches and dreams: sophisticated fraudsters fiddling merchant banks and insurers, as well as ordinary people, out of tens, or hundreds, of millions of pounds.

Their boss, the precisely-spoken Martin Kenney, is one of the world's most pre-eminent 'multi-jurisdictional' lawyers. Licensed to practise in several countries, his team of covert investigators, attorneys, forensic accountants and IT specialists tracks down and recovers criminal wealth, returning it to victims. With traditional law enforcement increasingly ineffective against sophisticated money launderers, Kenney targets felons where it hurts most – their pockets.

Early on in his fraud-busting career the former champion ice-hockey player (whose brother Jason is a minister in Canada’s government) investigated Nick Leeson, the Singapore-based trader who brought down the venerable Barings Bank. Two of his British team took on controversial property millionaire Nicholas van Hoogstraten, once convicted (later overturned on appeal) of the manslaughter of a business colleague. Since then his law firm, Martin Kenney & Co., Solicitors (MKS), has tackled American telemarketing fraudsters, dodgy Brazilian banks, corrupt insurers, Russian organised criminals and even crossed swords with the Chinese government in its battles on behalf of victims of economic crime. One moment they could be tackling a case involving a Wall Street legend such as Bernie Madoff; the next they might be in the depths of Liberia, hunting stolen assets. Yet their foes will often stop at nothing to hide their deeds.

"Mr Fraudster is nomadic, boundariless, he moves around the world, prowling for victims and knows how to hide the money. Most of these characters are very charismatic," states the impeccably-dressed Kenney, seated behind an antique desk, his Afghan hound Jackpot at his feet. "But I've seen people brought to ruin, even died as a result of their actions. I've been in some horrendous cases. I've had a client suffer a heart-attack, due to the stress of a case."

This is a war fought in the shadows of an increasingly globalised world. Yet its ramifications are massive. According to international security firm Kroll (in 2008), in the past three years four out of five firms have suffered from some form of corporate fraud and about one in 10 have been losing more than $100 million a year. Those costs are often passed along the chain to us, the public. But it is not just corporations: rich individuals and poor alike have been targeted. Few in this hidden war ever reclaim their money, especially in an electronic age when funds can be moved in a matter of seconds. Once the FBI or Britain's Serious Fraud Office goes after a fraudster, restitution to victims is not high on the list of priorities, either. With trillions travelling through this highly secretive world every year, including the proceeds of organised crime and drug money (which is then 'washed' back into everyday use) the problem is clearly getting worse.

“There’s a huge portion of the world’s legitimate economy owned by nefarious criminals. And it’s very hard to distinguish between the legitimate economy and that which is not, because they have blended. How do you distinguish between the two?” Kenney utters a short, puffy laugh. “You know, in most normal communities, if a bank robbery takes place and someone has taken a gun and shot a teller, stolen money and run off down the street – people will help!”

Making extensive use of ‘gagged’ (secret) court-appointed powers, such as the curiously-named Norwich Pharmacal (‘discovery’) and Anton Piller (‘raid’) orders, Kenney’s teams can obtain documents or enter premises, just like a law enforcement agency. With a variety of undercover surveillance and sting operations, backed up by forensic accountancy skills, they then trace document trails on FBI-inspired ‘link analysis’ software, to ‘follow the money’ and build a pictorial model of how a crime was committed. Together with lawyers and other specialists, such as handwriting analysts, criminal psychologists and IT experts, the team finally freezes a criminal’s assets via civil courts, right across the globe – sometimes at exactly the same time. A Mareva Injunction (‘freeze order’) and other legal manoeuvres prevents the villain selling on any of those assets, before they are then liquidated and the proceeds shared back with the victims. The criminal can even be bankrupted by the process.

The Canadian is doubly unusual in that he will work for the poorest, as well as richest victims, sourcing private financial backing (investors) on certain cases. The model has been so successful, in fact, that officers at law enforcement agencies such as the FBI have referred some of the world’s most complex fraud cases to the company. These can still take years, however, with the con men free to spend victims' money to fight their corner.

"They're heavy hitters, for sure," says Kenney’s head of investigations, former US Secret Service agent James McGunn. "The general public doesn't realise how powerful these characters are, because they have so much money. They can be very challenging adversaries. Very difficult. You just can't underestimate them. That's a serious mistake."

Robbed of everything

Paradise Beach, now 'The Angelus' in St. Kitts ©Bert David

The letters pile up. Notices of death. Penury. Suicide. Ill-health. And, strangest of all, prayers for the con-man that took their worldly wealth.

"We will pray daily that all our prayers will be answered, and that God will help us find a way to recover our money. There are so many of our investment group in desperate circumstances. God Bless Us All."

Diana Rowe puts down the letter from just one of the many victims and sighs. "Our lives have been turned upside down: we don't do anything but live, sleep and eat this case. It has robbed us of any peace in our family life."

At the start everyone had loved Bill Sherwood. He charmed old ladies. He took in the homeless. As his office manager and one of the highest-paid men on the island of St Kitts, Derrick Fraites admitted he had cried for days when Bill passed away of a heart attack in 2001: tears for a former Mob enforcer, who had feted Prime Ministers and investors alike with his honeyed words. He was a larger-than-life street preacher, who told everyone he had given away his worldly riches when he was 'saved'. Christian investors loved him.

"He was just a normal looking guy, kinda modest," Diana Rowe's husband Dick told me. A FedEx airline pilot, he flew up to Helena, Montana in the USA where Bill lived in a small three-bed property with Mary Estes, his second wife. "Though I did find some of his associates rather ... unseemly. But he showed me the plans for the resort and I was convinced from what I saw that it was good, solid truth and a good investment. It just looked very believable."

"He just seemed a genuine guy. He said he was a pastor and minister. That was my soft spot." Fellow airline pilot Mark Secrist, from Virginia shakes his head, eyes downcast. "He was a likable, godly person. Everyone knows I have a whole lot of love for the Lord. By golly, he seemed genuine! I just feel betrayed now."

Bill Sherwood was in fact a consummate con man, with a hidden past – and second identity [Bill Gagnon]– to hide. "There's an old movie called Elmer Gantry [about a con-man preacher, starring Burt Lancaster]. That was Bill Sherwood-Gagnon," says Martin Kenney. "What a colourful character! He used to be a a Mob enforcer: he had hand grenades with the pins pulled, going in to collect from Chicago restaurants."

Over a period of years in the mid-to-late 1990s, the born-again hustler travelled the States preaching and in turns selling offshore trusts linked to a new luxury beach resort he was hoping to build in the Caribbean. On the sales videos he is shown as a short, stocky man in a suit. He looks like a bank manager – except for the dark pits of his eyes. He peppered his sales talk with veiled attacks on "the tax man". What few seemed to know was that their beloved Bill, and his wheelchair-bound wife, Mary (a multiple sclerosis sufferer) was selling them a lie.

It had all seemed so plausible. Investors paid cash in; in return they got back these fantastic rates of return and didn't (apparently) have to pay any tax. Kittian Government ministers, still nominally subservient to the Queen, and other highly-placed figures were only too keen to associate themselves with Bill's project. "I attended one of his seminars on the island and sat across from Sir Probyn Innis, the former Prime Minister of St. Kitts," says Diana Rowe. "He told me that I would be getting on the ground floor of the investment opportunity in his country."

The resort Bill Sherwood began with their money sits neglected today. Security guards lounge in the shade of palms, escaping the searing heat. Vegetation sprouts from the empty parking lot. When Bill first flew down here in 1998, it was an open plot that was to become 'The Paradise Beach Resort and Convention Center', built with over a million dollars of investors' cash. Its later title, 'The Angelus', is lacquered onto a sign partly obscured by weeds. The sea glimmers in the distance, perhaps the last reminder of a dream now shattered.

Few in fact understood that the entire thing, the dream of a Christian-funded resort down on St. Kitts, had been a con from the start: an elaborate Ponzi scheme, like a vast pyramid, collapsing when new investors ran out. (Named after 1920s con man Charles Ponzi, such schemes usually offered fantastic investment growth, but simply recycled investors' money as 'fake' interest payments, whilst the rest was siphoned off by the crooks.) With its founder dead, and his wife falling terminally ill, the resort had simply been snapped up by a smarter con artist: the suave-talking Englishman, Roland Thomas, who had shown up from Las Vegas promising a "$100 million" rescue. Originally from Surrey, England but now living in the States, the "businessman" had a history in penny stock swindles and casino scams. With the help of her brother Bob, a shifty character who had recently arrived in Paradise Beach, he swindled controlling shares from Bill's ailing wife, Mary. He then took out new mortgages on the property with the National Bank of St. Kitts and other institutions, in excess of $2.5 million, as well as other loans. He would end up stealing a resort worth around $12million.

By the time Mary died of her MS in the summer of 2003, investors were completely cut out of all communications. Towards the end of that year they'd hired a local Kittian lawyer and managed to get a class action law suit together, prosecuting Roland Thomas and the remains of the Bill Sherwood empire. The trouble was that Thomas and his cronies simply ignored them. When the investors got a High Court Order for all the resort's records and documents, Thomas at first denied their existence and then had them shipped to rogue agents in the IRS, back in the USA.

It was a brazen move and gross contempt of court, for which – amazingly – he went unpunished: now the victims themselves would be investigated for tax evasion back home in America. "We strongly believed that this would be the 'smoking gun' that would seal our case," says Diana Rowe, who by now had lost over $100,000. "Instead it was an indication of the legal nightmare to come that we could not imagine."

For many, it was the last straw. They were dying off, living their last days in a nightmare. The con men had got away with millions of dollars of their money and their children and children's children would be paying for it.

Day of Reckoning

James McGunn, chief investigator

"There's still the element of the old-fashioned detective, Sam Spade," he says with a conspiratorial smile. "But the world has gotten so much more technical than it was in the Forties or Fifties, and Seventies – and Eighties! It's just so much different."

James McGunn sits in a polo shirt and slacks in his office in a corner of the Martin Kenney & Co. building. A barrel-chested figure, silver-haired and still far more youthful-looking than his 66 years, he is surrounded by certificates and frames from his service days, even a picture of him as a beat cop taken in the late-1960s, before he became a US Secret Service agent. A huge blowup cover from TIME magazine shows him in a car behind Richard Nixon, during a 1974 state visit to Egypt. Wedged into an old diary are a couple of photos taken on the Afghan-Pakistan border in the early 1990s, with a younger version of himself hoisting an AK-47.

"Technology has changed everything," says McGunn in a laconic drawl. "Everything is easier in one sense but gotten more complex. You've got more powerful tools for searching and analysing things: keyword searches, etcetera. But people can move money in a heartbeat," he snaps his fingers. "Everything has gotten more complex ... including crime."

He places a large hand on a leather case, as if by way of habit (it contains an anti-bugging device), then turns to his computer screen and brings up an image of a house in Florida on Google Earth. "This is a house that was owned by someone connected to another Christian-affinity fraud – Tradex." He narrows his eyes. "This is a case we've been investigating for five years now. We've got five properties in Florida we've frozen and we're in the process of taking them. All controlled by this one crime family, run by someone called Art Ferdig."

He turns around to grab more files. "We've also frozen about 400 acres of property in Jamaica, worth between $1-2 million. He paid a million dollars for it, taken from this firm that he started, a Ponzi scheme. He has charities, he's on the internet," he says, returning to his screen and bringing up details of a kindly-looking older gent offering spiritual guides via a website. "There he is," McGunn smiles, "down in Panama."

Paradise Beach is just one of four such 'Christian-affinity frauds' they are handling: each led by a charismatic front man; each involving hundreds of the eager faithful. Each also involves the Caribbean. For some reason the dark side of paradise attracts con-men and victims alike.

Earlier I'd seen a photo of Roland Thomas, a heavy-set Englishman shaking the hands of St. Kitts' Prime Minister, outside what he renamed 'The Angelus' resort. Back in the US, Thomas had already collected a judgement from the financial regulators, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), for running a con. Not long after he'd taken control of Paradise Beach, Thomas was rumoured to have fallen foul of gangsters – casino owners – in Las Vegas and was hunting for a way out of his Caribbean 'investments'. So when their paths finally crossed with the Englishman, the fraud-busters quickly mobilised their resources.

Having been contacted by one victim who had lost upwards of $500,000, Kenney headed directly to St. Kitts to find a local lawyer. "But the case was radioactive amongst local members of the Bar!" he exclaims, seated beneath a screen which takes up an entire wall of his conference room. "I was consistently told that the whole matter was a disaster and highly-complex and that I would 'do well' by having nothing whatsoever to do with it... It was very unusual."

Suspecting "some form of corruption", yet undeterred, the Canadian met with the lawyer for the other (class action) victims, involving Dick Rowe and Mark Secrist. But there was resistance to allowing Kenney's team onboard. "It's not uncommon," he shrugs. "Our investigations soon revealed that two leaders of the board [of victims] were openly hostile to our involvement. It transpired that they were linked to another major fraud in the US and had laundered about $700,000 through Paradise Beach." Having infiltrated the victims, they were also in secret negotiations to force through a sale and then buy the resort from con-man Roland Thomas, at a vastly-discounted value.

'The internet has been a great tool for investigators, but also a great tool for thieves.'
- Dan Wise, fraudbuster

Kenney and his men swept in. The two fraudsters were removed. Dan Wise, the former London solicitor who'd once investigated Nicholas van Hoogstraten, personally visited St. Kitts 32 times, tracking down witnesses, collecting affidavits and preparing a 'freezing order' that would stop anyone from selling on the resort. (He later joked how the locals would watch, bemused, "as this fat Englishman strode around the island sweating in a suit".) Thomas and his associates had been continually trying to sell individual condo-apartments, which the victims' previous lawyer had had to try and re-freeze, one by one. "We'd get to the situation where an Order would expire and six minutes later, a condo would be sold," sighs Diana Rowe. "Despite the fact they were never advertised. Clearly someone knew what was going on."

Led by Wise, Kenney's lawyers also moved against a bank on the island of Antigua holding the fraudsters' accounts, secretly obtaining all their records. James McGunn had already mentioned that finding, and then secretly subpoenaing a fraudster’s bank accounts, was a key part of their investigative work.

“That tells us a lot, because the money is usually wired in from somewhere else. You go from both directions on tracing: you trace money back from the point it is spent. Money doesn't do the criminal any good unless he can buy things with it, or invest it. You find these things through electronic searches, through physical surveillance, video surveillance, you may find them through interviewing associates, friends and relatives, and those interviews can be done in the open or covertly," he says. "You go from that, back to where the money came from, essentially to trace back to the crime."

Assisted by John Bagalini, their forensic accounts specialist (an adventure sports nut who dresses in a flamboyant Hawaiian shirt), the team uses specialised 'link analysis' software to build complex flow charts highlighting that money trail. Such diagrams are essential in understanding both where the money went and how the criminal is now spending it.

"They may succeed in disrupting the trail, of course, like taking out cash and moving it in an armoured car to another institution," continues McGunn. "But that creates another trail, leading to where they buy their mansion or their plane, or have some type of, you know, vices: gambling, women, whatever and they're spending money. If you have a judgment against someone, you don't have to find your money: you just have to find they have money."

As they were tracking Thomas, agents were also dispatched to interview Dwayne Parsons, Bill Sherwood's record keeper in Montana, USA – "we found an incredible amount from him" – then Kenney himself travelled to the Montana backwoods to meet an old blind woodcutter who had once worked with the con-man preacher, Bill Sherwood. "They were working together collecting scraps of wood with Bill driving his ‘Bill Dozer’ truck, on which he had fastooned a great blade,” laughs Kenney. “This interview alone put the lie to Sherwood-Gagnon’s stories about his great financial acumen and success pre-St. Kitts; and showed that he lied to get a licence to operate there by falsely inflating his assets."

Down in St. Kitts, Bill’s profligacy indeed made him a popular man. Scores of construction workers had joined his morning prayers, and broke regularly for further discussion of the Lord, as they started to erect the condos and holiday apartments that his sales teams were selling back to new buyers in the United States. All these and more, men like Derrick Fraites – Bill's former administrator – now swore affidavits to Kenney's men; pressure that was to further tighten the screws on Roland Thomas.

In fact, if the original investors had seen some of Bill Sherwood's sidekicks that Kenney and McGunn were to discover, they may have had second thoughts about their money. There was Terry Murphy, an alcoholic who seemed to rub up the local mobsters the wrong way and eventually ended up leaving the island. Bill and Mary's son, Tim, had got into drink and drugs and caused trouble, eventually being shipped out to expensive rehab centres. McGunn tracked him to a new job in the US Army stationed in Korea – he was now clean – and got his sworn statements, too, helping him enter into the legal struggle against Thomas, and alongside the victims, after learning how Thomas had stolen his inheritance.

Kenney had another trick up his sleeve: once they had tracked him down he used an innovative legal move to 'depose' Bob Estes, the ex-train driver and brother-in-law to Bill Sherwood, who had turned up and tried to take over the resort when his sister and Bill's wife, Mary, was ill. (He was eventually sidelined by Roland Thomas.)

"Bob Estes was a key witness to all these shenanigans going on in St. Kitts. Bob now lives outside Milwaukee [USA] – we found him via various means, then we went to a federal judge there and asked him to order that Bob sit down and answer our questions," explains Kenney, shuffling various papers he is preparing for an international conference. "Bob tried to resist and he got nowhere! The federal judge ordered him to sit down."

Videotaping and questioning him under oath, in a local lawyer's office, they discovered someone was signing off all share transfers in the resort using a signature stamp: millions of dollars were being transferred, illegally, in effect for nothing. Meanwhile, by now the legal team was ready to unleash an 'Unless Order' – freezing the entire resort, as well as ordering over all the documents that had been illegally sent to the IRS by Roland Thomas – whilst James McGunn had dispatched agents, via a private investigator in Arizona, to shadow Thomas once he had left St. Kitts for the USA.

"You know, we go round, we ask people questions, if they won't assist we get an Order and compel them. All of this investigative activity was designed to build the rudiments of a core case," outlines Kenney, with a shine in his eye. "We had to build this from very little to start with, as the fraudsmen had been very aggressive in their activities in suppressing the core evidence in the case – the resort's financial records."

©Bert David

The crime fighters had one other ace. An inside route to the fraudster himself. "He [Thomas] was fighting the SEC and rumours had been passed to us suggesting that he borrowed money from some businessmen in Las Vegas who were not the nicest of people. He had quit St. Kitts because press articles about him had made him 'personna non grata' with the powers that be. He needed money."

Kenney leans back in his chair, steepling his fingers. "So one of our victims became the 'White Rabbit' one summer [2005] – what we call the White Rabbit channel, under direction from us – and started corresponding with Thomas. They were corresponding with each other, where Thomas was decrying the fact that he hates these lawyers in St. Kitts who were representing him, that the victims would get nothing and the lawyers would take everything and they should just take the $10 million value he was offering and split it in half. That was the kind of 'soirée' they had. Though he kept saying that the victims were not victims at all, but tax evading crooks who got what they deserved."

The lawyer's look hardens. "We sent some investigators to Las Vegas to meet Roland Thomas to further those talks. He showed up late one morning for breakfast, at Caesar's Palace, completely hung over, still trashed from the night before. Maybe at eight o'clock at night, when he's having his third martini I'm sure he can seem quite smooth. But we get to see him as he really is. And he could see our firm meant business."

The White Rabbit channel and the investigators also confirmed earlier evidence that the victims had sprung a major leak. Thomas gloated about having possession of confidential lawyer-client communications between the victims and their law firm. "You can't underestimate this," says Kenney. "In almost every major fraud the villains will be found swirling around their victims, trying to leech yet more money, using the cover of specialist asset recovery firms – what we call 'reloader frauds'. Or they seek to penetrate the victims' veil of confidentiality with their own lawyers, so as to be able to take evasive action." He smiles grimly. "That's why the fraudsters hate our becoming involved in a case and why they fight so grimly and make us the subject of such ferocious slurs, because we see through all that."

By now Thomas had joined up with his own private investigator to launch one last ferocious counter-attack on Kenney's team – hoping hunter would become the hunted – using victims' stolen money to defend himself. Dan Wise was crossing swords, daily, in court with one of the Caribbean's top lawyers, Anthony Astaphan, representing Thomas. Astaphan went for the jugular, trying to cast doubt on Kenney's methods and his firm. As Wise recalls: "One time Anthony got so annoyed our serving him with voluminous material the night before we had a major hearing – to counter his vicious assaults against the victims and our firm – that he insisted the next time we sent materials we do so by serving them at his hotel room via two dancing girls, a bottle of Mount Gay Barbados Rum and some Cohiba Cigars!"

But with the legal noose now slowly tightening around the fraudster, despite his shenanigans, hopes were high. Dan Wise and his team managed to get an 'Unless Order' slapped onto the fraudster – a legal move which would force the con-man to turn over all relevant documents within three days, or face having his case struck out. The victims stood to gain $19 million in damages. After such a tremendous struggle, it was a major victory.

And then the government stepped in.

Nowhere to go

Mark Secrist, victim of Sherwood and Thomas, and now the IRS too ©Mark Secrist

The saga has robbed victims such as Mark Secrist not only his financial future (he lost more than $600,000) but left him being chased by the IRS in America for tax and fines it claims is owed on the money that was stolen. A committed Christian and popular man at his local church, Secrist has had to seek marriage guidance counselling following the troubles and strains the case has caused in his life. If the IRS wins its case against him, he will be "destroyed". Hundreds of other victims face similar disaster. Kenney calls the situation a scandal.

With those victims now dying out or with nowhere to turn, the battle for Paradise Beach/The Angelus has shifted to the St. Kitts authorities. They compulsorily acquired the resort in January 2007 on the verge of Roland Thomas paying up to the victims. To this date the government has dragged its feet on any compensation deal for those victims: not a penny or cent has been paid to them. Not only that: after the island's English-trained Attorney General, Delano Bart, pushed through the acquisition in the island's Parliament, he resigned his position and joined the Marriott Hotel (next door to The Angelus) as legal counsel. The Marriott then bought the entire site from the government in a deal shrouded in secrecy. No-one has been able to find out what was paid for The Angelus by its new "owners".

The team turned to diplomatic pressure, enlisting support from the US authorities (keen to crack down on dodgy tax regimes and corruption in its "back yard") to help bring about a special Tribunal to decide the victims' compensation. Dan Wise, who is leading the negotiations, is particularly pleased that the Chairman is a retired judge from Anguilla who campaigns on anti-corruption issues. After a long, long wait, Wise says that the victims are "seeking in the region of $11 million plus costs and some interest [another $1-2 million]." The St. Kitts Government has continually stalled, but if the story can be said to have a happy end, that might be it.

For Kenney, of course, such delays and hiccups are par for the course. Cases can take years to come to fruition. "What inspires me to work hard in these cases is to help right wrongs and help folks who have been vanquished by villains... I just think it's a good thing to do," says the lawyer, something possibly instilled in him by his headmaster father back in Canada, he admits.

"But they didn't sit me down and say you should go and fight bad guys some day," he smiles. Over dinner that evening, James McGunn talks of "some bad times, very bad times" when the firm was nearly destroyed – and eventually prevailed – in a huge multi-jurisdictional battle against a Canadian telemarketing fraudster. "There are stresses in this work that can affect anyone," admits Kenney. "Long hours, threats: I have a fraud lawyer in Florida who had to get a specially-trained attack dog to live with his family, because of death threats."

There can be direct danger, too. In one of their most hard-fought cases, against the telemarketing fraudster who stole upwards of $300 million from US pensioners, James McGunn went to extreme lengths to track his target, even placing investigators on a South American luxury cruise liner to shadow the fraudster's brother-in-law and wife, then personally following the criminal down to Papua New Guinea. Moving in disguise, but with a hired killer at the con-man's disposal, “it would be extremely hazardous to be detected,” McGunn only half-jokes, raising his eyebrows. Eventually they retrieved $36 million in what was to become a landmark legal judgment in the USA.

These days the former Presidential guard has to regularly sweep the offices for electronic bugs. The firm has also been working on a big case in Liberia, which has meant one colleague toughing it out with over half-a-dozen bodyguards in tow, in the process catching malaria. "He still stuck it out, though," nods Kenney, approvingly. Kenney himself has had to hire private military contractors – former special forces soldiers – to protect him on his visits to Latin America, digging deep into corruption behind the collapse of several banks in Brazil. And he recalls one meeting where a fraudster forced to the point of bankruptcy "frothed and used many unkind expletives, explaining that he had lain awake all the night previous, thinking of ways to kill me!"

"It becomes very personal when you get the guy by the pocket book," he adds, with a serious look. "But it just washes over me: it doesn't stick."

Not surprisingly, their foes rarely think highly of Kenney & Co. Dan Wise confides that: "Martin was once accused of being an economic terrorist, by the lawyers for one of the fraudsters we tackled." He laughs. "We sometimes get accused of being zealots, essentially by the people we're suing of course. Sometimes their lawyers make very serious allegations and put the firm to a lot of expense to defend itself – it's part of their strategy to delay us, to try and frighten us off the pitch. It takes a lot of work and money to put them off. It's extremely unpleasant."

Yet victims such as Dick Rowe call what Kenney does "amazing"; Mark Secrist says his team contains "some of the most remarkable men and women you could find on the planet." Peter Lowe, head of FraudNet – a collection of international asset recovery specialists, which is part of the International Chambers of Commerce – backs up this belief: "Martin is extremely talented and creative in finding solutions for victims." Ross Gaffney, an ex-FBI agent who has worked with Kenney, also claims "his work ethic is unrelenting and he is able to persevere through the most bleak of times."

Wise, however, thinks they are only tackling a tiny proportion of the fraud. "There is a lot of fraud out there. A lot. It's about taking financial advantage through deception, lies. I can only see more of it, sadly, arising from the economic output of China, India, the former Soviet Union. And structured finance products, which increase the speed with which you can make or lose money. So it's a massive, huge problem."

With news of the collapse of Wall Street's legendary investor and Nasdaq founder, Bernie Madoff, it seems no surprise that Kenney and his team are already on the case. Kenney’s firm is now working for a European bank which invested over $10 billion in Madoff’s scam, via two Virgin Island feeder funds. Madoff’s plea bargain involved agreeing to cooperate fully in exchange for immunity for his family – an investigator’s dream.

As he shakes my hand, on the last night of my stay, Kenney reveals that one day he wants to work on behalf of Death Row inmates ("men of insubstantial means"), denied justice. "I believe very strongly that all accused persons are entitled to a robust defence – especially when charged by the State with capital murder that can lead to their execution."

For today, though, there is still a strong urge to wipe the world of the con artists and charmers who steal millions each and every day. There is clear loathing in his voice when he talks of these characters.

“They’re as sophisticated and bright and as well organised and articulate as some of the best commercial business people in the world could ever be. And some of these fellows are really sick! They get their ‘jollies’ off of victimising and laughing at people. Why do they do this? Well, there’s a sickness there; they have sick, psychological states of mind.”

“That might explain why some of the big boys who take $200 million at a roll, do it again, and again, and again. There’s no reason; they can never consume all they steal. It’s a sick psychological game, that’s what it is.”

This story was commissioned for Live magazine, The Mail On Sunday ©2008; a shorter version finally appeared in 'M' magazine, The National in the United Arab Emirates ©2009.