Hella Nation - Evan Wright [70]
When Britt read the surveillance report the next day, the location of Southland’s home caught his interest. Britt knew it well. He often played at Wildfire and had a clear mental image of the home on the sixteenth hole. It was among the grandest along the course. Situated on a nearly two-acre lot, the yard featured a private putting green, a half-size basketball court, a pool and Jacuzzi, and was partially screened from public view by a stand of giant, candelabra-shaped saguaro cacti.
From his earlier investigations, Britt already knew about Southland’s relationship with Simberg and his role as the “Big Boss” in the failed FedEx heist of September 24. Britt now looked into Southland’s relationship with Langdon through Peak Physique and Sea Castle Ventures. He reexamined his interviews with people at Serono and noticed that not only had Langdon placed the order for Saizen, he had added the unusual request that all of it be shipped at once, so it would arrive on one truck.
Britt interviewed the FedEx driver who normally delivered to Peak Physique and Cactus Pharmacy. He had called in sick the day of the attempted heist, and Britt was curious about this. Dusty Swindle, the high school student Britt interviewed, had told him the driver was supposed to be in on the job. The driver, David Ludwig, denied any involvement.
But when Britt subpoenaed Langdon’s phone records he discovered Langdon had placed several calls to Ludwig’s personal phone in the weeks leading up to the attempted heist. When presented with this evidence, Ludwig admitted that he had agreed to allow his truck to be robbed in return for $100,000. Ludwig told Britt that Langdon enticed him with cash. “Troy came out to my truck and fanned several thousand dollars under my nose. He told me that plus a lot more could be mine if I walked away from my truck at the right time.”
But Ludwig got cold feet, and phoned in sick hours before he was supposed to begin his rounds. When the driver who replaced him failed to accept Simberg’s offer to “make business” and delivered the Saizen, Langdon immediately owed Serono a million dollars for that order, as well as an additional quarter million he hadn’t paid the firm for a previous order. Britt discovered that a day after taking the delivery, Langdon phoned his insurance company and upped his theft coverage at Peak Physique from a quarter million to a million dollars.
Britt learned from employees at Cactus Pharmacy that the storeroom allegedly burgled on October 1 had been emptied of its eighteen boxes of Saizen a few days earlier. Then he received an interesting report on the forensic examination of the storeroom itself. Police examiners discovered that whoever smashed the window on the storeroom had apparently entered and hit the burglar-alarm motion detector with a blunt object. The motion detector was left hanging by its wires, but it continued to transmit data to the main hard drive of the building’s alarm system. Data from the motion detector indicated that after the window was smashed, burglars had spent fewer than sixty seconds inside. Britt deemed it highly unlikely that all eighteen boxes could have been removed from the room in under a minute.
The final pieces of Britt’s case fell into place when he learned that a few days before the “robbery,” Langdon had sold the entire lot of Saizen HGH to a pharmacy wholesaler across town for under a million dollars. The eighteen boxes of Saizen had been delivered on a flatbed truck registered to Payless Towing