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(snip) Now living in Chicago, he set up another phone bank and began raking it in again. And along with it, the lifestyle: booze, coke, power suits, full-length mink coats, weekends in Vegas losing 50 grand at the crap table.
Then came a fateful dinner with a couple of old acquaintances from the brokerage world. They were investment bankers with knowledge of pending corporate takeovers. They set up a deal: The brokers would give Keller information about companies that were about to be bought up; he would buy gobs of their stock via an off-shore account. When news got out about the acquisition, the stock would skyrocket, Keller would cash out and the insider trio would split up the spoils.
Keller was on a plane for the Cayman Islands the next day. For a few months, the scam worked beautifully. (He says that compared to the Michael Milkens of the time, he was just a little fish.) But the Drug Enforcement Administration had set up a sting operation to catch crooks laundering drug money in the Caymans. With him making about three trips a month there, he quickly showed up on the DEA radar. When the narcs found out that Keller was not involved in the dope trade, they turned the case over to the Securities Exchange Commission, which brought a civil suit against him.
After a few months of legal scrums, the SEC referred the case to the U.S. Attorney's Office for criminal charges. Keller remembers the scene well: It was chilly in Chicago on Oct. 12, 1989. His lawyer had told him to be at the U.S. Attorney's office for a meeting. Keller was running late, so he had his limo driver pull up on the sidewalk in front of the federal building. He emerged from the back seat, draped in a mink coat, 45 minutes late.
"I never actually sat down," Keller recounts. "We shook hands and the U.S. Attorney looks at my attorney and says, 'If Mr. Keller cooperates we can probably work out something in the range of six months.' I looked at him and said, 'It's been nice meeting you. One day, when you're as good as me, we can talk about something else.'"
Ten days later, Keller left for a Florida vacation. He insists he did not go on the lam. Brazenly, he failed to leave a contact number with his lawyer, so he was not aware he'd been indicted. On Dec. 17, 1989, Keller was lounging around a friend's Pensacola Beach condo, sipping a snifter of Louis the 13th cognac, waiting for the pizza delivery man and Monday Night Football to come on, when he answered a knock at the door.A bevy of U.S. Marshals, with a helicopter hovering overhead, pushed Keller to the floor, handcuffed him and tossed him in the Escambia County Jail. On the day after Christmas, he was shipped back to Chicago, where a judge pegged him a flight risk, denied him bail and remanded him to the city's Metropolitan Correction Center.
Keller soon copped a plea with the authorities. From November 1990 until August 1992, he did what he calls "Club Fed" time at the Federal Prison Camp at Saufley Field near Pensacola.http://tampa.creativeloafing.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A3441There must be a mold somewhere where they make these types.
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