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Oklahoma. "I was more 'One in the hand is worth two in the bush.' His was 'Let's shake the bush and see what comes out.' "
Their boyhood differences persisted into later life. "Our folks grew up in the Depression and raised both of us that the object of life was to find a big company, a stable environment, find something that is solid and stay with it," said Jay, whose cheerful, jokey personality tends to mask the real thoughts churning around in his head. "Joe pretty much has done that, and I did for a long time, too, worked for Wilson foods for thirteen years and had a pretty decent job. But I just came to the conclusion one day that people who did well financially were those who had their own business, and I figured if I was ever going to do anything, I'd better get on with it. And so I did, and it's been a roller coaster ever since."
After failing at several different ventures, Jones ran into Bart-ma
In those months before prison, when he wasn't sleeping well and his eyes would blink open at two or three in the morning, Jones would sometimes kill the time until dawn by taking a sorry inventory of the material riches in his life that were now lost. He would think about the $5 million, fourteen-thousand-square-foot dream house that he and his wife had started building south of Tulsa. As conceived, it had granite walls and huge gables, a main staircase inspired by the one in Tara from Gone with the Wind and two artificial ponds co
He also thought about those trips in the company's $25 million, fifteen-passenger Gulfstream G-IV, which he ordered up for spur-of-the-moment vacations for his wife and two grown daughters and their husbands and two or three other couples as well. Fly to Paris and the Caribbean, to Bulls games in Chicago, front-row-center seats, put it all on the company tab as a business expense. Give all that money to the government, it would only waste it. Most frequently, he and Je
Another thing feeding on his mind those nights was how he might have provided his life story with a more positive ending. Aside from the criminality involved, the downfall of CFS had its roots in the company's very success. In the late nineties it grew so fast-from fewer than two hundred employees in 1995 to twenty times that number just three years later-that it lost the personal touch on the telephone that had produced such a high rate of return. Back in the early days when he and Bartma
The ability CFS developed to wheedle money out of former deadbeats had generated an A rating for the bonds it sold to investors. That meant more money so CFS could buy more loans. But with collections begi
What happened next is the thing Jones now regards with deepest regret. Although he founded the company with Bartma
"So in late September of ninety-seven, somehow I became aware the Chicago company is not going to buy any loans this month. Bill had this amazing ability to convince you to do something before you-I have a hard time describing this-but he could in some ma
That very day, Jones recalls, he phoned a lawyer friend down in Shawnee and got him to set up a straw corporation called Dimat, into which Jones fed money from his share of CFS profits so that the company could begin purchasing loans from CFS as a replacement for the firm in Chicago. The scheme provided camouflage for a year, to the tune of $63 million in bogus loan purchases. Then in October 1998, an anonymous letter arrived at Standard and Poor's, one of the rating firms that had been giving CFS bonds their A rating. The letter revealed that Dimat was really a sham corporation and that all its "purchases" of CFS loans were a ruse, paid for by money from CFS itself, to give investors a false picture of the company's financial health. Virtually instantly, the market for CFS bonds dried up; with no cash coming in, the company defaulted on payments to previous bondholders. Bankruptcy ensued, and by the following July, CFS was no more.