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Needless to say, this was not the way Jones thought things would turn out. In his mind, the Dimat scheme was only a temporary arrangement, to give CFS managers time to get collections up to their previously high level. "The choice was certainly mine, whether I fully realized it or not at the time," Jones told me. "That first time, when it started, the company wasn't in that bad trouble. But as it got further, I should have recognized that if we'd quit after the first two times, if we did that, there would still have been no harm, no foul. We could have simply said, 'Guys, we've missed the projections here.' We could have said, 'We're going home, and you've got to figure out what to do.' I wouldn't have liked that, it wouldn't have been great for investors, but certainly there would have been no criminal activity."
A blizzard of investor suits rained down on Jones and Bartma
In Jones's mind, it was Bartma
If Bartma
His daughter Holly, thirty-six, a graduate of Oklahoma State University who for a while worked as a midlevel manager at CFS, says that she thinks there was also a psychological dimension to why her father did what he did, something deeper than avarice. "What he did was totally plausible to me," said Holly, who lives in Dallas with her husband and who gave birth to Jones's first granddaughter shortly after he went to prison. "I had seen some of the fights Dad and Bill had had. Dad ended up doing nothing. They excluded him from everything, future pla
Maybe some of that's true. But Jones also admits that along with saving the company, he had this other idea of taking over those $63 million in CFS loans himself-the ones that he had bought surreptitiously through Dimat-and setting up a junior version of CFS in Nevada as his own company, handy to the gambling casinos.
He even formed a shell corporation for this purpose called Card Services of Nevada. "The plan was that I'd leave CFS, and it pretty much stayed as that throughout the whole period. Then one day that anonymous letter bubbles up."
Winter passed into spring, a lushly green period in eastern Oklahoma, and Jones was trying to keep himself busy. He bought a smoker, which he used for practice in barbecuing great slabs of meat, thinking that maybe he would open a rib-and-country-music place after he got out of prison. He also worked on a list of things he had long wanted to do but had never found the time for-seeing the Chicago Cubs play at Wrigley Field, taking a rafting trip down the Snake River in Idaho. Je
Whatever its ups and downs, her married life ranked as a definite improvement over what she had been through as a child growing up in Shawnee. The family lived next door to the Sinclair filling station run by her father, who was a fearsome drinker and a womanizer and had wreaked havoc on the family, right until he committed suicide in his garage via carbon monoxide fumes. A brother she had been close to died in an automobile accident; her sister was murdered by her husband with a shotgun. At the end, her family had dwindled down to just her mother and her. "I went from my mother's house when I was eighteen to marry Jay Jones, and I have never been alone my whole life," she said that spring. "I don't want to live in this house by myself. It's just so big, and I'm terrified of being alone. There are so many places for people to hide."
Along with her fears of being alone, Je