The Violin Conspiracy(82)

Chapter 25


    Day 17: Raising Money and Hope


Here was the thing that Ray knew about himself: he was hardwired not to give up. The violin was gone, and its loss paralyzed him, but paradoxically, its loss also spurred him to control the two areas in his life that he could control: practicing his ass off and raising money for the ransom.

By the last week of May he had resumed his regular practice schedule: up at 6:00 a.m., exercising, and beginning practice by seven. Every morning he’d awake and expect the violin to be returned, and every day its loss punched him like a bowling ball to the face, but he would draw a breath—or two, or three—and reach for the Lehman. More than ever, he would not let the loss destroy him. He could still make music. He could still stand tall. He could still be worthy of respect.

He’d practice maniacally until early afternoon, until his legs wouldn’t hold him or his fingers had gone numb. Then he’d grab another bowl of cereal—cereal was pretty much all he was eating these days—and open his laptop.

He spent every afternoon trying to raise $5 million.

Six days in, his crowdfunding campaign had raised a whopping $143,228. “That’s an awesome beginning,” Nicole told him that afternoon on the phone. They were both in their respective cars: she driving to a last-minute substitute performance in Cleveland, and he in Charlotte, heading over to meet Wells Fargo’s wealth-management team to discuss possible benefactors or investors.

“That’s so far from five mil that it doesn’t even count,” he said.

“Will you stop? It’s a start, and a great one. These things take time. You have over a month to raise the money. And it always snowballs.” When he’d decided to raise money using crowdfunding, she’d helped him with a lot of the research, even edited his plea for money.

“I should have started it right away,” he said. “I should have gone on TV shows. I could have said something and millions of people would have heard me.”

“They wouldn’t let you, remember? The FBI didn’t want you on TV.”

“Well, they ain’t got shit done,” he said. “Pilar Jiménez is probably partying every night, playing merengue on the violin to her family.”

“You have time,” she repeated. “It hasn’t even been a week. You’ve raised almost thirty thousand dollars a day. That’s incredible!”

“It’s been almost a week. At this rate it’ll take me five months to raise five mil. I have less than five weeks. And the comments are fucking me up.”

“Call Benson again,” she said. She was convinced that the insurance company was to blame: all it had to do was pay the ransom, or pay out the insurance policy before the ransom date, and Ray would have his violin back. Simple. The insurance agent had tried to explain to both of them that the company had a strict policy not to pay ransoms and that there was also a waiting period before any payment would be issued—let alone the delay required by his family’s settlement—but Nicole told them that their “strict policy” about ransoms wasn’t written anywhere in any of the paperwork. She’d checked. So now she hounded Ray to make them pay.

“It doesn’t do any good to call them,” he said. “They’re not paying more than the twenty-five-thousand reward.”

Benson was no help—neither were the investors. Trying to convince wealthy investors to cough up some of their hard-earned cash to invest in a small percentage of a stolen Stradivarius violin wasn’t quite as easy as it might sound—especially when Ray had no proof that the violin still existed. And of course these investors were savvy enough to understand the implications of the Markses’ lawsuit: Even if Ray did get the violin back, he might not actually own it. He might have to give it to the Marks family.

When the violin had been stolen, it had seemed that there were a half dozen very possible leads—Pilar, Ray’s family, the Marks family.

Pilar had turned out to be a dead end. Alicia had talked to her, then the FBI had flown down. She’d refused to say anything, and they could find nothing in her movements or actions to tie her to the lost violin.

Ray’s family continued to be scrutinized, Bill Soames reported, but their bank accounts remained consistent (Consistently low, Ray thought), and none of them had acted suspiciously. Until someone made a move or slipped up, nothing could be done against them.

The Marks family, by their very existence, was the most frustrating. If they hadn’t stolen the violin, they should have—and in any case they should take the blame. That said, the Markses had been very quiet since the theft: their lawyer had never coughed up additional evidence of the Markses’ legal claim. “Why should they,” Ray told Alicia, “since they already have the violin? Their niece is probably practicing on it right now.” Maybe the niece and Pilar Jiménez would start a chamber group.

So Ray had lost faith in the FBI and in Benson’s crack art detective, Alicia. If he was going to get the violin back, he was going to have to do it himself.

He’d tried to find investors to pay the ransom, but the money hadn’t materialized. So he’d tried to raise the money himself, spending an hour a day on his crowdfunding site, answering questions or reaching out to music lovers, violin aficionados, fan groups. By the first week of June, he’d raised $1.2 million.