Jamie Rickie
Jamie Rickie
Decameron's in-house accountant, who has been cooking the books for years
In Game
Character Hint
You are Jamie Rickie, accountant at Decameron Enterprises, and today has been just shocking. Several people shot, including the CEO; you are just glad it wasn't any closer to your office.
None of which is really your problem, but having all these police around makes you rather nervous. Not that they are likely to be poking in the books, but it really wouldn't do to have someone realize how much money you have been embezzling, for how long...
Costuming: you tend towards office formal, a tad on the prissy side.
Character Sheet
You are Jamie Rickie, and today has been absolutely shocking. Decameron Enterprises has certainly been shaken. You are glad that none of your money is in the company. Yours all came out of the company.
You were brought into the firm quite a long time ago now -- over 20 years, my! -- by your old and dear friend Fred Ronit. He was one of the founders, dealing with the Sales and Marketing, and needed someone there who understood how money actually works. Accounting was your specialty, so you were happy to come in and take that over.
At first, you didn't even think of it as embezzlement; at least, you wouldn't let yourself think that consciously. An accountant's salary isn't quite enough to live on comfortably downtown, and you found yourself slightly short on cash. So you took a few hundred, marked it into the books as petty cash expenditures -- and nobody noticed. After all, Fred was theoretically running the Board's Audit Committee, and he doesn't really know much about such things. Since the company wasn't public, it didn't need to have outside auditors. You realized you were really the only person paying attention to the money, and nobody was paying attention to you.
So a few months later, you tried it a little more seriously and carefully: create a fake vendor, make up an invoice in the files for the purchase of some sort of framistat (you copied the technical terms from real invoices), charge a nicely non-round amount that seems plausible, and put the money into your own account. A couple thousand that time; again, no one noticed.
Over the years, it gradually became habit to "supplement your income", as you liked to think of it. Basically a victimless crime -- the money was mostly coming from the rich investors like Helen Derren, all capital and no work. Really, the crime was that people like that were getting rich while you were getting paid peanuts. And it wasn't as if you were taking millions, or anything like that -- just a few thousand here and there to make your life more comfortable. In total, over the past 20 years, you figure you've probably pulled out something shy of half a million dollars.
Of course, you'd know exactly how much, to the penny, if it wasn't for those damned thieves. About five months ago, they broke into your apartment. When you got home, you were terrified, you will admit it -- you victimized, betrayed, violated. You were terribly afraid that someone was trying to get to you, but that nice Officer Finlay talked you down, and convinced you that it was just a routine robbery. Yes, they had taken your computer, but they'd also taken the television set; presumably they wanted to sell it all for money. You and the Officer hit it off, and you and she have been meeting for drinks every few weeks since then. It is oddly nice to have someone from such a different socio-economic background to relax around; you don't feel quite so constrained by the formalities of the work environment, and you don't really have all that many friends.
You thought it was all over until about a month ago, when you noticed that your desk was slightly disarranged: nothing dramatic, just a few things in your drawers not in the right place. (You always keep your desk Just So.) You looked in the files, and it was the same thing: nothing missing, but they weren't as neat as they should be. Someone had been rifling through your things, and that was worrying.
Then, perhaps a week later, Roger Cameron, the founder and CEO of Decameron, came storming into your office and accused you of embezzlement. You pretended to be shocked and innocent, until he dropped the bombshell that you had been dreading: he had "obtained certain files" listing exactly how much you had taken, using which fake invoices, and when. Of course, you were outraged -- that was your file from your personal computer at home, and you accused him of orchestrating the robbery. That set him back on his heels, but he claimed that an anonymous caller had sold him the file, and that it didn't excuse your actions. Which was true, so you played your trump card -- and accused him of the exact same thing.
Back around 15 years ago, the company was in bad shape, nearing bankruptcy. You felt a little guilty about that, but only a little -- mostly, it was due to mismanagement, and the company not understanding how badly it was misunderstanding its markets. You were preparing to send your resume around town, when word came in one morning that the company's main warehouse, down at the docks, had burned to the ground the previous night, taking all the stock with it. They asked you to draw up a detailed list of the losses, and they were impressive: inventory worth several million dollars at retail. Oh, what a terrible accident, everyone said. Pshaw, right: you know an insurance scam when you see one. But there was no proof that it was arson, and Regan, the company lawyer, is an awfully tough negotiator, so the insurance company eventually paid up. There were still considerable layoffs, but the company managed to stay afloat without needing to go Chapter 11.
What nobody but you knew, though, was that a month or so after the fire, Roger began to quietly draw money out of the company's account. It was quite regular, and Roger's attempts to conceal it were pathetic: $5000 per month was going to a "Tagh O'Malley". Detective O'Malley had been all over the news a few months before, when his dark history as an IRA bomber came to light and he was drummed out of the VCPD. Apparently, he'd also decided to "supplement his income", by going back to his original trade.
Those payoffs continued, regular as clockwork, for well over ten years. Indeed, they only stopped last year -- right at the same time that Seamus O'Malley, a fresh-out-of-college engineer, got hired. Not exactly subtle, that.
So yes, Roger had you over a barrel for the embezzlement -- but you had him equally dead to rights for the same crime and criminal fraud, arson, conspiracy and all sorts of other lovely things. You made clear that would not just sit on that information if he did anything to you. So he stormed right back out of your office, just as angry as he had come in. It was really rather delightful, you have to admit: he'd always been a bit of an arrogant prick, lord of his universe and all that, and it was fun to see him taken down a peg. Since then, the two of you have exchanged some snippy emails, tossing veiled references back and forth, but he's known that he can't do anything to you.
The only other person who knows about what you've been doing is poor Fred. You actually feel a little guilty there. Not long before the fire, he demonstrated that he wasn't actually a complete idiot when it came to numbers. Since the company was in trouble, he had sat down, looked through the books in considerable detail, and noticed that there were significant payments that didn't line up with actual goods received. He came to you to ask about it, and you confessed the whole thing. That was frightening, but you couldn't lie to one of your oldest friends, not like that. You offered to stop, but he thought about it for a minute, muttered something about Roger being an idiot, and told you that he didn't care. You know that he was disappointed, but happy to not be going to jail.
You finally got a chance to repay that kindness six years ago, when he decided to run for State Representative. You thought it was a fine idea -- he had always been passionate about politics, and it would be a good use of his skills -- but he had precious little money, having sold much of his Decameron stock just before it hit bottom. You'd built up quite a sizeable nest egg, though, so you donated fifty thousand dollars to his campaign -- more than you can consider a casual gift, but appropriate under the circumstances. It helps you sleep a little better at night, knowing that you've repaid his kindness to you.
There are times you wonder whether you should stay at Decameron -- the money is good enough that it keeps you here, but the managers are sometimes such idiots. That was really driven home to you about three years ago, when Greyrock Investments took a 20% interest in the company.
It all seemed normal enough, a routine venture investment in a growing company, but you always like to understand the money flows. So you started looking into Brian Truman, the lead partner, and Greyrock in general, and it was... odd. There were several partners, all of whom were rags-to-riches stories, but those stories continued afterwards: each apparently went through hard times, squandering their fortunes in various stupid and high-profile ways. And after each one seemed like he or she ought to have been ruined, they invested in Greyrock as partners. Indeed, when you looked into what you could find publicly, Greyrock has clearly invested considerably more money than all of its partners had between them. So you started looking into what you could find about their rumored debts -- and every trail led directly to Don Signoretti.
It was blood-chilling, but you have to admire the sheer audacity of it. The Signoretti Mob are legendary in Vermillion: everyone knows that they run much of the illegal activity in the state, but no one has ever been able to build a case against them. And heaven knows the government has tried, repeatedly, but they've never been able to make it stick, in large part because they weren't able to track the money laundering. So now you knew what the Federal Government couldn't puzzle out: Don Marco Signoretti was stashing his money in the most perfectly upstanding American way imaginable -- by going into the venture capital business, hiding behind a bunch of failed entrepreneurs as his pawns.
Not that you've told anyone about this. You aren't stupid, and you value your life. You don't even know whether Roger even knew where his money came from: his naivete could almost be charming, sometimes. You are certain that Brian Truman is in this up to his neck, but other than that, it's all a bit murky.
As for today -- well, it's terrible. You may not have liked Roger all that much, but you certainly wouldn't wish such a fate on him. And now there are police all over the place, which simply makes you nervous. You can only hope that Officer Finlay is here, to perhaps calm your nerves again...
Who You Know
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Fred Ronit: Your oldest and closest friend. Sometime co-founder and salesperson for Decameron Enterprises, currently State Representative from Violet City. And soon -- perhaps Senator? That would be nice. You have been helping him manage the money for his Senatorial campaign.
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Roger Cameron: The other founder of Decameron. An arrogant piece of work, and not so honest as he might have claimed. Still, nobody should die like that.
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Millie Cameron: Roger's wife, who you've long through was the more sensible half of the family. Quite a lovely lady, with a real head for numbers -- if she hadn't been brought up with that whole "southern lady" thing, you suspect she could have made a fine businesswoman herself.
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Helen Derren: Decameron's original investor, she parlayed a modest investment into millions, as you understand it. A canny investor, but you do somewhat resent her easy profits.
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Rhona Finlay: Your savior and occasional bar companion. A very good person, in that sort of "salt of the earth" way.
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Shrivatsa Kiran: One of those young engineers who Roger hired over the past year or so. Most of them are dreadfully undisciplined, but you've taken a shine to this one. He actually sought you out, wanting to learn more about business and finance -- he is from India, and wants to make sure that he learns as much as possible while here in America. So you've been tutoring him on a regular basis, once or twice a week, teaching everything you know about the business world. He has been quite the eager pupil, and it's been refreshing finding someone so young who actually cares about these things.
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Brian Truman: The partner from Greyrock Investments who sits on Decameron's Board of Directors. As far as you can tell, he is a patsy for Don Signoretti.
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Regan Archie: The company's lawyer. She isn't stupid -- part of how the company avoided hot water over the warehouse "accident" was her smooth work. Does she know about Greyrock?
GM Notes
Wasn't involved in
The Accident per se, but knew perfectly well how much trouble the company was in (indeed, felt a bit guilty, since a little of that trouble was due to embezzlement), and knows that the accident was
very convenient. Has always suspected that Roger and some of his cronies were involved, and noticed that he has been drawing suspiciously regular amounts of money ever since.
Him apartment was broken into about five months ago. It was a shocking incident, but the eventual conclusion was that it was just a robbery. The thieves took the (rather expensive) television set and computer.
R Finlay was one of the cops who showed up to help out, and helped calm him down. They hit it off, and have been occasional drinking buddies since then, each of them enjoying having someone from a different world to hang out with.
He was initially nervous, unsure what might have been on that computer, but relaxed after a while. But a month or so ago, an anonymous person contacted Roger with "some very interesting information about one of his employees". He paid $500, and in exchange got a copy of the private books Jamie had been keeping on the computer. Roger stormed into his office, accusing him of embezzlement; he turned around and accused him of the same, paying someone off for the arson job on the warehouse. This Mexican standoff has continued since, with occasional snippy emails hinting in both directions.
Also about a month ago, he noticed one morning that someone had been in him stuff. There wasn't anything dramatic, but him desk drawer was slightly disarranged, and the files in him invoice cabinet weren't as neatly arranged as they should be. That has made him very nervous and a bit paranoid -- has someone found out about the embezzlement? Is someone trying to gather evidence against him? Did Roger instruct someone to find evidence to nail him with this?
Is one of Fred Ronit's oldest and closest friends -- he originally brought Jamie into Decameron in the first place. In return, Jamie largely bankrolled his original run for the State House. Neither of them really have ever had much love or respect for Roger. Fred is the only person who knows at least vaguely about the embezzlement, although they've never talked about it explicitly.
