This is just me ‘hypothesizing’. The Significance of R is no Wikileaks. This is my own personal speculation. I knew for a fact that the company produced, distributed and sold music CDs and DVDs, doing everything from recording, producing, editing, and distribution, as well as graphic design, not to mention all advertising and international sales. The drawback was… we only had one client.
I began to think that perhaps the company could be a front operation, (visitors often made sly remarks about it), perhaps it was a money-laundering scam outfit, shipping guns or drugs from Asia through Lebanon to fund allegedly, I’m just speculating for the hell of it, Hezbollah in Syria? At least I thought it could, perhaps…allegedly.
This ‘client’ represented a handful of musical artists, mostly relatives and their friends, each with some musical talent or other. I had great respect for these artists, and the work of the designers and their vision, even the Pitbull was an accomplished photographer and knew a thing or two about art. The ‘client’ was a mystery.
As time moved on I began to notice odd things, like the fact that we only sold about ten CDs a month, while the production line made hundreds every six to twelve months. It didn’t make any kind of economical sense. Our overheads ran in the thousands per month. Doing the simple math you could see red flags popping up everywhere.
We spent a fortune on recording studio equipment, microphones, speakers, synthesizers, computer hardware and software to run the stuff, furniture to stack the stuff, and the biggest plasma screen in Cyprus, to play the stuff. All the while we made approximately a hundred Euros monthly in sales!
Like all modern security conscious offices, ours had a camera in almost every room, the entrance to the building, the front corridor and reception, the kitchen, the screening room, the computer room, and the door of the storage room. However, these cameras didn't all work, which never seemed to bother the CEO.
The office flooring was designed with raised access parquet tiles. You need a special mechanism to lift the tile off. We usually had the thing handy because the I.T. technician (the boss used friends of friends rather than specialists like CISCO technicians), they would be forever coming to fix the under-floor wiring.
On many occasions the mechanism, a sort of iron suction handle, would disappear. We would search the entire office but never find the damn thing. The next morning it would appear in the CEO’s office or stationery room. One day the storage room door was ajar and noticing the handle on a table inside, I commandeered it for future use.
The CEO and his brother would often take the thing into the storage room and close the door behind them. They would reappear without it and be holding an envelope or something else. It was common sense that they were lifting tiles in the room. The storage room, it appeared, stored more than CDs.
I never told anyone about the lifting of the floor tiles because it wasn’t my business. If they were hiding their ill-gotten gains under my feet, money which paid my salary at the end of the month, I wasn’t about to snitch.
Their monthly trips to France, Germany, Armenia, Lebanon, and back to Cyprus, began to show more red flags when they coincided with regular trips into the storage room to remove suitcases which were left by a ‘weekend VIP’ visitor, to be picked up the following Monday morning. It was obvious to me, and the employees, that an empty suitcase turning up in the design office meant someone was collecting or dropping off items of an unconventional nature.
My curiosity peaked as I knew DHL had their own schedule for delivery and pick-ups from our office, so I took to research and reading up on the history of the company. I wanted to find out who the ‘client’ was. What I discovered on the Internet, teamed with what I knew professionally, caused me to seriously re-think my future with the company.
…to be continued
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