His empire was crumbling, the feds had already infiltrated the building and the phone calls had gotten desperate and angry, investors demanding their millions. So Tom Petters apologized to the woman who allegedly helped him orchestrate the crime that epitomized this American decade -- the Ponzi scheme. He began to cry, then asked Deanna Coleman for a hug.
There would be no hugging that day in Petters' office. If Petters had held her tight, he'd have known his long ride was over, obvious in the recording device hidden in the small of her back.
"I'm sorry you ever had to meet me," cried Petters, in a conversation recorded for posterity.
The jury sat riveted in the dark paneled room in federal court, dressed for comfort in their Minnesota soft clothes. One wore a sweater hoodie, another a rugby shirt. One young woman had a punkish streak in her hair.
They were watching a story of our times, a microcosm of the American economy where the workers lived on other continents, phantom money was borrowed from one another, mortgages were given from the over-leveraged to the under-funded, the Play Station IIIs behind the big box signs didn't really exist.
We thought it would go on forever; the party that would never end, the great, insatiable whirligig of life.
"[I'm] dancing," Petters wrote in an e-mail to Coleman, describing how he was trying to evade creditors. "I've got holes in my shoes."
At the end of each e-mail, Petters included a hokey, now ironic, quote by Henry David Thoreau: