The My Friend Jay Story

                                                     The My Friend Jay Story

                                                                  1988

                                      A true story about a real “Loose Cannon”                                 

                                    Written 1/2010 and Re-written 03/01/2016                                                                                                                      

                                                            Howard Yasgar

    If I had to list the most interesting people that I have ever met and been involved with, it would be very difficult to do.

    It’s because I have been fortunate, and in some cases unfortunate enough to have met and been involved with quite a few interesting people.

    My involvement with a  fellow named Jay ended up being one of the more unfortunate and a costly ones, and I could have lost my entire business by my getting involved with him.

    To say my involvement Jay  was an interesting fellow would be an understatement, I think my calling him a loose cannon would be more accurate.

    It didn’t matter whatever direction Jay went in, someone like me, was always left behind with a problem.

    Jay was a very likeable guy, and I don’t think he ever really intended to hurt anyone.

    But Jay was the kind of guy someone could write a story about.

    That’s the  reason I’m writing this short story about him and some of the things that I got involved in with him.

    It was 1988 when I first met Jay.

    I was in Miami and just getting involved in the rebuilding electrical parts for the military.

    I didn’t know a whole lot about the military business, nor did I know anything about the details regarding the way that the government’s procurement system operated.

    I first met Jay when he was located in Cleveland Ohio.

    He was in the business of making carbon brushes that were used in all types of electric motors.

    Jay was an extremely intelligent fellow with an engineering background, so I started buying carbon brushes from him, and after a while we became good friends.

    According to what Jay told me, he had married to a woman whose father had owned a company that bought and sold military carbon brushes.

    When they eventually divorced, Jay remained in the carbon brush business.

    Because of his engineering background Jay was able to manufacture most any type of carbon brush.  for every application, and he was good at it.

    By the time in 1988 when I met Jay, he had already been manufacturing and selling carbon brushes to the U.S. government for quite a while.

    I started using Jay as my supplier for all my special carbon brush needs.  

    You have no idea of how happy I was to meet someone as intelligent as Jay, he was a person that I could talk to about most any mechanical engineering subject and get the kind of answers I was looking for.

    Over the years, our conversations eventually got to the point, where Jay and I would just talk, and we would discuss all kinds of different subjects, most  not related to the carbon brush business.

    Jay told me he was writing a book about a special aircraft that our government made during WW II, it was an aircraft manufactured with a gold plated interior.

    He said that after the second world war, all of the gold plated airplanes  were given to Russia.

except for one that had crashed into the Great Lakes, and that was the story Jay was writing about.

    One day, in 1990, Jay unexpectedly told me that he had sold his brush making business.

    When Jay told me this, I was taken by surprise.

    Jay said, everything had been  sold to a Carbon Company located in Nova Michigan, and he was now going into partnership, and would be working for them.

    Jay said his new partner was a fellow named Lee.

    Several months later I met Lee, when he came to Florida on a business trip.

    I found Lee to be another expert in the carbon brush business, and Lee told me a cute story about how he had gotten started in the carbon brush manufacturing business.

    He said, he had been traveling around the country, selling carbon brushes to steel mills and other  manufacturers that had big electric motors.

    While Lee was calling on the steel mills, he purchased their left over scrap carbon electrodes.

    They were electrode “Stubs” left over from electric steel melting furnaces.

    The carbon stubs were considered junk by the steel mills, so they were happy to sell them to Lee.

    Lee then cut the carbon stubs up to make the carbon brushes that he was selling to them, it was a brilliant idea.  

    After meeting Lee, I felt that the combination of two people like Lee and Jay was going to be a pretty good thing.

    However, at the time, I had no idea that there was a whole other reason why Jay had sold his company.

    It was probably late 1990, when I learned that my good friend Jay had suddenly disappeared, and

eventually I learned the whole sad story.

    It seems that Jay, had taken an order from the U.S. government for a large quantity of carbon brushes, they were brushes were originally made by the Westinghouse Electric Company.

    Over a period of several months, Jay had made eight shipments to the government.

     At some point, the government found out that the brushes he sold them were not original Westinghouse manufacture.

    Obviously Westinghouse had monitored the sale, and then protested to the government.

    Once the protest was lodged, an investigation had taken place, and my friend Jay was charged with eight counts of mail fraud. (He had made eight shipments). He was prosecuted and convicted.

    Just before Jay was scheduled to be sentenced, he disappeared.  

    When Jay disappeared, it was the end of the story, as far as I was concerned.

    After about two  years had passed, I received a phone call, it was Jay, asking me if I could help him out.

    He said he was calling me from the Bahamas, where he said he was hiding from his ex-wife.

    So, when Jay called, I simply thought of him just as an old friend, that needed my assistance in hiding from his ex wife.

    He asked if I would help him to get some information on how to change his name.

    I had seen several ads on the subject in the classified section of  Soldier of Fortune magazine, and

I felt they were exactly what Jay needed.

    I spent $19.00 ordering several books, books  that covered subjects on how to change your name and how to lose yourself in society if you didn’t want to be found.

    Jay gave me a general delivery Post Office address that was in Marsh Harbor, the Bahamas, so I sent him all the books there.

    About 6 months later I received another call, it was from Jay, he had now changed his name and was living temporarily in a sailboat behind Nova University in Fort Lauderdale.

    Jay said he wanted to get together with me and my wife for supper, so my wife Katherine and I went to Nova University to meet him.

    We found Jay living on a 27 foot sailboat that was docked in the private boat basin right behind the

University.

    That evening, Jay told us a very unusual story.

     He said that two years earlier, he had, driven his car from Cleveland Ohio, to Miami, and he then found a 16 foot boat with a small outboard engine on it for sale.

    Jay said he bought the boat, and then went to a local hardware store and bought everything he thought he and his dog would need for an extended outdoor camping trip.

    It included a chart showing him how to get to Nassau in the Bahamas.

    Jay said that he had never been to the Bahamas before, and had no idea of how to get there, so he relied on a small compass and the chart he had bought.

    He loaded up the boat with supplies, abandoned his car at the waterfront and set off for the Bahamas, arriving at the port of Nassau the next day.

    Jay knew he couldn’t enter the Bahamas without a passport, so he veered to the right side of the island, and continued around the coast, avoiding what looked like the populated areas.

    Eventually he found a small opening into a bay that appeared to be uninhabited.

    As he entered and got closer to shore, he saw there was a house on the left that appeared to be inhabited, but at the time all closed up.

    In front of him, was an abandoned homestead, so Jay just moved in.

    Jay said, that during the day he fished in the bay, and caught sharks for he and his dog to eat.

    He found an old orchard in the woods behind the house, with trees that still produced some fruit.

    One day Jay saw someone was living at the other house on the bay, and he became nervous, but eventually he went over and introduced himself.

    The people turned out to be an older couple from the States that spent part of each year in the Bahamas, and they were happy to have a new American neighbor to talk to.

    Jay must have given them a good story because they liked him, and since they had a generator and water maker in their home, they supplied Jay with drinking water.

    Jay said that he spent most of his day light hours foraging for food and writing his book about the gold plated airplanes, it was a book he knew in his heart would be a best seller.

    Jay said that he already had a publishers name in mind, one that he would send the book to when it was done.

    After several months, Jay started to missing the taste of fresh vegetables, things like onions and tomatoes, and lots of other small things that we all take for granted.

    He took a chance and left the bay, motoring to the next peninsula of land, where there was a dock.

    At the dock, he tied up his boat and walked along a dirt path, that led to a small village called

Cooperstown.

    At Cooperstown he was told that a bus came twice a day and it could take him to Marsh Harbor

where there was a post office and a grocery store.

    Jay made the trip, and at Marsh Harbor he found all the vegetables and supplies he wanted, as well as a public telephone, which he used to call me.

    One day, about a year later, Jay woke up hearing voices.

     There were whole bunch of guys  with electronic equipment, camping on the shore of his little bay.

    He went to see who they were, and found that they were a group of marine professors from Nova University.

    They told Jay they were doing a research project testing wave action in a Bahamian bay.

    Jay made friends with all of them and because he was always hanging around their campsite, they began to refer to Jay as the mayor of the bay.

    One of the professors told Jay that he had a 27 foot sailboat that he wanted to sell, and Jay agreed to buy it, so the next time the professor came, he sailed the boat over.

    It had now been nearly two years since Jay had left the states and his source of funds was drying up.

    His partner, back in Nova Michigan, had now had more than enough of Jay and his expenses, he didn’t want anything more to do with financing him.

    It appeared that Jay had been living off the money due to him for buying his company, but that was now at an end.

    So Jay then decided to sail to Fort Lauderdale with the 27 foot sailboat, and that’s when he got permission to dock it in the Nova University boat basin.

    While at the Nova University boat basin, Jay found a lady working there that could edit the manuscript for his book.

    He also met a really nice girlfriend there, she was a technician working for a testing laboratory at the university.

    It wasn’t long before Jay moved in with his girlfriend, and his life started to normalize.

    However, his girlfriend’s brother, didn't like the fact that his sister and Jay were not legally married, so they asked me, as a Florida Notary Public, to perform a wedding ceremony for them.

    I agreed and using my wife Katherine as a witness, we performed a nice wedding ceremony at her brother’s home.

    While Jay was living in the Bahamas, he had seen how the fishermen harvested lobster, and he wanted me to go in business with him to farm raise Caribbean lobsters.

    Jay said he had watched the Bahamian lobstermen threw the lobster heads away, and he felt that if he ground up the lobster heads it could be used as chum to attract fish.

    After he told me, I tried it and Jay was right.

    After that Jay had a lot more ideas, but as much as I wanted to assist him, I couldn’t, I was just too busy with my own company and my own projects, so I had no time to devote to Jay and his ideas,  regardless of how interesting they were.

    What was happening, Jay had access to the Nova University library, and he soon found that the library was a virtual gold mine, loaded with hundreds of studies done by professors looking to get

government grants.

    Every day when Jay found a  project that some professor had done a study on, he wanted to do it, and he wanted me to do it with him.  

    One day, Jay informed me that he and his wife had found a project boat in a Fort Lauderdale boat yard and they were going to buy it, and he invited us to come and see it.

     Once we saw it,  we couldn’t believe our eyes, because it was a very old wooden twin mast wooden sailing yacht, 60 feet long.

     The boat originally built in the 1950’s  was now up on blocks in dry dock.

     The original boat had started out many years ago as a fancy private yacht, it even had a stand up piano in the salon, of course the piano now long gone.

     When the original owner had died, the boat was sold, and the new owners made it a sailing charter boat, and they chartered it out until the original  six cylinder diesel engine quit on them.

     To save money, the engine was then changed  to a 4 cylinder diesel engine, and when that engine failed so did the owners.

     Then the yacht was pulled out of the water,  and now it sat in the marina yard deteriorating.

     It appears the marina, had acquired the boat for overdue fees, and they put it up for sale for $35,000.00.

     Jay, bought it, using his new wives savings. He caulked the  hull and moved the yacht to the boat basin behind Nova University.

     By the time Katherine and I came for a visit and boarded the yacht, Jay had already started working on it full scale, he had set up a carpentry workshop in the boats bow.

     It looked like a hopeless project to us, as far as we were concerned Jay had taken on a project that was much  more than he could ever do.

     For a while Jay stopped coming around, he was spending all his time working on the boat.

     As the months passed, we visited him several times and we could see Jay was making a junk yard out of the Nova University boat basin.

     After watching Jay operate, we were starting to feel that perhaps his thinking was a little unbalanced.

     One day Jay came into my office, he had a government surplus catalog with him and he showed me where there was a big lot of marine boat bottom paint coming up for sale at a government surplus auction in Jacksonville Florida.

     Because my company was already registered with the government, Jay wanted to know if he could use our registration number to bid on the paint.

     Jay said that if he was awarded the paint, he could sell all of it very quickly in the Bahamas.

     I looked over the government booklet that Jay had, and I noticed that there was also being auctioned about 1000 pounds of lubricating grease.

     I thought that as long as Jay was bidding on the paint, he could also bid on the grease for me. So I told Jay to bid $100.00 for the grease.

     When the winning bids were published, Jay did not get the bottom paint, someone had bid more than he had. But my company was awarded the 1000 lbs. of surplus grease, for only $100.00.

     Jay said that he wanted to go to Jacksonville to review some marine items that were being auctioned off in the future, he said, it would not really cost us anything for him to pick up the grease at the same time because he was going to be in Jacksonville anyway.

     Against my better judgment I said he could do it, and Jay used our credit card to rent a small U-Haul truck to make the trip to Jacksonville.

     I had a bad feeling about the whole thing, and I didn’t like his getting involved in renting a truck.

     The next afternoon I received a call from Jay in Jacksonville, he said he had our grease and was just getting on the road, but he would not be in Miami until after 6 PM, could I please wait at the office for him.

     At 6 PM, Jay called again and said it would be about another hour, and he asked if I could open up our warehouse across the street so we could unload the truck and he could return it to the rental company that evening.

     I was already very tired from a very long day of work, when Jay finally showed up at 7 in the evening.

     When Jay backed up the rental truck into the warehouse, it was not the small truck he had left Miami with, it was now a bigger 20 foot U-Haul truck.

     When Jay opened the truck up, it was filled to capacity with grease and adhesives of every size and description, some of it was already leaking on the trucks floor.

     Needless to say, I had a pretty terrible argument with Jay that evening.

     Jay said he had used my companies name and my registration number to bid on two term contracts to remove all the out of date lubricants and adhesives from the navy base at Jacksonville Florida for one year. He had used my name and bidders number without my permission.

     I looked closely at it, and I saw that all of the material Jay brought back in the truck was out of date, and it was clearly labeled as such, some of the adhesives were already leaking and some were so old that they were already getting hard.

     I saw the entire situation as being an environmental nightmare for my company, it was now a serious situation.

     It appears that the government was being smart, instead of paying to have all the grease and adhesives removed to a special HAZMAT dump site at great expense, they just looked for some sucker like Jay to buy all of it.      

     It was all a hazardous materials nightmare, if we were ever caught warehousing  this stuff by the EPA or the fire department, they would close our company down and make us remove everything to a HAZMAT dump site.

     But none of this was Jay’s problem, it now became my problem. I was responsible, as everything was in my name.

     Jay started making weekly trips to Jacksonville to pick up more expired material, and before long, 4000 square foot warehouse was completely filled up with hazardous material, and Jay was now piling up pallet loads of 5 gallon cans of grease and adhesives in our  storage yard.

     Leaking cabs of adhesives were now everywhere, some on the ground, and some was coagulating into a pink jelly mass in our drainage system.  

     Jay, now, was completely out of control, he was absolutely a loose cannon.

     I personally had little time to try and get rid of all the hazardous material he was bringing in.

     I tried to persuade all our export customers to buy  some of the grease and adhesives, and some of them did.

     But it didn't take long before the customers started calling me from overseas with their complaints.

     They said that some of the adhesives were already hard when they received it, and they said that anyone who could read, saw the expiration labels and they had already started returning it.

     I had to return  their money, and their cost of freight and duty.

     I had to do something, so I started calling every type of customer I could think of to get rid of the stuff.

     Eventually I found a ship chandler company that was located in downtown Miami, they were interested in selling the stuff to the commercial shipping industry.

     Jay and I went to meet them, and the ship chandlers just fell in love with Jay.

     I encouraged them to become Jay’s partner., it appeared that they knew nothing about the “HAZMAT” problems associated with out of date  lubricants and adhesives.

     I offered to give them all my excess shelving for free, just so Jay could put a stock in their warehouse.

     Eventually Jay moved about 20 percent of our inventory of grease and adhesives to their warehouse, and he even set up an office in their building.

     Every day, I kept pushing Jay to take more stuff to the ship chandler, and he did.

     Jay's relationship with the ship chandler's lasted about 4 months, that’s how long it took for them to realize that Jay was problematic, and they kicked him out of their building.

     Fortunately, Jay had already found another sucker, who had a bigger warehouse than the ship chandler, so he immediately moved in with the new fellow.

     Jay told me the new fellow he found dealt in damaged food goods.

     I felt it was a dangerous move for Jay to put lubricants and adhesives in a warehouse with food goods, but I was desperate to get rid of the stuff.

     Little by little, when no one was looking, I started to throw all the hardened adhesives in the trash and we started giving stuff away for free anything that anyone would take.

     Fortunately for us, we never had an EPA inspector, or fire inspector visit us.

     After a year, the term contract at Jacksonville ended, and Jay stopped coming by, but I was left with about 200 5 gallon pails of grease, as well as a lot of other material.

     I couldn’t believe it, but I eventually sold all the grease to a neighborhood business for $5000.00,

they didn’t know it, but I would have given it to them for free.

     By the time I disposed of the last of the grease, it appeared Jay was no longer involved with the damaged food goods dealer, he had already kicked Jay out.

     By then, I should have been very mad at Jay, but I was so happy just to not have him around.

     The next time I heard from Jay, he had finished the final manuscript of his book, and he said he was going to send it to the publisher.

     We were very happy for Jay, I asked him for a signed copy, as we thought he could become a famous author, but unfortunately the book was never published.     

     After that, we kind of lost track of Jay, until he came by one day and said that he had gotten involved working with a Marina in Fort Lauderdale, and he told us he was still working on repairing the wooden sailing yacht in the basin behind Nova University.

     Jay never acted as if he had done anything wrong, and he continued stopping by every now and then to say hello.

     When I finally thought I would never be involved with Jay again, he came to me with another deal.

      He said the Government was going to auction off four, all aluminum hydrofoil boats, boats that had been used for drug interdiction in Key West.

     Jay, had estimated that he could cut up the boats for scrap in Fort Lauderdale, and the scrap aluminum would bring in $17,000.00, each.

     Jay wanted to get us involved, as we could finance the deal, he said the boats were going to be auctioned off in Key West.

     Even though I wasn’t excited about getting involved with Jay, again, we thought that driving to the auction in Key West would be like a mini vacation.

     My wife and I agreed that we would  go to the auction with Jay, and bid up to $10,000.00 each to buy the boats.

     We drove to Key West the morning of the auction,  and Just as Jay had said, the boats were very big, and they were all built of solid aluminum.

     However the more I looked over the boats, the more I realized that I was getting in to something that was going to be a whole lot more difficult than Jay had said.

     But luck was with us, there were about eight people at the auction and before I knew what was happening,  the Textron Corp of Texas offered $40,000.00 per boat and I never got to even raise my hand and bid.

     Jay kept in touch over the next year, he said he was working with a wealthy Canadian that had a construction business in the Bahamas.

     One day Jay came by and showed me another government auction sales booklet that described a radar station and building complex located on an island in the Bahamas. The U.S. Government was auctioning off the entire radar facility and Jay and his Canadian friend were going to bid on it.

     Jay asked, if  I wanted to get involved?  No, I said I wasn’t interested in being a partner and living on an island in the Bahamas.

     In July of 1992, Jay invited us out for supper with him and his wife.

     At the restaurant, Jay said that he had located a not quite finished houseboat, and his wife was going to move into it.

     After listening a little more to Jay, it appeared to us that he and his wife were preparing to separate by mutual agreement, obviously  Jay’s wife had also had enough.

     We were right, a few weeks later Jay told me he was leaving for Nassau where his Canadian friend had a contract to dredge the harbor between Paradise Island and mainland of Nassau.

     Jay said that he was going to run the dredge for the Canadian, we wished him the best of luck.

     Over the next 18 years, I often wondered what happened to Jay, but I was not curious enough  to try and find out.

     Around January of 2010 I received a phone call from the Bahamas, the call was from someone I didn't know.

     He said he was calling on behalf of a Canadian man that was in jail in Nassau, and requested that I be of assistance.

     I declined to be of assistance, as I was very sure it was something I should not get involved in.

     Then I received another call from someone else, and he said that “your friend”,  an Australian Citizen, had not renewed his temporary visitors visa and was being held in custody.

     I told the caller that unfortunately as a U.S. Government Contractor, I could not even entertain the conversation.

     I have heard nothing since.

     I certainly felt bad, but there really was nothing anymore that I could do for Jay.

     I was sure it would be a matter of time before the Bahamian immigration would check his fingerprints, and find out who he really was.

     I really hope Jay is OK, but frankly I had already had enough.