Here is Part 2 of my father's response....Part 3 will be written in about a week from now....
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From:
[email protected] (Jay & Elaine) Date: Sun, Jun 2, 2002, 1:20pm (EDT-3) To:
[email protected] Subject: #2
Hello again, this is Jay Gubitz.
At the end of my last letter I promised to tell you about "The Telephone Calls." I also promised to point fingers. As you read through this letter, you'll find that the two promises are intertwined. This letter may be lengthy, so please bear with me.
On the morning of May 8, I received a phone call from a man who wanted to let me know about my son, Neil. He told me that Neil had burglarized his own store in an attempt to steal from me and cheat the insurance company - and that Neil had asked him to be a part of it.
This was my first introduction to the fact that Neil was being accused by anybody of any wrongdoing. Naturally I was shocked and disturbed by this news. When I asked his name, he hesitated before he told me it was "James." And it wasn't until I insisted that he said "Thornton" was his last name. When I asked him to spell it, he said (I"m sure) "T-H-R-O-N-T-O-N," almost as if he wasn't quite certain. It wasn't until later that I found out it should be Thornton. He absolutely refused to give me a phone number.
He told me a lot of "facts," mostly false, about Neil and the burglaries. He said he knew that I sent Neil $25,000 checks after the four breakins, for a grand total of $100,000. He also said that I gave Neil another $50,000 after the May 01 breakin to help beef up the security systems, and that Neil had spent only $2,000 and pocketed the rest. (All of the above is patently false, as I had explained in my previous letter.) He said Neil killed some of the animals just to collect the insurance. He said that Neil just had his 50th birthday (true) on April 4 (true) and that my wife and I had sent Neil a $2,000 gift for him to get the Lasik eye surgery he so greatly wanted (true). [Neil never had the surgery; he put the money into the store.] He told me that I had another son, whom I disliked (false). [My other son looks just like me, has given me four wonderful grandchildren, and I love them all.]
He also told me that Neil didn't know anything about the herp business, either retailing or breeding, and that Angie was the key to whatever success The Snake Pit was having.
I asked how he knew that Neil was responsible for the burglaries. He told me that Neil wanted to ship him the stolen animals, and then have them sent back to replace in inventory. This didn't make sense to me. He said he wanted no part in it.
Further, he told me that the investigator, Thomas Crowley, told him he believed Neil did it, and that Neil was the Police Dept's prime suspect. He added that he had sent a retainer of $500 to Mr. Crowley and the balance of the donations to Neil. Mr. Crowley told him he never received any more payment toward his bill.
From the way Mr. Thornton spoke, I was under the impression that he lived near Neil, was in constant contact with him, and knew the store intimately.
Still shaking, I called Neil, and confronted him with James Thornton's story. Now it was Neil's turn to be shocked. Neil thought that I, too, was accusing him - but all I wanted to know was who Mr. Thornton was, how did he know so many "facts," and how did he get my phone number?
Neil told me he never met Mr. Thornton, had never seen him in his store, and had only communicated with him over some advertising to be used in Fauna Classified - and this was some time back. He adamantly insisted that no one ever had sent him any of the donated money for the investigator. He said to ask Rich Zuchowsky, and gave me the phone number. He also gave me Thomas Crowley's number.
I immediately called Mr. Crowley and introduced myself. He was polite, but cool. He refused to tell me anything about the case, telling me it wouldn't be legal to discuss it with anybody except the person who hired him He did tell me he wasn't paid for his work. It was a short call.
I then called Rich Zuchowsky. We had a nice extended, informative, talk. He told me what he knew about Mr. Thornton and Mr. Crowley. Rich told me about the situation that had developed between him and Mr. Thornton, how Mr. Thornton had "disappeared" without any accounting of the money raised for the investigator. Or any accounting for the informal "partnership" he had regarding some Web business. That was when I found out that Mr. Thornton lived in Texas, not anywhere near Neil in Florida. (How, then, did he know so much?)
It was right after this that I went to Fauna Classified's BOI for the first time. I could hardly believe what I was reading! But I did learn a lot more about Mr. Thornton, from Webslave's posts, and about the situation in general.
Now we go to the morning of May 12. I received a phone call from Dave Lawson, to tell me he was going to sue Neil and The Snake Pit for slander - for ruining his business. He was giving me a "heads-up" because as the legal owner of the corporation I would be part of the lawsuit... unless I could get Neil to stop saying those terrible things about him. He told me that Neil was the thief, and when I asked him Why?, he told me it was because Neil was stealing my money. He said that for four burglaries I had given Neil $25,000 each time, totalling $100,000, and Neil was keeping most of it. He told me that Mr. Crowley told him that he (Crowley) thought Neil was guilty. Mr. Lawson also said that the police were carefully investigating Neil. He said that Neil, in the last two burglaries, had included some dead animals, and some animals that Neil deliberately killed, in the inventory of stolen items in order to defraud the insurance company.
Do you feel that I've had this conversation before? Now we fast-forward to one week later, to May 19. Mr. Lawson
called me again. By now I'm leery of talking with anyone, and since I knew that this would be an adversarial talk, I asked more questions than I answered. He told me that more evidence was pointing to Neil and that the police were very sure that Neil did it.
I kept asking Mr. Lawson why he phoned and what was the purpose of the call? He just kept relating more bad things that Neil had purportedly done: Neil called Julie's workplace and tried to have her fired; Neil called Julie's mother in order to aggravate her; Neil shipped his own animals out of state, got them back, and resold them; and on and on.
I told Mr. Lawson that he had caught me in the middle of packing my car for a trip, and I would have to end the call. [I drove to Arizona, not Europe.] That was the end of that.
Neil had asked me if I had ever spoken to James Thornton, which we both knew I had not, so how did I know it was really him? I called Sprint and asked if they could verify a long distance call I received on May 8. I was told they didn't keep records like that and therefore couldn't help. I suspect that they would help if the police or a lawyer intervened, but I didn't go that far. If James Thornton is reading this, perhaps he could clear it up.
Do you get the feeling that the content of the calls from Mr. Thornton and Mr. Lawson were too identical to be coincidental?
This has been a long letter, and I'm going to be away for about a week (again?) so I'll let you you all think about the details. Start your theories and speculations, and when I get back I'll add mine to yours and see where they lead us. Or maybe you'd rather wait and listen to what I have to say, and then we can all embellish from there?
Again, thank you for your time and attention. Jay Gubitz.
