House Flipping Into Eternity

Sure, the glorified shanty had all the rustic charm of a Little House on the Prairie episode. But its price tag of $120,000 probably made it the bargain basement buy of the decade.

Curb appeal didn’t exist for the rundown cabin, but a few steps from the entrance you stepped into one of the most beautiful lakefront stretches of forest he had ever laid eyes on.

Then, after gingerly ascending the crooked front steps, Tom Cupiskin peeled back several layers of cobwebs on the porch and turned the ancient doorknob with his gloved hands. The knob then slipped out of his hands and onto the ground as he pushed the door open.

Of course, the fixer-upper value of the house and the possibility of living off the grid nearby fit in very nicely with the non-conforming spirit that motivated much of Tom’s newly-acquired pioneering lifestyle.

His decision to take a different path in his life began with the end of his loveless marriage to bed-hopping socialite Janie Cranston and

blossomed more fully as his dead end job in the advertising game lost what limited appeal it had when he started on his journey after his graduation from Cornell.

Five years ago, when everything in his existence started going South,Tom had taken the profits from his over-inflated salary on Fifth Avenue and started to invest in high-yield mutual funds–his only concession to the establishment he grew to despise more and more each day.

“Finally,” he said to himself, “I’ll put my personal stamp on something rather than marching lockstep in line with the rest of the New York City robots.”

He had redeemed a substantial part of his nest egg in extensive research about the log cabin housing market surrounding Lake George, NY.

Now, though, second thoughts entered his mind as he stood in the entranceway to his first investment in real estate.

“I know I’m starting over from scratch, but I think I have a shot at turning this glorified lean-to into a showplace of the Adirondacks,” he

thought . “The cabin certainly fits the bill for a humble beginning, but will the online house-flipping courses I took help me to take it beyond that?”

Anyway, onward and upward. As he walked slowly forward on the creaking floorboards he saw a staircase that appeared to lead up to a loft.

Steeling himself for more unexpected surprises, he ascended to a dank bedroom, with a promising high ceiling. It seemed like a pretty ordinary space. Then, in the middle of the floor, he almost fell flat on his face after stumbling over a dusty wooden box. It had a carving of a wooden heart on its lid.

This whole encounter began to get more and more creepy by the minute, but Tom wasn’t about to let a little touch of frightfulness interfere with his dreams of real estate Nirvana. So he opened the lid of the box and found a newspaper crumpled up inside. The lead story in the five-year-old edition concerned a stabbing in the loft. A young man, who had no apparent skeletons in his closet and no known enemies, had rented the cabin for a weekend fishing trip and his

murder remained unsolved.

Clues in the killing included several envelopes containing large amounts of cash found hidden in closets in the loft and underneath an old mattress. Although police suspected the involvement of the illegal drug trade or a blackmail situation, no evidence connected the victim to any illegal activities.

In any event, the authorities had found nothing but dead ends in the case and had seized the cash and chalked the case up to another entry in their unsolved files.

Tom saw no reason to make a big deal of his discovery because publicizing it probably would make it even more difficult to sell the cabin once he finished with renovations. Once his crew completed the improvements the loft, and its contents, probably would be unrecognizable anyway.

The following Monday, the fixer uppers began tearing apart the age-scarred floorboards and hammer-clawing the walls to determine the difficulty of giving the cabin the open concept Tom believed his target millennial buyers had their sights set on.

Just as they tore into some of the outdated wooden paneling in the small first floor living room they found a well-hidden false panel that police apparently had overlooked. Removing the panel, they found a metal box containing some type of diary.

Each of the weekly entries contained names highlighted with one or several asterisks. A notation on the title page said that each asterisk represented a debt still outstanding, and those names with more than three asterisks had initials signifying “c” for “completed” or “i” for “in process” next to them.

When they lifted the journal they found a dusty and folded note that contained a list of names, probably those who hadn’t paid up yet. Next to many of the “c” and a few of the “i” notations Tom’s crew found messages that resembled funeral arrangements often found in newspapers.

The fixer-upper in the woods began to look more and more like a hiding place for a mob execution operation. He called a halt to demolition for the day and brought in the local police to look over his crew’s discoveries.

Police Detective Sgt. Roy Tompkins looked up the history of the site in his archives before coming to the scene. Apparently, no one had lived there for at least five years and the previous owner had no current contact information for the last tenants.

Tompkins and his team reviewed unsolved murders for the previous decade and newspaper clippings from the same time period.

He said, “Looks like a local casino operator, Harry Clawson, had become very aggressive in going after losers in his operation with large IOUs. Clawson had hired a collection agency with mob connections, and a few of the debtors mysteriously disappeared shortly after the collection agents paid them final notice calls.

“Two of the agents also had rented this cabin. Our detectives never found evidence directly connecting the collection agents to any of the disappearances. Despite rumors of the mob connections, Clawson’s contracts with the collection agencies all appeared to be legitimate business transactions. After a weekend of fishing it also looked like the collection agents had left the area for parts unknown.”

Tompkins still didn’t like the diary notations. He brought in two

undercover detectives from a nearby jurisdiction and had them pose as angling enthusiasts with a taste for gambling who said they wanted to rent Tom’s cabin.

“They’ll say they don’t mind that renovations are underway because they only want to stay for about three weeks and need a place to flop when not fishing or gambling.”

“They’ll lay down heavy bets at Clawson’s establishment and purposely begin losing heavily and accumulating large IOUs which they supposedly will have trouble retiring.

Soon the collection agents began meeting regularly with Clawson and started leaning heavily on the two cabin renters to pay off the IOUs quickly at usurious interest rates or face more serious consequences.

The tenants continued to plead financial difficulties and the agents gave them a week to pay up or live to regret it.

In the meantime,Tompkins and his detective squad compared handwriting on the IOUs approved by Clawson and samples taken from the diary found in the cabin. They matched.

On the day set for the final payup the police raided the casino and arrested Clawson for first degree murder while other members of his squad closed in on the cabin and took away the agents as accessories.