William had watched the news, and then headed out. It was 10:30 a.m. when William stepped into UCLA’s Hugh & Hazel Darling Law Library. He donned expensive chinos, red Polo shirt, and Gucci loafers. He sat at an elongated oak table, sat his briefcase on top, and glanced out at perfectly manicured campus lawns. The library was empty considering it was finals week. The corner was perfect and unofficially his man cave. Same place, same author time every week.
He spent countless hours in the corner researching legal procedures and reading trial transcripts to shape his manuscripts. He had spent enough hours in the library to ace the criminal law section of the Bar Exam. Since he was first published and became a consistent, effective novelist, he did not need to frequent the library as much. His fan P.O. Box kept up by Jewel was often under siege with offers from an array of government officials and attorneys from both sides of a trial proceeding. All of them willing to dole out their agencies’ most sacred secret new equipment, gadgets, and techniques. And for what, a listing in the acknowledgment page?
William walked through the labyrinth library and gathered the books that he needed. He planned to search for flaws that Government agents made prior to an arrest. Mistakes that ultimately lead to the dismissal of a defendant’s charges.
He told stories about identity theft to warn the public about crimes in a more colorful manner than the six o’clock news. Despite William’s work, banks harshly condemned his novels right to the top of the New York Times Best Sellers List. To no one’s surprise, William called them blue prints for hard working citizens to be less inadvertent with their personal data. He had shown them how simple and rewarding it was for a law abiding America denizen to become ashamed of themselves for having spent 330 hours and $1,400 to regain control over their good name, for their own errors.
William’s novels conveyed a chilling snapshot of thieves fixated on hacking computers, stealing mail, counterfeiting checks and identification, and forging documents as a job. A job that spawned the Truncated Act, which required merchants to use a series of X’s to safe guard all but the last few digits of a credit card number on a receipt. A job that cost the business community $15,000 per compromised identity. A job that federal statistics indicated stole $53-billion annually from the economy. A job so ruthless that William had cashed in millions in book sales forcing ordinary people to think twice about how careless they were with their excellent identity profile. Thanks to Mr. Fortune, the public had been taught to be as equally interested as bankers and the Government with setting boundaries for criminal cretins. He had shown what the typical fun filled day of an identity thief looked like in black and white. The sight was horrifying enough to prevent consumers from breeding these fakes by protecting their information.
William’s area of the table was littered with books, notes, and handwritten chapters of his manuscript. He continued to envision visiting Ashley Tomlinson, his former criminal law professor. While not a law student, William was granted permission to take the course. He consulted with Professor Tomlinson for novel plots since.
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