“What is man?
A miserable little pile of secrets.”
-André Malraux
TUESDAY JANUARY 4, 2022 - 7:27am
I’m dying, asshole. Go away.
That’s Lisa Jones’ first reaction when the barrage of knocks rattle her front door. She’s not proud of it, but her mood is understandably foul after another painful and sleepless night on the ancient couch in the living room of her frigid home.
She fights against the yoke of chemotherapy-infused fatigue to sit up, then rubs her dry eyes clear enough to see the shadow of a man through the frosted glass of her front door, his left arm a blurry triphammer.
She throws the pile of cheap blankets off her thin frame. “I hear ya! Just gimme a minute,” she yells, trying to sound cheery and lively.
“I got you, baby.” Her father Darius emerges from the guest bedroom down the hall that has been his home base for the last three months.
He’s been staying with Lisa to care for his one and only daughter, over forty years grown but still his little girl, sicker than she’d ever been, sicker than he thought she could be after the doctors found the cancer that has been killing her for nearly a year.
The man’s arm cocks to assault the unresponsive door one more time.
Darius shouts “Hold on!” loud enough for the visitor to parade rest on the frost-covered stoop. He shuffles to the front door with his threadbare robe around his shoulders, the same robe he has been wearing for a million years by Lisa’s recollections, her daddy’s cape. “You expecting something?”
Lisa doesn’t have to rummage too deeply in her exhausted memory for the answer. “Too poor for packages,” she mumbles.
Darius knows. He’s lived among her empty cupboards and fridge and shelves for months, filled more with dust and dirt than food. He’s done what he can to restock her when he can, stretching every penny of his pension and Social Security to feed and support his little girl and his only granddaughter, but it’s a losing battle.
Darius swings the front door open to reveal a tall, sturdy young man in a forest green jacket, rocking back and forth to keep warm. He asks through chattering teeth, “Mrs. Jones?”
Darius smiles at him. “Very astute, my man. Did my lovely dress give me away?”
The young man chuckles, which clatters his teeth even harder. “I’m sorry, sir, I meant…is Mrs. Jones here?”
Darius nods. “She is.”
“That’s me,” Lisa wheezes from the couch, waving a bony hand over her head. Mr. Jones sure as hell isn’t, Lisa muses bitterly, the sonofabitch.
Darius moves aside so Lisa can see the young man extend a large green envelope, the same shade of green as his jacket, thick with an unknown payload.
Darius reaches for it. “I’ll take that off your hands.” He peers at the driver’s nametag. “Mr. Mike.”
But Mike pulls it just out of Darius’ reach and, with a sheepish look at Lisa, says, “I’m sorry, but it’s addressed to Mrs. Jones and only she can sign for it.”
Lisa’s heart skips with dread, worried this is from her almost ex-husband, The Sonofabitch Shawn Jones.
He had peeled out of their life like an Indy 500 race car six months after Lisa received the worst news of her life - that what she thought was a harmless urinary tract infection was actually stage 4 cervical cancer.
Can’t handle this anymore, he’d texted her a few days after his abandonment. Things had been rough between Lisa and The Sonofabitch for a while, but her diagnosis vaporized any remaining love he’d had for her.
To The Sonofabitch, he was the one suffering the most from her cancer. He had to take time off of work every week to drive her thirty minutes to the chemo infusion center, hang out there for four hours or more until she was done, then haul that weak ass of yours the thirty minutes back home because Lisa’s aggressive treatment regimen would exhaust her so much that she couldn’t drive.
Then came the avalanche of medical bills and insurance statements, nightmarish sums in the tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands, of dollars. As more commas and zeros filled the dreaded Patient Pays section of the bill, The Sonofabitch snapped.
He slithered out of their house in the middle of the night, driving away in the only car they owned, the one for which they still had the Hendricks United Bank car loan, all of his possessions stuffed into the trunk, all of his responsibilities shrinking in the rearview mirror.
He’d spent the last three months trying to get the divorce finalized and custody arranged through a blizzard of legal papers, all the while zipping around in a car he was making Lisa pay for, which she would never drive again.
Darius had used a hefty chunk of his savings to buy a replacement vehicle from the local buy here/pay here lot, but that rusty beater had its own case of terminal chassis cancer, one hungry Indiana pothole away from a brutal farewell to a tire, axle, or muffler.
This better not be another load of shit from The Sonofabitch, Lisa frets. She sees her daddy’s jaw and fists clench, telltale signs of his own protective rage sweeping over him. She can tell he wants to grab the envelope and hurl it into low earth orbit.
Darius instead takes a deep breath, turns back to Mike, and with the light and jovial tone with which he’d opened the door, asks, “Who is it from?”
For a moment, Lisa hopes it is from The Sonofabitch, regardless of the legal fuckery he’d heaped on her this time. She wishes that her shithead of an almost-former husband had included the new address of his almost-bachelor pad on the label so her daddy would have an excuse to pay him a visit and forcibly remove almost all of his teeth.
Without turning the envelope over or looking at the label, Mike says, “Hendricks United Bank.”
“Shit,” Lisa repeats the epithet three more times with growing intensity and dread as she struggles off the couch and limps to the door.
Darius reaches for the envelope again — addressee be damned — but Lisa plucks it gently from Mike’s hand. “It’s okay daddy, I got this.”
Mike offers an electronic signature pad.
She draws her name with a shaking finger, then thanks Mike as he hustles toward the warm oasis of a white sedan with the distinctive green and yellow HUB logo stuck on the side.
Darius closes the door and guides his little girl back to the couch. He sits next to her and they both stare at the envelope in silence.
She’s been behind for months on the car and the house and the credit cards and personal loan she’s had with HUB. They filled her phone with texts, voicemails, and emails that began amiable enough — Let’s help you get back on track! — but quickly turned menacing: We’ve tried getting a hold of you multiple times…we know you’ve read our recent texts and emails…we will take legal action against you.
The collection calls were the worst. She declined them, at least five or more a day, because they were from numbers that HUB had previously used. But as she sunk deeper into HUB’s shit list, they changed tactics. They started calling from unrecognized numbers that would fool her into answering because she thought they were from the growing army of oncologists, specialists, physicians, and nurse navigators keeping her alive.
Dread would fill her head and chest so completely that all she could do was collapse on the couch as the collectors berated her for how seriously delinquent she was, and how she was in violation of her repayment agreements. HUB now had no choice but to pursue much more aggressive collection actions unless Lisa brought her accounts current.
As if she didn’t know. As if the impossible financial stress hadn’t exhausted her past the point of meaningful sleep.
Lisa would explain that she had an incurable cancer, that she was on unpaid leave from her job as the manager of the local license branch because of the physical trauma the chemo inflicted on her, that she couldn’t afford to get caught up with HUB and still afford her medications, treatments, or doctor visits.
That her husband and car and money were missing. The Sonofabitch had wiped out their joint savings account on his way out of her life, which forced her to rip three- and four-figure chunks out of her meager retirement savings just to keep herself and their seventeen-year-old daughter Amaia fed, and the hospitals and specialists and physicians paid.
She is now barely surviving on two HUB credit cards and a personal loan that she’d taken out years ago just for emergencies. They’re subsidizing her groceries and gas and food and utilities. The money from the personal loan is almost gone, though, and the balances on both credit cards are hovering near their limits.
So is Lisa. She can’t afford even the minimum payments on those loans, or the mortgage, or the kidnapped car. She’s fighting for her life. The expense of that effort is killing her. And she had careened past desperate into full-blown, unrelenting panic.
She isn’t physically able to go back to work, either. Just the momentary exertion of hustling off the couch to take delivery of the envelope from HUB had left her trembling, as much from another anxiety-fueled adrenaline dump as from the weakness from the medicinal drain cleaner funneled into her veins every week to kill her cancer only slightly faster than her cancer was killing her.
None of this mattered to HUB, though. They refused to consider any changes in the payment amount or terms, refused to waive any late charges or interest. Lisa Jones was just another account to recover, another loss to mitigate.
HUB’s collection efforts had stopped in the brief interregnum between Christmas and New Year’s Day, when nearly every financial institution catches their breath while most of their staff are on vacation.
This envelope from HUB, though, means their holiday silence wasn’t mercy. They’d tired of Lisa’s delinquencies and excuses, expended too much energy on this lost cause and her sob stories. HUB was reloading for their final offensive against Lisa Lorraine Jones, another bloodless stone to be smashed under the hammer blows of foreclosure, repossession, and at least one lawsuit.
This is the end for me and Amaia, she laments silently. She’ll have to tell her today after she's back from high school that this house — hungry and drafty and trauma-filled, yes, but still one of the few fixed points left in their crumbling world — is going to be taken away from them too, and right soon.
They’ll have to pack their few remaining belongings and find shelter somewhere, innocent victims of Lisa’s cancer that had claimed her marriage, her career, her finances, and, very soon, her life.
Amaia’s inevitable, inconsolable grief and hopelessness mix with Lisa’s own guilt and pain and regret, and tears pour out of her, first onto the envelope as she looks down on it in her lap, then into her daddy’s chest as he holds her weakened body close to his, cradling the back of her head in one hand as the other dries her tears with a fresh tissue from the nearby box.
The envelope slides out of her lap and falls to the floor with a dull thud, pulling her away from him.
She tries to bend forward and pick it up herself but her stiff back won’t allow it. Darius grabs it instead. He starts to pull the tab to open the envelope.
“No, daddy. I need to do this.” She grabs the tab, rips it the rest of the way, then peers cautiously inside at a thick sheaf of papers.
Following her gaze, Darius deadpans, “Well, at least it isn’t a bomb.”
His little girl giggles at his dry observation, his favorite sound in the world. Her alto laugh merges with his own basso rumble of amusement, the sweet chord only a daddy and daughter can play.
She pulls the papers from the envelope, laying the stack face-down on her lap and folding her hands on top of it, her good humor disappearing as quickly as it came. “Let’s get it over with.”
She flips the pile over and reads black laser-printed text on Hendricks United Bank stationery:
12/31/2021
Dear Ms. Jones:
This letter serves as official notice that all your debts with Hendricks United Bank — 1st mortgage, used car loan, two credit cards, and one personal loan — have been canceled as of 12/31/2021.
Enclosed please find the following documents:
Mortgage release documents
Canceled mortgage promissory note
Paid-in-full statement for mortgage
Lien release for used car loan
Car title showing the release of Hendricks United Bank’s lien
You now own your house and car, free and clear.
We have mailed the Certificate of Satisfaction for your mortgage to the county government, who should be sending your home deed to this address via certified mail in 2-4 weeks.
Please visit the HUB banking app to verify that the outstanding balances on your credit cards and personal loan are now all $0. You are free to use the credit cards up to their original credit limits.
This is not an error or oversight on our part. This is a special exception we’re making to help you recover from cancer.
It’s part of a larger initiative we’re rolling out in 2022 to help more of our customers experiencing similar financial hardships. More details are coming soon, but until we’ve formally announced the initiative, please keep the news of this transaction confidential at this time.
Thank you for being a Hendricks United Bank customer.
Sincerely,
Hendricks United Bank
Where Your Money LIVES!
Lisa and Darius stare at the letter, their matching brown eyes wide in shared disbelief.
Lisa breaks the silence. “What in the actual fuck is this?” She covers her mouth with one hand and lifts the cover letter closer to her face with the other.
“Is this…did they really just…?” Darius stammers, gaping at Lisa.
She snags her iPhone from the side table, ignoring the groaning stiffness in her back, and logs into the HUB app faster than she ever had in the fifteen years they’d had her business.
“OhmigodohmigodOHMIGOD OH MY FUCKING GOD!!!” Lisa shoves the screen into her daddy’s face and leaps to her feet, the pain in her recalcitrant back momentarily forgotten.
He looks at the list of her HUB accounts and balances:
Basic HUB Savings: $14
Classic HUB Checking: $455
HUBHome 1st Mortgage: $0 (no payment due)
HUBMoney Personal Loan: $0 (no payment due)
HUBAuto Used Car Loan: $0 (no payment due)
HUB Platinum VISA: $0 ($9,500 available credit, no payment due)
HUB Gold VISA: $0 ($5,000 available credit, no payment due)
“This has gotta be a mistake, right? Somebody screwed up, right? Right?” Lisa sputters, her fists muffling the excitement and confusion in her voice.
Darius is transfixed by the list of zeroes and no payment due. He expands each loan account with his finger, displaying the transaction history that, sure enough, shows the full payoff amount applied to each account on Friday 12/31/2021 with a description of SysGen Payoff.
He looks up at Lisa, who is rocking back and forth now, hands still tangled under eyes as big as Christmas morning. “Baby, I don’t think so.” His free hand scratches the gray stubble on his chin and cheeks.
Lisa takes her phone back from her dad, slips it into the pocket of her robe, and grabs the stack of HUB paperwork off the couch. Darius joins her in the center of the front room. She flips past the cover letter and they both examine the documents more closely, Lisa’s hands still trembling.
Each is stamped Paid in Full in the deep forest green of the HUB logo. Each has been signed with the same signature that was on the cover letter, a looping ribbon that looks to be in all the right places on each document.
When they reach the last page, Darius takes the stack himself and repeats the inspection. Lisa is lapping the room, reviewing her account history on her phone in between anxious glances toward her at her father, expecting him to find a loophole or error that will strangle this answered prayer.
But he can’t find any. “This all looks legit,” he marvels, his tone low and reverent, like an art expert verifying the authenticity of a previously unknown Monet painting that had just been hand-delivered to him by a freezing courier named Mike. “HUB signed off on the car title in the right spot, and the mortgage docs are all buttoned up, too. And your loans are all zeroed out on the app.” He pauses. “You don’t think your ex had anything to do with this?”
Lisa stops and lets the naked stupidity of his suggestion hang in the air.
“My bad,” Darius mumbles.
She shuffles toward him, suddenly wrecked by the effort of speedwalking around the room — more physical activity than she’d done in months — and the joy and confusion that had been pulled out of her in equal measures in the last few minutes. She looks up at him, her chin quivering. “Is this real, daddy?”
His little girl is pleading with him to make something good again, to show her that there is more to her world than sharp needles and silent pity and veiled threats from serious people, that she is more than a pre-paid burial plot and a legacy of trauma for her own little girl, that there is one more miracle made just for her.
Time now for his tears, his bright and strong grin. “Yeah, baby…it’s real.”
Lisa weeps for the second time that morning, harder than before, her dying body convulsing as she exorcizes a year’s worth of misery into the draft and chill of her broken house, her daddy’s cape catching all of it and all of her, the safest place in the world for his little girl to finally fall apart.
—————
Mike is crouched behind a bush next to Lisa’s porch at this very moment, holding his phone as close to the door as he dares without being seen, capturing the audio from inside that was the real purpose of his road trip.
As Lisa’s cries slow and soften, Mike ends the recording and texts it to his contact with a message: That was awesome.
A few seconds later, a reply: Great work. Now hurry back. Need you here asap.
Mike acknowledges the message with a thumbs-up, then slips into the white HUB-branded Dodge Charger and pulls away. He watches Lisa Jones’ house disappear behind him, no one running from inside to flag him down or follow him. He got it done and got away.
If Mike could’ve lingered a little longer, maybe even risked a peek through the front room’s windows, he would’ve seen a father carry his little girl into her bedroom, tuck her into bed, and watch her drift into the deepest sleep she’d had in ages.
Mike would’ve heard a father, overwhelmed by the mercy and kindness of strangers, telling himself he’s gonna be thankful for what HUB did, no matter why or how they did it.
Darius will rejoice in the miracle visited upon this busted-up home. He will savor it. He will remember it. He will tell others about it.
He will forget that, per the instructions in the cover letter, he wasn’t supposed to.
If Mike had been a part of the “Greenwood Chatter” page on Facebook that served as the social media center of the town in which Darius and Lisa had lived all their lives, he would’ve read four simple and innocent sentences from a grateful daddy that were meant to inspire a community.
And that’s when the real problems started.
—————
My name is Penelope Steward. I’m a freelance journalist. This is the first book I’ve written. It will also be my last.
This story found me, rather than the other way around. I know that’s the ultimate journalism cliché, and I wish I had a more clever way of introducing myself to you, but I’m worn out and need to get this into your hands before I can’t anymore, so a cliché must do.
I was born in London, England in 1995, then emigrated to the United States in 2010 when my father was transferred to Indianapolis, Indiana for work.
In 2016, I graduated from Butler University in Indianapolis with a bachelor’s degree in journalism. I was eager for a job in the field in which I’d invested one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in student loans that will take me, at my current level of spotty part-time income, approximately four hundred years to pay off.
I thought that I’d be shoo-in for the new part-time Business Reporter position at The Indianapolis Courier, the local morning daily newspaper at which I’d interned the last two summers. I’d done the requisite intern scut work and thought my unpaid labor for my former supervisors would deem me worthy enough to join them on their payroll.
Nope.
Although we appreciate your previous contributions to our company, your current body of journalistic work is insufficient for the demands of the position for which you’ve applied, was the pull quote from the stiff and turgid rejection email from the general IndyCourier HR account.
In other words, you ain’t done shit, kid.
In that same email, the anonymous recruiter reminded me to carefully read all of the requirements of the position before applying again.
Message received.
One of those requirements was dive in for explanatory, narrative, and watchdog stories, and consumer scams and rip-off stories.
That’s what you’re about to read.
This book documents the death of Hendricks United Bank, an institution that, with more than twenty billion dollars in assets and headquartered in downtown Indianapolis, was one of the largest privately-owned banks in the country until it vanished in 2022.
The words “death” and “vanished” are in direct opposition to how HUB’s acquisition by Vono Financial, the Boston-based financial services conglomerate with over ninety-seven billion dollars in assets, was described in the press.
The marriage of a big financial fish to a bigger financial fish was lauded as a “continuation of the transformation of the Vono brand into a full-service national banking leader for the 21st century and beyond, fueled in no small part by the strong and innovative relationship that Hendricks United Bank has nourished between themselves and the world-class healthcare providers across central Indiana.”
That boilerplate language hides one of the biggest scandals in financial services history.
This book reports, for the first time anywhere, how one hundred million dollars was stolen from HUB in a matter of seconds on New Year’s Eve 2021, how the theft was connected to the cancellation of Lisa Jones’ loans, and why HUB’s executive leadership and the four largest hospitals in Indianapolis tried to conceal these events from state and federal regulators, HUB staff and customers, and the rest of the world.
It’s taken from hundreds of hours of interviews, thousands of pages of HUB documents, and terabytes of internal media files.
I’ll flit in and out of the narrative when necessary, recounting the conversations I directly participated in and reconstructing key moments as they were described to me and corroborated by me.
I stand behind every word in this story, confident that this is a true and accurate account of what really happened in the three fateful days that killed Hendricks United Bank.
This book will end a few careers, starting with my own.
And it will be worth it.