Completely.

*  *  *

If Marshall had a personal motto, it was “Everything can be bought for a price.” The unspoken half of that motto was “And if you don’t like my price, I’ll manufacture circumstances that will cause you to reconsider its attractiveness.”

Marshall quickly sent me with an offer of ten cents on the dollar. I told Marshall that his price would never fly down here and he told me to remember whose money I was playing with, so I shut my mouth. In an effort to insulate myself from the backlash—because as dumb as I was, I knew enough to know that they might attempt to kill me if I delivered it in person—I contacted an attorney who, for an up-front cash fee, carried the offer to the Cinco Padres while I sat at a café watching the bank entrance from across the street. To no one’s surprise, he entered and exited within the same five minutes, quickly returning with a no and a soiled dress shirt where one of the fathers had thrown his manure-stained boot at him.

No counter. No consideration. No conversation. No nothing.

About what I expected. The five fathers’ farms had been in their families for two and three hundred years, and there was much more at stake here than profit and loss. These folks were tied to the land. It was as much a part of them as their black hair and suntanned skin. Simply put, it wasn’t for sale. Not today. Not tomorrow. Not for any amount of money.

If Marshall had a firm grip on his money, he’d met his match in the actual five fathers, and in Alejandro, their leader. When he reluctantly increased his price to twelve cents on the dollar, they filled up two five-gallon buckets with fresh cow manure. The first they dumped over the attorney’s head. They second they poured inside his car. All of it. And it wasn’t the solid, pick-it-up-with-your-hand kind. It was the other kind.

Marshall didn’t take too kindly to this form of non-negotiation, and it didn’t take him long to find the chink in their armor. Through a series of shell companies created for the sole purpose of bankrupting Cinco Padres, Marshall and Pickering and Sons, with Brendan driving the bus and me as their hatchet man, bought the entire year’s production of several South American competitors and then began selling that coffee at a reduced rate to all the buyers of Cinco Padres coffee. Naturally, the five fathers had to follow suit. Wanting to inflict more and greater pain in the shortest amount of time, Marshall bought the bank that the fathers used to finance their operations during lean years. Given the growing losses and their weakening share of the market, their open lines of credit were “reassessed,” and when the dust settled, they were required to put up twice the collateral for half the credit. The result reduced their buying power and hence their profit margin. It also meant that the bank owned more of their land than they did.

To Marshall, Nicaraguan coffee was a passing fancy. Idle thinking that filtered through the smoke-filled air of post-dinner conversations. It occupied his thoughts like golf or poker or the latest and greatest wine in his collection.

Marshall had little—correct that, he had no—regard for what he was doing to the generations of families in his wake. He couldn’t have cared less because they, their lives, and their problems never occurred to him. He was sitting behind a desk in Boston wearing a $10,000 suit and $1,500 dollar shoes, picking out color combinations and textures for his next two-hundred-foot yacht. Their problems never entered his cranium—as was his right given his money. Or so he had convinced himself. In short, if someone else’s life sucked, that was their issue. Not his. Welcome to Earth.

My role was a bit closer to the tip of the spear. I spent months in Central America, was constantly in communication with the people of Nicaragua, but I never once thought to learn Spanish. Had no intention of learning to communicate with these people. My thinking was, If they want to do business with me, they can learn to speak my language. The only thing I need to know is how to count their money. I’ve got enough to worry about. I dealt with those around me like crumbs on a table. Tasked with selling tons of coffee, I did. At the lowest rate I could obtain and to anyone who would buy it. Retailers loved me because I nearly gave it away. For the Five Fathers, my business method was death by a thousand cuts. I remember walking out onto the porch of my hotel room, propping my feet on the railing, staring out across León, and laughing when I received a report that they were now delivering coffee via horse-drawn cart as they couldn’t afford gas for the trucks. Why? Because it meant I was that much closer to leaving this godforsaken place. When I called in to report, Marshall affectionately referred to me as “The Butcher of Boston” as I was “single-handedly gutting the Cinco Padres.” He could almost taste the beans. I didn’t really care what he called me or what happened to these people, and I didn’t care about their Mango Café or their country.

I knew we had them on the ropes when I heard reports that Alejandro had stopped paying his workers and begun butchering his own cattle, pigs, and chickens to feed them. I did some digging and found out the size of his herds and the number of employees and figured he could last about another month, and then, without food, the people who worked for him—who were fiercely loyal—would have to seek work elsewhere as their children were starving. I was right; after a month, all work stopped, coffee production ceased, and living conditions on his mountain began driving people down and off. To add insult to injury, he was sitting on a fortune of coffee, as the best crop he’d ever planted hung from the bushes waiting to be picked. Staring at his own destruction, he and his wife and daughter and a few family members were single-handedly trying to harvest the crop of coffee in the hope that they could find a buyer. They could not, and it was a futile effort as doing so would have required hundreds of pickers, sorters, and a host of other people to pull it off. Problem was the workers could see the writing on the wall, and they knew that even if they picked and sorted and bagged, it would sit in those bags in their barns because some other company had sabotaged the market and now the bottom had fallen out. The old man would never sell that coffee. And everyone knew that. We all knew it. That had been the goal the entire time. To leave that man sitting in a pile of his own coffee beans.

Because Marshall prized information and always had, I paid a kid on a motorcycle to ride up the mountain and spend a day or two spying. I told him, “I just want to know what he’s doing.” He came back and told me that the old man had not slept in several days and had been working around the clock. News reports circulated of a coming storm. It had started raining and even the family had gone inside. Last he saw the old man, he was kneeling in the dirt, coffee beans sifting through his fingers, crying. He said he’d never seen an old man cry. Said he was screaming at the rain. Pointing his finger. Angry and sad at the same time. He said his daughter had climbed up into a mango tree to watch over him, and when he’d started to cry, she’d come out with a raincoat and put it over his shoulders, kneeling in the mud next to him. I remember laughing, thinking, I bet he wishes he had sold when he had a chance. I also remember thinking, We broke him. We won. And I took satisfaction in that.

Then came Hurricane Carlos.

Marshall could not have orchestrated a better natural disaster. It was as if he had bribed the hurricane because, for some inexplicable reason, it hovered over Nicaragua. For four days it stalled over Central America, and the rain never let up. In that time, Hurricane Carlos dumped over twelve feet of rain. That’s right. Twelve feet. Doing so not only killed whatever crop was currently growing, but it filled up the lake atop a dormant volcano called Las Casitas. Once full, the weight cracked the mantle, causing a miniature eruption and mudslide. The thirty-foot-high, mile-wide mudslide shot off and down the mountain at more than a hundred miles an hour, cutting a thirty-mile swath to the ocean. Naval and Coast Guard vessels would later pick up survivors clinging to debris some sixty miles in the Pacific.