A novel by Terence D. Robinson

The mid-90s were the Wild West days of the telecom industry. Most American families had adopted cell phones. Many dropped their landlines. At the same time, home internet became ubiquitous. Landline phone companies began a transformation to wireless and internet services. Much of this innovation was spurred by the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Companies rushed to merge and implement revised strategies to survive.

Organized crime found pearls of opportunity in the new era. In 1996, a Fortune 500 company sold a small landline telephone company tucked away in rural Cass County, Missouri. Ostensibly, the buyer was a highly regarded business executive. In what could be a scene plucked from The Sopranos, the executive acted as a frontman for the New York Mafia. The Mafia allegedly owned the holding company that acquired the phone company. They used the same frontman to purchase a bank in nearby Garden City.

After acquiring the phone company and bank, the executive and his Mafia associates allegedly used the companies and other Mafia-owned businesses to perpetrate fraudulent internet porn billing schemes on the American public. These actions cost consumers as much as one billion dollars. At that time, it was the largest consumer fraud in history.

The Mafia’s Telephone Company is inspired by that true story. The people and companies described in this novel are fictional. The crimes are realistic portrayals of fraudulent schemes carried out across the United States.

I worked with the frontman during the early ’90s, before his involvement with the Mafia. I returned to Missouri in 2005 as a consultant, assisting the group tasked with removing the telephone company from the Mafia-controlled holding company.

Terence Robinson