home.
But it was like shoveling sand against the tide. Late that spring, Donna Parker got a call from a grocery store near her parents’ home. Her mother had been in five times that day to wire money.
She remembers one particular evening, sitting around the kitchen table, attempting to help her parents draft a budget. About an hour and a half into the visit, she realized they hadn’t been paying attention.
“Why aren’t you listening to this?” she asked.
“We’re waiting for the phone call,” her mother replied. They were expecting delivery that night of a new Mercedes, another supposed reward that would never come, of course.
Exasperated, Donna stormed out.
___
Miriam Parker had become a cog in Howard Clark’s fraud machine. The FBI’s Fleming decided to turn the tables on him.
On April 3, 2007, Miriam phoned him — this time with Fleming recording.
“Howard?”
“Yes, dear,” he replied sweetly.
It might have been her fault, Miriam began, that they’d had trouble with some shipments lately.
“I should have mentioned to you, I’ve been having an ear wax problem, and it’s gotten real serious …,” she said apologetically. “I don’t always hear too well.”
As the conversation went on, Howard grew testy about her failure to send her packages quickly. In one case, he noted, trucks had left a UPS office just before an important package arrived from her. Send everything next-day air, he demanded.
When she asked whether she should go back to her former shipper, Howard cut her off.
“Don’t go back to that same store, sweetheart. No, you can’t never go there again.”
When she suggested that the person at the store was just trying to save her some money, Howard told her that was not their concern.
“I’m giving you the money to pay for this. YOU just do what I instruct you to do, dear.”
Perhaps sensing he’d been too hard, he changed his tone.
“Not to say that YOU are making the mistake, but maybe they are,” he said. “And we can’t afford for you OR them to make the mistake.”
But this time it was Howard who’d made the mistake.
Using “trap and trace” technology, the FBI determined the pitch calls were coming from Montreal, and Mounties soon had a real name for “Howard Clark” — he was Clayton Atkinson.
Atkinson had 13 convictions for assault, theft and weapons possession stretching back to 1994.
On April 13, 2007, three officers in blue flak vests positioned themselves at the door of his apartment. An agent down the hall dialed Clark’s number, and the ringtone sounded from inside.
Pretending to be Jim Parker, the agent said he was calling to help his mother collect her prize. As soon as Atkinson spoke, the officers burst in.
In Raleigh, a federal grand jury handed up a 35-count indictment against Atkinson and two co-defendants — Dave Stewart and Jamaal McKenzie, aka “Joseph Reid”. The three were charged with one count each of conspiracy and interstate transportation of stolen property, seven counts of wire fraud and 26 counts of mail fraud.
___
Even then, the trouble wasn’t finished for the Parkers, obviously now a marked couple.
Not long after the indictments, Donna Parker got a call from a Western Union office near her parents’ home. They’d been there twice in one day, “sending money to a relative in Jamaica.”
By then, Charles and Miriam Parker were nearly 84. Pushed to the edge, Donna suggested it was time they let her take over their affairs.
“I am NOT mentally incompetent,” her father, who had suffered a second heart attack, protested.
“Dad,” she replied. “I’m not going to go and say you’re incompetent. But I will go and say you’re financially incompetent.”
In May 2008, she filed a petition seeking appointment of a financial guardian. The last line was the most difficult of all: “It is the Petitioner’s opinion that senility or some other undiagnosed condition may be the cause of the Respondent’s actions.”
The court appointed local attorney David T. Watters guardian ad litem. The Parkers were “charming and personable,” but hopelessly blind to their predicament, he wrote.
It was clear to him that Miriam Parker was the main concern.
“Incredibly, Respondent fails to recognize that the family is the victim of a cruel financial scam,” he wrote. “In two conversations, she indicated that she felt that she was working with a better quality of person at this time, and that these people would live up to their promise to provide money to Respondent.”
The court appointed Donna Parker guardian of their estate.
___
The criminal case ground slowly along, and last year Atkinson and Stewart pleaded guilty to one count each of conspiracy and mail fraud. (Jamaal McKenzie is awaiting trial in Canada on an unrelated assault charge.) The plea agreement listed 31 individuals who’d been defrauded of a total of $840,705.
When Atkinson appeared for sentencing at U.S. District Court in Raleigh on March 15, Miriam and Donna Parker were there. Charles Parker had died just a month earlier.
Miriam Parker had imagined Howard as much older, perhaps with gray hair. Standing