MrLasVegas wrote:
This story is really quite plausible. There are a lot of of PI types out there with an LE background. It wouldn't take much to contact a CR law enforcement type looking for extra cash. So the US investigator forwards between $500-$1000 to a reliable CR contact. CR contact heads down to DR and offers a few hundred cash for copies of the records. All in all, if you speak elementary Spanish and offer the money discretely, most of you could do this yourself. And never forget this can be done just as easily in a Vegas or Miami hotel as it is done in CR. I can't believe the DR keeps records for that long of who you took up. But if the contact got lucky and requested the info at the right time, the desk staff may have included it as a part of the deal. The supposed CIA part seems a stretch. I have friends that now work for NSA and at Langley. They are not at all James Bond spies. They are just eggheads that speak multiple Arabic dialects apiece. They have always told me that access to classified network material is heavily monitored to prevent abuse. Every use has to be documented. So unless this supposed friend was working on something regarding CR, any attempt to access it would be blocked. So I will say 60% possible.
Exacto! How do you his wife didn't pay a private I and/or Del Rey several hundred dollars for the info?
This guy could have essentially been telling the truth, with maybe a bit of speculation added as if it were the truth. According to the story as retold by VB, all we really now for sure is that he said that his wife had an e-mail sent from somebody in CR with chica names and dates on it, somehow knew about his conversation with a guard and she SAID that she also had obtained pictures of the girls (though we don't know if she actually showed him those pictures or whether that was just a bluff/lie on HER part).
Was the e-mail from the HDR directly or was it from someone else down in CR who had contacted the HDR for her to obtain the information? And if it were the latter and the HDR released the information to an intermediary instead of directly to her, its quite plausible that either the VB simply related that detail slightly wrong or the guy was a bit unclear about that detail in his story. It doesn't mean that either of them were lying about it and it doesn't really do anything to diminish the credibility of the overall tale.
If the information was obtained through an intermediary, how was it compiled? The chica names may not be part of the computerized records printed out at check-out but clearly those paper records do exist. Similarly, the conversation with the guard may not be part of the records obtained through the front desk, but could have been relayed directly by that guard to a local investigator poking around the HDR, showing a snapshot of the guy to various staff and asking "Do you remember seeing this gringo?"
Lastly, he said she said she "had a friend who works for the CIA who got her PICTURES of all the chicas from their VISA numbers." We don't know if she actually did and neither really does this guy. She easily could have been making that entire part up (and if she indeed said that as this guy says she did, she probably was making that whole part up). In that case, it doesn't really matter whether a person working for the CIA would have actually done that or not. Frankly, that part of the story NEVER made any sense to me. Forget about whether a CIA employee would ever release that sort of information or not. Why would the CIA even bother to have that sort of information in their files? Poor working girls from Central America who probably never even set foot in the US let alone represented any sort of threat to national security. If a CIA employee had access to that sort of information at all, then it probably wasn't through accessing the CIA's own files, but rather through its contacts with foreign governments and THEIR files. And if this woman did in fact obtain those pictures as she claimed, they could have come through ANY person or agency that had contact with someone in those foreign governments. In other words, maybe this guy was just confused or was speculating about his wife's contact being a CIA employee. If that was shat happened, how would that have in any way necessarily cast doubt on the rest of his story? Maybe it wasn't actually the CIA. Maybe it was the US State Department (although I'm sure there would also be controls on their employees using agency resources in that way). Or maybe her source didn't go through any US govt. agency at all, but went direct to the source with the CR Immigration authorities. You might think that such things could never happen with US govt. agencies (even though they HAVE as with the 2008 presidential campaign example I gave earlier), but does anyone want to bet that an investigator in CR couldn't bribe that sort of information out of a CR bureaucrat? Again, the mere fact that the CIA angle was mistaken doesn't mean the whole picture angle was a lie. And even if the wife was completely lying about having pictures on top of the other evidence she showed her husband that doesn't mean he was lying about seeing all the rest.
Maybe this was all a belated April Fool's joke, but all the various discrepancies can be explained and even if parts of the story are untrue (or misrepresented) the core part of the story, that a wife was somehow able to obtain incriminating information on her husband out of the HDR, is entirely plausible. Sure, it is also possible that a resourceful wife and/or her hired PI could obtain similar info out of other hotels, but I think it less likely for several reasons.
1) Being a much larger hotel with a steady flow of first-time guests, the hotel and staff are much less likely to care if they betray one of their guests. The reported attitude of the manager at the HDR was as telling to me as the alleged breach of information itself. She appeared largely unconcerned. She said simply that she'd look into (ie apparently without even an apology) and I wouldn't want to bet that investigation will ever go really far or hard. In contrast, how do you think the management at the SL, Castillo or Amistad would react if one of their long time guests came forward with an allegation like this, and what do you think would happen to the employee found to be divulging that sort of info on guests?
2) Being a hotel that is literally world reknowned as essentially one huge brothel, a spouse seeing that name appear on a credit card bill is much more likely to investigate it then if the name on the bill were something more like the Sleep Inn, Clarion, or Holiday Inn. Of course, this problem could largely be controlled if the bozo had used cash to pay his bill instead of a credit card for which his wife had access to the bill. And even if he had used cash, if she knew he was going to CR (as most do), he would have needed to be able to claim staying at a different hotel as part of his cover story.
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