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 Editorials | Opinions | April 2008 
Brenda Martin Called Scapegoat
 Brookes Merritt - Sun Media
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| | The book is available for purchase at WantedUnwanted.com and major online bookselling sites. | | |
Brenda Martin should never have stayed in Mexico after her boss's empire of fraud started crumbling, says Canadian Roger Harrison who's penned a book about the infamous $60-million TriWest Internet Ponzi scheme.
Roger Harrison, 37, worked with Alyn Waage in Mexico and Costa Rica in 2001 before the Edmonton-area fraudster was arrested for masterminding one of the biggest pyramid schemes in history.
Harrison published a book about his experiences in 2005, which has become popular in recent months as Martin's case dominates Canadian headlines.
After being held in a Mexican prison without trial for two years, Martin was recently found guilty of Internet fraud by a Mexican court.
Even Waage - who is now serving a 10-year sentence at a low-security federal prison in the U.S. - has said Martin is an innocent scapegoat, dragged through Mexico's court system in hopes of a kingly bribe Waage would pay to Mexican legal officials.
Harrison said Martin is guilty only of naivete, and was such a minor character in Waage's scheme that he excluded her from his book.
"She truly was nothing more than a cook. Not even a good one, her cooking was atrocious," he said yesterday from his home near Edmonton.
"There are a lot of ex-pats in Puerto Vallarta and a lot of money moving around. It's actually not that odd that she would have been given such a big severance (approximately $26,000 after less than a year of employment). Alyn liked to spread his money around and hated to fire people."
Harrison said Martin was fired because "she called Alyn's mother a bitch."
"Otherwise, she's not guilty of anything. None of us knew Alyn was running a Ponzi scheme. He was just a weird, eccentric guy with lots of money."
Ponzi schemes paying quick returns to early investors with money invested by later investors. Harrison's book, called The Wanted and the Unwanted, chronicles the few months he spent doing data entry for Waage, working with a small circle of others to move money around to investors in the TriWest scheme.
"On the surface it looked fine. We were paying investors. It was a strange job, but that wasn't proof to any of us it was illegal."
Harrison was never questioned or detained by police, but saw the writing on the wall and returned to Canada after Waage was arrested in 2002.
"Brenda stayed in Mexico and she shouldn't have. That's why she's had to endure this ordeal." |
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