FiftyPlus Richmond -Time of my Life

The Time of My life Randy Fitzgerald

Randy Gets a Not-So-Special Delivery
Mysterious Packages Create Unease

Barb and I fear that a couple of months back we were unknowingly drawn into some sort of ring of illegal activities involving our little summer farmhouse near Charlottesville. To this day we are still not sure what crimes were involved, what the correct response should have been, or whether we or our neighbors there were ever in any danger. It felt at times as though we were.
No one in officialdom seemed very willing to offer advice or investigation—not the police and not the couple of courier companies who innocently brought the problem to the wrong doorstep. Phone calls were not returned, promises were broken, follow-up did not materialize.
Here’s the story. Our farmhouse about 60 miles northwest of Richmond—the first house of three along an isolated country road—is unoccupied during the cold months since it has no heat. The house next door has also been empty for some time, its tenants having moved out months earlier. The owners of that house live in a nice modern house along the main highway, on land in front of this little trio of country cottages.

Down at the highway end of the country lane, a real estate rental agent’s sign has notified passersby for months that there is a vacant rental property on this road. That’s where we think the trouble started, and we think it started in February.
Back then, the owners of the rental property happened by and found that a package had been delivered to the doorstep of their vacant rental property. They picked it up and took it home, intending to drop it off at the courier service the next day. It had been sent from Italy, addressed to the vacant house but to a person whose name they did not recognize. A check of the Charlottesville phone book did not reveal anyone of that name.
When the neighbors called the delivery company the next morning, they were told they could not bring the package to the company office, nor could it be picked up at their home; it had to be returned to the doorstep to which it had been delivered.
They were also told that the company had delivered other packages to that same address previously, as well as some to the house on that lane with the house number of our little cottage. Whoops.

That’s when the neighbors called us. We all pondered why anyone was having packages sent to these two empty houses. The neighbors told Barb the name of the sender on the package and she Googled it to learn it was a European distribution source for Prada, Armani and Versace. Someone had expensive tastes.
The return pickup promised for the next morning had not materialized by noon, but our neighbors saw a new white Volvo SUV pass behind their home and head to their rental house. The husband quickly went to see what was going on.
The SUV driver indicated that he had seen the sign at the highway and was interested in renting the property, but he did not want to view it until his wife arrived. She was on her way, he said. The homeowner left, but he did notice in passing that the package he had returned to the door the night before for pickup was no longer there.
That might have been the end of it, except the neighbors were now extremely curious, and as they watched from a window, they saw their visitor pull his SUV way to the back of the property, as far as he could go to get out of sight. And then he sat there and waited “for his wife.” For four hours!

She never showed, but around 4 p.m., a delivery truck did. Our neighbors watched as the driver got out and headed toward the door with a small package. Five minutes after he drove away, out came the white Volvo. Of course when our neighbors checked, the second package was gone, too.
When the police were called, the neighbor’s wife was told it did not appear that any illegal activity was going on. Then the officer began to closely question her, culminating with a request for her social security number.
“I refused to give it to him,” she said, “because I felt that all of a sudden the investigation had shifted from this stranger who was using my rental house as a pickup site for his packages, to me, the citizen who was trying to stop a crime.”

We all felt stymied. The deliveries continued for a while, and strange cars kept showing up to check for them.
One of the delivery companies told our neighbor, on one of the several calls she made, that possibly this was a ring of thieves who were ordering expensive goods, charging them to stolen credit cards, and having the deliveries made to homes that they knew were empty. That company at least indicated that they would start a fraud investigation, but nothing was heard from it, if they did.
We still don’t know what was going on. Was it indeed credit card fraud? Or perhaps drugs? Terrorism even crossed our minds. Whatever it was, it was surely something illegal.

I guess the “perps” finally figured out someone was onto them because they seem to have moved on, no doubt to some other empty home. I hope it isn’t one you own, because this kind of thing really does make you feel uneasy.

Randy Fitzgerald is chair of the English and journalism department at Virginia Union University. He is a former Richmond Times-Dispatch columnist and University of Richmond administrator. His blog is www.randyfitzgerald.blog.com.

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