Over the past eight years I have accumulated enough material to write quite a juicy piece of fiction about the escalating incidents of encroachment and violent harassment that we have suffered at the hands of an Australian citizen named Jason Wade Lever.
When these commenced in 2018 he was a tourist here in Guatemala, but has since acquired residency.
It's really such a long and complicated story that I have fretted over how to share it, as I feel I now must, if only to shine a spotlight on a pattern of behaviour which appears to have an underlying violent and perhaps even criminal intent and because we have been unable to get the authorities to take his threats and trespassing seriously enough to reassure us in the least.
In narrative form, as protocol dictates, names and details would/will be altered, but here on this medium I shall be open and factual. And episodic.
Our first encounter with this individual in 2013 began with a description of animal torture and concluded with a thinly veiled threat (...of poisoning).
Veiled threats led to not-so-veiled threats, and to repeated acts of aggression in the streets of our village, with no care for who might get caught up in them: friends, family, children. Trespass, seemingly both digital and physical.
But in particular there has been a pattern of vile, misogynistic and frankly rather pervy abuse directed against my wife.
And then there is the stuff at which most well-balanced teenagers would turn up their noses: an intense and utterly infantile, six-week cyber-bullying campaign, plus moronic behaviour like this — giving the finger to our security cameras while he wizzes by on a scooter.
A panza verde professional that came to hear of our plight and who, whilst not personally acquainted with Lever, occasionally mingles amidst the same ex-pat cliques, to conduct an investigation into this individual, entirely off his own bat.
When he verbally presented his report to me in his office, it was a tale of alcohol and substance abuse plus mental problems, yet he was also at pains to add that Lever was pretty well liked within his own milieux, considered to be non-violent and widely believed to have put many of his past problems behind him by marrying a nice local girl.
That, unfortunately, is not the story I have been left to tell.
But to begin with, like all noodly tales, it has a bit of a backstory...
Longer-termers around here will no doubt recall this rather sordid character, Jeffrey L. Cassman, who went by the name of Mark Francis whilst on the lam here in Antigua.
It was a punter from Arkansas who eventually rang the bell on one of the 'fool proof' investment schemes touted by Cassman Financial, forcing the eponymous 'advisor' to flee south over the Tropic of Cancer with his spouse and (then) nine children. Oh, and in excess of $350,000 that didn't really belong to him.
Ensconced in Antigua as 'Don Marco' he was soon up to his old tricks, not exactly full ponzi, but a friend of mine once shared with me a prospectus for a 'fool proof' tuctuc fleet start-up that JC had circulated, which insisted it would pay double digit returns from the first year onwards.
To profit from that sort of nonsense he’d need to prey on the relatively vulnerable.
Eventually some of his ill-gotten gains from both here and stateside went into a local catering operation called El Ocelote SA, the name of which is still proudly displayed right inside the entrance to the business that now meets the world under the umbrella brand El Barrio.
It is also a company whose utility bills I discovered had been registered to my own private address, but more on that subterfuge in future posts perhaps.
I have no reason to conclude that this estafador has since ceased to be a sleeping partner of sorts there. I can certainly demonstrate his continued open contact with other individuals connected with it.
Cassman was certainly back in Antigua a couple of years ago, having announced proudly on the interwebs that he needed to check out his various business interests here. These were almost certainly partially seeded by stolen loot from the ponzi scheme for which he served time in Federal lock-up, orange jumpsuit provided.
Before he was marched off in handcuffs, one Jason Lever, occasional miner, had also reportedly been Cassman's associate or even employee. And with Don Marco off to spend a four year sentence in his home state (he pleaded guilty), Lever soon re-styled his image as co-proprietor; the new alpha in el barrio.
At the time we acquired our current home, I had no notion of any connection between this pair, but its significance cannot now be discounted, because readers might remember how Mark Francis, auteur of GuateLiving, became my wholly uninvited digital snooper and stalker.
His blog is long gone, but not before I harvested it in its entirety.
Using his alter-ego, Cassman presented himself as a Latin mass-exclusive, Catholic fanatic (years behind bars have not prevented him adding four more offspring to his tally), as a right-wing extremist (one that has lately segued effortlessly into support for the insurrectionist-in-chief) and as an unrepentant xenophobe.
I generally hesitate to bandy about the R word, but the level of respect he showed to this country and its inhabitants whilst he skulked around here as an unwanted guest was almost certainly deserving of it.
Above all, a hypocrite, for the word on the streets after his arrest was that his extra-marital indiscretions had contributed to his downfall. Yet somehow his wife has stuck by him, even though he scammed her close family as well, and had left her in a run down house with their now ten kids when he was carted off back to Nashville.
I never met him and it remains a mystery to me what I could have done to merit those flourishings of online attention that soon began to appear like a morbid infatuation.
This is the first time I have in a sense responded personally and proportionately to the drip drip of caustic abuse I had for almost two years.
Yet this personal experience was but a tiny part of this 'ripping yarn' recounted at some length elsewhere...
Even if the connection I intuit here is ultimately entirely coincidental, the undeniable commonality for me is going to have to be that men who are pretty much all facade and who derive pleasure from preying on others, also tend to suffer from simmering resentments.
And vendettas often have deeper, more twisted roots than one may at first be able to grasp.
Stay tuned...
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