Carole Baskins Diary

Don ran off at first light to the Tampa Machinery Auction and bought some truck pieces that he says he is going to build a good truck out of.  He had committed us to doing a benefit yard sale at AB Able Academy but he couldn’t be bothered with going.  I took, Al Cochran, Jan Cochran and Sandy Wittcopp along with Whoopie Lemur, Jumanji Leopard and the Serval twins and raised $208.00 for the animals.  Don came home at 3:30 p.m. and was looking for a fight as soon as he came through the gate.

 

He wanted to fight about whose cars were parked where, and where the truck driver with a load of shingles was, and why Jamie was painting in the Bengal barn and who ate all of his left over Chinese food (Publix left it for us for free) and started yelling at me when I said I didn’t want another load of dirt dumped in the front yard but would rather have it dumped out of sight.  The last mountain is still there.

Don returned from Costa Rica at 1:30 a.m. and I had been up until after midnight taking care of the cats and feeding the kittens.  I got up again at 3:00 a.m. and fed them again but Don was too tired to help.  All morning was spent getting the last details in order for the Publix commercial and the crews and trucks arrived en masse at 11:00.  Filming went on until 1:00 a.m. but Don went to bed at 8:30 p.m.  He did feed the outside cats but did not help with the kittens.

 

In the past 7 days I have been able to bring in $2900.00 for the cats from extra pay, books, videos, memberships and photo tours.  I don’t know what Publix’s donation will be yet.  It later turned out to be $2000.00.

C Stairs Loan Shark

 

I’m writing this from 5/26/2020 because it came up in another context and I don’t think it was mentioned in my diary before.  If you search the public records from 1950 until 1981 when I met Don, you will see he only had owned a house, his used car lot in a bad part of town and a lot that he later built a house on for his wife in Brandon. 

 

One day in 1984, while standing in line at the bank, Don overheard a bank officer say he had a $20,000 loan in default he would be glad to sell for $2000. Don got the information and, because he could not read beyond a first grade level, asked me to look into it. In brief, we bought the loan, foreclosed, and sold the property for a substantial profit. That is what got us into the real estate business. We started buying defaulted loans from banks and going to tax deed sales. This was before this became a popular business. There were few people doing it. With me doing the research, negotiations and title clearing on the properties we built this to a portfolio of properties to rent or resell that was worth around $5 million dollars at the time of his disappearance.  My maiden name was Stairs and I was the person all the bankers and people in the industry dealt with. 

 

I told everyone my name was Gilda Goldman and that I was working for a tough businessman named C.Stairs, because a woman couldn’t get the time of day in that field in the 80s.  My business card said C.Stairs, Loan Shark on it and I’d answer the phone as if I was just the secretary.  The image was my name: C. Stairs in the shape of a shark I drew bearing down on a little fish.  I chose the tag line and graphic because we were the last people anyone should borrow from as we charged 18%.  We would tell people to go anywhere and everywhere before borrowing from us because the interest was so high and we would foreclose on them if they defaulted.  We were willing to deal with people who had horrible credit and would likely default and trash the security, because that is a high risk, high reward business. 

 

When Don and I married people were always calling him Mr. Stairs because they figured he’d been the shrewd man behind the curtain all that time.  Everyone was initially confused about why I called him Don.

 

We kept the properties in land trusts. During the roughly ten years we were partners before his divorce and our marriage there were properties we bought together and some Don bought on his own or with another woman, Pam Enriquez. When we married I put all of those I had not worked on into one trust. The ones from our joint efforts were kept in a separate trust. The trust holding the properties I was not involved in was set up with his children as beneficiaries if he passed and called the PRSL Land Trust. I was the beneficiary of the trust holding the properties I was involved in.  Anyone can search his name in the public records from 1950 – 1997 to see this is true.  Anyone can also check the conservatorship case to see that the Will, Power of Attorney and Trusts were all authenticated by multiple firms and stipulated to be authentic by all parties to the conservatorship, including Don’s daughters.

With several suitcases full of petite ladies clothing and shoes, two telephones and a couple of hand guns and rounds of bullets, Don flew back to Costa Rica.  He said he had to go to fire Vokker who is running the TriPlex in Rohrmoser and for no other reason.  He wanted to be here Friday for the Publix commercial so he was only going to have 3 days there and I thought that $400.00 was a lot to spend just to tell someone to get out, but he insisted that he had to go.

 

When he got there, the TriPlex was fully rented so I could not call him because they had also rented out his room.  His phone in his room can only be used for local calls and the phone Vokker and the rest of the guests have access to is the international line, which is weird and I am sure the day will come when Don gets burned with unauthorized charges.

 

Don called Anne McQueen just having a fit because Simeon and Sherry Frost had not made their cat payment and wanted me to take the papers to Sheldon Wind, Esq. for him to start a suit.  I was trying to call him to find out what papers he was talking about, because the security agreement I had tried to get him to present to them, he had refused, saying that if he made them sign it then they wouldn’t pay for the cats.  I never could reach him, even though I left a message, but he called Anne McQueen and she said Don wanted me to take the security agreement to Sheldon Wind, Esq..

 

I relayed back to her that Don had refused to ask them to sign one and Sheldon Wind, Esq. said there was nothing he could do without the security agreement.  Don finally remembered that he had not required them to sign one and was hoping that a piece of paper with a number and both of their signatures would be sufficient for a lawsuit.  A paper that didn’t exist.  He just has no idea of what is going on in the real world.

Don went to the gun show to buy ammunition to kill Richard Perez. 

Last night he suggested that I give up all of the things I am doing to try and make Wildlife on Easy Street financially independent and go back to working the real estate for him full time.  I told him that I don’t feel comfortable doing that because he is draining all of the profits off of the good deals that I have worked for him and investing it all in Costa Rica in his name and his corporations.  He corrected me by saying that he bought a couple of dumps in Pinellas County and I reminded him that he was now buying only in his name.

 

When I asked why he has been doing this he said because he didn’t trust me because the day he had said that if we divorced he would give me the Sultenfuss mortgage (I made that deal possible) and a house to live in that is valued at $38,000.00.  I had told him that he was dreaming if he thought I work like a dog every day to have him take it all away from me on one of his stupid whims and he took that to mean that I would somehow not deal fairly with him.  It has been years since he has made a good deal and he has been constantly throwing money away on his friends and with his secretive dealings in Costa Rica.

 

Note from the future:  There are pages still missing, obviously, because Richard Perez’ name shows up only twice.  Once where I mention he’s cost Don over a million dollars in a deal gone bad and then here where I gave no detail.  I’m filling in this missing blank from the future (2018) with what I can remember.   Richard Perez and Pamela Enriquez had somehow used racketeering charges to extort a million dollars from Don.  Apparently he kept having sex with Pam but decided to kill Richard.  I warned Richard that Don was out to kill him and told him I’d keep doing my best to stop that from happening. 

 

Many times I could scare Don out of stalking Richard by telling him we were being followed, or that I’d seen police in the area, or whatever I could do to divert him from completing his mission.  I thought he mostly just wanted to revel in the idea of it, rather than actually do it, so I’d help him put on ridiculous disguises, and spend so much time on getting ready for the deed that he’d be too tired to actually go.  I can remember a couple of times, where we go out to Carrollwood where Richard lived, Sugartree or Sugarwood (something like that) and Don’s dressed up as a blonde female, with full makeup, high heels, gloves and all.  Why was dressing to look like me a disguise?  We are laying there in the bushes as it’s getting dark and I’ve run out of ways to keep it from going this far.

 

On one occasion I tell him that I’ve seen Richard sneaking away and that he’s probably on to us, which freaks Don out and he’s ready to go home.  I don’t remember what it was the second time we got that far, that I did to make him go home.  Each time I’d play up how it was going to take both of us if we were going to get away with this, so that he wouldn’t actually go kill Richard on his own.  Looking back on this I can hardly believe the craziness I was dealing with and what I was willing to do to keep Don out of jail.

1996-12-06

1996-12-05

1996-11-30

1996-11-21

1996-11-18