After Pearl Harbor, my parents both came to Hawaii in support of the war effort. They stayed on for a few years afterward and I was born in Honolulu during that time. Not long thereafter, my dad took a job in Mexico as head of the new Mexican subsidiary of a US company. My sisters and I were raised in Mexico City where I attended Mexican schools run by Benedictine nuns.
Later, I attended the University of Santa Clara in California where I majored in economics and studied French and Italian. I spent my junior year in Paris where I took classes at the Paris Institute of Political Studies and the Sorbonne Nouvelle. I was also offered an internship as a research assistant at the headquarters of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. That experience set the course for my career for the subsequent three decades. Having been raised speaking Spanish in a bilingual, bicultural environment, I also acquired fluency in French, Italian and Portuguese.
Following graduation from Santa Clara, I spent a year working at a community action agency packaging small business loans and overseeing a rural farm cooperative. Finally acknowledging that I had no real marketable skills, I enrolled in the MBA program at Cornell University. Upon graduation, I was fortunate to land every young person’s dream job. I joined Bristol-Myers as an internal auditor and flew virtually nonstop around the world performing financial and operational audits of manufacturing and distribution facilities. Shortly after my 28th birthday, I was promoted to Financial Director for the Central American operations based in Mexico City.
Just days before turning 30, I decided to launch off on my own and become an independent consultant in California. After a relatively tough year getting started, a firm in Washington, DC contacted me about a four-month assignment in northern Mali in West Africa. One thing led to the next and I spent the following 29 years working on financial management systems all around the globe, eventually tallying up a total of 77 countries. In 1990, I left California and moved to Wyoming and continued to consult internationally.
Around 2005, through pure happenstance, I became involved in addressing a case concerning an instance of financial exploitation of an elderly person by an individual in a position of trust. Following that experience, I became a Certified Fraud Examiner and began to work with attorneys and law enforcement in the capacity of a forensic accountant to document and quantify financial information that can be used in civil or criminal court in attempts to recover stolen assets. In early 2013, I joined an academic research group consisting of professors from eight universities who are conducting research into the causes of elder financial exploitation by a family member. At present, we are speaking at conferences and are conducting webinars and publishing documents on our research.
Over the years, I played competitive tennis, flew airplanes, taught scuba diving and skippered large oceangoing sailboats. Nowadays, Kim and I volunteer in the community in Laramie at schools, the public library and the hospital with our little Certified Therapy Dog, Miss Penny.