{"id":1418,"date":"2026-08-12T06:47:40","date_gmt":"2026-08-12T06:47:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nationallogisticspost.com\/?p=1418"},"modified":"2026-08-12T06:47:40","modified_gmt":"2026-08-12T06:47:40","slug":"scott-mckays-the-necessary-men-episode-1-nothing-left-to-rent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nationallogisticspost.com\/?p=1418","title":{"rendered":"Scott McKay\u2019s The Necessary Men<\/i> \u2014 Episode 1: Nothing Left to Rent"},"content":{"rendered":"

Welcome back to the world of Mike Holman.<\/em><\/p>

If this is your first stop, here\u2019s what you need to know: Mike Holman is the independent journalist, podcaster, and inveterate maker-of-enemies at the center of Scott McKay\u2019s bitingly satirical thriller series \u2014 four novels (so far) chronicling one man\u2019s habit of ending up in the middle of the very stories the rest of the media is too scared, too compromised, or too incurious to tell. Catch up on the whole series, read past episodes, and find links to every book at \u201cThe Mike Holman Novels at\u00a0<\/em>The American Spectator\u201d and soon, see the video-novel version of this and the previous books at MikeHolman.com.<\/em><\/p>

Read more The Spectator P.M. Ep. 238: You Probably Have (or Will Have) an AI Addiction<\/a><\/p>

Starting this week, we\u2019re serializing the fourth Mike Holman novel, <\/em>The Necessary Men, right here at <\/em>The American Spectator \u2014 new episodes dropping every Wednesday and Saturday. The full book goes on sale September 26th at Amazon and the new MikeHolman.com site, and you can pre-order a signed copy right now.<\/em><\/p>

Where we left off: the last time we saw Colonel Cabrillo, he\u2019d just lost a war \u2014 and his commission in the Venezuelan Army \u2014 in the jungles of Guyana. Mike, meanwhile, is riding about as high as a retired journalist can ride, having just helped blow up half of corporate Hollywood in a string of hostile takeovers that reordered American media and culture in real time.<\/em><\/p>

Neither of them is done making history. This time, the target is Cuba.<\/em><\/p>

Here\u2019s the Prologue and Chapters One and Two of <\/em>The Necessary Men.<\/em><\/p>

\n

\"Black<\/figure>\n<\/p>

Prologue<\/h1>

Havana, Cuba \u2013 February 11, 2026<\/em><\/p>

\u201cCienfuegos,\u201d said Cabrillo.<\/p>

\u201cCienfuegos?\u201d came the response. \u201cThis is madness. No. The answer must be no. Not on these terms.\u201d<\/p>

Manuel Lopez Alejandro Cabrillo, retired colonel in the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias<\/em> \u2013 the Revolutionary Armed Forces of the Republic of Cuba \u2013 sighed and rolled his eyes before taking a sip from the water glass in front of him.<\/p>

He\u2019d been listening for an hour to Manolo Candela, the president of the country, as he made demands of Cabrillo\u2019s current employers. Cabrillo rejected none; the demands were absurd, ridiculous and largely petty.<\/p>

Candela was very clearly to be the last president the Republic of Cuba \u2013 or at least this iteration of it \u2013 would have.<\/p>

And Cabrillo\u2019s current employers knew it. They had sent him here to negotiate with this fussy, professorial bureaucrat who had nevertheless schemed and brutalized his way to the top of Cuba\u2019s communist government largely because both sides were desperate, and both sides knew the clock would soon run out.<\/p>

And getting the best possible deal while there was still sand in the hourglass was what both sides needed.<\/p>

For Candela, it was obvious: Cabrillo\u2019s current employers were a lifeline. Not for the country, of course; there would be no positive solution for the people of Cuba. The government couldn\u2019t keep the power on, food rations were getting tighter, the economy \u2013 including the tourist economy which Cuba had recently been banking on \u2013 was in utter collapse. There were riots in the streets often, which Candela was putting down with greater and greater brutality. The prisons were filling with dissidents while emptying of hardened criminals, and Cabrillo knew that was a sign of the end stage of a regime losing its legitimacy.<\/p>

What Cuba did offer, though, was worthwhile to Cabrillo\u2019s current employers.<\/p>

Manuel Cabrillo hadn\u2019t so much retired from his job in the FAR as acknowledged that it had gone away. He\u2019d been stationed in Venezuela and installed in the Ej\u00e9rcito Bolivariano<\/em>, the Venezuelan army, as a field commander, as had thousands of other Cuban military and intelligence officers during the Madeira regime there. Cabrillo had led troops in battle, including in Madeira\u2019s ill-fated war against Venezuela\u2019s neighbor Guyana; he\u2019d been captured on a destroyed runway in a little town called Mahdia, a few miles from Liberty Point, the city in the jungle built by the American capitalist Pierce Polk.<\/p>

It wasn\u2019t even Polk\u2019s American mercenaries who\u2019d captured him. That was the humiliating part. He\u2019d been captured by Guyanese militiamen while surveying repairs to the runway. It was no particular salvation to his ego that Earl Roberts, the head of that militia, had later been elected president of Guyana.<\/p>

Cabrillo\u2019s capture had set his life off in a direction he hadn\u2019t planned but wasn\u2019t surprised by. He\u2019d amassed a small fortune while in the employ of the Madeira regime, including a little freight company which did a brisk business moving cocaine from Colombia through the port of Maracaibo to Merida, Mexico on its way to the United States. It was a perquisite of his position in the Venezuelan army that his shipments were not to be checked at the border.<\/p>

When the Madeira regime fell, and especially when his wife left him and cleared out the bank accounts on her way to\u2026 somewhere, Cabrillo lost everything.<\/p>

But not everything. He still had contacts from the freight company. And the Colombians and Mexicans both recognized that Manuel Lopez Alejandro Cabrillo was a man of talent and drive, a man who merely needed opportunities and resources and he could achieve substantial things.<\/p>

So he hired on as a security consultant for a consortium of cartels. And that soon led to a role in something like governmental relations. With certain governments.<\/p>

One of which was Manolo Candela\u2019s government, which still regarded Manuel Cabrillo as a hero.<\/p>

Over the past three years, Cabrillo had connected the cartels with Candela\u2019s regime as never before. It wouldn\u2019t be out of place to say that Cuba had become something of a narco-state, though what was being negotiated was a grand escalation of that status.<\/p>

Cuba was perfect for the cartels. Far better as a jumping-off point for shipments into the United States than Mexico, as it turned out; the reinstalled Trumbull administration had all but shut down the southern border and made drug shipments considerably harder and less profitable.<\/p>

But Cuba was just 90 miles away from the southern tip of Florida. And Florida had miles and miles of coastline, much of it swampland and other uninhabited areas. And the cartels had become very, very sophisticated in the waterborne transportation of product to the American market.<\/p>

In particular was the invention of the coffins.<\/p>

They were submersible boats, crewed by three or four men, into which as much as ten tons of cocaine could be packed. The cartels built them in jungle shipyards throughout the Caribbean, at a price of between two and four million dollars. Often the coffins would make one, maybe two, runs and be scuttled; to the naked eye this would seem to be an exorbitant expense.<\/p>

Until you calculated that ten tons of cocaine translated into as much as a hundred million dollars in revenue, and at that sum the cost of the coffins began to seem quite low.<\/p>

What Cabrillo\u2019s bosses wanted him to procure from Candela was the old Soviet submarine supply and repair facility at Cienfuegos, not far from Cabrillo\u2019s family\u2019s beachfront property there, so that the cartels could consolidate their boat production in a hardened facility and create an assembly line for the coffins.<\/p>

They would overwhelm Trumbull\u2019s Department of Homeland Security with vessels and fill the streets of the United States with white powder, serving two purposes \u2013 fattening the wallets of Cabrillo\u2019s employers, and weakening the monster to the north before it could deliver the long-anticipated blows both to Cuba and the cartels everyone knew would come.<\/p>

Trumbull had been back in office for almost a year and a half, and Cuba still stood against him. It was a surprise, but one that Cabrillo\u2019s employers knew was also an opportunity with a short window.<\/p>

Candela knew that, too. Which is why he was demanding not a straight fee to the government in exchange for a lease of the Cienfuegos facility but a cut of the revenue from each load delivered to Florida from Cuba, and a larger cut from the deliveries made from the coffins.<\/p>

\u201cI cannot convince my employers to make you their partner, jefe<\/em>,\u201d Cabrillo told Candela after the president had finished his fit of performative indignation. \u201cThat was not my charge. I was told to negotiate a number, a rate of regularly scheduled payments or a one-time fee, and to secure the use of the facility. I have listened to your list of requests and have not said no. Now is the time, jefe, for you to not say no.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cYes, but you do not understand,\u201d said Candela. \u201cCienfuegos is not for sale.\u201d<\/p>

Cabrillo merely looked at the president.<\/p>

\u201cIt is not for sale, Manuel,\u201d Candela said again.<\/p>

Cabrillo sighed once more.<\/p>

\u201cJefe<\/em>,\u201d he said, \u201cwe are not buying Cienfuegos, and you are not selling it. You are renting out a hole the Russians dug forty years ago to hide things from the Americans. It is a hole full of cobwebs now. Useless. No submarine has entered that facility since you and I were little boys. If not this arrangement, what use will you make of it?\u201d<\/p>

\u201cThe Chinese will\u2026\u201d<\/p>

\u201cJefe!<\/em>\u201d Cabrillo cut in, a derisive rebuke. \u201cIf the Chinese wanted Cienfuegos they would have bought it from you already. They do not. We do. Now, what I have put in front of you is a far more advantageous arrangement than you will get anywhere else. You can sell the rest of Cuba to the Chinese\u2026 if you haven\u2019t already. But this, you will say yes to. And on the terms you have been presented. I have come bearing more than enough gifts for both the revolution\u2026 and the revolutionaries. After all, as the saying goes, La codicia rompe el saco<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cYou deride the revolution,\u201d said Candela, in a tone Cabrillo read as defeat. \u201cAnd you call yourself a communist.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cI\u2019m a committed communist, jefe<\/em>,\u201d Cabrillo retorted, \u201cbut even I know communism doesn\u2019t work. So do your Chinese friends.\u201d<\/p>

Candela snorted, but Cabrillo could see that he had won.<\/p>

\u201cYou need something new,\u201d he said. \u201cMy employers are that something. And because they want this to work, I have brought you one last thing.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cYes?\u201d Candela asked. \u201cWhat would that be?\u201d<\/p>

Cabrillo rose from his chair and knocked on the door of the study. The large black man standing outside opened the door, nodded at Cabrillo, and motioned to another man down the hall.<\/p>

And a few moments later came the girl. Cabrillo guessed she was 17. He hoped she was 17, at least. He didn\u2019t know where she was from. Southern Europe, perhaps, or maybe the Caucasus. He could see in her pale, Slavic \u2013 maybe it was Slavic \u2013 face the desperation, or maybe it was resignation, of someone who could see, even at a tender age, that her life was not her own and would never be again.<\/p>

She wouldn\u2019t look at him as she walked past him into the room, her dress so tight it revealed everything, unsteady in the spike heels either from the sedatives she\u2019d been given or the fear \u2013 Candela had a reputation, after all. Cabrillo judged that was for the best. He didn\u2019t want her eyes to meet his. He did plan on sleeping that night, after all.<\/p>

\u201cDoes it meet with your approval?\u201d he asked Candela.<\/p>

\u201cQu\u00e9 chica!<\/em>\u201d said the president. \u201cYou may have your Russian hole, Cabrillo. Send your men with papers. And leave us!\u201d<\/p>

Cabrillo did, exiting the villa from a side door and making for the car taking him to the hotel. It was dusk, and he could see the meager lights flickering on in the capital city across the bay.<\/p>

\n

\"Line<\/figure>\n<\/p>

Chapter One<\/h1>

Jupiter, Florida \u2013 February 19, 2026<\/em><\/p>

\u201cHey,\u201d she said.<\/p>

And she gave me one of her looks.<\/p>

I knew that look. I\u2019d known her for a bit less than two years, and I\u2019d been married to her for a bit more than one, but I was beginning to believe that I had mastered all of PJ\u2019s looks.<\/p>

I was hoping that wasn\u2019t true. I couldn\u2019t get enough of her looks. I was desperate to see more of them. And I savored each one.<\/p>

This look was her I-have-something-important-to-say look. And that was fine, except as I turned to look at the clock, it said 5:45 a.m. And that wasn\u2019t really the best time for a PJ look, least of all this one.<\/p>

\u201cHey,\u201d I said back happily, because I was far too deeply in love with my wife to wake up to her with anything other than a smile.<\/p>

\u201cI\u2019ve been thinking, and I want to say this before the day starts, and things happen, and it just vanishes. OK?\u201d<\/p>

\u201cI guess,\u201d I said. \u201cIt\u2019s not really dawn yet, though, and I really do want to get some sleep before that little monster in the next room makes it impossible.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cThat little monster has the same name you do,\u201d she said.<\/p>

\u201cYes, but he\u2019s very loud when he decides to make himself known.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cWhat I was going to say,\u201d she said, \u201cis that I was listening to this podcast yesterday, and I\u2019ve been thinking about it ever since. So with women, we do, like, nonstop validation of each other. And that\u2019s actually true. Take my friend Mary Beth. The other day she broke up with that guy Tyler\u2026\u201d<\/p>

\u201cThey broke up? He seems like a cool guy.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cI know. It\u2019s stupid that she broke up with him. And yet when she told me about it, all I could say was \u2018he\u2019s not the one for you, honey. You can do better.\u2019 I don\u2019t even know why I said it. I don\u2019t actually believe it. But it\u2019s like the podcast said, female relationships are mostly about making each other feel better and not so much about making each other be<\/em> better.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cI\u2019m going to remind you that the sun has not yet come up,\u201d I said, \u201cand later this morning I will be available for each and every existential discussion that might strike your fancy.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cNo, OK? I have something I\u2019m getting to.\u201d<\/p>

I smiled weakly at her. It was a ploy of mine. But she caught me trying to roll over away from her and pulled me back.<\/p>

\u201cWhat I\u2019m getting at is that on the podcast they were saying that women do a great job of validating each other, maybe too great a job of it, but we do a terrible job of validating the men in our lives.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cWe don\u2019t have that problem,\u201d I said.<\/p>

\u201cAre you sure? Because I can\u2019t remember the last time I said I was proud of you.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cI\u2019ve never felt like you weren\u2019t proud of me,\u201d I said.<\/p>

\u201cBut I don\u2019t say<\/em> it.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cInstead you smile at me. All the time. And honestly, if that\u2019s all I ever got from you for the rest of my life, it would be more than enough.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cYou came up with that before sunrise?\u201d she said, shocked.<\/p>

\u201cUh huh,\u201d I said. \u201cCan I go back to sleep now?\u201d<\/p>

\u201cI\u2019m not sure,\u201d said PJ. \u201cI kinda think I have other plans for you right now.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cOh,\u201d I said. \u201cWell, OK. But then can I go back to sleep?\u201d<\/p>

She did let me go back to sleep. Eventually. But PJ was awake, and she was determined to make that count. When I finally woke up an hour later, I could hear the music, and I knew she was doing the spinning thing again.<\/p>

She\u2019d turned one of the spare bedrooms into her Peloton studio. She insisted on having two of them side-by-side facing this giant-screen TV on one wall that she plugged into the bikes \u2013 setting up the illusion that you\u2019d be riding in the Alps, or on the streets of Tokyo, or around the Australian outback. We had a subscription to some service that would stream those landscapes to the bike, and PJ was addicted.<\/p>

And she\u2019d gone old-school in her spinning studio with the stereo system. Big woofers built into the walls, treble coming from the ceilings, Bieber or Taylor Swift blasting out across the house. It only cost us like seven grand to set that stereo system up. A bargain. Totally. And I\u2019m not complaining at all.<\/p>

PJ\u2019s spinning soundtrack never seemed to wake up Little Mike. Other things would, but PJ\u2019s awful music didn\u2019t bother him. So she was perfectly fine pushing those pedals and pretending to be biking around the Kalahari or along the canals of Amsterdam.<\/p>

When I\u2019d suggested that rather than her virtual landscape tours, we might consider actually traveling, PJ wasn\u2019t impressed.<\/p>

\u201cNo thanks,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019m good. I have a three-month-old and three dogs. Y\u2019know, responsibilities.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cBut we have resources. Melissa says again and again that she\u2019s happy to house-sit, and between your mom and my mom\u2026\u201d<\/p>

\u201cNope,\u201d said PJ. \u201cI\u2019m good.\u201d<\/p>

And she just smiled.<\/p>

It struck me that my wife had found a groove. Morning Peloton madness, making breakfast, working some genealogical project for one of her friends in the neighborhood, making lunch, running errands with Little Mike on her hip or walking the dogs with the baby in a stroller, pickleball at the club, making dinner, entertaining a few of our friends in the neighborhood\u2026<\/p>

She was happy. Content. PJ wanted nothing more out of life than our little paradise in Admiral\u2019s Cove in Jupiter, Florida, and she resisted anything changing. Fiercely.<\/p>

I couldn\u2019t blame her. I was pretty happy as well.<\/p>

But unlike PJ, I was starting to get restless.<\/p>

My life had changed completely over the space of three years. I\u2019d been a pretty successful independent journalist with a website that brought in a lot of traffic but didn\u2019t make me rich, until I\u2019d finally relented and let my old college roommate Pierce Polk hire me to write his autobiography. Then came his hiring our company to handle his PR. And once I\u2019d done that, I really wasn\u2019t independent anymore; I was in the orbit of one of the five or six richest men in the world.<\/p>

Which was a life I hadn\u2019t wanted.<\/p>

But honestly, if I was a sellout, what I could say was that I\u2019d certainly not suffered for it.<\/p>

My company, Holman Media, had grown exponentially even without me actively running it anymore. I\u2019d turned my podcast over to our website editor Colby Igboizwe, who\u2019d held my audience and then some; I would do guest appearances with Colby all the time, but I was out of that day-to-day grind. I still wrote a weekly column at the site, but it was nothing like the daily work I\u2019d done before. But with the capital we\u2019d raised through taking over Pierce\u2019s PR, and the fat profit my autobiography of one of the world\u2019s greatest capitalists \u2013 Pierce had no less than six Fortune 500 companies that he owned more or less lock, stock and barrel \u2013 had brought in made me my first million.<\/p>

I\u2019d made many more than that over the last couple of years.<\/p>

And that morning I had to talk about it.<\/p>

It was a podcast interview with a kid named Terry Hadenroth, a YouTuber who\u2019d become a big deal in the aftermath of the revolution in mass media we\u2019d managed to engineer over the past year. Hadenroth\u2019s folks were both in show business \u2013 his mom was a costume designer, and his dad had a bunch of executive producer credits, but not of any giant hit movies \u2013 and he\u2019d gained a bunch of notoriety for doing reviews that had lots of inside scoop about what had gone on in the making of the movies and TV shows he was reviewing.<\/p>

PJ blew into the bedroom after her Peloton ride \u2013 she said it was down St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans and then into the French Quarter, and she wasn\u2019t all that happy when I noted that there\u2019s a chunk of New Orleans between St. Charles Avenue and the French Quarter and asked her if she got to see that part \u2013 and told me I\u2019d better get cleaned up or I\u2019d be late for the interview.<\/p>

That was another thing PJ liked doing. Melissa was my assistant. PJ did some of her job for free. I think it was her way of ruling our household.<\/p>

I didn\u2019t mind. She did a good job of it. And she generally stayed out of my home office, which I know was a sacrifice for her because she absolutely loved the couch in there. It was one of those giant overstuffed leather couches like you get at Restoration Hardware, but it wasn\u2019t from Restoration Hardware. It was from some company in England, and she had it in the house Pierce had rented for her in London when I was in Belmarsh Prison, and she was keeping vigil for me.<\/p>

That\u2019s a whole other story, obviously.<\/p>

Anyway, my office was my office. So much so that PJ bought me a vacuum cleaner just for the office, stashed it in a closet, and told me it was my responsibility to keep the place clean.<\/p>

So if she was a domestic monarch, she was at least beneficent about it. In particular, PJ was becoming a heck of a good cook. And I had Little Mike sitting on the island counter in the kitchen making googly eyes at me while I was annihilating the Belgian waffle PJ made, when\u2026<\/p>

\u201cYou probably ought to let me put him in his crib,\u201d she said. \u201cHe\u2019s going to start crawling around and fall off.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cDearest PJ,\u201d I said, \u201cyou can leave off with the helicopter mommying. My man here is going to exercise very good judgment and stay right where he is. Besides, my breakfast is fascinating. Isn\u2019t that right, Little Mike?\u201d<\/p>

Little Mike just gave me a cute laugh. So, having put down the final bite of that waffle, I stood up and grabbed the kid and held him up to my face.<\/p>

\u201cHow\u2019s it goin\u2019, little buddy?\u201d I said.<\/p>

Then I got my answer.<\/p>

\u201cUmm, PJ?\u201d I said.<\/p>

\u201cWhat?\u201d<\/p>

\u201cHe\u2019s, uhhh, leaking. And I have that interview\u2026\u201d<\/p>

\u201cHere,\u201d she said, laughing. \u201cGive him to me.\u201d<\/p>

And she went in one direction and I, very happily, went in the other.<\/p>

\n
\"Black<\/figure>\n

Be like the Holmans and ensure your nursery is always stocked and organized with these ultra-soft diapers. A perfect essential for every baby\u2019s daily routine!<\/em><\/p><\/div>

Hadenroth was a good sport about my demand. I\u2019d big-boyed him pretty severely, saying that my schedule would only allow for a 90-minute block from 8:00-9:30 a.m. my time, which forced him to be up and ready at five in the morning L.A. time with his people. Grant Paxton, who ran Surge Vision Entertainment under the Blockbusters umbrella \u2013 Blockbusters was the streaming-based media conglomerate we had built, which had upended and reordered most of American media culture \u2013 had begged me to be nice to the kid, and I\u2019d promised I would. He yelled at me for jacking Hadenroth around, though he was laughing when he did it.<\/p>

I was hoping Hadenroth would just cancel.<\/p>

I was lying through my teeth about being swamped. That afternoon I was playing golf at the Admiral\u2019s Cove Golf Club with Stan Lynch, the 56-year-old retired hedge fund titan who was a board member of the Polk Global Freedom Initiative, of which I was the president. It wasn\u2019t one of those golf-course business meetings. It was a beer-golf session that would finish up in the men\u2019s grill with one or two too many of those Myers Rum-and-orange-juice-with-a-dash-of-the-bitters cocktails Stan swore by, and then I\u2019d catch a ride back to the house on a golf cart from one of the kids working at the bag shack so PJ wouldn\u2019t yell at me for driving home.<\/p>

But Hadenroth didn\u2019t know that.<\/p>

\u201cHey,\u201d he said, \u201cI\u2019d do this interview any time, any place. Seriously, it\u2019s an honor. You\u2019re\u2026 well, you\u2019re a legend.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cOh? Damn.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cYou\u2019re to podcasting what Limbaugh was to radio, Mike.\u201d He spent another couple of minutes in that vein before getting to it.<\/p>

\u201cYou do realize you\u2019re mostly hated out here in Southern California,\u201d he said.<\/p>

\u201cMostly, yeah. Adam Carolla is a fan, though.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cWhat\u2019s your response to the people who say that you\u2019ve wrecked the film industry and cut it loose from its home in Hollywood?\u201d<\/p>

\u201cGosh, I\u2019ve never heard that complaint before,\u201d I snarked. \u201cWhat I\u2019d say is that we didn\u2019t kill it \u2014 it was dead when we got there. There are actually more film projects going on in SoCal this year than there were last year. They\u2019re smaller, because technology has advanced to where you don\u2019t need $200 million and three years to get an epic look. More projects, better quality, more democratized. Anybody with a good idea can find an audience now.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cThe Westerns are back,\u201d said Terry, \u201cbut they\u2019re starring Gary Cooper and John Wayne, and those guys have been dead for half a century. AI John Wayne seems like he\u2019s displacing actors who\u2019ve actually been practicing their craft.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cOh, I know,\u201d I said. \u201cI saw your interview with Mark Ruffalo. But I don\u2019t know what he\u2019s complaining about. Who would cast Mark Ruffalo in a Western? Come on.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cI think he might take issue with that,\u201d said Hadenroth.<\/p>

\u201cWell, it\u2019s not like he\u2019d say anything about me that he hasn\u2019t already said.\u201d<\/p>

Hadenroth laughed. \u201cFair enough,\u201d he said.<\/p>

\u201cLook,\u201d I continued, \u201cAI John Wayne doesn\u2019t go on a podcast and say something stupid that costs the studio $200 million in lost box office like Alan Ritchson does every time he gets cast in something. Surge Vision had John Candy play Ignatius J. Reilly in A Confederacy of Dunces<\/em> \u2014 a role Candy always wanted \u2014 and his family loved it, audiences loved it, thirty million streams in a month on a five-million-dollar production. For somebody who\u2019s very sick of overpaid lunatics from Jane Fonda to Rachel Zegler to Lupita Nyong\u2019o pretending that anybody cares what they think just because they can pretend to be somebody else in front of a camera, this is a much better world.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cI knew it was a good idea to have you on,\u201d said Hadenroth.<\/p>

The interview went on, and then toward the end he hit me with a question I wasn\u2019t prepared for.<\/p>

\u201cIt seems like you\u2019ve climbed this mountain,\u201d he said. \u201cSo is this it for you? Or do you have something else up your sleeve?\u201d<\/p>

\u201cI, ummm, well\u2026\u201d<\/p>

\u201cDon\u2019t tell me I\u2019ve stumped the great Mike Holman.\u201d<\/p>

I just shrugged.<\/p>

I had nothing to say, and it pissed me off.<\/p>

Three years earlier, if anybody had told me I\u2019d be where I was, I wouldn\u2019t have believed it. Spent two decades grinding it out in independent media and then took off like a rocket. I was getting a lifetime achievement award in an interview with a 22-year-old with a million subscribers on YouTube, and he called me a legend.<\/p>

This was in an interview I thought was going to be hostile.<\/p>

\n
\"Black<\/figure>\n

Mike\u2019s home-office and podcast studio<\/em><\/p><\/div>

And I was\u2026 bored?<\/p>

I wouldn\u2019t let myself admit that. To even think it utterly reeked of ingratitude.<\/p>

After all, I\u2019d gone from broke and single, to being on the front lines of that war between Venezuela and Guyana, as Pierce and his Sentinel Security private army fought off the communists to protect his jungle Shangri-La, to married, and then to prison in Britain for the crime of doing a podcast interview the Stormer government didn\u2019t like, and then to revolutionary media mogul status. Who could take a ride like that and not think it was nirvana?<\/p>

I loved my life.<\/p>

But I also hadn\u2019t written a book since Pierce\u2019s autobiography. And my current, allegedly, creative project \u2013 a screenplay for a very unflattering biopic of Barry Omobba, the former president who all but wrecked the country on a host of fronts \u2013 was just languishing.<\/p>

I was too comfortable to summon up the indignation it took to finish it. Much less to put the folks at Belmarsh Entertainment, one of the two Blockbusters film studios, to work crafting the AI imagery that would back it. Finding an actor willing to play Omobba in a movie trashing his legacy was, I was told, nothing short of impossible. So the whole thing would be an AI production.<\/p>

Those were becoming commonplace. But I didn\u2019t know what I was doing trying to be an AI filmmaker. I didn\u2019t even know what I was doing trying to write a movie screenplay. And I didn\u2019t want the Omobba thing to be a book; there had been a million books about the guy.<\/p>

So I was without a project. I was almost semi-retired. And at 54, that was crazy.<\/p>

The last time Stan and I had played the Admiral\u2019s Cove course, we\u2019d both gotten so lit up that neither of us could finish the round. It was a lot of fun, but we were embarrassed about it. The guys at the club had a good laugh at our expense over that adventure, and both of the wives had given us the scowl of disapproval. So we were adamant that there would be no drinking this time.<\/p>

And instead of getting wasted, I was unloading my existential angst and ennui on Stan. Who had a problem of his own \u2013 namely, that his game had deserted him in absolutely comic fashion.<\/p>

\u201cThen let\u2019s do something else,\u201d he said. \u201cWhen we got PGFI started, we talked about doing something big with education. What if we put a plan together to create a whole ecosystem for microschools, learning pods and homeschoolers?\u201d<\/p>

\u201cWe should,\u201d I said. \u201cYou know anything about that stuff?\u201d<\/p>

\u201cI do not,\u201d he said, as he shanked his approach on 14 and looked askance at his nine-iron. \u201cThis stick is an absolute piece of shit.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cOh, yeah,\u201d I said. \u201cDefinitely the club and not the guy holding it.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cFuck you,\u201d he laughed. \u201cWhy don\u2019t we gather up the team and start brainstorming? We\u2019re loaded with cash right now, there\u2019s momentum, and we\u2019re already built. At this point we can basically apply a hedge fund model to pretty much any project, and we can throw ten or even eleven figures into it.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cThat\u2019s the benefit of having Pierce at your back,\u201d I said, as I drained my one birdie putt of the afternoon and savored the jealous look Stan gave me.<\/p>

\u201cLook,\u201d said Stan, \u201cyou and I are two guys who\u2019ve got the world by the balls. The one thing we aren\u2019t allowed to do is not be grateful for it. You\u2019ve got a little kid and the second-best wife in the world, everybody loves you\u2026\u201d<\/p>

\u201cWell, not everybody.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cEverybody whose opinion you give a shit about.\u201d<\/p>

I shrugged. He wasn\u2019t wrong.<\/p>

\u201cWe can just take our time and find that next mountain to climb, and then we\u2019ll do it right and climb the motherfucker,\u201d he said. \u201cMeantime, when is that John Rich movie about the bootleggers and the early days of NASCAR coming out? I can\u2019t wait to watch that.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cTwo weeks, I think,\u201d I said. \u201cThey ran into some problems with rights at the last minute. The lawyers are working through it.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cOh,\u201d said Stan. \u201cI forgot. You want to meet Diego Maceo?\u201d<\/p>

\u201cLa Bala?\u201d I asked. La Bala was Maceo\u2019s nickname. \u201cThe Hall of Fame pitcher?\u201d<\/p>

\u201cYeah. He\u2019s having a big VIP charity thing at his brewery in Hialeah and Trina got us an invite. She knows Esmerelda, who\u2019s Diego\u2019s wife. If you and PJ want to go, it\u2019s Saturday night.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cSure, why not?\u201d I said. \u201cI have no idea what PJ\u2019s gonna say. She\u2019s such a homebody it\u2019s crazy right now, but I imagine I can drag her out for a night on the town.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cCool. Let\u2019s do it. Ahhh, Goddammit!\u201d<\/p>

He\u2019d just put his tee shot on 16 into the drink. I almost asked him if his driver was as defective as his nine iron, but I figured that would be rude.<\/p>

And anyway, I didn\u2019t get the chance, because my phone rang just then and it was Pierce.<\/p>

Read more How Hamas Hijacks the Aid Pipeline<\/a><\/p>

Who was calling to solve my problem for me.<\/p>

\n
\"A<\/figure>\n

Stan\u2019s golf game disintegrated just as Pierce called to change\u2026 everything.<\/em><\/p><\/div>

Chapter Two<\/h1>

Jupiter, Florida, February 25, 2026<\/em><\/p>

\u201cWhere are you and who are you with right now?\u201d Pierce had said when he called.<\/p>

And I told him we were on 16 at the club just as Stan hooked his three-wood into the trees.<\/p>

\u201cThis is freakin\u2019 hopeless today!\u201d he said.<\/p>

\u201cIs it a money game?\u201d Pierce asked me. \u201cThis is kinda important.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cNo, not at all,\u201d I said. \u201cIn fact\u2026 hey, Stan, you want to call it a day? This is Pierce and he says it\u2019s got some meat on it.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cBest news all stinkin\u2019 day,\u201d said Stan, who was cooling off and recovering his promise to Trina that he\u2019d stop cursing \u2013 a promise which didn\u2019t fare overly well when his golf game went to seed like it had that day.<\/p>

So we hopped in the cart and rode back to the clubhouse, Stan driving and me making small talk with Pierce, and then I got the guy on duty at the men\u2019s grill to hook us up with one of the private rooms while Stan got us a pitcher of Yuengling and a couple of glasses.<\/p>

\u201cLeast I can do after that pitiful performance today,\u201d he said, kicking the door shut with his foot as I laid the phone down on the table and put it on speaker.<\/p>

\u201cOK,\u201d said Pierce. \u201cAre we ready?\u201d<\/p>

\u201cYeah,\u201d I said. \u201cGo ahead. It\u2019s just you, me and Stan.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cRight. Last night and this morning I had Burro down here. We did a dinner with Earl Roberts and George Abaka from Suriname, and then he left out after breakfast to hit Caracas, Bogota and Panama City.\u201d<\/p>

Mario Burro was the American Secretary of State. Earl Roberts was the president of Guyana, which was where Liberty Point was. George Abaka was the president of next-door Suriname.<\/p>

\u201cOK,\u201d I said. \u201cI take it he said something to you at breakfast, right?\u201d<\/p>

\u201cHe did indeed. And I\u2019m gonna caution that this is my interpretation, because I got the strong sense that he was leading me in a certain direction without saying all the words. All right?\u201d<\/p>

\u201cJust tell us the interpretation and then we\u2019ll pick it apart,\u201d said Stan, who was good at that game.<\/p>

\u201cOK, the long and short of it is I got the impression that he wants us to do a\u2026 green revolution, or a friendly invasion or something like that, in Cuba.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cWell, that\u2019s not much of an ask,\u201d I snarked.<\/p>

\u201cOK, why do you have that impression, Pierce?\u201d asked Stan.<\/p>

\u201cWhat he said was this \u2013 they\u2019ve got a very full plate on foreign policy right now. They\u2019re trying to manage the transition back to something workable in Venezuela, Colombia is a mess, so is Mexico, you still have Russia and Ukraine, China and Taiwan is still a crisis in the making\u2026 but the one thing they think has to get done is Cuba. And he thinks the domestic opposition in Cuba would be\u2026 the word he used was debilitating. Even despite the unlimited support of the Cuban exiles in Miami.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cTwo questions,\u201d I said. \u201cFirst, why is Cuba so important now, and second, why is he asking you to do something about Cuba? They could send the Marines in and finish that regime off pretty quickly.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cFirst answer is pretty short: because the regime in Cuba is going down in a matter of weeks or months, and the question becomes what does it collapse into? Right now, the likely result is that it becomes a Chinese colony or a narco-state or both. It pretty much already is a narco-state.\u201d<\/p>

The DEA had just made a massive drug bust in Key Largo, where they\u2019d run up on some Colombians who were loading 10 tons of cocaine on a semi truck from three pickup trucks in a gas station parking lot, and in the press conference after the bust, the lead agent said they were pretty sure this was another example of a submersible craft depositing a mass load of product somewhere out of the way and then the distribution network getting to work putting it on the roads. He said there was so much cocaine coming from South America and passing through Cuba that the cartels were now warehousing it in cities across America.<\/p>

And he caused more than a little bit of a stir when he noted the cartels had really profited by having four years to build out their human network inside the United States thanks to the open border during the Joe Deadhorse administration.<\/p>

\u201cWe\u2019re shutting it down along the border with Mexico now,\u201d he said, \u201cbut it\u2019s so advanced coming by air and sea from Cuba that we\u2019d practically have to set up roadblocks all over South Florida to even make a dent in what they\u2019re doing.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cBut the second answer,\u201d Pierce said, \u201cis that there just isn\u2019t the political bandwidth.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cWhy not?\u201d I asked.<\/p>

\u201cWell, it sounds like they don\u2019t have a choice but to go into Iran. They\u2019re trying to stop them from getting nukes, and the Iranians have basically given them the finger. And once they\u2019re in it with Iran, that\u2019s gonna be all they do until it\u2019s over. They have to keep a hand free to deal with whatever Russia or China will throw at them.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cSo, neocon shit,\u201d said Stan.<\/p>

\u201cIt is all connected, though,\u201d I said. \u201cI mean, PJ got shot saving Trumbull\u2019s life in Guyana, and the guy who fired that bullet was an Iranian the Venezuelans brought with them.\u201d<\/p>

Stan shrugged.<\/p>

\u201cThe other problem, like I said,\u201d said Pierce, \u201cis domestic politics.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cYeah,\u201d said Stan, \u201cbecause people don\u2019t like neocon shit.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cI\u2019m gonna push back on that a little,\u201d Pierce said, \u201cbecause my complaint about the Bushies who had to start all those foreign adventures was that they started them in stupid places. Afghanistan should have been six weeks of bombing everything that moved until the Northern Alliance took the place over and then we\u2019re out. Iraq was\u2026 I don\u2019t know what that was.<\/p>

\u201cBut think of this: where would we be if, at some point in the \u201890s, after the Cold War ended, we\u2019d have gone in and run the Castros out of Cuba? What if they\u2019d had freedom and market democracy for the last three decades?\u201d<\/p>

\u201cI doubt seriously you\u2019d have had to fight a war against Cubans and Venezuelans a couple of years ago,\u201d I said.<\/p>

\u201cExactly. Cuba\u2019s been more than a thorn in America\u2019s side; they\u2019ve been an active exporter of radical revolution all over the Western hemisphere for better than 60 years, including in America, and honestly it hasn\u2019t even stopped with not having the Soviets behind them, or more recently, Venezuela bankrolling them. They\u2019re still at it even while they\u2019re dead broke.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cSo you\u2019re saying the neocons should have hit Cuba instead of Iraq.\u201d That was Stan.<\/p>

\u201cWouldn\u2019t you agree?\u201d said Pierce.<\/p>

I was watching Stan, fascinated at the discussion.<\/p>

\u201cI\u2019d rather hit nobody,\u201d said Stan. \u201cBut if you\u2019re saying pick one, sure. Cuba.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cAnd here\u2019s what that failure gets us. Burro said, and obviously this is a big deal for him, because his people all came from Cuba, that they\u2019ve got a list of a whole host of political and media figures in this country who have documented ties with the Cuban regime. It\u2019s not even a secret list or anything.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cOh, no,\u201d I said. \u201cIt\u2019s the usual suspects.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cYour pal Gramsci-Ramos is one of the more obvious ones,\u201d said Pierce.<\/p>

I groaned and rolled my eyes.<\/p>

One of the more uncomfortable moments I\u2019d had after we\u2019d engineered a massive stock-market coup and run hostile takeovers of all of the big media companies during Blockbusters\u2019 big run was having to testify on what we\u2019d done at the House Oversight Committee. The ranking Democrat on that committee was a crazy lady named Dolores Gramsci-Ramos, who represented part of Brooklyn. Gramsci-Ramos had run for president in 2020, raising an absolute shit-ton of money from \u201csmall donations\u201d through the Democrats\u2019 online fundraising platform, which did what looked like an intentionally horrible job of credit card security and financial reporting. She\u2019d raised almost $300 million in strange denominations: $5.17, $8.91, $11.35 and so on. The theory, though nobody bothered to prove it, was that those numbers could be best attributable to foreign currency exchanges \u2013 a clear sign that her money was coming from overseas.<\/p>

Gramsci-Ramos didn\u2019t get the nomination. She did get further than anybody expected her to. And she was far and away the most radical leftist of the 20 candidates running that year.<\/p>

And when she ran, she got out of Congress. Another wacko leftist, Naomi Yanko-Munsch, won her seat.<\/p>

Then Gramsci-Ramos divorced her husband \u2013 everybody thought that guy was gay in the first place \u2013 moved to the congressional district next door, which was partly in Brooklyn and partly in Queens, and won it in 2022.<\/p>

The rumor had been, and it really wasn\u2019t a rumor anymore, that Gramsci-Ramos and Yanko-Munsch were together. They shared a house in DC as \u201croommates,\u201d and the legacy media treated that as very sensible and laudatory, but when the two of them started wearing rainbow pins on their lapels and insisting on pushing the entire pride agenda from top to bottom, nobody was buying \u201croommates\u201d anymore.<\/p>

Anyway, Gramsci-Ramos was livid over the fact that we\u2019d basically cornered the film and TV market under the Blockbusters umbrella, and as I was testifying at that committee she absolutely lit into me about an independent docudrama which had appeared on our platform, produced by a bunch of Cubans in Miami, that trashed Fidel Castro and his brother Raul and focused on all the money they\u2019d stolen from Americans and Cuban exiles. The figure was something like $9 billion in 1961 dollars, which was $325 billion or so in today\u2019s money, and it was clear the Candela regime, which was the Castro regime, really, would never be able to pay that back.<\/p>

\u201cThese are lies,\u201d she thundered at me. \u201cYou barged in and took over all these companies so that you could tell lies about the Castro brothers. You call that freedom of speech?\u201d<\/p>

\u201cWell,\u201d I said, \u201cI do call it freedom of speech that people can access a film someone made and circulated on the Blockbusters platform and that they had the ability to produce it? Yes, that\u2019s freedom.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cBut you promoted<\/em> it.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cOK, the platform has an algorithm which presents content to people based on the interests they input and the ratings they give to similar content. So I guess you could say we promoted it based on what we saw as the likelihood certain audiences would find it enjoyable or informative, sure. And it did get a 92 percent audience score at Rotten Tomatoes, so I think we did OK.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cAgain, Mr. Holman, the film was full of lies<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cI\u2019d say that\u2019s more your opinion than established fact, and you\u2019d be better off having that debate with the people who had their stuff stolen from them by the communists.\u201d<\/p>

Ohhh, she did not like that. She went absolutely ballistic, calling me every name in the book, and when the gavel came down, it was Yanko-Munsch, after what felt like one of those tag-team World Wrestling Federation handoffs, who was screaming at me. And it wasn\u2019t even her time yet. They ended up recessing the hearing for an hour to calm things down.<\/p>

And it was shocking how much support the Hyphens \u2013 everybody called them that \u2013 were getting for shilling for Cuba. So Burro telling Pierce he had a list of people who were Cuban assets wasn\u2019t surprising at all.<\/p>

\u201cHow does a shitty little country like Cuba have political influence here?\u201d asked Stan.<\/p>

\u201cAll kinds of reasons,\u201d said Pierce. \u201cBut don\u2019t you dare doubt that they do. Hell, the mayor of Los Angeles was in the Venceremos brigades when she was a college kid. She\u2019s explicitly a Cuban asset, and she runs the second biggest city in the country.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cWell, yeah, but that was college,\u201d said Stan. \u201cShe\u2019s not still an asset.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cYou don\u2019t stop being a Cuban asset, Stan,\u201d I said. \u201cThat\u2019s like being in the Mafia.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cExactly right,\u201d said Pierce.<\/p>

Stan shrugged.<\/p>

\u201cOK, next steps,\u201d Pierce was saying. \u201cI\u2019m gonna circle back with a plan for pushing the dirty commies out of power in Cuba, and then assuming you guys are up for this, we\u2019ll start working on putting PGFI on this project. What say y\u2019all?\u201d<\/p>

\u201cShow me the plan,\u201d I said, \u201cbut yeah. I like it.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cWait a minute,\u201d said Stan. \u201cWhat are we doing here? This is gonna be some Christopher Walken Dogs of War<\/em> type thing?\u201d<\/p>

\u201cExplicitly no,\u201d said Pierce. \u201cIdeally we\u2019d do this without firing a shot.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cHow?\u201d said Stan, incredulous.<\/p>

\u201cIt might be as simple as just rolling up in there with food, power generation, bags of Quikrete and some agricultural equipment,\u201d said Pierce. \u201cJust go in and buy up the local jefes<\/em> and make them let us take over town after town, and then the regime doesn\u2019t even fall so much as it becomes irrelevant and just melts away.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cYeah, OK,\u201d said Stan, clearly not buying that.<\/p>

\u201cI\u2019m not gonna ask you to sign off yet,\u201d said Pierce. \u201cLet me get you something concrete so you can see more than just a vision statement. I know you\u2019re an operations guy. But in the meantime, if it was doable to turn over the communist dictatorship of Cuba without starting a war, would you be in favor of it?\u201d<\/p>

Stan looked at me and then at the phone.<\/p>

\u201cYeah. Sure, OK. I guess so.\u201d<\/p>

\n
\"Black<\/figure>\n

Stan\u2019s post-golf Yuengling fix.<\/em><\/p><\/div>

A couple of days later, PJ\u2019s brother Hank stopped into town. He\u2019d flown to Palm Beach from Austin, where he lived, and he said the next morning he was flying down to Liberty Point to see Pierce and the Sentinel Telecommunications guys.<\/p>

Hank had a company that made apps. He\u2019d started out working for his father, The Great Peter Chang, at Chang Pan-Pacific \u2013 which was a big import-export company out of San Francisco his dad had built. Hank had ejected at the perfect time; his dad had severely lost his way, and then he lost his company and his wife.<\/p>

Not to mention his daughter. PJ was\u2026 estranged from The Great Peter Chang, which tends to happen when your father is involved in a plot to assassinate a presidential candidate you, as a Secret Service agent, are assigned to protect.<\/p>

Yeah. It was bad.<\/p>

They didn\u2019t get Donny Trumbull, but the lunatic who managed to get just next to the stage of that basketball arena in Terre Haute and shoot him in the chest before turning the gun on \u201ctheyself\u201d \u2013 yep, one of those \u2013 almost did. And PJ was running the Secret Service detail protecting Trumbull. They sabotaged her operation and expected her to cower while her dad used his stroke with the Deadhorse administration and particularly Pamela Farris, the vice president whose career in politics he\u2019d bankrolled while he was banging her off and on, to bail PJ\u2019s career out.<\/p>

This did not go well with PJ, and she blew the whistle on the plot. She did it on my podcast; that\u2019s how we met. And then Pierce, who saw the podcast and loved it, invited her to chill out down at Liberty Point, which she did, and loved it. And when I got down there just in time for the Venezuelans to invade the place, I found out that she loved me, too.<\/p>

Anyway, The Great Peter Chang wasn\u2019t done with evil things. He had something to do with Deadhorse\u2019s people putting the Stormer government in the UK up to throwing my ass in jail for doing a podcast, and then he ended up fronting a Chinese media company which was trying to buy into the American entertainment sector that we were able to block as part of our Blockbusters victory. But The Great Peter Chang was a fish out of water going from import-export, a business he knew, to media, and he lost his financial backers a very large amount of money.<\/p>

PJ and Hank stayed close. PJ stayed cordial with Kevin, the oldest brother who was trying to reconstitute his dad\u2019s business. The other brother, George, was a submarine captain somewhere in the Atlantic; we never got to see him much.<\/p>

And Mary, PJ\u2019s mom, was separated from Peter. Probably forever. The only question was whether Mary was going to fully pull the ripcord and divorce him. She hadn\u2019t decided. What she had decided was that she was relocating to Miami from San Francisco. Mary did international trade law; she\u2019d caught on with a big firm downtown that had made her a senior partner. She was doing very, very well. And half the time she was in Liberty Point, because Pierce \u2013 and the Exchange of the Americas he\u2019d built down there \u2013 was her biggest client.<\/p>

Not to mention that Hal Gibson, the ex-Marine hero who was running Pierce\u2019s security force in Liberty Point and handling all kinds of other projects for him, was Mary\u2019s new squeeze.<\/p>

I liked Mary. A lot. She showed up at the house when she could. Mary was very, very fond of Little Mike. She wasn\u2019t unique in that regard.<\/p>

Kevin was still in the Bay Area. Hank was in Austin. Peter was now in Hong Kong, trying to work some deals with his old Chinese friends and rebuild his empire. And PJ was with me.<\/p>

But Hank was probably the most interesting of the Changs, and it takes a lot for me to say that given my bias toward PJ.<\/p>

Hank made apps, as I said. He\u2019d made two that were turning him very rapidly into a big-money tech bro. And in both cases, it had been his ability to work in Pierce\u2019s orbit that catapulted him to success.<\/p>

The first app was called RKtech. It was a construction app, which allowed you to design a house using an AI interface that had oodles of templates and guidelines. Which was cool enough, but through the app you could also do things like file construction permits and do other paperwork items you\u2019ve got to do if you\u2019re building or remodeling a house. What was also cool about RKtech was that if you dropped an address or a pin into the app, it could give you site data from the lot and help design the floor plan based on the topography, the view, where the water and sewer connections were and so on, and it would pop out AI-generated images of the inside and outside of a building you\u2019d design with it.<\/p>

Hank sold that app to Pierce, and Sentinel Construction started using it to expedite projects, and before you knew it, they were revolutionizing the construction and homebuilding industry.<\/p>

Then Hank hooked up with some people who were building the mother of all AI filmmaking apps, an engine called CASTR, which, in its first iteration, would let you pick a movie, then pick actors from drop-down menus to play the characters, and it would stream the recast movie an hour later. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie in Casablanca<\/em>?\u00a0No problem. At Blockbusters we jumped on that app, had them build it out into a full-on post-production suite such that it could now make feature-length movies from a screenplay, with a few steps in between, and CASTR was the tech backbone of our media revolution.<\/p>

Hank was going to be the richest one of us, except for Pierce. And he said his next project was probably the most consequential one yet.<\/p>

\u201cWhat is it?\u201d I asked him as we tucked into the feast PJ had put together \u2013 a roasted chicken with new potatoes and grilled vegetables with a garlic sauce.<\/p>

\u201cWe\u2019re calling it Conduit. It\u2019s a crypto-communications app that reopens free speech. Big freaking deal.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cWhat, like Telegram?\u201d PJ asked.<\/p>

\u201cNnnnot really,\u201d said Hank. \u201cThis is several levels above that.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cOh,\u201d said PJ.<\/p>

She was in the Secret Service, which meant she actually had some experience and technical knowledge of this stuff, but nope. Not her thing anymore.<\/p>

Hank just smiled and winked at me. He knew his sister. Before I could blink, the two of them were talking about his sex life and friends back home in Frisco, and I was the third wheel.<\/p>

Which was fine.<\/p>

Then dinner was over, PJ kissed her brother as I cleared the table and insisted on doing the dishes, and she took the dogs for their nightly mile-and-a-half walk while Hank and I retired to the deck by the pool. I had half a case of Diego\u2019s La Bala beer iced down in a cooler, so I brought that out there, and Hank and I relaxed by the water.<\/p>

\u201cGo on, tell me,\u201d I said.<\/p>

\u201cSo you don\u2019t need the internet to use this app. It works on bare cellular signal \u2014 even a weak 2G signal. Governments know how to block apps. They can\u2019t turn off their own cell towers.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cInteresting,\u201d I said.<\/p>

\u201cSecond: the traffic is invisible,\u201d said Hank. \u201cTo anyone monitoring a network, it looks like ordinary cellular traffic. There\u2019s nothing to flag, nothing to identify as the app. It\u2019s a ghost. We almost called it Ghost, but there\u2019s a web design platform out there that already has that name.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cRight,\u201d I said. \u201cSo that\u2019s\u2026\u201d<\/p>

\u201cWait,\u201d said Hank. \u201cThird: no phone number to sign up. Telegram still ties you to a phone number. This gives you a randomly generated ID. Nothing links the account to a person.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cOK, that\u2019s a big deal,\u201d I said.<\/p>

\u201cAnd fourth: nothing lives on a server. This is all decentralized. There\u2019s no central system to raid or subpoena.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cOK, but while technically this sounds like the end-all and be-all of online freedom, they\u2019re just gonna say it\u2019s for pedos and terrorists and arms dealers and cartel thugs. What\u2019s the response?\u201d<\/p>

\u201cWe\u2019ve handled all that. Three things are built in that weed out the scumbags about as best as can be done.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cAll right,\u201d I said. \u201cGive it to me.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cSo first, we set up a vouching system for access,\u201d said Hank. \u201cYou can\u2019t just download Conduit. You need an existing verified user to bring you in. Every account has a chain of accountability without revealing actual identities. If someone in your chain does something criminal, the whole branch gets flagged and shut down. It\u2019s not foolproof, but it filters out opportunistic bad actors who can\u2019t get a referral, because who wants to lose their account and then have to beg a friend to get back in?\u201d<\/p>

\u201cOK, but that could hurt your growth, though.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cNot that worried about it. We think we\u2019ll deter most of the bad actors with that protocol. But we\u2019re also doing hash-matching\u2026\u201d<\/p>

\u201cHash-what?\u201d<\/p>

\u201cBasically, the app can fingerprint known illegal content \u2013 CSAM databases, known terrorist material, that kind of thing \u2013 without actually reading or storing anything. The content stays encrypted end-to-end but known bad material still gets flagged.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cThat\u2019s over my head, but I guess it sounds good,\u201d I said.<\/p>

\u201cOK, and here\u2019s why I\u2019m flying down to Liberty Point in the morning. Because we\u2019re making this thing in concert with the Sentinel Telecoms guys. It\u2019s going to be their app. And because they co-developed the infrastructure, there\u2019s a quiet security layer that monitors behavioral patterns without reading content.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cSo Pierce is Big Brother here,\u201d I said.<\/p>

\u201cIt\u2019s going to be his<\/em> app. He isn\u2019t Big Brother unless you ask him to be. And his effort is that he\u2019s throwing people off the app who do illegal shit.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cWhose idea was this thing, Hank?\u201d<\/p>

\u201cMine. I pitched it to Pierce a few months ago. And honestly, it was your ordeal in the UK that inspired it. All over Europe they\u2019re censoring people. Putting them in jail for Facebook posts. It\u2019s such bullshit. We wanted to even the score, and you know how passionate Pierce is about this stuff. So this thing is just about ready to turn on, and when it turns on we\u2019re going to set it loose in Germany first, then in Western Europe, then in China\u2026\u201d<\/p>

\u201cI know another place they need it,\u201d I said.<\/p>

\u201cOh, yeah. Definitely Cuba. By the way, this beer \u2013 this is Diego Maceo\u2019s stuff? It\u2019s pretty good.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cYeah. It\u2019s not bad. Reminds me of Dos Equis a little, but it\u2019s more of a full-bodied taste.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cAnyway,\u201d said Hank, \u201cI don\u2019t know that this app is a massive moneymaker. This is more of a world-changer. All the worst shitholes, they control the internet and stifle speech. We want to give the regular guy a middle finger they can use, whether it\u2019s against the mullahs, the Davos assholes, some commie commissar, whatever.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cI like it,\u201d I said. \u201cI don\u2019t know if Pierce told you, but he\u2019s got some sort of plan he\u2019s putting together to try to change Cuba over. We\u2019re going to see somebody next week about this operation; he didn\u2019t say who.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cDude,\u201d Hank said, and smiled before taking a big pull from his bottle of La Bala.<\/p>

\n
\"Black<\/figure>\n

Refresh with the classic look and bubbly feel of Diego Maceo\u2019s own La Bala Cerveza.<\/em><\/p><\/div>

Hank left for Liberty Point the next morning. While he was in the air, I assumed Pierce called.<\/p>

\u201cHey,\u201d he said, \u201cwe need to put you and Stan, and I guess Trent, and whoever else you think you should bring, on a plane somewhere. Probably be three or four days, say, Wednesday to Sunday of next week.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cAnd where is this somewhere?\u201d I asked.<\/p>

\u201cSingapore,\u201d said Pierce, as though he was talking about Charlotte or Birmingham.<\/p>

\u201cWhy in the hell are we going to Singapore, Pierce?\u201d<\/p>

\u201cAll will be made known in time. Besides, you\u2019re gonna be flying on a Gulfstream 800. If you were going to freakin\u2019 Antarctica, you ought to be pumped to ride on that thing.\u201d<\/p>

He wasn\u2019t wrong, but on the other hand Pierce was asking me to collect my people and fly them almost as far away as it was possible to fly them. I thought that was a little on the obnoxious side.<\/p>

\u201cAnd if I say fuck that, let\u2019s meet whoever we\u2019re going to meet somewhere else, then what?\u201d<\/p>

\u201cJust go with it, Mike. I promise this will be worth the ride.\u201d<\/p>

I didn\u2019t see how, but I also realized that if Pierce wanted us to go to Singapore, it was because Pierce was operating on a far higher level than I was, at least with respect to this Cuba operation. And if he said it would be worth the ride to Singapore, he was probably right.<\/p>

So I told PJ.<\/p>

\u201cHey, honey,\u201d I said, \u201cPierce wants me to get on his Gulfstream 800 jet and fly to Singapore next week. Wanna come?<\/p>

She smiled.<\/p>

\u201cNope. I\u2019m good.\u201d<\/p>

And she kissed me.<\/p>

She didn\u2019t even ask what on earth would make that destination necessary. She trusted that there was a reason I was going, and that was it.<\/p>

And Stan and Trent and Melissa were like kids at a playground over the idea that we got to fly to Singapore on Pierce\u2019s new jet.<\/p>

\u201cThis is going to answer my question, I\u2019ll bet,\u201d said Trent.<\/p>

\u201cWhat\u2019s that?\u201d I asked him.<\/p>

\u201cHow do we get in? My guess is Pierce has got us a Chinaman.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cTrent!\u201d said Melissa. \u201cYou can\u2019t say Chinaman!\u201d<\/p>

\u201cI can\u2019t? Why not? It sounds way cooler than Chinese.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cYou\u2019re supposed to say Asian.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cAsian? Guy could be an Uzbek or Bengali or a Mongolian. What good is that?\u201d<\/p>

\u201cOK,\u201d I said, breaking up the debate over 21st-century\u00a0semantics. \u201cPierce gave me the \u2018all will be made known\u2019 treatment when I asked, but yeah \u2013 I\u2019m assuming we\u2019re going there to see somebody who can get us into Cuba under some sort of friendly cover.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cWonder who it is,\u201d said Stan. \u201cThere aren\u2019t that many people with the wherewithal to pull off a thing like this, much less be Chinese and willing to work with Pierce.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cWhy meet in Singapore, anyway?\u201d asked Trent. \u201cWhy not Hawaii?\u201d<\/p>

I shrugged.<\/p>

\u201cBecause the guy is in Singapore, and you go to him,\u201d said Stan. \u201cThat\u2019s why.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cEven if you\u2019re Pierce?\u201d asked Melissa.<\/p>

\u201cIt\u2019s not\u2026\u201d said Trent, with a suspicious look.<\/p>

\u201cOh, no,\u201d said Stan. \u201cNo way.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cNot who?\u201d That was me.<\/p>

\u201cWell, Simon Lim is in Singapore,\u201d said Stan. \u201cHe would be big enough for this. But that guy is\u2026\u201d<\/p>

\u201cI\u2019d be terrified to get on a plane to see that dude,\u201d said Trent.<\/p>

\u201cWhy?\u201d I asked. \u201cWho is Simon Lim?\u201d<\/p>

\u201cHe\u2019s an oligarch\u2019s oligarch. Grew up literally in the Politburo in Beijing. His dad was one of Mao\u2019s inner circle. Simon came up in ChiCom politics and then he ended up flipping over to the business side. Electronics, energy, shipping. He built a substantial empire, a lot of it shady. At one point several years ago he ran afoul of the leadership and they put him through their six-month re-education thing, where you come out refreshed and you publicly proclaim yourself cured of all wrongthink. He did that and then he ultimately ended up in Singapore, where he owns like half the city.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cThat would make him richer than Pierce,\u201d I said.<\/p>

\u201cOh, no,\u201d said Trent. \u201cBut I\u2019d say this guy is a lot more powerful than Pierce is.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cIt doesn\u2019t matter,\u201d said Stan. \u201cLim is not our guy.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cWhat makes you think he\u2019s not?\u201d<\/p>

\u201cBecause. That cat is way, way too embedded at the top. They have him doing stuff that\u2026 you\u2019d have to have the absolute complete trust of the regime to be anywhere near it.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cLike what?\u201d<\/p>

\u201cLike he\u2019s the guy who runs the shadow fleet of those oil tankers which ship sanctioned oil to China,\u201d said Trent. \u201cThey\u2019re getting hundreds of millions of barrels of oil at deep discounts from places like Iran. There is no way a guy like that would help us pull Cuba out of communism.\u201d<\/p>

But on Wednesday, aboard the Gulfstream over the Atlantic, Pierce sent us a packet of information about the trip and prominently in that packet was proof that Stan and Trent were wrong.<\/p>

Read more New Executive Order Announces New Federal Vaccine Guidelines<\/a><\/p>

Simon Lim was our guy. And that was not what I wanted to find out.<\/p>

\n
\"Vector<\/figure>\n

Pierce\u2019s Gulfstream 800 soars above the Atlantic on its way to Singapore.<\/em><\/p><\/div>

Coming Saturday, August 15: Episode 2 of Scott McKay\u2019s <\/em>The Necessary Men.<\/em><\/p><\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A most wonderful article<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1409,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[93],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1418","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-necessary-men"],"yoast_head":"\nScott McKay\u2019s The Necessary Men \u2014 Episode 1: Nothing Left to Rent - National Logistics Post<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/nationallogisticspost.com\/?p=1418\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Scott McKay\u2019s The Necessary Men \u2014 Episode 1: Nothing Left to Rent - National Logistics Post\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"A most wonderful article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/nationallogisticspost.com\/?p=1418\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"National Logistics Post\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-08-12T06:47:40+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/nationallogisticspost.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/c26e98d6fd9a038e8d4a788b6742c2e4.png\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"300\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"198\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/png\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"54 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/nationallogisticspost.com\\\/?p=1418#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/nationallogisticspost.com\\\/?p=1418\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/nationallogisticspost.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/af6e6ad9b3cf5bfe495dc5541ee6a5cc\"},\"headline\":\"Scott McKay\u2019s The Necessary Men \u2014 Episode 1: Nothing Left to Rent\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-08-12T06:47:40+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/nationallogisticspost.com\\\/?p=1418\"},\"wordCount\":10785,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/nationallogisticspost.com\\\/?p=1418#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/nationallogisticspost.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/08\\\/957581597473aeee1f8dad7061a7eabb.png\",\"articleSection\":[\"The Necessary Men\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/nationallogisticspost.com\\\/?p=1418#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/nationallogisticspost.com\\\/?p=1418\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/nationallogisticspost.com\\\/?p=1418\",\"name\":\"Scott McKay\u2019s The Necessary Men \u2014 Episode 1: Nothing Left to Rent - 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