“I’ve heard about internet theft or people stealing your identity but this guy came several times to my place, followed my cookery courses, read all my recipes off the website and, instead of going home and copying me or, better, being inspired by me to do his own thing, he goes home and tries to BECOME me.....and I don’t even get a credit”.

Jean-Marc was striding around his lawyer’s Paris office mildly upset at the news that “legally” there was practically nothing he could do except take out a lawsuit in the United States which would cost a small fortune .... in fact a large fortune if one takes into account the millions that the “Captain Marco” brand was generating around the world and the expensive lawyers they could therefore afford.

“Why isn’t there a rights society for this kind of thing?” asked Jean-Marc thinking about the tiny royalty cheques he still received each year from the worldwide airplay of the songs he had written with Martin all those years before.

During Jean-Marc’s return journey from the West Indies, his lawyer Gérald had been doing some investigating and it transpired that the Captain Marco Gourmet Delights empire was indeed owned by a certain Charles Vinneker Kloch, one of Jean-Marc’s (now) “ex-acquaintances”. The investigation had been very complicated because Kloch had obviously gone to tremendous lengths to disguise his involvement in the business, indeed Jean-Marc’s own name appeared on a number of the legal papers and public company records however the false addresses and string of PO Box numbers made the whole thing look very flimsy.

Gérald actually had been very lucky, through his contacts in Hollywood he had managed to get the phone number of the on-screen TV “Captain Marco” who was actually called Wojciech Kedersky, a (previously and soon to be again) out of work actor of Polish origin. Some gentle persuasion over the phone (“liabilities for debt, possible criminal action for usurping another person’s identity” ) had been sufficient for Gérald to get the name “Charles Vinneker Kloch”.

Kloch is the kind of charismatic acquaintance who persists in cropping up throughout one’s life, mostly when it’s highly inconvenient. He claimed to be of Czech origin, he had mostly lived in the US but his perfect English had a very definite Australian twang to it. His big “pitch” and dinner party “act”, always delivered with great charm, was “The Creditors’ Scenario”.

Kloch’s Creditors’ Scenario is a simple distillation of the American dream. The hero in the story buys a Coke, he sells the Coke for a small profit but manages to get the bottle back (for the deposit), the profit enables him to buy another Coke and a bag of peanuts..... and so on....and so forth....from deal to deal using the ficticious unpaid debt as collateral and the turnover for credibility** .... until he gets to the million dollar deal when he has sex with his girlfriend the day before signing the contract (“the only time Mohammed Ali ever lost a boxing match”) and the whole house of cards falls down...and he moves onto the next town with the creditors from the previous debacle following hot on his heals. And so on and so forth until the phone company, the biggest creditor, finally catch up with him.

The biggest flaw in this scenario, always delivered with such panache that the discrepancies are not always easy to see, is quite simply that most of today's trade is (still) based upon a human contact and loyalty factor that cannot possibly enter into the spreadsheet calculations of the god-dollar worshippers. The internet has not changed this “mystery” element in exchange between humankind, on the contrary it is re-enforced.

So Charles Vinneker Kloch had found, in Jean-Marc, something which he didn’t have himself: that unknown factor which separates you from the masses, that spark and inspiration which could be transformed into real money if properly handled, that respect, loyalty and passion for cooking and making others happy which transcended all consideration for profit.

Kloch could steal it all and all the profits were his.

** in volume 2, you will find out how Charles Kloch sold the Creditors Scenario to Bill Gates who transformed it into something called Microsoft Excel, computer software which deforms reality, puts human beings in little boxes, and today governs the lives, directly or indirectly, of several billion humans on our planet