Insert Family Pictures with Karen 1980-1985

In 1985, I moved to Los Angeles, along with my partner, Dennis Dooley, in an attempt to ditch her; but she showed up a few days later, after driving the route from Portland to Los Angeles non-stop, except for gas.

Dennis, Karen, and myself made a lot of money installing the big dishes, working for several marketing firms.

After both main Retailers landed in jail, I had kept a list of all the customers, so I sent them fliers about service, so I got all the good referral customers. Most of the customers were very wealthy Jewish guys belonging to the big Temple in Encino./p>

When the pirate decoders appeared we made very good money for a while, but it became a cat and mouse game keeping them running, so there were dry spells of no income. Once Hughes and Dishnetwork announced that the little dishes were coming, the business dried up. I continued along putting systems into motels, hotels, and taverns.

When my gallbladder crapped out I was sitting around bored, so I got a job at Harmon Electronics building JBL and Infinity projection TVs as the supervisor.

Karen's two sons were with us on-and-off, in such a manner that they never got far enough into a school system to get the special reading help they needed.

We ended up getting married in Las Vegas.

In 1990, I had over $20,000 in cash from finishing a big project in Westwood, (The Blair House). We tried to purchase the house were living in, but the REIT that owned the place laughed at only having $20,000 to put down.

The Hotel business was booming in Las Vegas; simultaneously Karen's sons were starting to have legal problems in Los Angeles. (Setting a dumpster on fire behind a Safeway store.)

The Early Las Vegas Years 1990-1992

When one of my customers, that commutes from Las Vegas to LA every week mentioned he would sell his house in Las Vegas with $20,000 down, so we checked it out, and purchased it; (on 6558 Bourbon St., 3 bedrooms with a huge pool.)(May 1990).

I was staying in another building of this hotel the night I came to deal with the paperwork for the house.

I was commuting, every other week to LA.. I Lived in an apartment in LA, that fell in during the Northridge earthquake, after I quit commuting. The apartment split with my bedroom still up there, and the other bedroom crashed down to the parking area. It was on the news, even in Las Vegas.

After 2 years of commuting, the business of putting satellite dishes, for room TV, into hotels and motels was getting good in Las Vegas.

Robie Gets Killed

Karen's son Robie, got killed, J-walking, just outside the school crosswalk. He was in a brain dead status for 8 days while the organ vultures tried to get his organs. Eventually Karen gave in, with the stipulation that his organs would go to a kid. She got a letter 2 weeks later stating a 65-year-old man got his heart. She was pissed. The lady that mowed him down only got a ticket for speeding in a school zone. Running over pedestrians was legal then yet.)

Matt, her other son, who was in the kids jail for steeling too many cars, was let out for the day of the funeral.

It was too depressing living around the corner from where Robie was run down for Karen, so we moved again, to 1213 Charmast Lane, very close in to the strip area of Las Vegas, where all my projects were located. She was working as a medical biller for some surgeons.

This house was filled with advantages and disadvantages. The seller scheduled for us to look at the house at 5:00 PM, when the freeway (I-15) is running very slow; well later, it speeds up and gets extremely noisy. The pool was quite a bit smaller, but required less maintenance. The neighborhood is filled with trees, and is in a much nicer area. Both side neighbors were pot heads, and behind us was a office building, so we had some seriously fun parties there, with no noise limitations.

Both daughters were doing good, and the business was running great, so I went to Costa Rica several times.

The Big House Era

Business was running very good now, so when a real nice house became for sale in a much better neighborhood, a few blocks away, I went for it.

Both my daughters wanted to move to the big house in the Scotch 80s neighborhood, with their families, allowing us to easily make the payments.

I was in the business of putting room TV systems into hotels and motels, peaking out at about 10,000 rooms. After Cox Cable purchased Prime Cable, the cable system was completely squared away: so I had begun to lose customers to them and Direct TV, both outfits selling TV to the hotels below my wholesale cost. I built the sports and race book TV systems at the new MGM, as a union worker; then moved to the Stardust to remodel their system from analog to digital.

Karen wanted to get divorced and move up to Washington, so we divorced, agreeing to pay her part of the house equity. We loaded her stuff in a Rider Truck and unloaded it in her dad's garage in Vancouver. She quickly gambled away the money ($80,000) on the stock market.

Two weeks after she was settled in, Matt, her youngest son, got shot trying to extort money from is real dad; 5 shots to the stomach, and it was still considered self defense.

She soon died of complications from smoking herself to death, eventually overdosing on methadone in her bathtub. She was down to 78 pounds, and sucking on oxygen, while still smoking several packs of Vantage 100s a day.

All good things came to an end for me when the FBI raided my office/house, my rental house with my workers living there, and many of the hotels and motels. They confiscated many computers and a lot of satellite gear for their investigation, that they never did return.

The rest of the motels, the FBI guys would pop into a little motel office with four guys wearing identical blue suites and red ties, saying, "...We are investigating this Mr. Winquist, he MIGHT be a criminal; scaring the shit out of them."

I tried to reconstruct the business, retaining the good customers, by removing the gear from the low budget Pakistani guys' motels.

After a year went by, I was charged with 10 counts of mail fraud (that is what they charge you with, if you have not commuted a crime that they have on their books and they want to put you out of business.) Therefore, I spent 2 year at La Tuna Satellite Low in El Paso Texas. on Ft. Bliss.

Texas

My attorney walked mo to jail for $7400. He basically said, "They have spent $700,000 investigating you; therefore you are guilty. I cannot stop the cooperation between the Federal prosecutors and the Federal Judges. It's the way they work."

Latuna Satellite Low is located on an aprons of the huge airstrip on Biggs Army Base, where they had the B-29s during WW-2. Part of the buildings were moved in from the former detention camp for the Germans during WW-2. There were a lot of books in German in the library, and books written in English before and during the war about Germany. I did a lot of reading, and writing by pen, for my books.

The Texans say, "If god were to give the earth and enema, he would stick it in El Paso."

Eventually, I spent 6 months in the halfway house on Industrial Boulevard in Las Vegas. I attempted to reconstruct the business, but it was impossible with the probation people stopping everything I wanted to do, because in their pea-brains, it MIGHT be a crime.

When My dad died, I expected to get a little money, that I would have re-setup the business totally legal with, but the asshole made a trust fund out of the money, for various churches and religious colleges.

End of the Big House

Oh well, life goes on. My neighbor offered to purchase my house at a very good price as the market was just starting to go down, so I took it, and moved into a condominium. (1800 Edmond St, Las Vegas)

I was given an opportunity to sell a lot of the building materials, windows, and fancy oak kitchen cupboards, and so on.

On Halloween, a few weeks later, a friend of mine, that comes over on Halloween so the kids can go trick-or-treating, came to the house and pulled into the driveway. The little girl said, "PAUL'S HOUSE IS GONE!

The last year in Las Vegas

The little condominium and four storage units were full from the move.

2 Years of photos are missing from the various cop's raids on my computers for various reasons.

I got an opportunity to manage a little apartment complex in Hillsboro Oregon for free rent, so I threw away a lot of stuff, sold a lot of stuff, closed the business, and sold a lot of stuff. It was during the transition to digital, so a lot of equipment was becoming worthless. I threw out over $500,000 worth old analog equipment, as I cleaned out the equipment rooms.

Taking on two partners, we started a little computer shop in Hillsboro, but it didn't work out too good.

I started having Catherine Rasmussen as a girlfriend. We enjoy going to listen to music, and to her beach house in Rockaway Beach Oregon. We also do a lot of pleasure driving; I like to take scenery pictures, and she likes to drive.

When you are older than 65, you can go to PSU for free (auditing) so I have continued on with classes in artificial interline, agent based processing, E-book publishing, and Ethics of the Internet.

A Long Ways From Finished

Not running since I moved; am working on rebuilding it on 104.7 FM and the Internet.