The couple traveled abroad constantly, and they planned to sponsor a home for 12 children at an orphanage in India. There were also the Lexus and the zippy single-engine airplane, a Cessna 400, which he’d never tried to fly. The couple lived in a three-bedroom in Fall River, north of Halifax, a rich suburb only recently carved out of a forest near a long dark lake Cotten owned a third home in Kelowna, in British Columbia’s wine country a fourth in Calgary and 14 rental properties in Nova Scotia, including, in Bedford, every house on a dead-end street. He cleared trees and built a house, though he had no apparent plans to move in. One of those bay islands-four acres of pine encircled by black sand-Cotten purchased that summer. His name was Gerald Cotten, and he went by Gerry his girlfriend was a property manager named Jennifer Robertson, or Jen her two Chihuahuas, who liked to sun themselves on the deck as the Gulliver negotiated the islands and shoals of Mahone Bay, were Nitro and Gully. Over several dozen hours of sailing lessons, the yacht dealer learned a few things about his customer. He named his boat the Gulliver, after the traveler who trusted himself to the mercy of the waves and swam as fortune directed him. “I love electric.” The whole thing would cost $600,000, but expense never came up-only safety. When offered an electric motor for the life raft, the smiling boy gestured to his Tesla in the marina’s parking lot.
They settled on a customized Jeanneau 51 with a pink and cream interior: three cabins, a dining area for six, a dishwasher, a gas stove, a washer and dryer, an en suite bathroom with standing shower, and a swim platform with teak battens. That would require an extra fuel tank, the salesman explained, and a desalination system for drinking water. This summer day, however, he was dead serious. It was difficult to imagine that this particular trait was contrived, but later, after it was revealed that nearly everything about him was a work of pure contrivance, you had to wonder whether the incessant smiling was just another part of the act. It put strangers at ease it made him seem lighthearted.
Most conspicuous was the odd way that the young man always seemed to be smiling. They struck the yacht salesman as a couple you’d less likely see at Scaramouche than in a Walmart parking lot. He was accompanied by a girlfriend who drove her own Jeep.
#CX PROGRAMMER CONTADOR SKIN#
He wore a wrinkled golf shirt, cargo shorts, and beat-up Birkenstocks, and he was obscenely young, with sandy hair and pale skin that appeared not to have seen sunlight since puberty. Its clients tended to be surgeons and litigators and C-suiters who travel from Toronto and Paris and Hawaii to summer in Nova Scotia their wives wear silks and Manolos and perfect fingernails that cost $300 yesterday at the salon.
Sunnybrook is the largest yacht brokerage on Canada’s east coast. The smiling boy visited Sunnybrook Yachts in the summer of 2017, after the value of Bitcoin had reached an all-time high, having tripled in five months.