Twenty-Three Retirees Paid a Fake Crew Using My Company’s Name. The First Snow Was 40 Days Away

“I’d just like to know when your men are coming back,” the old woman said. “They took my check in August.”

I put down my coffee.

“Ma’am, which men?”

“Your men. Aalto Roofing. It was on the side of their truck. Nice young fellows. They tore off the old shingles, put a blue tarp on, and said they’d be back Monday with the materials.”

“Which Monday?”

“August eleventh,” she said. “I’ve been calling the number on the card. It doesn’t ring anymore.”

Her name was Helvi Korpela. Eighty-two, a widow, in a little house on the north side of Marquette, Michigan. She’d paid fourteen thousand dollars. Most of her savings.

I’m Bjorn Aalto. Fifty, single, Finnish on both sides, like half the Upper Peninsula. My grandfather started Aalto Roofing in 1951 with a ladder and a hammer. Today we’re the biggest roofing company north of Green Bay. Two hundred employees. Sixty million dollars a year.

I never sent anyone to Helvi Korpela’s house.

“Mrs. Korpela,” I said carefully. “I’m coming over right now.”

“Oh, good. I’ll put coffee on.”

I was there in fifteen minutes. The blue tarp was snapping in the wind off Lake Superior. Water stains ran down her kitchen ceiling. She’d put pots on the floor.

She handed me a business card. My logo. My company name. A phone number that wasn’t ours.

“I told the girls at church about it,” she said. “So they’d know who to call.”

My stomach dropped.

“How many of the girls at church called them, Mrs. Korpela?”

She thought about it, counting on her fingers.

“Twenty-two,” she said.