About Dick Gentry

Dick Gentry's website

Dick Gentry is a former seagoing Marine and an award-winning writer who has worked in newspapers and magazines across America and one foreign country. His career in journalism spans more than 40 years.
        Gentry and his wife Martha, a registered nurse, live in the Georgia mountains north of Atlanta.
         Born in Tupelo, Mississippi, he began his professional career in 1962 as sports editor of the Artesia Daily Press in New Mexico. This was right after the University of Mississippi barred the enrollment of controversial civil rights champion James Meredith. The riot there has been called the first American insurrection since the Civil War. Gentry served as editor of the school’s daily newspaper in the summer of 1962 just before the battle began. He was a first-hand witness to the rebellion. A revealing interview with Meredith recently is also in the book.
         He was executive editor of The Birmingham Business Journal in the mid-1990s. In between, he has been city editor of the Ocala Star-Banner in Florida, a staff writer for the Spokane Daily Chronicle in Washington State, executive editor of Hawaii Business Magazine, and editor of the Atlanta Business Chronicle and the San Diego Business Journal. He graduated from Eastern Washington University in 1980.
        During recovery from a stress-related illness in Texas while working for the Beaumont Journal in the early 1970s, he penned an impulsive letter to the managing director of the only newspaper in a tiny, Caribbean nation. To his surprise, he received a reply. Thus began the adventure of a lifetime in The Cayman Islands, recorded in this book, At the Foot of the Southern Cross.

The Cayman Islands are very
relevant in today’s turbulent times

      This book is much more than the misadventures of a new publisher of the country’s only newspaper. The economy of The Cayman Islands depends on both tourism and offshore banking. Most Americans are as confused about tax havens as the newly landed Gentry was when he stepped ashore. But he learned quickly.

It is an invisible world for those of us who do not have huge bank accounts and/or portfolios worth millions. The population of Cayman has doubled since the author first arrived.

Dick and Martha in Grand Cayman. Debris from terrible Hurricane Ivan still litters the south shore

BUY NOW! $6.99 USD (approx.) or £4.69 GBP

Today, the Caymans began the new millennium with a population approaching 34,000, and its offshore banks and financial industries are also booming. There are more than 550 banks, almost 2,500 mutual funds and in excess of 500 insurance companies registered or licensed in The Cayman Islands. Deposits for them may reach as much as $1 trillion.
The number of non-resident companies registered by individuals for whatever purpose—secret bank accounts hidden from spouses, family members and creditors; trust funds; tax evasion—is not publicized, but must number in the hundreds of thousands. An estimated 3,000 new offshore companies are registered per year. In recent years, more regulations have been added to avoid fraud and suspicious transactions.
      In today’s collapsing economies around the world, Gentry expects the tax havens to flourish.
      There are still no taxes today on income or profits, capital or wealth, or capital gains. There is little official communication with the taxing authorities of other nations, although concern that dirty money from the increasing drug trade and resulting money laundering in the 1980s would find its way into George Town and spoil a good thing, compelled the government to sign a treaty in 1986 with America and Britain that they would assist each other in the investigation, prosecution and suppression of criminal offences.
      It’s uncertain how much the government combats the flow of illegal money because the nation is so secretive about its offshore industry. It’s illegal for any bank employee to disclose any information about any client’s private account.
       “Much of the misconception about the islands’ financial industry is due to a lack of information about the effort by the government and private sector to ensure we protect our financial industry from criminal misuse,” Cayman Islands Financial Secretary George McCarthy told a USA Today writer in 1997. By mid-2002, in an effort to combat money laundering, the government began requiring banks and other financial companies to keep information on file on all of their customers and clients.
       Tourists see almost none of this banking activity, since the offshore business is literally that—somewhere else, listed only as computer data in some out-of-the-way bank office in George Town. You can’t walk into an offshore bank in George Town and expect to cash a check.
        And if you ask the average American today what he knows about The Cayman Islands, he or she will still answer, if they recognize the name, “Isn’t that the place where the scuba divers feed the stingrays by hand?” The history of the West Indies, as you will read, is a sad trail of blood and slavery.
        Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee visited George Town in February 2008 to make a speech for the Young Caymanian Leadership Awards. Huckabee had complained during his campaign about the “$12 trillion” packed in offshore tax havens like the Cayman Islands, which he called a burden on the American economy. He also joked before he left the U.S., “I may go down there and visit one of those post office boxes where some of the other candidates have their money…”
      But, overall, The Cayman Islands, all three of them, is a beautiful small nation. The people are friendly and welcoming today. Cruise ships call every week, jets load and unload hundreds of passengers every week. Lying on Seven-Mile beach with Caribbean sunshine baking your bones is a perfect way to heal the soul…
        
     The young Gentrys ran afoul of the law only once. Importing animals of any kind is strictly prohibited by law. So how did the Gentry’s beloved cat “Smokey” end up alive and well one day placidly overlooking the beautiful sea from a rock on the ironshore? It’s a story worthy of agent James Bond. Of course it’s entirely fiction.

Go to Dick Gentry's website.

Links

eSites-UK - Web Design & Hosting, Search Engine Optimisation, e-Commerce Sites

eBooks-UK - longest established UK eBook publishers;
the leading publishers of quality eBooks

If you would like a link here, please email * us.

*remove nodamnspam for actual email address
- (this deters spammers who trawl websites for email addresses)

We would be very grateful for a reciprocal link back.

Please link to:

eBooks-UK

http://www.ebooks-uk.com/

Please feel free to copy a logo below for the link (right-click and 'Save as')

Note: while you may copy the eBooks-UK graphic and place it on your own site, it is also possible to link directly to the image on eBooks-UK so that your page(s) will display the correct graphic in the event that it ever changes.

Copy onto your webpage the following code for the above graphic:

<A HREF="http://www.ebooks-uk.com" TARGET="_top">
<IMG SRC="http://www.ebooks-uk.com/images/ebooks_logo2.jpg" WIDTH="126" HEIGHT="86" BORDER="0" ALT="eBooks-UK logo"></A>

For the thumbnail above logo, copy the following code:

<A HREF="http://www.ebooks-uk.com" TARGET="_top">
<IMG SRC="http://www.ebooks-uk.com/images/ebooks_logo_thn.jpg" WIDTH="75" HEIGHT="51" BORDER="0" ALT="eBooks-UK logo"></A>