On October 1, 2013, his parents were killed in a plane crash off the coast of Cape Cod. The airplane was a private twin-engine plane that Michael had sent to fly his mother and father to the cape for a family vacation that ended in tragedy. Two months later, after selling his mansion and his parents’ home in Charlestown, Zannick moved to Pulaski, Tennessee. He bought a hundred acres on Highway 31, and within a year, moved into a six-thousand-square-foot home, complete with a man-made lake, swimming pool, and even a zip line through the woods in back. Hooper showed Bo pictures that he’d snapped of the mansion with his drone last month. During construction, Zannick rented a home on Jefferson Street in downtown Pulaski. In his first six months as a resident of Giles County, Zannick formed Z Bank, a new lending institution, with the help of local attorney Butch Renfroe. He also bought several properties along College Street and three thousand acres of farmland off Highway 64 comprising seven different tracts.

Bo reviewed the tracts with Hooper, noticing that the only property Zannick hadn’t bought was Walton Farm.

Zannick was known to be in negotiations with Hoshima Automotive, an up-and-coming Japanese auto manufacturer, to construct and operate a manufacturing plant on fifteen hundred of the contiguous acres on Highway 64. The plant would assemble the Hoshima Family Wagon minivan and a new midsize pickup truck that Hoshima was calling the Bobcat.

The Hoshima deal stalled when, in November of 2014, Michael Zannick was charged with the forcible rape of fifteen-year-old Amanda Burks.

As for family beyond parents, Zannick’s best friend throughout elementary, middle, and high school was a male named Finnegan McElwain Pusser. Finn was born in Dublin, Ireland, and he and his parents moved to Boston when Finn was in the third grade. Three years later, Finn’s mother and father died in a car accident. After their funerals, and at Michael’s urging, the Zannicks adopted the boy.

Finn Pusser graduated with Michael in the Charlestown High class of 1996, but there was no record of him going to any college. He enlisted in the navy in 1997 and received a general discharge in 2003. From 2008 to October 2013, Finn worked exclusively for Michael Zannick in “security,” based on reports from field hands who worked at the house in the Berkshires. When Zannick moved to Pulaski in December 2013, Pusser didn’t come with him. Only when Zannick bought and reopened the Sundowners Club did Pusser move to Pulaski to run the exotic dance club for his adopted brother.

Zannick had no known living relatives other than Pusser. According to Hooper’s extensive review of the yearbooks at both Charlestown High and MIT, Zannick had no college or high school classmates who lived within a hundred miles.

With respect to medical history, Zannick had cleft-lip-repair surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital in 1985. There were no other known surgeries or medical conditions.