Fixers

by Michael M. Thomas

  He chuckled. “Well, I guess that lets out HSBC.” Then he turned serious. “I assure you the money’s clean.”

  “That’s good enough for me.”

  So there’s the proposition. Mankoff wants me to negotiate and execute an arrangement by which $75 million will be made available to the senator’s campaign.

  “And what exactly do you think you’re going to buy with this?” I asked. “You’re sure as hell not going to get any promises in writing.”

  He smiled. “The money will go into the campaign in return for certain policy and personnel understandings.”

  “Such as what?”

  He reached into his pocket, took out a standard three-by-five index card, and handed it to me. Three names were written on it: Harley Winters. Thomas Holloway. Eliza Brewer.

  The first name was instantly recognizable: Harley Winters, former deputy treasury secretary (international affairs) and adviser to presidents, MIT star economist, former provost of a major university, former Time and Forbes cover boy. He’s a “public intellectual” who gets $100,000 a speech, a guy universally known as “the smartest guy in the room, just ask him.” He’s also what influence peddlers value most, he’s what they call “flexible”: finger in the wind 24/7, changes his stance more often than he changes his shirt.

  If Winters is a high-profile type, Holloway’s not one at all. He’s the officer at the New York Fed who oversees the big Wall Street finance houses, including STST. From what I’ve been told, Holloway’s policies are so aligned with Wall Street’s desires that if he left the Fed tomorrow he’d have his pick of $5 million/year employment offers.

  “The deal will be this,” Mankoff explained. “Assuming the senator makes it to the White House with our help, he’ll appoint Winters and Holloway to head up his economics team. Winters in the White House, and Holloway high up at Treasury.”

  This was a no-brainer. Winters and Holloway have a 99.9 percent Wall Street approval rating. They’ve drunk the Kool-Aid. To them America is all about freedom of capital to do whatever the hell it wants without Uncle Sam laying on a finger. Anyone with a reform or prosecutorial agenda is going to have to go around them or through them and they can be counted upon to oppose it or stall it to death.

  “And Eliza Brewer?” The third name had me completely stumped. Not a clue.

  “A very smart securities lawyer. We need to get her a key slot at Justice where she can play backup just in case anything gets past Winters and Holloway.”

  “Like what? Inconvenient criminal prosecutions?”

  “That’s the idea.”

  “I think I dig,” I said, and handed the index card back to him. He tore it into little pieces.

  At this point, Gentle Reader, I know what you’re thinking. If I agree to do this job—and it’s odds-on that I will (I’ll get to that)—and if I pull it off, it’ll be one of the biggest political scams in American history, probably the biggest ever. Corruption at a level never before scaled: Boss Tweed or Teapot Dome with six zeros. I can’t say I ever considered myself hall of fame material in the political corruption department, even though some of our CIA gambits were pretty virtuosic, but then again, there’s always a first time.

  “OK,” I said. “Suppose I sign up. Where do I start?”

  “The guy who’s calling the shots is named Homer Orteig. Old friend of the candidate, from the University of Chicago. You’ll need to get with him. Ideally, the deal you’ll cut will be strictly between you and Orteig. The senator doesn’t even need to know. In fact, it’s probably better if he doesn’t.”

  “And how do I do that?”

  “We’ll figure it out. We have time. Right now it’s early days. You know how it is: people get overexcited. The usual early adopters—Soros and that lot—write checks in order to get on the inside track, just in case. The first quarter money-raising numbers for both Clinton and the senator should be pretty spectacular. The second quarter will most likely show a huge drop-off, and that’s when we should make our move.”

  Mankoff was making a good point. Political enthusiasms are like overnight fevers. The camps of both Clinton and OG are in the throes of that first, fine, careless rapture when everything seems possible and money drops from trees, from $10,000 Hermès handbags and from the pockets of $5,000 Kiton suits. This top-table ecstasy will probably last another month or so. Then people will start to get real, will sit down and calculate the odds—and the money flood will slow down. That’ll be the time to float a tasty $75-million fly under the trout’s nose.

  “OK,” I said, “assume we figure out how to get to the campaign. We’ve been talking about $75 million. Is that my limit?”

  “Consider yourself to have discretion up to $75 million. Beyond that, we’ll need to talk. So there we are. You up for this?”

  I told him I’d let him know within twenty-four hours. There was still stuff I needed to think about. Stuff I didn’t want to talk about with him—ethics-type stuff I thought he’d understand only in theory.

  He slid out of the booth, leaving his usual lousy tip, to which I added $5. He paid the cashier for our breakfast and I followed him out onto Madison Avenue, where his car was waiting.

  “Back to Bach?” I asked. He nodded with all the enthusiasm of a man being led off to the gallows. He has a sprawling old-fashioned house in Woodbridge, Connecticut, on the outskirts of New Haven, where he and his wife Grace go on weekends. She’s a former music librarian he met in Washington during our CIA tour. She can turn the pages for him while he’s learning a new piece, and in return he indulges her passion for decorating. They have two grown sons who live out west—indeed, they’re about to close on a place in Santa Fe near their elder son and his family.

  In Connecticut, Grace gardens and reads decorating magazines, and Mankoff practices the harpsichord. He has three: an original Kirkman from 1787 on which Haydn is said to have played, the others modern-built—on which he takes weekend lessons from a member of the Yale Music School faculty who once taught William F. Buckley. By his own estimation, Mankoff’s not bad. Not great—but not bad.

  “Bach is proving too much for me,” Mankoff lamented as his driver ran around to open the door. “His Three-Part Inventions. I just can’t get certain fingerings.”

  “My sympathies,” I said.

  As he started to climb into the car, he turned back and said quietly, “If we get Orteig on board, and swing this business, and even if we don’t and there’s a crisis, this may be just one of several … let’s call them “diplomatic” missions I’ll be asking you to carry out. You’re someone I can trust, Chauncey, and you know your stuff. There aren’t many of those.”

  “I appreciate that,” I said, adding quickly, “but it’s something I want to think about. I think you understand why. I’ll let you know by Monday.”

  “That’ll be fine,” he said. “Take whatever time you need.” He sounded confident that I’d get on board—and why not? He thinks of us as attached at the hip. He had mentored me at the CIA, made important introductions and godfathered a business that lets me pursue work I like and a lifestyle I enjoy; I owe him. Besides, we were both Skull & Bones, and greater love hath no man, etc. etc.

  I watched his car turn east on 76th Street. And that’s when I had the idea for this diary.

  So there we are. This puts you up to speed as to why Mankoff summoned me to Three Guys two days ago.

  Now all I have to decide is do I do or do I don’t. The decision isn’t as cut-and-dried as I may have made it sound.

  FEBRUARY 19, 2007

  I called Mankoff a couple of hours ago and told him to count me in.

  Gentle Reader, I know what you’re thinking. What about those civic and communitarian virtues in which I was “marinated” by upbringing and education? If I do this, will I ever again be able to look in the eye those portraits and monuments on chapel walls I used to study during dull moments in prayer services? Am I not betraying where I come from them by accepting Mankoff’s assignment?


  The way things are today, 90-plus percent of the electorate don’t think they have a friend in Washington. They’re convinced that the fix is in, that the government is run strictly to promote the interests of the rich and powerful—and they have a point. Provided his message gets out, OG will look and sound to them to be the man to turn the tide: a great leader by, of, and for the people. The man to restore the American Dream. Someone who isn’t all about the money, as one suspects the Clintons are.

  Let’s suppose a crisis comes just as Mankoff predicts, with Wall Street as the eye of the storm. The voters will expect that whoever they elect as president next year will go after “the malefactors of great wealth,” just as FDR did in 1933, and they will be entitled to that expectation. They will want justice and justice is what I will have contrived and connived to deny them. Do I want to do that?

  That’s the question I’ve debated over the past couple of days. I’ve felt like Larry, the character in Animal House played by Tom Hulce, when he is presented with the opportunity to have his way with a young girl he’s gotten drunk at a Delta House toga party. Animal House was my old man’s and my favorite movie; we must have watched it together a dozen times, and I still watch it every year on Pop’s birthday. “Animal House,” he used to say, “provides all the tools a man needs to chop his way through the thicket of modern life.”

  Anyway, if you’re the cultivated soul I consider myself to be writing for, you’ll remember the scene and the moment when two tiny figures pop up on Larry’s shoulders: on one, a devil who exhorts him to fuck the girl, and on the other, an angel who admonishes him, “Don’t you dare!”

  That’s how I felt as I deliberated Mankoff’s deal. On one shoulder was an imp peddling the thrill of the chase, the sly pleasures of reliving Agency days, plus what I feel I owe Mankoff. On the other is an angel arguing for my upbringing and education, the values that my schools claimed to stand for. Underline that word “claimed,” because at Groton, we fifth- and sixth-formers were expected to help out on alumni weekends, and many’s the time I overheard FDR—surely the school’s greatest alumnus—being cursed as a traitor to his class, sometimes by people born after his death, who’d obviously been indoctrinated by the sort of purse-worshipping, Upper East Side Republican parents and grandparents to whom tax rates were the lodestar of existence. Such people constituted my Yale Daily Themes professor’s definition of the “upper crust” as “a bunch of crumbs held together by dough.”

  My father, Groton ’51, wasn’t like that at all. He didn’t seem to care all that much about money, despite the fact that he spent his working hours trying to add to—or at least protect—the wealth of his clients. Like certain of my teachers and housemasters, men my father’s age and younger, he preached that noblesse oblige, looking out for others, was the brightest thread in the Groton fabric, the woof to the warp of “Do unto others …” and that the New Deal was essentially the application of these ideals to the conduct and policies of government.

  It was a kind of civic catechism that we were taught, a lesson in moral citizenship, but today its ruling principles appear to have been relegated to the metaphorical dusty vitrines to which the folks who push the buttons and pull the levers that consign to the wastebasket ideas inconvenient to their self-enriching plans for the nation. I’m talking about ideals like “city on a hill,” “I have a dream,” “Ask not …” and—as I’ve pointed out—almost anything FDR argued for. Pop also saw decent behavior as a practical matter of self-preservation: “Flaunt your advantages long enough, and loudly enough,” he once told me, “and it will occur to someone to come and take them away from you.” The bottom line is that there’s enough residue of this kind of idealistic thinking left in me to cause second thoughts about Mankoff’s proposition.

  People are saying that communitarian democracy is withering away into a kind of oligarchic feudalism in which a tiny fraction of the populace ends up with the power and the goodies. Do I want to further that process? That’s the big question facing me. If I do this job for Mankoff, I’ll have perpetrated a fraud on the people who vote for OG, assuming he gets the nomination—no sure thing—and then wins the White House. Whose urging should I heed: the imp’s or the angel’s?

  Well, I’ve decided to accept his proposition.

  Why? Lots of reasons.

  Number one is that I really don’t fancy the idea of Hillary Clinton as my president. It’s not so much her as the thought of her husband trading on his White House connections—and trade you can be sure he will; look at his record since he left the White House, for everything from cash to women. This country really doesn’t need a First Lecher doing shady deals in the Rose Garden.

  Number two is the opportunity to see whether I’ve still got game. Once you’ve tasted the heady intoxicants of undercover intelligence work, you don’t forget how great it is to be a guardian of big secrets, to know what others don’t, to deploy skills and resources that can alter the fates of people, institutions, even nations. I like my day job, but it’s not exactly blood-stirring. Helping to arrange the funding for a Jane Austen workshop at Oberlin, a named professorship at Berkeley, or an Edward Hopper exhibition in Berlin doesn’t carry the same thrills, chills, and technical satisfaction as blowing up the offshore accounts of some especially vile and genocidal sub-Saharan dictator.

  Number three plays itself. You can’t really call my mission a bribe. It’s really a wager. In a proper bribe, there are few or no contingencies between cup and lip. What I’ll be doing for Mankoff will be like the bets I placed for my old man when he twisted his ankle playing tennis and couldn’t make it to the $20 window in 1975 when we went out to Belmont to watch Seattle Slew complete his Triple Crown. This is no sure thing. The senator has to knock off Hillary in the primaries to get the nomination, and then he has to win the election eighteen months from now. Suppose Mankoff’s got it wrong; suppose a financial crisis doesn’t occur and the anti–Wall Street issue is a nonstarter. The odds on OG getting it done definitely lengthen, whether we’re talking about winning the nomination or beating whoever the GOP puts up in the presidential election. Maybe the Republicans have their own OG lurking in the wings. Or he can get hit by a bus, or turn out to be a closet pedophile, or there’ll be another 9/11.

  So there you have it. If I do Mankoff’s bidding I will be adding a mite of my own to the pandemic of corruption that has afflicted nearly every atom of American public life. If I pass on his offer, I’ll miss out on a chance to remake history. If I don’t pass, I’ll have an exclusive on what will potentially be one of the big game-changing moments in American history, what the chinstrokers in the pundit class will call “an inflection point.” If you have a chance to leave your footprints on the sands of time, my housemaster at Groton used to say, jump with both feet and land hard.

  And finally there’s this: if I don’t take the job, Mankoff will surely find someone else who will. I know this is a lousy reason to pursue a given course of action, but I’m human, aren’t I?

  My plan is to limit myself to a personal account of what I do for Mankoff; who I see, who I deal with, what’s said. No personal stuff unless absolutely essential. Nothing about my friends, my love life such as it may be, my lifestyle, my personal metaphysics, or, except when absolutely necessary, my innermost existential yearnings. Apart from weekends or as the result of exigent circumstances, at the end of every day I’ll set down events while they’re hot and fresh. No backdating, redacting, lily-gilding, pensées d’escalier. Just plain vanilla accounts of planning and negotiations in which I’m involved, meetings at which I’ll have been present as they happened, recorded as accurately as my memory and as soon as is practical.

  All of this is protected by encryption software I’ve installed on this laptop, which itself has no phone, Internet, or Wi-Fi connection. That way it’ll be eyes-only for me—and, of course, depending on what I eventually decide to do with this account, for you, Gentle Reader.

  So off we go, friends. Fasten your seatbelts.


  As the Lone Ranger used to shout, “Hi-yo, Silver: away!”

  That’s “silver.”

  As in thirty pieces of.

  FEBRUARY 20, 2007

  Future readers of this account may need a bit of background on STST.

  The firm was founded in 1903 by Lembert Struthers and Herman Strauss, ambitious young clerks chafing under the yoke of their senior partners at Harriman & Co. and Kuhn Loeb & Co.

  They had a very clear idea of what kind of business they would do, and how they would do it, which they laid down in a series of fourteen precepts. The first and uppermost of these statements of principle was this: “We comply fully with the letter and the spirit of the laws, rules, and ethical principles that govern us … and our clients come first” is the exact wording.

  I have it on good authority that the passage is displayed wherever one turns in STST’s far-flung empire: when the firm’s traders, whether in Prague or Johannesburg, turn on their Bloomberg screens at the beginning of the day, there it is—the first thing they see in the crawl; it’s posted in every conference and waiting room from London to Hong Kong, in every restroom and vault between Las Vegas and São Paulo; you can’t agree to a deal or take a leak without the noble motto hitting you in the eye.

  Let it be said that there are many on the Street who are disinclined to take STST’s pious exhortation of client primacy at face value. Finance capitalism, as it’s called, likes to drape itself in a thick, warming blanket of self-congratulatory tributes to its concern for the customer, but when I listen to some of my clients and read the financial news closely, the more convinced I am that in transaction after transaction after transaction, the STST client who really comes first is STST itself. The firm itself rationalized such outcomes during the height of the ’20s boom, when (as would later come out) it was unloading pretty egregious junk on its customers. Here’s how Struthers put it in his 1927 Christmas letter to the staff: “Our first loyalty is to the client rather than the transaction. Now and then these coalesce, and we can in all honest good faith serve two masters.”