Fixers

by Michael M. Thomas

  I must say that I’m struck by my own moral inconsistency. One day I’m this, the next I’m that: like a little kid, I don’t seem to know what I want. I worry that all the wheeling and dealing that surrounds me might be contagious. I fear I’ve turned out to be the sort of person that my father, that Groton, that Yale all tried to ensure that I would never become.

  Is there such a thing as a moral vocation? If you went to Groton, you were certainly taught to think so. How much and for how long should we be bound by what we learned in the classroom or at chapel? Every day, I find it harder and harder to rationalize why I acceded so readily to Mankoff. Why I went for it so quickly, so thoughtlessly. Did I let myself get too much in the moment, as the saying goes? I realize that Mankoff casts a kind of spell on me. He was my senior at Bones; my commander in the CIA; my mentor and sponsor in the world I’ve tried to make for myself; in a way, he created the professional Chauncey. How could I have turned him down?

  And yet … and yet …

  I can’t get my lunch last fall with my Williamstown friend out of my mind. When Mankoff approached me, I never really appreciated the extent of the damage this crisis would cause among ordinary people. The lure of the game was too compelling—the old CIA stuff, all that. The sort of people I care about have had their lives wrecked, while the sort I tend to despise are better off than ever. There’s something hideous and ugly about that state of affairs, and in a way I suppose I’m fractionally responsible.

  So how guilty should I feel?

  Not as much as many, more than some. I tell myself that most people on the Street or in Washington have euthanized the better angels of their nature, while I have merely anesthetized mine. So what happens when virtue awakes?

  There’s no knowing how all of this is going to end up. Maybe things will work out; maybe there’ll be blood in the streets.

  On which jolly note I’ll close.

  JANUARY 4, 2010

  Toward the end of the day, Lucia called to ask whether I’d be free for a New Year’s drink. We met at P.J. Clarke’s in the World Financial Center, a few blocks west of STST’s new headquarters. She sounded pretty fraught.

  I figured she had office drama on her mind, probably some new Rosenweis offense she needed to vent about. At least she’s put her concerns about Mankoff aside, reporting that the boss seems in reasonably good fettle, with few reminders of the slack performance he displayed at times late last year.

  This has been a tough two months for Lucia. The firm is taking fire from all quadrants and it’s her responsibility to mount both defense and counterattack, working from here and from her Washington hotel. And that’s just on the business end of her life. Who knows what’s happening on the home front? I get the definite feeling that all’s not hunky-dory on West 72nd Street.

  It turned out that what’s especially driving her nuts now is a flap about aluminum warehouses for storing the stuff, not built of it.

  “Aluminum warehouses?” I asked. “For a bank?”

  It turns out that STST is buying a bunch of aluminum warehouses in the Midwest. Because of the way the market for the vital metal works, STST will be able to control day-to-day prices by limiting the amount of physical metal released into the market at a given time. In other words, monopoly pricing power, worthy of a Thomas Nast cartoon. Naturally, it will fall to Lucia and her people to explain to this transaction to the public, no easy task when the firm’s in an unfortunate position: anything STST does that looks like the slightest departure from “normal” lines of business is regarded as criminal.

  JANUARY 9, 2010

  Bad, sad news. The Warrior is dead. He was up in Vermont staying with a daughter and her family and went out alone for some cross-country skiing yesterday; bad idea when you’re coming up on 90 and it’s starting to get dark. The San Calisto consensus is that the old boy got the sort of end he would have wanted. Or, in the view of the Ancient Mariner, deserved: “The old fool! Who goes cross-country skiing at his age?”

  His family is planning a memorial service in ten days—the usual: Upper East Side church, followed by a reception at a private club a couple blocks away—but if it were my call, I’d stage a Viking funeral, a flaming pyre floating down the East River.

  It’s hard to escape the feeling that the Warrior’s death marks the last hurrah of another era, a whole other set of values. He would never have blown his own horn, but when he wasn’t around, the San Calisto regulars used to boast that the Warrior was the only STST partner ever known to have turned down a client who wanted to take over an Ohio steel company. It was the sort of deal that promised huge fees and a lot of publicity, but the Warrior was concerned about what it might do to the target company’s community—plants shut down, jobs eliminated. And he refused to handle. Another firm took on the assignment, booked the fat fees, and in due course the plants shut down and the jobs were eliminated, and Wall Street had claimed the life of another community. Well, he’s gone now, and in time the others in San Calisto will follow, and then who will be left to light the way back into the past?

  JANUARY 19, 2010

  The Warrior’s memorial service was held at St. James’s, the Madison Avenue church where my old man sent me to Sunday school, although he himself only darkened its pews for weddings and funerals.

  The Warrior’s decorations were arranged on the American flag draped over the coffin. On the cover of the order of service was an old photograph of the man—he must have been in his early twenties then—standing by the nose of a vintage jet on an airstrip that I reckoned must have been somewhere in Korea. Under the photograph was printed, simply: “Roger Farnsworth Garson, 1928–2010.”

  For the hour the service took, it was as if I’d been fed into a time warp, as if I’d been transported back into the world I grew up in. The hymns and readings were familiar. There were two eulogies, both touching sentiments and standards no longer much honored. When I left the church, it was with brimming eyes. Fortunately, I’d thought to bring a handkerchief.

  The second eulogy was given by the Warrior’s eldest son, a man in his fifties, a chaplain at the Air Force Academy, wearing a dog collar with his dress blues, a light-colonel’s oak leaves on his shoulders. He spoke movingly about his father, and what he’d meant to his family, his schools, his comrades in arms, the philanthropies to which he’d devoted time and money, and the business world in which he’d made such a success and enjoyed such a fine reputation. And then he said that he wanted to read a passage that he had for some years imagined would fit his father’s end, whenever that came. It turned out be the famous passage from Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress about the death of Mr. Valiant-for-Truth. I had a housemaster at boarding school who read this passage to us at least once a term. As a boy, I always found it moving, but this time, in St. James’s, read in a fine, practiced voice from the pulpit, it nearly tore me in half.

  When he understood (he was about to die), he called for his friends … and said, I am going to my Father’s; and though with great difficulty I have got hither, yet now I do not repent me of all the trouble I have been at to arrive where I am. My sword I give to him that shall succeed me in my pilgrimage, and my courage and skill to him that can get it. My marks and scars I carry with me, to be a witness for me that I have fought His battles who will now be my rewarder. When the day that he must go hence was come, many accompanied him to the river-side, into which as he went, he said, “Death, where is thy sting?” And as he went down deeper, he said, “Grave, where is thy victory?” So he passed over, and all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side.

  After that, the service was a bit of a blur. For a recessional hymn, instead of “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” the organ roared to life with the familiar strains of the Air Force hymn, and with lusty ill-tuned voices and hardly a dry eye, we sent our revered friend off into the wild blue yonder.

  After passing through the receiving line, I decided to make tracks. Walking to the subway, I checked my BlackBerry, and learned that OG made yet a
nother speech today indicating a harder-line stance toward Wall Street.

  Some things never change, do they?

  JANUARY 22, 2010

  Yesterday the Supreme Court rendered its decision on the Citizens United case, the one that has Arthur Han in such a swivet. Basically, the Court has ruled exactly what Artie feared: that money is speech, and that corporations have the same legal standing as people and the same First Amendment rights of free speech. They can therefore make political contributions virtually without limit.

  One hates to think of the rich idiots this decision will empower. There are a couple of upmarket thugs from the Midwest named Donald and Douglas Dreck who have been pouring a ton of inherited right-wing money into politics. Citizens United should have those two licking their lips.

  Corruption should be harder work than this.

  FEBRUARY 15, 2010

  Artie Han has returned from the Mysterious East, and we got together for lunch at Le Veau d’Or.

  The place wasn’t crowded. Three tables of “Olde New Yorke” types, a young couple billing and cooing in the back corner, an elderly man alone with a formidable martini at a banquette under the famous painting of a sleeping calf (Le veau dort. Get it?). That’s something else that I like about the Veau; it’s one of the few places in the city where one can comfortably dine by oneself.

  Artie looked like he’d lost his best friend, as well as his parents and his dog. “I’m sorry about Citizens United,” I said, patting him on the shoulder.

  “No worse than I expected from this Court.”

  It seems that he has a new jurisprudential bone to gnaw on: ACA, which stands for “Affordable Care Act,” the complex universal health-care plan on which, in my opinion, OG has pissed away a fair piece—if not most—of the political capital with which he came into office. Compared to ACA, the offering documents on Wall Street deals are models of transparency. Artie’s read the legislation, all nine million pages, and worries that, as drafted, it contains a real Achilles’ heel: four little words that some clever lawyer for the bad guys may seize on as a basis for judicial nullification.

  “And those four words are?” I asked.

  “Established by the state, quote unquote,” he replied. He went on to explain, between bites of celery remoulade, the damage this phrase, literally applied, might do. I won’t bore you with that. Suffice it to say that Artie sees sinister forces at work.

  “It’d be easy,” he said, “the way Washington works nowadays, to pay off a couple of staffers with drafting responsibility to sneak the four little words into the final version and see that they stay there.”

  For the balance of lunch, our conversation centered on the seminar course in corruption in American politics that Artie is teaching in the spring semester, centering on the work of a young Fordham professor with the astonishing name of Zephyr Teachout. She published some of her research in the Cornell Law Journal last year, and Artie says it’s original and terrific. He’s been in touch with Teachout, given her his notes to use for the book into which she’s expanding her Cornell article, and hopes to get her to speak to his seminar. Of course, if Artie wants someone who understands corruption from the inside to address his class, maybe he should sign me up as a guest lecturer.

  “It’s really unbelievable what’s going on in this country,” Artie went on. “Although not surprising if you look at the record. You realize, don’t you, Chauncey, that what we’re seeing in this country’s politics right now is the endgame of a slow-motion coup that started in 1971. I trust you’re aware of the so-called Powell Memorandum?”

  I shook my head. “Never heard of it.”

  Artie explained. Lewis Powell was a big-time corporate lawyer, principally for Big Tobacco, who wrote a memorandum to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in 1971, advocating a forceful pushback on many fronts against the leftist radicalism that he saw as threatening to overthrow the free enterprise system: unions, college faculties, a wide range of do-good organizations, and northeastern and west coast congressional Democrats.

  Powell’s ideas took hold, principal among them the one that Reagan made gospel: that government is the enemy of democracy. As Artie puts it, “Powell can be considered the grandfather of our present deplorable condition of government by plutocracy.”

  He shook his head at this. “Funny,” he said. “I often think he would be as dismayed as you and I are at how his grand scheme has turned out. Not long after Powell wrote his memorandum, Nixon appointed him to the Supreme Court, where he turned out to be surprisingly moderate.”

  “So what would you do about it if you were king?” I asked.

  “There’s only one solution.”

  “Which is?”

  “Fight fire with fire. Someone with the resources and the willingness to take on, say, the Dreck brothers. Financial civil war, if you will, with good big money pitted against bad big money. Find someone who recognizes what people like the Drecks are doing to this country and is rich enough to go toe-to-toe and head-to-head with them.”

  “That’s a lot of money to go up against,” I commented. The recent Forbes list, after all, puts the Dreck brothers’ combined net worth at $30-odd billion. So who do you send into the ring against that level of political purchasing power? Bill Gates or Merlin Gerrett? Neither is known to be political. George Soros and the mayor of New York seem likelier candidates.

  Artie and I played a few rounds of “Fantasy Billionaires,” and then it was time to go. He’ll be busy with his new seminar, and I have to go to Seattle and Honolulu on client business, so we probably won’t see each other until his party next month. I’m looking forward to it. I’ve read up on Bianca Longstreth, and I’m intrigued.

  FEBRUARY 16, 2010

  Had to go over to STST this morning to see Mankoff about his Yale project. Lucia’s back to worrying about him, so I was alert for symptoms of mental slippage, but he seemed OK. He told me that the word has gotten out that STST’s 2009 bonuses, due to be paid out in a few weeks, will be right up there at pre-crash levels, so everyone at the firm is alight with joy. They’ll be smiling in Gerrett country, too: with STST stock roaring along at $169, the warrants he extracted from Mankoff are a couple of billion dollars in the money.

  Oh, and there’s been an entertaining development. Rosenweis has gone all English on us. He’s taken a flat in the hyper-exclusive West End apartment house called simply “Albany” (never but never “the Albany,” except by low-rent ignoramuses who also say things like “We’re staying at the Claridge,” meaning Claridges, the famous Brook Street hotel). Lucia says it’s tarted up as if Lady Bracknell were expected for tea at any moment, accoutered at vast expense with furniture from Mallett, a Munnings racing painting over the mantel, portraits of other peoples’ ancestors and estates scattered throughout, and a proper central casting English butler. Just like a Ralph Lauren store, in other words.

  He’s taken up shooting: paid £200K for a matched pair of 1947 Purdey 12-bore shotguns hand-tooled for a belted earl, signed up for lessons at the Holland & Holland shooting school, and this coming August has “taken” a week at Biddick Hall, the fabled estate near Durham, which the cognoscenti consider about the best grouse shooting in the UK.

  He’s pestering Lucia to use her family connections to get him into White’s, the paragon of London men’s clubs on which the Weir is patterned. The next thing you know, he’ll be asking Lucia if she can arrange a royal warrant. I can just see it: “By appointment to Her Majesty the Queen, purveyor of junk bonds.”

  When I asked how this unfortunate development had come about, it seems that over Martin Luther King weekend in Palm Beach, the Rosenweises hooked up with the Duke of Sunderland (known to his friends as “Woody,” as in Marquess of Woodbury, His Grace’s second title), the sort of fellow who appears at royal occasions draped in scarlet velvet and ermine and carrying a mace, or a rod which he uses to dowse for rich Americans with opulent guest rooms in Palm Beach and Newport and consulting fees and company directorships to dish o
ut. Lucia says he’s right out of P. G. Wodehouse and would be at home at the Drones Club.

  So powerful is the infatuation that His Grace has become STST’s first “house peer.” Lucia was summoned to Rosenweis’s office last week to meet the duke, and was instructed, “Woody here’s going to be consulting to our International Advisory Board, opening the right doors in London, that sort of thing, and I’ve assured him of our full support.”

  “Just out of curiosity,” I asked Lucia, “what are the right doors in London nowadays?” I hear from my UK contacts that an entire cottage industry has grown up to service the lifestyle requirements of Russian, Middle Eastern, and Chinese billionaires, selling powder-room-quality Dufy paintings at Cézanne prices and arranging choice tables at restaurants like the Ivy. No one, after all, pants after money with the desperate enthusiasm of the English. They’re more avid for cash than the Clintons.

  I wished Lucia good luck with His Grace. What else was there to say?

  MARCH 7, 2010

  I’m still a couple of weeks away from meeting Bianca Longstreth, but she’s been on my mind more than I care to admit.

  I Googled her right after Artie told me about her, and on the basis of her looks alone, I’m interested. “Aristocratic” was the first adjective that lit up in my mind. She has what I think of as Lampedusa looks: smoldering yet refined, aloof yet passionate. Dark eyes, a great Italian nose, a very direct gaze. She’s forty-six, just three years younger than me, and divides her time between Manhattan and Los Angeles. She and her twin brother Claudio (someone in the family clearly felt strongly about Shakespeare) run a TV/film production company called Gemelli (Italian for “twins”!). Its biggest hit so far has been Bad People, which, in its five seasons on HBO, garnered enough Emmys and Golden Globes to sink an aircraft carrier and gave birth to a couple of moderately successful spinoffs. They also wrote the script for a new animated version of Wind in the Willows, which was nominated for a major Oscar and won a few minor ones. In the last couple of years they’ve worked on everything from Cirque du Soleil to theme parks, and there seems to be more to come.