“Hi, Chet,” Neary said, and flashed an ID card.
“Hello, Mr. Neary. This is your guest?” Chet asked.
“This is him,” he answered. Neary wrote in the logbook and had me sign in too. He walked to the metal door and ran his ID card through the reader. The door gave a click, and he pulled it open.
We were in a corridor that extended to the right and left. Across from us, arranged end-on to the corridor, were row upon row of steel shelves. They reached almost to the ceiling, like library shelves. But the effect was more warehouse than library, as they were stacked not with books but with large, green filing boxes.
I followed Neary off to the left and around the corner. The floor was laid out like a square doughnut, and the four sides were mostly open space, given over to the rows of metal shelves. The aisles between the shelves were narrow, and as we walked past I saw windows at the other end, with dim views of buildings and airshafts. At each of the four corners was a cluster of offices, and in the central core were bathrooms, a kitchen, a room with copy machines, and access doors to the fire stairs and freight elevators. We passed maybe half a dozen people along the way, mostly young, mostly male, all casually dressed. They all knew Neary and greeted him.
The shelves aside, the floor was nicely fitted out. The carpets were coffee-colored and thick, and the walls were covered in a beige fabric. There was dark wood molding at the baseboards and the cornices. But the place had an abandoned, deserted feel nonetheless, and the ranks of high, metal shelves, stacked boxes, and narrow aisles made me slightly claustrophobic.
“We’ve got this floor and the one above,” Neary explained. “They used to be MWB’s back-office operations. We put in the security out front, pulled out the cubicles, and put in the shelves. Upstairs is set up just the same. Come on, I’ll introduce you to someone.”
“Any particular story you’ve told, about who I am and why I’m here?” I asked.
“I’ve been vague, and I intend to stay that way. Busman’s holiday is all I’ve said. It’s alright. My people are mostly ex-feds—they’re used to not being told shit. And the Parsons people are all accountants—they expect even less.”
Neary headed for one of the corners, and I followed. We walked into a small office that had been stripped down to the picture hooks. All that remained of furniture was a metal desk, two worn chairs in front of it, and a swivel chair behind it. A woman sat in the swivel chair, gazing at a computer screen. Her fingers were poised over the keyboard, and she had a pen between her teeth. She did not look up when we entered.
“Is now good?” Neary asked.
“Give me a sec,” she answered, without moving. She had several windows opened on the screen. A browser was running in one, and she was reading a document displayed in it. She made some notes on a legal pad.
“There,” she said to herself, and swiveled in her chair to face us. She stood and stuck out her hand. “Cheryl Compton,” she said.
Cheryl Compton was an early thirty-something, maybe five feet tall on her tiptoes and one hundred pounds soaking wet. She had café au lait skin and thick, shoulder-length hair the color of dark chocolate. Her face was broad, and her features an attractive mix of African and Asian. Her eyes were large and pitch black, and they flashed with an impatient intelligence, despite the fatigue that lay over them just now. She had a small, square chin and a sharply etched jawline, marred by a little knot of muscle working on one side. Her full lips were pursed. Compton was casually dressed, in gray wool pants and a black sweater. Her only jewelry was a black plastic watch. She pushed a wave of hair behind her ear and sat. We sat too.
“Cheryl joined us about three years ago, from IRS,” Neary began. “And most of her time with Brill has been on this account. Early on, she worked with the Parsons people and the technical guys, setting up the document management system, and now she’s our senior investigator at MWB. And whatever we pay her, it’s probably not enough, because she’s the one who really knows what’s going on around here.” He smiled. Compton rolled her eyes elaborately, but some of the tension went out of her jaw. She turned to me.
“He tells me you’re looking for some background stuff on what we’re doing and how we do it. I can give you the ten-thousand-foot overview, and you can tell me where you want to go from there. I’m assuming you know the basics about MWB.”
“I think so. I’ll call out if you lose me,” I said. She took a deep breath and began.
“Basically, there are three kinds of work going on here.” She ticked them off on her fingers as she spoke. “There’s liquidation analysis, litigation support, and document management. It sounds like consulting gobbledygook, I know, but it actually means something.
“Liquidation analysis is what the Parsons people are mostly engaged in, with some help from us. What they’re doing, essentially, is reconstructing the bank’s balance sheet—on the one hand determining what assets the bank still has, and on the other figuring out what it owes, and to whom. They’ll take you through all the grim details.
“Litigation support is Brill’s responsibility, and it’s just a fancy name for sending documents to people. As you probably know, there are a bunch of criminal proceedings underway against former MWB employees, and more are coming. On top of that, a slew of civil actions are gearing up. That means that every day, day in and day out, the MWB liquidation committee gets requests—orders, really—to produce documents. Task force investigators, the U.S. attorney, defense counsel, civil plaintiffs, you name it—they all want documents—lots of them. If the liquidation committee agrees to the requests—and they don’t usually have much choice in the matter—then we make sure that the orders get filled.” Compton spoke quickly. She’d done this spiel before, and her delivery was practiced. She paused to see if I was still with her. I was.
“Central to these two activities is the third thing we do here: document management. It was the first task we had when we started, and none of the other work can go on without it. When we came on the job, it was like boarding one of those ghost ships in the Bermuda Triangle. You know, where everything looks normal but all the people are missing. Senior management was in jail or on the run, and the people who actually did the work, the traders, operations people, and accountants, had all been let go. And we couldn’t call any of them back, since they were all potential defendants. So we had an empty bank on our hands— a ghost ship. The only things that could tell us what the hell had been going on were the documents they’d left behind.
“But it was a huge mountain of paper, and organized filing was not MWB’s strong suit. To get—and keep—control of the documents we use a set of procedures and a computer system. The procedures are straightforward, even if the work itself isn’t. Every document we find on MWB premises is assigned a unique identification number, and is scanned in to a central documents database. Then, someone reviews it, classifies it, and writes an abstract of its contents, and all that goes into the database too. After that, the physical document goes offsite, to a warehouse out in Jersey we use as a storage center. From then on, any research we or the Parsons people need to do involving that document is done using the document database.” A chiming sound came from her computer, and Compton paused to glance at the screen. She clicked something and continued.
“Say, for example, that Parsons needs to review all the correspondence that took place between MWB and some particular client. Using the system, they can look at it by date, by subject, by department, by a bunch of other criteria—all online. Or say we get a request for documents, maybe from the U.S. attorneys. We use the system to find what they’ve asked for, and we have the guys in the storage center ship the hard copy. And we also use the system to keep track of who has asked for what items, and to record what we send, and where and when we send it.” She paused again, waiting for questions. This time I had some.
“Do only paper documents go into the database? What about e-mail? Or data from MWB’s accounting systems?”
Compton began nodding
before I’d finished my question. “Yep, yep—we use all that stuff. E-mail and any other electronic documents go in the database, the same as paper—only we don’t have to scan them. We use their systems, too—their general ledger, their trading systems, their settlement systems—but that data doesn’t go into the documents database.”
“Is everything that’s supposed to be in there actually on the database at this point?”
“Almost. We’ve got everything from the offices worldwide, but there are some documents from offsite storage that we haven’t gotten to yet. That’s a lot of what you see on the shelves out there.”
“So you’ve got documents going back . . . how long?”
“Nearly thirty years, to when MWB first opened for business.”
“And people need documents going back that far?”
“Well, not so much the feds. They’re focused on more recent stuff, activity within the statute of limitations—the last seven years or so. But Parsons, for the liquidation work, they go back that far.”
“All the work is done here? All the scanning and abstracting and the rest?”
“Yep. It needs to be controlled centrally. Once stuff is on the system, our teams in the overseas branches can access it. We’re all hooked up to a wide area network.”
“And once something’s in there, how do you find it again? Do you need to know the ID number?” Compton grimaced a little at this.
“No. If you knew the number, you could get at it that way, sure, but nobody knows the numbers. Remember I said that part of what we do is classify? We use those classifications to find documents on the database. Every document gets labeled with information about its subject, its date, the person who authored it, and what department they were in, who it was sent to, who got copied on it, its source—meaning where we found it. And a bunch of other tags as well. We can search on any or all of those fields.” Neary cleared his throat.
“Can you give him a demo, Cheryl?” he asked. Compton’s jaw tightened again, and she glanced at her watch.
“I was going to turn him over to Mitch and Bobby for that, if it’s okay,” she said. Neary looked mildly surprised, but nodded.
“No problem,” he said. “They’re in their office?” She nodded. Neary and I got up, and I thanked Compton for her time. She gave me a quick, distracted handshake, and started clearing papers from her desk.
I followed Neary back down the main corridor, to an adjacent corner of the floor. We walked into another office, about the size of Compton’s and nearly as bare, but outfitted with two desks. Two men were sitting at them.
“Mitch, Bobby, sorry to wake you. Cheryl nominated you guys to give a quick demo of the doc system,” Neary said. The two men chuckled and stood to shake hands and introduce themselves.
Bobby Coe was a ruddy, balding guy, somewhere in his late twenties. He was about my height, but stockier, with a round, open face, and large blue eyes behind wire-framed glasses. What little hair he had left was strawberry blond and short. He wore khakis and a red plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up over his beefy, freckled forearms. Neary had said most of his guys were ex-feds, and maybe Coe was, but he looked more like an ex–park ranger.
His office mate, Mitch Vetter, was about the same age as Coe, but shorter, about five foot ten, and not as heavily built. He had dark, wavy hair, worn long in a vain attempt to hide the thinning patch on top. His face was pale and narrow, with thick brows and dark eyes set close around a prominent nose. He had a heavy beard, and his five o’clock shadow was barely lighter than his close-trimmed moustache and goatee. He wore black pants and a dark blue shirt, and he did look like an ex-fed—the kind you’d send to infiltrate a crew of Jersey wiseguys.
“Yeah, Cheryl told us,” Vetter said. His voice was surprisingly high, and he had a heavy New York accent. “Step this way.” Vetter sat down and spun his computer screen toward us. Neary and I pulled up chairs, and Coe came around and perched on the edge of the desk. Vetter had a browser running in a window on his screen.
“Cheryl gave us the basics, so you can cut to the chase, Mitch,” Neary said. Vetter nodded.
“Cool. This is the search engine for our document database, and this is the main query screen,” he explained. “With this you can filter through the whole database to find, for example, all the documents that were generated by the loan department on July 23, 1994.”
His fingers flew over the keyboard as he spoke. He entered search criteria into several labeled fields that appeared on the screen. I could decipher the meanings of some of them, like “document date” and “author,” but others, like “req loc ref,” were gibberish to me.
“This isn’t running on the Internet, is it?” I asked.
“No way,” Coe answered, looking aghast. “It’s running on an intranet we’ve set up. That’s like a private Internet.” Vetter clicked a button labeled “Search,” and almost instantly the results appeared in the form of a list.
“See,” Vetter pointed at the screen. “We got 124 items in all. We show the first twenty on this list. We can pick one and read the abstract.” He highlighted an item and clicked another button. A new window opened, displaying a couple of paragraphs of text. “Or, we can see the original.” He clicked another button and another window opened, this one containing the image of a document on MWB letterhead. It looked like a letter to a client.
“And if we want, we can then go and find any other documents that reference this same client,” Coe said. Vetter demonstrated. The engine came back with 568 items, the first twenty of which were displayed on the screen.
“And if you need to find everything written by a particular person?” I asked.
“No problem,” Vetter said, and he showed me.
“And for all of the items in the database, you keep track of where each one was found?” I asked.
“Yep,” Coe answered. We were all quiet for a while.
“And you also use the system to keep track of who has requested which documents?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah. Everything gets logged—including who made a request, the date they made it, what they asked for, what we sent them in return, and when we sent it,” Coe said.
“What about searches like the ones you just ran?”
“Online queries? Those get logged too—‘everything’ means everything,” Coe said.
“Can you search for documents based on who has accessed them?” Vetter and Coe looked at each other for a while. Finally, Coe spoke.
“If you mean finding every document that, for example, Special Agent John Doe has requested—sure, that’s easy. Like I said, if someone asks us to send something, we record who, what, where, and when on the system, and we can query on those things. If you mean finding everything that, say, I’ve accessed online, that’s doable too, but not as easy. And not everybody could do it. It would mean searching through the log files, and this search engine doesn’t look in those.”
Vetter had swiveled around to look at me with the beginnings of curiosity. He drummed his fingers slowly on the desk, waiting for more questions and wondering. But before I could ask anything else, Neary suggested that we let them get back to work. He got up and thanked them and headed for the door.
Chapter Eight
“Too many questions?” I asked, when we were back in the hallway. Neary nodded.
“Vetter’s antennas were starting to wiggle,” he said.
“Sorry. I liked that system, though. Seems like it could tell me a lot about what I’m interested in. Documents written by Nassouli, documents found in his office, everyone who’s asked to see them.”
“We’ll get there, don’t worry. Besides, I can answer some of those questions, without any system,” Neary said. “You want all the documents found in Nassouli’s office? It’s a real short list. Nothing, not a scrap of paper—not unless you count a yellow sticky pad and a box of tissues.” I must have looked puzzled.
“We think he had himself a little shredding party before he hit the road,” Near
y explained. “Some of the other execs did the same, and it didn’t make Shelly and her crew very happy when they figured it out. Speaking of which, you want to know who’s been asking for Nassouli’s documents? The feds will top that list. Until a few months ago, they were all over anything that had to do with him. They got copies of everything he wrote or was copied on or that made reference to him.”
“And what happened a few months ago?”
Neary shrugged. “I don’t know, exactly. Five, six months ago, it just stopped. No more requests. No more noise about him at all from the feds. And they get a little prickly on the topic. Not that I press.”
“So . . . what, you think they found him?” I asked.
“You never know with those guys,” Neary said, and raised his eyebrows. “Maybe we should call Freddy and ask. He’ll be happy to share. Come on upstairs. You can have a look at the Parsons people, and then we’ll poke around on the system.” I followed him back through the metal door to the reception area and the elevators.
The fourth-floor reception area was identical to the third, except for the guard behind the desk. This one was a heavyset white guy in his middle fifties, with a florid face and reddish hair that was going fast to white.
“Hi, Tim,” Neary said. “He’s with me—signed him in downstairs.” Tim nodded, and Neary opened the metal door with his card key. Four had the same square doughnut layout as three. It had the same forest of shelves and the same abandoned feel, too. I followed Neary to another corner, and another cluster of offices. He gave me some more background as we walked.
“Like Cheryl said, Parsons mainly does the liquidation work. The committee brought them on first thing, even before we got here. They’ve got forty-plus people here in New York, and probably another sixty or seventy in the other offices around the world. The partner running the engagement shows up here for an hour or two every month, and spends most of that time schmoozing the management committee. The real guy in charge is Evan Mills. Sort of an asshole, but a bright guy, once you get past the aging preppy thing.” Neary gave a little laugh. “Hey—you two might have a lot in common. He should be around here somewhere.”
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