I downloaded the Lompoc Visiting Regulations. Guests, I learned, are authorized to enter the facility with up to twenty dollars in quarters—more than enough to fund a foosball face-off with the Shiller from Manila. (Any spare change, I decided, would be used to buy vanilla lattes from the prison’s celebrated vending machines.)
I was under no illusions about winning. If I couldn’t outmaneuver Cesar on the Belvedere table, I sure as hell couldn’t take him in Lompoc, where I think it’s safe to assume he had tons of time to train.
As it turned out, my prep work was moot. While plotting out the showdown, I discovered that the Bureau of Prisons only furnishes foosball tables in Texas and Colorado. More consequentially, a one-word update, pulled from the BOP website, derailed any and all scenarios of jailhouse retribution.
PIZZA AND SPEARS
“RELEASED.”
According to a federal “inmate locator” launched in the midst of my search, Cesar had rejoined the civilian population on May 6, 2005. And while his liberty was conditional—a probation officer would be monitoring him for another five years—the reaction of my family was not.
“Whoa. Game changer,” Max said when I told him Cesar was out on parole. “Let’s prank him. We can call up and order a dozen pizzas sent to his house.”
Françoise vetoed the idea. “Hors de question! He’s a convicted felon. Who knows what else is on his wrapping sheet.”
“It’s called a rap sheet, Mom. And he wouldn’t know the pizzas came from us. My computer has a speech synthesizer that can change Dad’s voice into a girl or a robot.”
I let Max down gently. “Sorry, kiddo. Payback by pizza is not an option.”
“Do you know how the Warlpiri at Yuendumu would deal with someone like Cesar?” Françoise said. “They’d spear him.”
“Cool,” said Max. “You have that spear-thrower thing on your desk. I’ll go get it.”
“Non!” Françoise said forbiddingly. “No pizza. No spearing.”
In the weeks and months following the news of Cesar’s liberation, I stockpiled dozens of revenge scenarios, not all of which required props. Max’s headmaster, a movie buff professionally mandated to defang bullies, suggested a streamlined response requiring neither pie-shaped carbohydrates nor Aboriginal weaponry.
“Have you considered taking your cue from the guy in Diner?” he said.
“I’m listening.”
“Whenever the guy in Diner spots someone who picked on him at school, he walks over and—bam!—coldcocks him. The guy then ticks the bully’s name off a mental checklist and goes about his business.”
I needed no help when it came to revenge fantasies. I had generated plenty all on my own. The most elaborate involved luring Cesar into a karaoke bar to reenact the flogging scene from Jesus Christ Superstar. Except in my adaptation of the musical, Cesar would play the title role and I’d be the one holding the whip.
Karaoke comeuppance, like spearing, prison-camp foosball, and payback by pizza, provided diversion from the substance of my inquiry, but I never for a moment considered taking direct action against the ex-convict I had once roomed with in Switzerland.
Françoise’s Aboriginal spear thrower.
TRUE LIES
What prevented me from satisfying the retaliatory impulses that had been roiling inside me since 1971? In a word? Risk. What did I know about taking on a felon? Hell, what did I know about Cesar? Françoise was absolutely right. I had, at best, an incomplete knowledge of my former roommate’s wrapping sheet. Maybe the wire fraud conviction was part of a much lengthier, much nastier criminal history. I wasn’t so reckless as to undertake real-world, lie-for-a-lie, screw-unto-others schemes of Hammurabian justice. Armchair investigation was a lot less dicey. In fact, surrounded by the criminal dossiers, rather than the criminals, made me feel in control. I knew it was just a matter of time before Cesar’s story and my story would converge in the pages of a book chronicling the rise and fall of a childhood tyrant.
“It will make an amazing novel,” Françoise said.
“I guess.”
“You don’t sound convinced.”
“Well, it is a great story,” I said. “A twelve-year-old bully grows up to become a con man. Hooks up with a guy claiming to be the seventy-fourth grand master of the Knights of Malta and a ‘baron’ who wears spats. Helps the bogus royals and their administrator operate a scam out of the biggest law firm in the world. Dupes all sorts of business types to travel the world. But here’s the thing. Would you believe any of that if it happened in a novel?”
“What are you saying?”
“It has to be nonfiction.”
“But you’ll change some of the facts, no? To keep the real Cesar out of our lives?”
“How? How can I change the details of an unbelievable fraud without making it sound unbelievable?”
“Pardon?”
“What I mean is, I can’t write a based-on-a-true-story story because the ‘true’ story is built on lies. The House of Badische was a house of cards. Start monkeying around with any of the ‘facts,’ the whole thing falls apart. It’s a bad idea to make stuff up about guys who make stuff up.”
“At least change Cesar’s name,” Françoise urged.
“To what? Julius? Nero? What good would that do given that the scam is on the web? The trial is a matter of public record. To mask his identity, I’d have to change his name, the name of the bank, the names of the prince, colonel, baron, and duke. Once I do that, the believability of the whole story is shot.”
“So what are you planning?”
“I’m not sure. For the moment I just want to keep digging. I still don’t have a sense of Cesar. Even the basics are in dispute. Goodman thinks he’s American. Laurence told me she thought he might be Asian or Spanish. Glass remembers him being Mediterranean. His lawyer states he’s a naturalized US citizen, but the files include an INS report that contradicts that claim. The Bureau of Prisons identifies Cesar as white. He says he’s Hispanic.”
“None of that changes the fact that he’s a criminal. He just spent three years in prison. Now that he’s out, he’ll be looking for new victims. I don’t want you to be one of them.”
“It’s a bit late for that,” I joke.
Françoise fails to see the humor. “Just promise me you won’t contact him.”
“I’m not an idiot.”
“Promise me,” she repeats. “No contact.”
“I promise.”
DATA MINING
Following the discovery of Cesar’s release, I became more vigilant about monitoring his movements. It came as a shock to discover that after leaving Lompoc he revived Barclay, the one-man financial group that put him behind bars in the first place. He might have been even more cavalier than that. An Internet archive indicates that his website, barclaycg.org, was updated five times during its founder’s incarceration. In the fall of 2005, Cesar deleted his name from the site’s home page and moved the world headquarters of the firm to a studio apartment near the University of San Francisco. Otherwise, it was business as usual. Barclay continued to offer “results-oriented project specific Business Financing, Offshore Company & Trust Formations” to individuals needing loans of $10 million to $100 million. Given his prepenitentiary bankruptcy filing, the $1.2 million restitution order hanging over his head, and the wages paid to federal inmates (which top out around a dollar an hour), it seemed reasonable to assume Cesar was up to his old tricks. And, as I learned from my digital surveillance, some new ones, as well.
Around the same time he updated the Barclay website, Cesar created a subsidiary entity called NextLevel, through which he offered a broad range of corporate services steeped in the language of self-improvement and personal empowerment. The spirit of the offshoot was captured in an inspirational aphorism:
WHAT LIES BEHIND US
AND WHAT LIES BEFORE US
ARE SMALL MATTERS COMPARED TO
WHAT LIES WITHIN US
Cesar credited the motto to Ra
lph Waldo Emerson, but I did a little checking—okay, maybe more than a little—and determined that the actual author was a disgraced early-twentieth-century securities trader named Henry Stanley Haskins.* The professional dishonor Cesar shared with Haskins wasn’t the only irony to be gleaned from the NextLevel website. The “unique internal map of reality” Cesar offered his clients through something he called “‘Out of Your Mind’ Thinking” also resonated with unintended meaning.
{Courtesy of www.barclaycg.org}
A detail from Cesar’s “‘Out of Your Mind’ Thinking” program.
Soon after launching NextLevel, Cesar further reshaped his online persona by starting a film production company under an alias that made use of his mother’s maiden name. Cesar Augustus Viana became Cesar A. Teague. Although I can’t be sure, I suspect his experiment in pseudonymity can be traced, in part, to the polynomial habits of the Badische boys. Prince Robert juggled no fewer than twelve aliases during his long career as a con man,† the baron at least ten, and the colonel, though less than half the age of his royal confederates, regularly alternated among four names during the Badische loan program. (Government briefs identified him as “BRIAN D. SHERRY, also known as Colonel Sherry, also known as Prince Brian, also known as Brian Sherry-Berwick.”)
Cesar’s new surname caused me all sorts of problems. It was hard enough to track one ex-roommate. Suddenly, I had to keep tabs on two. Then, a month later, a third alias surfaced. Max alleviated some of the headache by programming an army of search engine bots to send me alerts about Cesar and his avatars.
A STALKER WITH PRIVILEGES
For almost a year, I obeyed Françoise’s restraining order. Given Cesar’s criminal record, avoidance seemed the only sensible course of action. Then, in early June 2006, one of Max’s web crawlers notified me of a tantalizing opportunity seemingly free of risk.
Cesar, in the role of indie film producer, announced he was organizing a fund-raiser open to the public. The implications hit me instantly. Here was a chance to observe without making direct contact, thus satisfying curiosity and spousal injunction. What harm could come from an evening of anonymous reconnaissance?
Predictably, Max and Françoise held opposing views on the merits of surveillance. “You’re going, right, Dad?”
Françoise shot me a look.
“I’m not really so sure I should,” I told Max. “It could be a little chancy.”
“But you wouldn’t have to talk to the guy.”
“That’s true,” I said. “I don’t even have to sign up to attend. Cesar wouldn’t know if I attended.”
Françoise sighed. She knew where this was going. “What if he recognizes you?”
“It’s been more than thirty years since we last set eyes on each other.”
“He might not have pictures of himself on the web, but you do,” Françoise noted.
“Dad can go incognito!” Max proposed excitedly. “He can grow a beard.”
I rubbed my jaw. “Not a bad idea. I could start tonight.”
Françoise’s resolve began to falter. “You wouldn’t make contact?”
“I wouldn’t make contact.”
“And you won’t mention your name?”
“Of course not. I’ll steal a page from Cesar’s playbook and adopt an alias.”
Françoise rolled her eyes. “And you’ll take someone along with you?”
“You really think that’s necessary?” That question prompted another disapproving look. “Okay, okay, I’ll bring backup.”
I had three weeks to prep for what Max began calling “the recon mission.” I decided to use the time to find out what I could about Cesar’s capacity for violence. That meant another frustrating round of calls to law enforcement officers.
All writers are stalkers. But as any freelancer will tell you, writers on assignment are stalkers with privileges. I pitched “The Search for Cesar” to a magazine editor who had published my stuff twenty years before. We’d lost touch in the early 1990s, after I started writing fiction full-time. While we were catching up over lunch, I learned that the editor was the mother of a nine-year-old girl who had just finished reading my first children’s book, Leon and the Spitting Image. The girl liked Leon enough to ask her mother for an autograph from the author. The request ended well for both interested parties. The nine-year-old got a signed book, and its author got a magazine contract. Soon after that, public officials who had previously played hard to get began taking my calls.
THE KENTUCKIAN
During his eight years as an assistant US attorney for the Southern District of New York, Timothy J. Coleman prosecuted all manner of crime: racketeering, embezzlement, identity theft, narcotics trafficking. His specialty was corporate fraud. Coleman played a major role in locking up the Enron executives at the center of an accounting scandal that wiped out some $78 billion in shareholder equity. Yet Enron isn’t the case Coleman remembers most giddily when asked to reflect on his career as a federal prosecutor. That honor is reserved for a minor swindle he litigated around the same time.
“Badische was in some ways my greatest case,” Coleman tells me over drinks at a midtown bar. “Never did I have so much fun.”
The six-foot-five-inch Kentuckian, now in private practice, figured out fifteen minutes into his first interview with the complainant, a television executive named Barbara Laurence, that something was amiss. The paperwork she presented—web pages from outfits calling themselves Barclay Consulting Group and the Badische Trust Consortium, a turgid loan agreement signed in green ink, and wire transfers for so-called performance guaranties—all suggested Laurence had fallen victim to a live-action variant of an Internet fraud commonly associated with Nigerian email hucksters.
At first blush, Coleman wasn’t drawn to the case. It raised no interesting legal issues, and the sums involved were “peanuts.” The cost of the investigation and prosecution would greatly exceed the sum Laurence had lost. Coleman could have followed the example set by the Manhattan DA and taken a pass. He didn’t, in part, because he was impressed by the monumental chutzpah of the swindlers.
“I have to admit a measure of admiration for the audacity and manner in which the Badische boys inveigled their victims,” Coleman tells me. “They managed to send their marks to remote locations all over the world. That takes a certain genius and a whole lot of window dressing. When the Trust needed an accountant, it didn’t scrounge up someone’s brother-in-law to play the part. It brought in a partner from PricewaterhouseCoopers.” And if a multibillion-dollar deed from an imaginary African kingdom required unimpeachable validation, Badische made sure an executive from Merrill Lynch served as a witness at the signing. When lawyers were required, they called on Clifford Chance.
“And the names! Prince Robert. The King of Mombessa. Duke d’Antin. Seriously?”
Those were hardly the kind of people the future lawyer encountered growing up in Falmouth, Kentucky (pop. 2,040), a riverfront town where the kings sold burgers, the colonels hawked chicken, and all the dukes came from Hazzard.
“It was Dirty Rotten Scoundrels meets Clue,” Coleman marvels between sips of a perfect Manhattan.
“Except Badische wasn’t fun and games for Barbara Laurence,” I point out.
“No, that’s true,” Coleman allows. “But that aspect of the fraud intrigued me, as well.” The humiliating apology letters the victims were forced to write and revise (and revise again) suggested to the prosecutor that Badische and Barclay had a taste for degradation, as well as an uncanny ability to “calculate risk and capitalize on weakness.”
I ask Coleman if he considers the Badische boys dangerous. His reply comes in two parts. Yes, if by “dangerous” I mean capable of separating a mark from his money. No, if by “dangerous” I mean violent. When I press him further, he hedges the second half of his appraisal by pointing out that he dealt with Cesar and the bankers while in the employ of the Department of Justice. “That afforded me a level of protection unavailable to civilians like you
rself.”
“I see.”
“I had little direct contact with Cesar,” he adds. “If you want to learn more about him, you should be talking to Dennis Quilty.”
“Dennis Quilty?”
“The investigator on the case. He was the one who pushed me to prosecute. He was the one who did all the initial legwork.”
The name takes me by surprise. None of the press reports cite Quilty, and I can’t recall coming across references to him in the trial transcript. Coleman enlightens me. “Case agents tend to keep a low profile—Quilty more than most. He’s no longer with the US Attorney’s Office, but while he was there, Dennis was one of the best. He was finishing up an incredible career when he brought in the Badische case. He really wanted us to prosecute the Trust, and I saw no reason to turn him down. Badische,” Coleman jokes, “was my retirement gift to Dennis.”
Back home I plow through my files, searching for the investigator’s name. It appears on fewer than a half dozen discovery documents, mostly at the bottom of federal subpoenas. The trial transcript indicates that Quilty never took the stand. He only gets mentioned in the court record when witnesses are asked who contacted them from the US Attorney’s Office.
Two days after interviewing Coleman, I give Dennis Quilty a call.
“Detective Quilty?”
“It’s Investigator Quilty,” he snaps. “Or was. I’m retired.”
I reach the former case agent as he’s speeding along I-95, somewhere north of Palm Beach. He informs me that he’s late for a golf tournament and that there’s no way he’s going to speak to me about Cesar or Badische or anything else.
“Let me tell you something, Allen, my first boss told me a long time ago. A good fraud investigator never talks to the press and never testifies at trial. His job is to hunt for diamonds, then hand those diamonds over to the prosecutor. It’s the prosecutor’s job to polish them up and sell them to the jury and the public.”
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