Whipping Boy

by Allen Kurzweil

  “Really?”

  “Really. People always intend to do things for positive reasons. Even Hitler. Hitler’s intentions were positive. They just didn’t match his outcomes.”

  “You’re saying Hitler was a do-gooder?”

  “In his own mind, yes.” Sensing my skepticism, Cesar hedges. “Probably not a good example. NLP is pretty complicated.”

  And also controversial. Wikipedia cross-references it to crop circles, crystal healing, dowsing, and urine therapy. Less neutral sources invoke brainwashing.

  NLP, I soon discover, is just one of the many self-improvement tools Cesar uses to tap his “core reality” on behalf of the executives he tells me that he coaches. “I use a little bit of this and a little bit of that.”

  “What specifically?”

  Cesar mentions qigong breathing, tai chi, brain wave therapy, biofeedback, and Buddhist meditation, relational public speaking (“to get grounded, to get connected”), EST, an EST offshoot called Landmark (“Human behavior is governed by a need to look good”), and a program known as Family Constellations, which teaches its practitioners that “there is no ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ when it comes to past transgressions”—a lesson that seems tailor-made for a felon who believes he’s been unfairly prosecuted.

  Cesar attributes his personal growth and professional success to many masters, but he privileges the insights of Tony Robbins, the square-jawed “leadership psychologist,” above all others. (“Forget your past,” Robbins advocates. “Don’t think about who you have been. Who are you now?”) Cesar tells me he has attended numerous Robbins events and owns a complete set of the speaker’s motivational tapes. He has even uploaded, onto his consulting website, a photograph of his personal (Robbins-inspired) “vision board”—an aspirational collage composed of, among other things, a beachfront Mediterranean-style home, an Aston Martin convertible, and a snapshot of Cesar posing in front of Machu Picchu. “I look at the board every day and tell myself, ‘That’s where I want to go. That’s where I will be. That’s where I already am.’”

  “Already? How has the vision board already helped you?”

  “Okay, here’s an example,” Cesar says. “About ten days ago, I cut Tony Robbins’s head off.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I cut off Tony Robbins’s head,” he repeats. “I found this picture in a magazine of Tony giving a presentation at Carnegie Hall. There must have been five thousand people in the audience.” I’m pretty sure he means Radio City Music Hall. “So I cut his face out and taped my head on top of Tony’s body. Okay, now here’s the freaky part.” I’m thinking we’re well past the freaky part. “I cut off his head ten days ago, right? And so what happens yesterday? I’m unexpectedly asked up onstage at a conference to help run a leadership class.”

  Cesar acknowledges that the turnout at his event was smaller than at Tony’s. (Twelve entrepreneurs attending a free seminar on “The Best Kept Secrets of Modern Day Heroes and Leaders” in the breakout room of an airport hotel.) But that does nothing to diminish his zeal. “Visualization is a very powerful tool,” he declares. “Don’t question how the subconscious brings about your goals. It doesn’t matter how. Besides, it’s beyond our conscious comprehension.”

  “Killing Me Softly with His Song” wafts over the café’s sound system while he’s telling me all this. The bluesy lament does a fine job capturing my reaction to his life lessons, but doesn’t help me to visualize how I’m going to get him to open up about Badische.

  My first ploy is to introduce the topic of aristocrats, hoping that might prompt Cesar to mention his own royal connections. I scroll through my phone and pull up three pictures of Aiglon alums bearing noble pedigrees: Prince Leka of Albania, Princess Marsi Paribatra of Siam, and His Highness Muhammad Jahangir Khanji, the Nawab of Junagadh. When that fails to provoke the intended reaction, I reminisce about a Belvedere housemate who comes from a long line of Florentine nobles. But all that gets me is a long tirade about the Italian aristocrat’s unwillingness “to explore various international IPAs” (income-producing activities) Cesar is trying to put together.

  Once I’ve used up my royal bait, I chum the waters with a tale of wrongful imprisonment. “Do you know about the current headmaster?” I ask.

  {Keystone/Getty Images (left), Courtesy of the Marsi Foundation (center)}

  Aiglon’s aristocratic alums have included Prince Leka of Albania, Princess Marsi Paribatra of Siam, and His Highness Muhammad Jahangir Khanji, the Nawab of Junagadh.

  “What about him?”

  “In 2000—this is while the guy was headmaster the first time—he was jailed.”

  “Why?”

  “His wife falsely accused him of molesting one of their sons. It took him two years, two whole years, to get the charges dropped. Can you imagine what that must have been like? But the most incredible thing is that the school rehired him despite the scandal. Talk about redemption! Extraordinary how he bounced back, don’t you think?”

  Again, Cesar refuses to be drawn in.

  “Have you ever revisited the school?” I ask.

  “Never.”

  “What about Switzerland?”

  “Never.”

  “No?”

  “No,” he repeats. Then he corrects himself. “Wait. Sorry, I’ve been to Zurich. I went there for meetings.”

  At last, a nibble. “Oh?”

  “I was doing partner financing back in ’99 and 2000.”

  I nod, trying to appear interested, but not too interested.

  “A couple times a year, I’d go to New York and Switzerland to meet with this lending group headed up by a prince.”

  “A prince? That sounds fancy.” I resist the impulse to say more. Cesar eventually begins to open up.

  “What happened was the group would lend money to people. But in order to borrow, you had to put up a bank guaranty. And there ended up being a lawsuit because they were signing contracts to lend money, but they didn’t have money in their account to lend it. They were going to syndicate the funds from various sources. Anyway, it became a big stink, which they’re saying was a fraud, which I don’t believe. It wasn’t a fraud, but they’re saying it was a fraud, and I didn’t make any money on it.”

  It would be so easy to dispute Cesar’s rambling defense by pulling up the mug shots stored on my phone. But that would be cheap and foolhardy. I need to reel him in slowly.

  Our second conversation ends soon after he brings up the fraud. I fly back to Providence knowing I’ll have to put some time between us before we talk about it again.

  THE TASTING

  A year later, I return to San Francisco and arrange another meeting with Cesar. This time I really go to town, booking dinner for two at an upscale Moroccan restaurant famous for its eight-course tasting menu. I figure a meal like that will provide ample time to probe the criminal activities Cesar mentioned in passing at the end of our previous exchange.

  The first thing I find myself thinking when Cesar arrives at the restaurant is that his black paisley button-down must be in the wash. Tonight he is wearing a polo shirt with an embroidered eagle, the logo of the aloe vera company that employs him. Unlike the avian emblems associated with Aiglon and Badische, this raptor is posed in a stance of midpredation, its talons clutching at a single word stitched in gold: “Forever.”

  After we order drinks, I try to soften Cesar up. “I read your web essay ‘The Art of Persuasion.’ Amazing piece of writing.” I quote a line from memory: “‘Information is power, so gather it well and manage it very carefully.’ That’s excellent advice. It’s advice I plan to follow.”

  Cesar acknowledges the compliment with a smile.

  “Oh, and dinner’s on me,” I tell him. “I’m on assignment.”

  “What assignment?”

  “Don’t you remember? I’m writing an article, maybe a book. About Aiglon. About the boys of Belvedere and the men they became.”

  “Oh, right,” Cesar says. “Brilliant.”

&
nbsp; I pull out pen and paper as the waiter arrives with our drinks. “Do you gentlemen wish a few minutes of face time before we begin building your meal?”

  “That’s not necessary,” I tell the waiter.

  “Very good. Then let’s get started. Tonight, our chef begins his tasting with a soup course. In addition to the lentil, we have available but not printed”—the waiter interrupts himself to lean forward and reveal with the conspiratorial delight of a black-marketeer—“the cauliflower soup, which we serve tableside, poured over a garnish of two raw almonds, a few dehydrated capers, a little bit of raisin puree, and a crispy fried individual floret of organic broccolini. . . .”

  After he completes his oration and we make our selections (anchovies, lamb shank, tuna and squab, etc., etc.), Cesar launches into an account of his recent trip to Spain.

  “Barcelona was incredible,” he says. “I wouldn’t mind living there.”

  “What would you do?”

  “Same as what I’m doing now.” He pinches the eagle on his shirt. “It’ll be my five-year Forever Living anniversary in November. I get a gold ring with an onyx and a little diamond in the middle, and that’s pretty cool.”

  “So you’d live in Barcelona and work in the Bay Area? That’s a helluva commute.”

  Cesar, the night he talked about his screenplay, Parallel Lies.

  “I could get away with it. I’d come back one week a month.”

  “One week in four? Really?”

  “I don’t think I could do two weeks a month,” Cesar says, misinterpreting the reason for my skepticism. “But a week I could manage.” He explains how: a German film producer who’s helping him finance a feature-length psychological thriller (“No, not Parallel Lies, another project”) told him that if you fly between Barcelona and San Francisco via Zurich in “business class three times, you get the fourth flight free.”

  It’s at this point that I write the letters DQ on my notepad, a coded reminder to myself that Cesar displays about as much common sense as that other Iberian fantasist, Don Quixote.

  “But commuting would only be temporary,” he assures me. “Forever Living has an office in Madrid.”

  “How’s your Spanish?”

  “Not fluent,” he says. This comes as a surprise, given that his father was Venezuelan. Still, it might help explain why he failed to convince the US Bureau of Prisons to change his ethnicity from white to Hispanic.

  “And if the Forever Living gig doesn’t pan out?”

  “I found a financial services job in Barcelona. I’ve sent them two emails.”

  “That’s right. You’ve done financial stuff before,” I say leadingly.

  Cesar nods. “I started my career at Merrill Lynch in ’82. Got my license in securities. Then I became a broker at Charles Schwab. Then I traded currencies. I was the manager for a foreign exchange outfit in the early nineties—before there was any Internet, before the euro. We used Knight Ridder equipment. Viewtron screens. Teletrac terminals.” (More specifically, Cesar worked for Infoex International, a short-lived day-trading operation that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission charged with “fraud” and “material misrepresentation.”) “I was basically overseeing executives. I wish I could do that again. After all, sales management is sales management.”

  “Isn’t selling aloe vera different from trading currency?”

  “Totally different,” Cesar says, seemingly unaware that he’s contradicting what he just told me. “But what I really want to do is more international sales and marketing.”

  “Which is what you were doing with that prince you told me about, right?”

  Cesar shifts in his seat.

  I prime the pump a little more. “That whole business sounded very, very . . . dramatic. What happened, exactly?”

  “You want to know what happened?”

  “I do.”

  And so, ever obliging, Cesar opens up about his ties to the Badische Trust Consortium.

  PART X

  PARALLEL LIES

  Truly I was born to be an example of misfortune, and a target and mark at which arrows of adversity are aimed and directed.

  Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote

  Most of the world today is governed by Caesars. Men are more and more treated as things. Torture is ubiquitous. And, as Sartre wrote in his preface to Henri Alleg’s chilling book about Algeria, “Anybody, at any time, may equally find himself victim or executioner.” Suetonius, in holding up a mirror to those Caesars of diverting legend, reflects not only them but ourselves: half-tamed creatures, whose great moral task is to hold in balance the angel and the monster within—for we are both, and to ignore that duality is to invite disaster.

  Gore Vidal, “The Twelve Caesars”

  “THIS AND THAT”

  “We used to stay at—where was it in Zurich?—at the . . .” Cesar struggles for a name I have no trouble remembering. “The Dolder Grand,” he says at last. “A six-star hotel on top of a hill.”

  It’s a five-star hotel, actually, but I resist the impulse to correct him.

  “That’s where we’d have meetings and see clients. The group I worked with was called Badische Anlage Treuhand.”

  I fake a confused look.

  “Treuhand means trust in German,” Cesar explains. “Prince Robert von Badische was the chairman of the Trust.”

  I start writing. B-A-D-D—

  “No,” Cesar corrects. “It’s spelled B-A-D-I-S-C-H-E.”

  “Got it. Thanks. And how did you meet this Prince Robert fellow?”

  “Through the administrator of the Trust. We used to do import-export involving urea fertilizers and debt-for-equity swaps on behalf of the Venezuelan Development Corporation in the Lincoln Building. I introduced the administrator to his current wife. He loves Latinas.”

  “What kind of company was Badische?”

  “A hundred-and-fifty-year-old investment house based in Baden, Germany.”

  Hardly. It was a Delaware corporation, established in 1997, operating out of a rent-stabilized one-bedroom on Central Park South.

  “What was it like, working for a prince?”

  “It was an incredible experience,” Cesar says. “Incredible. I served as Prince Robert’s aide-de-camp on a diplomatic mission to Malta. He even knighted me.”*

  “In Malta?”

  “No. The ceremony took place in New York, at a restaurant on Fifty-Fourth or Fifty-Fifth Street, upstairs in the Knights of Malta room.”

  I realize at this point that I’m starting to sound like an interrogator, yet I don’t sense Cesar minds. “What did you do for the investment house?”

  “I helped clients prepare business plans and loan documents.”

  “What kind of clients?”

  “High-powered types. There was a German guy who wanted to turn used plastics into new desks.” (If memory serves, he lost about $750K.) “Another guy, from Japan, had this epoxy invention that got hard underwater. I had one client who wanted to start a tire-recycling facility.” (He was referring, I knew, to Masimba Musoni, a Zimbabwean engineer compelled to submit a loan request for $100 million even though he needed only $1 million. With Cesar’s help, Musoni lost his shirt and, soon after, left the United States.)

  “How did you vet potential borrowers?”

  “There was a whole qualification process,” Cesar says. “These were big, big projects, generally requiring loans in the tens of millions of dollars. Project proposals are like a dime a dozen—you can find ’em anytime, anywhere. So one of the things I did for Badische was screen, say, four hundred submissions to find maybe four or five people that were really prepared. That had their act together. That they could put their own money in.”

  I suspect the last criterion was the only one that mattered.

  “Typically, we’d meet at the top of the MetLife Building, in the boardroom of Clifford Chance, the largest law firm in the world.”

  “And if the prince deemed your client acceptable?”

  When that
happened, Cesar explains, he would shepherd the prospective borrower to “Zurich or France, usually Zurich,” to hammer out funding details and sign contracts.

  Again I press for specifics.

  “The transactions involved bank guaranties.”

  “What are bank guaranties?”

  “So say you’re a client. Badische lends you money—more than needed to fund your project. The balance is used to purchase bank notes that mature at a certain rate of interest that end up covering the principal amount you needed.”

  “Sorry. I’m not following you.”

  “It’s complicated. My understanding of the way it works is that the larger sum is held by the bank that funds the transaction. So they end up earning the interest on the money and end up covering the principal released to you to begin with.”

  I’m still confused, but I see no reason to ask for further clarification since I know the whole point of the loan program was to confuse would-be borrowers into parting with their money. I find it interesting that Cesar describes the scheme in the present tense, as if it’s an ongoing and viable loan program. “How many deals did you complete?” I ask.

  “None.”

  “None? What happened?”

  Cesar lets out a sigh. “My clients kept promising me, ‘I have a bank. I have a bank. I have a bank.’ See, it’s the responsibility of the borrower to have a project and a bank—and it has to be a ‘top-twenty-five-class bank.’ Not some small branch. The bank, to be acceptable, has to be willing to back things up with a bank guaranty to support this money. Anyway, a lot of banks, I guess, told my clients they could do it—or the clients thought they could do it—and they couldn’t.”

  “I imagine that frustrated them.”

  Cesar brushes aside my concern. “Look. They signed contracts with their attorneys present. Their attorneys double-checked it all out. There was a schedule, a very strict schedule, that everybody had to follow. Everybody was clear on that. Painfully clear. Badische said, ‘Don’t even think about signing unless you’re sure you can perform, because after you sign, you have three weeks to present us with a letter from your bank stating you can take possession of the funds.’ You figure the client can do it, right?”