Whipping Boy

by Allen Kurzweil

  I shrug noncommittally.

  “Well, for one reason or another, the client comes back with ‘The bank changed their mind.’ Or ‘They don’t really want to do it.’ Or the client never really had a banking relationship in the first place.”

  “So what happened?”

  “The shit hit the fan is what happened.”

  ANNUS HORRIBILIS

  “Y2K was one of those years where one thing happens, then another thing happens, and then another,” Cesar says grimly.

  “I had one of those once a long time ago.” On my notepad I scribble, Y2K = C’s annus horribilis.

  “I ended up getting into trouble with the law because of a woman from New York who lost money to Badische.”

  Enter Barbara Laurence. “How much money did this woman from New York lose?”

  “A half million dollars. It was a performance guaranty, which she would have gotten back if she and Prince Robert had closed their transaction.”

  “But that didn’t happen?”

  “No.”

  “What did?”

  “She complained to the US attorney. Next thing I know, I get a phone call. ‘Hi, this is Detective So-and-So from the US Attorney’s Office. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I’m calling about this and that.’”

  “‘This and that’?”

  “He said that Prince Robert was not really a prince.”

  “Was he?”

  “I believe he was. The guy was a gentleman and very straightforward. I saw the people he hung out with. I mean, you can tell if someone is a prince, right? The way they act?”

  Apparently not. Robert was a serial con man who regularly got dragged into court. “I don’t know. Lots of people pretend to be something they’re not. You do have to be cautious. We live in a world of con artists and frauds. Consider Madoff.”

  Cesar scoffs. “You can’t compare what Madoff did to my situation. Madoff was a one-man show. Badische was an international bank. Did we sign deals in the back of a dark alley? No way. We were meeting in the boardroom of Clifford Chance, the largest law firm in the world! How could Badische not be on the up-and-up? Besides, like I was saying, these guys wouldn’t sign a deal unless you brought along your attorney or your adviser. They insisted on it. Would an illegitimate organization do all that?”

  “It seems the prosecutors thought so.”

  “Yeah,” Cesar allows.

  “Did you talk to the feds?”

  “I had an appointment to meet with their detective, but I was advised by three different lawyers not to go. They said, ‘Nothing good comes from talking with US attorneys. For them it’s good—but not for you.’ Everyone told me, including my sister, ‘If you testify, you’ll get fried, you’ll absolutely get fried. Whatever you say, they’ll end up using against you.’ Basically, the prosecutors wanted to meet with me to build their case.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “I canceled. I guess they didn’t like that.”

  “I imagine not.”

  “Their attitude was ‘If you’re not with us, you’re against us.’ And so that was that. The beginning of my end, so to speak. They wound up throwing me together with the other defendants.” Cesar lets out another sigh. “They needed to,” he adds.

  “Needed to?”

  “In order to prove conspiracy there have to be five defendants,” Cesar claims.

  “Really? The prosecutor couldn’t charge, say, four people? Or three?”

  “No, there have to be five.”

  “I never knew that,” I tell him, keeping my doubts to myself. “Who were the other four defendants?”

  “Prince Robert. That’s one. The baron, that’s two. The administrator who coordinated everything. Three. There was another broker who turned out to be the half brother of the administrator. That’s four. And me. That makes five.”

  “What were you charged with?”

  “Up-front fraud scheme . . . something fraud . . . something with up-front in it . . .”

  The charges were “conspiracy to commit wire fraud” and “wire fraud”—violations of Title 18, Sections 371 and 1342, respectively, of the United States Code.

  “Collecting fees up front is illegal,” Cesar says. “If you apply for a loan and they charge you an up-front fee, apparently, that’s against the law. I had no idea. Also, the money has to be in the account when you sign the deal.”

  “Did Badische have the money they were proposing to lend your clients?”

  “Badische never had the money in their account when they signed the contracts. But the contract didn’t say anything about the money being in the account. They were using syndicated funds.”

  “Meaning?”

  “In other words, Badische didn’t have the money lying around waiting for someone to sign a deal. That’s why there was a schedule. Three weeks for clients to provide the bank letter. A month for Badische to then pull funds from different accounts to meet the loan obligation.”

  Cesar still hasn’t answered the $90.3 billion question. I rephrase it. “Did Badische have access to the funds they were promising your clients?”

  “The prosecutor claimed they had no money, period. That Badische was a fraud.”

  “And was it?”

  “At first I was kinda wondering that myself. I asked myself, ‘Is this thing for real? Are these guys for real?’ But, Allen, when a Badische executive walks you into the headquarters of Credit Suisse in Zurich to meet one of their senior VPs, and that senior VP says, ‘Yes, this transaction is possible. Our bank will accept your client,’ well, it seemed legit to me. I still, to this day, believe it was good and real. But according to the prosecutors, I knowingly brought clients to Badische”—he pauses to bracket the phrase that follows in air quotes—“‘like lambs to be slaughtered.’ But that’s not what happened. I brokered deals because I felt good about the bankers. What I found interesting is there was a whole finance committee, and none of those guys had fingers pointed at them. Somehow the fingers were all pointed at myself!” Cesar slumps in his chair.

  “Did the members of the finance committee cooperate with the prosecution?”

  “As far as I know, they didn’t.”

  The trial transcript tells a different story. No fewer than five of them testified at trial. So did the senior partner from PricewaterhouseCoopers roped into client meetings, the Merrill Lynch analyst convinced to endorse the special deed of trust from the Kingdom of Mombessa, and David Glass, the Clifford Chance lawyer routinely exploited by the Trust.

  “Sounds like maybe you got bad legal advice.”

  “My attorney started off being good,” Cesar says. “Then I found out she was having an—that she had a boyfriend in Florida. That made her distracted. I’m not sure she was taking care of my situation. But man, she was pretty.”

  “Probably not the best measure of competence.”

  Cesar shrugs. “I told her I didn’t want to go to trial. That I didn’t need to go to trial. I wanted her to meet with the prosecutors and just talk to them. She told me it doesn’t work that way. This is all news to me. I don’t know the legal process, right? So here I am, saying, ‘Wait a minute. I’m innocent. I’m trying to fight this.’ My lawyer goes, ‘Well, it’s kinda past that point already.’ And I’m like, ‘No, it’s not past that point.’”

  “Was it?”

  “Who knows? Anyway, it didn’t matter. The US Attorney’s Office used illegal tactics to scare off potential witnesses.”

  “How so?”

  “Okay. So there was a great guy from Texas. He was actually going to testify on my behalf. He was actually going to say positive things. The US attorneys hid him in his hotel room. No one could find him. Nobody knew where he was.

  “And there was another client, from Hong Kong. Her family owned a hotel in Manhattan. She was told, ‘If you testify, we’re not going to be renewing the license for your hotel. Oh, and by the way, we’re going to do some really serious investigating into the taxes you filed on your businesse
s in the US.’ She never showed up, either. Then I come to learn that one of the jurors bullied the others during the trial.”

  “Bullied? How exactly did he do that?”

  “He said, ‘Everybody, we’ll do this’ and ‘Everybody, we’ll do that.’ And come Friday afternoon, he said, ‘We could be stuck here all weekend, or we could just decide.’”

  “So what happened?”

  “You know, at any trial, there’s always three parts to the story. There’s the one side, there’s the other side, and the truth somewhere in between.”

  There’s another part Cesar is forgetting. “What was the verdict?”

  “Bottom line? I lost. But it took the jury like three days to decide. They asked many, many questions, and 90 percent of the questions were about me.”

  The last observation seems to offer Cesar some comfort, if only briefly. “And to add insult to injury, I was stuck with a $44,000 bill on my AmEx card and ended up having to file for Chapter 7.” This last statement is true. I called the automated California Bankruptcy Court hotline to confirm Cesar’s insolvency: “No assets recorded. Beep. Disposition: Discharge granted. Beep. The case is closed. Beep.”

  “What put you $44,000 in the hole?”

  “It had to do with the meetings in Zurich. Badische said, ‘We’ll assemble some of the directors to come in and meet. But you have to front the costs, and we’ll reimburse you later.’ I said, ‘I don’t have a problem with that.’”

  “The Badische bankers didn’t pay you back?”

  “It wasn’t their fault,” Cesar says protectively. “They wanted to provide reimbursement, but their attorney in London refused to let go of the money. I’m wondering if he was working for himself.”

  Enter Robert Gurland, the London counsel who earned $250,000 in legal fees. I throw gasoline on the fire: “Did the guy in London get arrested, too?”

  “No!” Cesar exclaims. “It really was rather unfair, which of course is nothing new to me. I’ve got to accept that that’s the way the universe works.”

  The more he opens up, the more it becomes clear: Cesar has been on a hamster wheel of self-pity and delusion all his life. His father neglected him. His mother abandoned him. Aiglon abused him. The Cornell University Admissions Office rejected him. A bouncer at Studio 54 barred him from entering the disco (“This was in 1978”). Prosecutors shanghaied him. An aunt refused to put up bail after he was charged with fraud. A fiancée betrayed him by calling off their wedding after his conviction. And soon, I am confident, he’ll be adding another name to the list of traitors and turncoats.

  SABBATICAL

  “So you lost your trial?”

  Cesar nods.

  “Then what happened?”

  “I had a sabbatical.”

  “A sabbatical?”

  “Three years cut to seventeen months. Good behavior and all that.”

  “What was prison like?”

  “Ever heard of Lompoc? The original Club Fed?”

  “Rings a bell.”

  “Tennis courts, basketball, military-style dorms with bunk beds. I remember saying at the time, ‘This reminds me of Aiglon.’”

  “Interesting analogy.”

  “Only Aiglon was stricter. You got to chew gum at Lompoc.”

  “Was there foosball?”

  Cesar laughs. “No, but we had a decent weight room.”

  “Was it dangerous?”

  “There was no ‘Don’t drop the soap’ stuff, if that’s what you mean. But fights broke out all the time, mostly in the TV room over what to watch.”

  “What did you like watching?”

  “Formula One racing and concert specials. Sade was a favorite of mine.”

  “Sade?”

  The question prompts Cesar to start singing:

  He’s a smooth operator

  Smooth operator

  Smooth operator

  Smooth operator.

  Mother of God! Is he actually serenading me with a ballad about a con man? “What else did you do in Lompoc to keep busy?”

  “Well, I never went in for the whole refilling-ink-cartridges thing. You had to be up at like seven in the morning to do that kind of work. I took a job shelving books in the prison library for five bucks a week. That gave me plenty of time to read. Tony Robbins, Deepak Chopra, Wayne Dyer. Also, I taught a class on résumé building.”

  Résumé building strikes me as something Cesar is more than qualified to teach. “Who were your students?”

  “Tax evaders, people who did drugs, white-collar criminals. Basic folks.”

  “Basic folks?”

  “Basic folks.”

  “And how did that go?”

  “Not great,” Cesar acknowledges. “They all kept asking me, ‘Who’s gonna hire a convicted felon living in a halfway house?’ Anyway, I gave that up to work on a currency-trading system I developed. I’d get the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal. Another inmate had a subscription to Investor’s Business Daily. The opening, the high, and the close—that’s all my system needs.”

  But day trading from prison didn’t pan out, either, so Cesar reconnected with Sherry. “When I was still actually in jail, I asked for a list of client contacts from the administrator.”

  “Did the administrator give them to you?”

  “He sent me a bunch.”

  “And did you end up reviving the loan operation?”

  “No. I wanted to, but I never did. Probably best. The administrator’s name was mud.”

  “Are you guys still in touch?”

  “I am. His wife uses my products.”

  “Is he still in finance?”

  “No,” Cesar says. “He’s doing a religious thing now.”

  “Sounds like you miss the Trust.”

  “I do. I loved it. I wish I could do it again. I mean, all I need is to find lenders willing to fund projects without charging an up-front fee. Real lenders—lenders that can really deliver.” Cesar puts down his fork and leans across the table. “So if you know anybody, Allen. Or come across anybody. I’m still looking for credible backers to do projects.”

  “Sure thing,” I manage before redirecting my attention to the squab in nettle cake and foie gras emulsion. Then, glancing upward in the awkward silence that follows, I spot it, if only for the briefest moment: the grimace—that unsettling rictus I first observed forty years before.

  That’s when I know things have gone too far. It’s one thing to tally up our parallel lies, quite another to allow those parallel lies to converge. It comes as a huge relief when the waiter reappears tableside with the bill.

  “I appreciate you inviting me out,” Cesar says as we part company.

  “My pleasure,” I tell him, though of all the emotions that have accompanied the tasting, pleasure isn’t on the list. “The whole business with Badische is an amazing story.”

  “And it’ll make a brilliant book,” Cesar says. “I guarantee you.”

  “I wish I had your confidence.”

  “NOT BY ANY STRETCH OF THE IMAGINATION”

  I already had Cesar’s confidence—I had wormed my way into his life—but lacked the other, more conventional, kind of confidence, the assurance of mind about the story I wished to tell. Looking through my notes on the flight home, I wasn’t even sure I had the wherewithal to wrap things up. I felt caught between weariness and obsession. There were so many leads still to follow. Too many. I started crossing names off my list of potential interviews, and I kept cutting the list until only three remained: Prince Robert, the Baron Moncrieffe, and Colonel Sherry. I didn’t know how to reach the first two: the prince was still a fugitive (if he hadn’t passed away) and the baron had dropped out of view soon after leaving prison. But Sherry presented no such obstacles. After completing his forty-one-month sentence, he established a New York–based nonprofit with a Facebook page that included an active cell phone number.

  I call Sherry and request an appointment, withholding, at least initially, the reason for th
e rendezvous. Like Cesar, he agrees to meet without hesitation, proposing that we join up in the visitor’s center of the American Bible Society, a light-filled atrium on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

  The religious setting is only the first of many surprises. When we get together, I discover that the colonel is no longer a colonel. He has mothballed his uniforms and tailored business suits. Gone, too, are the Maltese crosses and military ribbons. He now wears a yarmulke under a golf cap and a lapel pin honoring Yad Vashem, the Jerusalem Holocaust memorial.

  “Call me Reb,” Sherry says at the outset of our interview. “Although I am a rabbi, I find the word self-important and pretentious.” The onetime colonel, prince, major, knight, administrator, and ambassador plenipotentiary tells me that he now tends to the spiritual needs of a congregation of Messianic Jews, blending evangelical Christian theology with teachings from the Torah, an interfaith work-around that allows him to practice a form of Judaism that assigns the burdens of atonement squarely on the shoulders of Jesus Christ.

  Soon after we find a spot to sit, under a plaque bearing a quotation from John 10:10—“The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy”—I tell Sherry I have no need for his religious counsel.

  “So how can I help?”

  “When I was ten, I attended a boarding school in Switzerland. It was both a joyous and traumatizing experience. So much so that I decided to track down my roommates—actually one roommate in particular.”

  “Did you find him, this roommate of yours?”

  “I did. His name is Cesar Augustus.”

  I wait for a reaction.

  “That’s his real name?” Reb asks.

  “It is.”

  “That’s interesting.”

  It falls to me to keep the conversation going. “For a while, my search was waylaid by false positives—by men who shared my roommate’s name. There was a flute player, a distinguished professor of electrochemistry, a set designer in Belgium. But it turns out that my Cesar Augustus was your”—the word confederate is on the tip of my tongue, but I catch myself and opt for a more dispassionate term—“colleague.”