Money, money, money.
The main house was one level, over 500 feet long. Twin, two-story buildings stood at either end of the sprawling ranch. The front door looked like a thousand pounds of glass, wrought iron, and rich wood, but it was opened effortlessly by a thin man in a black tuxedo.
“Mr. Perlmutter, Mr. Dewey,” he said with a smile. “Mr. Grover is waiting for you by the pool. My name is Roscoe. Follow me, please.”
We followed Roscoe through gleaming tiled corridors past lusciously carpeted rooms, fabulous works of art, elegant furniture, amazing chandeliers, and impressive statues. With each display of wealth, Lou got angrier.
“This bastard is living like a king with stolen money,” he whispered in my ear. “And so are a lot of other people who got into this scam when the pyramid first started. The original frauds got money out when they could. Now it’s a different story.”
“He’s innocent until proven guilty.”
“He’s guilty,” Lou muttered.
“Prove it,” I whispered.
We exited the rear of the house onto the elegant, tiled deck of an Olympic-size swimming pool surrounded by an acre of lush grass all overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. The sun was low in the sky; the setting was postcard pretty. Three well-dressed men in sport coats were standing by the pool. I recognized Grover from pictures I had seen. Next to him was a tall, dark, handsome, younger man. I guessed he was Jimmy “Big Game” Hunter. I didn’t recognize the third man, but he looked a lot like Grover. Behind them on a landing pad was a Robinson R22 Beta 2, two-seat helicopter.
It’s a rich man’s world.
Grover wore expensive clothes well, but he was small and soft looking. His expressionless eyes looked through stylish tinted glasses perched on a large nose that hooked over a forced smile. His swept-back, silvery mane made him look like the king of the jungle.
The three men waited for us to come to them. We met poolside. Grover smiled. He had capped teeth. He held out a freshly manicured hand. We shook hands. His handshake was decent, but his smile was phony.
“Mr. Perlmutter, Mr. Dewey, it’s nice to meet you,” Grover lied. “This is my associate Jim Hunter, and my neighbor Bernard Madoff.” We shook hands. Lou looked as if he were touching slime.
“I have to be going,” Madoff said. “Benjamin, we’ll talk later.” He nodded to everyone and departed. The four of us looked at each other like wary prizefighters.
Roscoe reappeared and asked about drinks. Grover ordered a gin martini, Hunter asked for vodka on the rocks, and I asked for a Diet Coke. Lou asked for nothing.
“I understand you want to ask me one question, and if my one-word answer is satisfactory … you will stop investigating my company,” Grover summarized.
“That’s right,” Lou confirmed.
“I can’t imagine any one question … or one-word answer … that could fully explain my business,” Grover said, all the while smiling condescendingly.
“I don’t need a full explanation,” Lou told him. “I already know how your business works.”
“Are you a finance man, Mr. Dewey?” Grover asked.
“No, I’m a con man, Mr. Grover.”
Grover raised his eyebrows, and Hunter cleared his throat nervously.
“A former con man, actually,” I interjected.
“Do you plan to make this an unpleasant meeting, Mr. Dewey?” Grover asked.
“Unpleasant for who?”
Roscoe arrived with the drinks, making an answer unnecessary.
Grover removed a long-stemmed glass from Roscoe’s tray and took a sip, closed his eyes, and savored the buzz.
Hunter gulped his vodka and looked uncomfortable. I took the Coke but didn’t drink. Lou crossed his arms in front of his chest and stared at Grover.
“All right, Mr. Dewey,” Grover said confidently, “what’s your question?” He raised his martini glass to his lips again.
“Would you be willing to produce trading slips to me that coincide with the trades you claimed for fiscal 2005?”
“What?” Grover said with alarm and choked on his martini.
“That’s not the one-word answer I had in mind,” Lou said.
“I … I … have thousands of trading tickets,” Grover stammered, clearing his throat of a shot of gin, a touch of vermouth, and a jigger of bile. His color had faded from pink to ashen.
“That’s not a one-word answer either,” Lou said.
“Your question is unreasonable,” Grover stammered again. “It’s not even a question. It’s a request that requires exhaustive work for my firm.”
“They should all be on file, cross-referenced,” Lou said. “It shouldn’t be difficult at all.”
“You don’t understand the complex nature of what we do at B.I.G.,” Grover said.
“Is that a yes or no?”
“It’s a no. I simply can’t expose private files like that. You don’t understand.”
“I understand perfectly. Thanks for the meeting.” Lou turned and began walking toward the ocean. When he realized he was headed in the wrong direction, he changed course abruptly. “How do I get out of here?”
“Can’t we talk this over?” Big Game Hunter requested.
“There’s nothing more to talk about,” Lou said.
“I don’t understand,” Hunter said.
I didn’t have a clue either.
“Ask Mr. Grover,” Lou said.
I looked at Grover. His eyes were glassy and frozen in a 1,000-mile stare.
“Benjamin … ,” Hunter said, “can’t you just-”
“Shut up, Jimmie,” Grover snapped.
As we departed, I watched Grover remove a cell phone from his jacket pocket, punch in one number, wait a few seconds, then start talking. He noticed me watching and quickly turned away. I glanced at my watch and saw it was only seven thirty. Our entire meeting had taken less than a half hour.
We exited the “King Kong” front door, and I noticed the Mini looked different. It was clean. The Mini was never clean. A rubber hose lay on the ground nearby. The weightlifter in the green shirt smiled and waved. I waved back, but I wasn’t happy. I don’t like anyone messing with my Mini, and I like it dirty.
“Let’s get out of here,” Lou said, and I could tell he was disgusted.
“What just happened?” I asked as I drove away.
“I just finished the career of Benjamin Grover.”
Driving west on Okeechobee, I told Lou I had no idea what he was talking about.
“Did you see Grover’s reaction when I asked him to show me trading slips?”
“Yes. He blew gin through his nose.”
“After that.”
“He said it was too much trouble to gather all that material,” I said.
“The trouble is, the slips don’t exist.”
“That’s ridiculous. His trades must have been verified.”
“Eddie, listen to me carefully because this is going to be hard for an honest man like you to believe. For the past forty years, Grover has been paying greedy people massive sums of money not to verify his claims. Feeder-fund managers were paid millions to raise billions and not ask questions. Grover convinced people to believe the unbelievable by either paying them royally or numbing them with bullshit.”
Like a boko with puffer-fish poison.
I pulled into a large parking lot and turned off the engine. “I want to give you my undivided attention.”
Lou continued, “Grover used social contacts, personal connections, greed, and hocus-pocus to create the largest Ponzi scheme in history.”
“Can you prove it?”
“Yes, I can,” Lou said confidently. “And I’m going to the FBI tomorrow to present the evidence. I have documents that prove Grover claimed B.I.G. made more trades in 2005 than the entire exchange made that year.”
“How did you figure that out?”
“I didn’t figure out anything,” Lou said. “Harry Chan did. His equations proved that for Grover to pay the twel
ve percent he claimed, trading blue chips, he had to take more positions than actually existed in the entire market that year. All I had to do did was explain Chan’s complicated formulas in a short, easy-to-understand format. I narrowed it down to the one question I asked Grover. The FBI can ask him the same question and back it up with a search warrant. Brilliant, huh?”
“What wasn’t so brilliant was tipping your hand to someone who might be capable of murder.”
“You worry too much,” Lou said. “This will be over first thing tomorrow morning.”
“What if Grover tries to stop you tonight?”
“He won’t. For all he knows, I already put out the story.”
“For all he knows … you didn’t.”
“I’m not worried,” Lou said.
I am.
I asked more questions, and he answered them all overconfidently, which worried me even more. After nearly an hour of interrogating and cautioning him, I resumed the drive to Boca.
I saw a “Boca - Next 5 Exits” sign and took Yamato west to Military south to Spanish River east. Joy’s house was a couple of minutes from the intersection and fifteen minutes, with traffic, to the ocean.
I made a U-turn and stopped in front of their slab ranch. Joy’s Cube (the ugliest car I have ever seen) and Lou’s banged-up Cadillac were in the driveway. Their garage was filled with old computers, computer parts, heaps of household refuse, Joy’s enormous stuffed-animal collection, and things they could not live without but could not say why.
“Are you ever going to clean out that garage?”
“No,” Lou answered honestly. “As a matter of fact, I just put an old mattress in there.”
“Why?”
“We wore out the old one,” he said with a wink. He got out of the car. “Get some rest. Tomorrow we’re going to change the world.”
I’m worried about tonight.
I watched him enter the house before I drove away. When I reached the intersection of Spanish River and Military, I got a gut feeling I shouldn’t leave. I U-turned again, parked a short distance from the house, and turned off my headlights. I decided to spend the night.
I glanced at my watch. It was only a few minutes past nine. The neighborhood was still awake and well lit. I decided to go to Kugel’s for a cup of coffee before my all-night vigil. I called Claudette and told her I was on a stakeout. She accepted my explanation the way an obstetrician’s wife accepts her husband’s leaving the house in the middle of the night because another woman called saying she needs him. It’s part of the job.
I saw Herb Brown sitting at the counter at Kugel’s, talking to an athletically built, coffee-colored kid in his late teens. I walked behind them and patted Herb on the shoulder.
“Hey, marine,” I said.
Herb turned and smiled. “Hey, Eddie, I was just telling my new friend Teofilo about your boxing career.”
“All lies,” I joked.
The handsome young man stood and shook my hand. He towered over me.
“Teofilo Fernandez,” he introduced himself. “Mr. Brown told me you were an undefeated champion.”
“Why were you talking about a broken-down, old fighter like me?”
“I told Mr. Brown I was named after a great Cuban boxer,” he said proudly.
“Teofilo Stevenson?”
“You know Stevenson?”
“I know of him,” I said, sitting on a counter stool and ordering a cup of coffee from Dave, the owner. Teofilo sat between Herb and me.
“Stevenson was the Olympic heavyweight champion in ‘72, ‘76, and 1980,” I continued. “I remember he refused $5 million to fight Muhammad Ali, saying being loved by 8 million Cubans was more important to him than millions of dollars.”
“He was an inspiration to many Cubans,” Teofilo said. “My father was a boxer, too, and he idolized Stevenson.”
“What was your father’s name?” I asked.
“Felix Fernandez,” the boy said proudly.
“I don’t remember him. Was he in the Cuban national program?”
“Yes, and he won many bouts. He was invited to try out for the 1984 Olympic team.”
“Cuba boycotted those games,” I said.
“Yes, for political reasons. My father was only twenty at the time and was going to try for the World Games and 1988 Olympics. But during training, he started losing endurance and power. By 1986 he could no longer compete. In 1988, the year I was born, he was diagnosed with leukemia.”
“What a shame,” I said. “He might have been a champion.”
The boy nodded. “He had a remission for several years and became a coach for the National Athletic Federation. When I was six, he began teaching me, but he got sick again and died when I was eleven. My mother decided to leave Cuba a year later to join relatives in Miami.”
“How did you get to America?” I asked.
“We escaped on a boat. Do you remember Elian Gonzales?”
“Sure,” Herb said. “He was the Cuban kid who survived a boat wreck in the Florida Straits. Two US fishermen found him floating on a rubber tube and brought him to Miami.”
“He became a big political issue,” I remembered. “He’s back in Cuba now.”
“My mother and I were supposed to be on Elian’s boat the night it left Cardenas six years ago,” the boy said. “The boat was scheduled to depart at four in the morning. We were delayed by bad weather and flooded roads. We arrived just as the aluminum boat was leaving. Two other passengers had already taken our place.”
“They left you there?” Herb asked.
“They had to,” Teofilo said. “Their homemade boat was flimsy, had a feeble engine, and was already overloaded with twelve people. A big storm was passing through, and the water was choppy. They told us another boat was leaving the next morning. We waited in hiding and were able to buy our way onto a much sturdier vessel the next night. After we landed safely in Miami, we learned that Elian’s boat had capsized and nine out of the twelve people drowned. That same storm that took their lives saved ours. We felt very lucky … but guilty, too.”
“I understand the feeling,” Herb said. “You ask yourself why you lived when others died.”
The boy nodded.
“Tell him about Tarawa, Herb,” I said … and he did.
“That’s incredible,” Teofilo said at the end of Herb’s war story. “Seven thousand people died, and you survived.”
“That’s life.” Herb took off his Marines cap, leaned forward, and pointed to the long, thin scar that ran the length of his bald head. “A millimeter here, or in your case, a day there, and we wouldn’t be sitting here having this conversation.”
“Do you think we were spared for a reason?” Teofilo asked.
“No. I believe everything happens by chance. If I didn’t bend down to pick up those dog tags on Tarawa, I would have been dead and buried for sixty-two years already. My gravestone would have read, ‘Corporal Herb Brown, 1922 dash 1943.’” He used his index finger to make the dash on the invisible monument.
Herb’s dash reminded me of a poem I’d heard years ago during a eulogy at a friend’s funeral. I shared my thoughts with them. “I can’t remember all the words, but I remember the meaning. The dash on a headstone is the most important thing because it represents a lifetime. We all have a birth date, and we all die one day, but our dash makes us unique.”
“Some dashes are better than others,” Herb said with a smile.
“Very true. What about yours, Herb?” I asked, returning his smile.
“My dash became a marathon,” he joked, and we laughed.
“Seriously,” I prompted him.
“I think I did the best I could with the dash I had.”
“What was the best single thing you did,” I asked.
“I ducked. It made everything else possible.”
“I dodged a few bullets to get here myself,” I said.
“I dodged a boat wreck,” Teofilo added with a smile.
“Interesting how life
works,” Herb said. “When I was on Tarawa, you two weren’t even a thought. And here we are at the same time in the same place.”
“Mr. Brown, I think you were saved so you could meet Mr. Perlmutter one night and me tonight.”
“It’s a nice thought,” Herb said. “But do you really believe everyone in this coffee shop is here for a reason?”
“I don’t know,” the young man said. “I only feel that way about us.”
We looked around at the eight other people in the shop. An elderly man and woman at a table near the front door were not talking or looking at each other. They sat glumly staring into space.
“They look unhappy,” Teofilo observed.
“Maybe they’re disappointed how their lives turned out,” I speculated.
“Maybe one of them is sick,” Teofilo guessed. “Maybe they’re both sick.”
“Maybe they’re just pissed off being old,” Herb said. “I know I am. Most old people are.”
“I’m not,” I said.
“You’re not old enough yet,” Herb said.
“Okay, Moses,” I said. “How do you explain the four people across the room having a good time? They’re in your age category.”
Two men, who were old enough to have fought in World War II with Herb, sat with two women who might have been their war brides. They were animated and laughing, using four forks to share one piece of cake.
“There are exceptions to every rule,” Herb said.
“Maybe they refused to get old,” Teofilo theorized.
“You can’t do that,” Herb said. “I tried.”
“You have to adapt to every stage of your life,” I said. “That’s what my doctor told me about aging.”
I noticed an African-American college kid wearing a Lynn University T-shirt and a New York Yankees cap. He was sitting alone at a table, reading a book. He looked to be about the same age as Teofilo, but I felt sure they were from different worlds. Yet here they were together for one night.
I turned to Teofilo. “What brings you to this place tonight?”
“My mother and I moved to Boca last week after six years in Miami. She was able to get a job as a nurse’s aide at Seaside Hospice on Hillsboro. I am picking her up after her work. I took a drive to learn my away around and saw this place.”
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