by Guy Lawson
As far as Sam was concerned, he was past the point of no return. He was now a murderer—like Nichols. Staging the murder made it impossible for Sam to leave the shadow market. He believed he could go to prison for the rest of his life if he was caught. He’d also saved Nichols’s life, proving himself in the eyes of the CIA hit man.
Now Sam truly belonged in the Upperworld.
When confronted years later with the possibility that Nichols had conned him, Sam vehemently disagreed. Of course there was no murder in Hamburg on the day in question—Nichols had cleansed the crime scene. Of course there was no German police investigation—the Octopus knew how to spray a jet of ink and disappear. Sam was convinced that Nichols had possessed the power to make all evidence of the homicide vanish into thin air.
“Bob controlled me from the #rst day we met,” Sam said. “But not in this way. There was no chance he faked it on me. It wasn’t a Hollywood setup. The guy’s left hip was bleeding profusely. His brains were sprayed all over on the pavement. This was the real
thing. I had nightmares about the scene for months. I would wake up in the middle of the night screaming. Bob told me to never mention it again—to not tell a soul. I haven’t —until now.”*
ON JULY 9, Sam wired $120,000,000 to Postbank—the most Bayou could a%ord to part with. Barthe converted the money into euros. Sam now had 96,864,000 euros. In the process of changing currencies, Bayou was shorted $60,000, the kind of thievery Sam feared—but failed to notice.
Before leaving Germany to evade retaliation from Severt’s faction or arrest by the Hamburg polizei, Sam and Bob went to meet the man who’d make the trades on behalf of Postbank. Derek Mirsky was waiting for them in the #rst-class lounge at the airport.
Mirsky was six-four, with dark hair and a thin, angular face. Like Barthe, Mirsky was in his thirties, urbane, and spoke fluent English. Mirsky wore a trench coat draped over his shoulder on top of his suit, an a%ectation that seemed torn from the pages of a spy thriller.
Sitting in the Lufthansa lounge, Nichols said he was concerned they were being followed—by another faction, the police, he couldn’t tell. Nichols suggested they take a walk. The trio drove to a nearby castle. As they strolled the grounds to avoid their conversation being listened to, Mirsky explained that Sam’s money would be “segregated.” The account would be in Israel’s name and that of Polaris Inc., the company Mirsky controlled. Trading would be on a joint basis, with 90 percent of the proceeds going to Sam and 10 percent to Mirsky. While decisions would be made together, Sam insisted that he have #nal say—at least on paper. The program would start the following week.
The homicide had altered the dynamic between Nichols and Israel. Sam had been the leading voice when it came to trading—at least that was what he thought. Nichols had taken charge of security. But Nichols said Israel’s skill and fearlessness were exactly the kinds of qualities “the boys” were looking for in an asset. For months, Nichols had been telling Sam that he was being groomed to become the next George Soros. Now Nichols suggested that Sam could become the next Robert Booth Nichols. Nichols conceded that he was getting older. He was exhausted by all the travel and need for vigilance. Nichols couldn’t keep up the pace of being a real-life James Bond forever. He needed to #nd a successor, and it appeared that Sam had what it took—especially as a mythomaniac.
But when the pair returned to London, Nichols was agitated and impatient. Three months had gone by, and he hadn’t made a dollar from the trades. What if the trade didn’t happen again? What if Sam wired the money back to New York again? What if Sam decided not to trade at all?
Early on the morning of July 12, Nichols turned up at Sam’s door at Claridge’s in an anxious frame of mind. He knocked loudly. Sam found Nichols pacing in the hallway.
Still half asleep, dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, he let Nichols in.
“I’ve got to talk to you,” Nichols said.
“What’s going on?” Israel asked.
“Look, you know I’ve got a bunch of deals going on,” Nichols said.
“Yeah,” Israel said.
“The condo I rent in Hawaii, I’ve known the owners for years,” Nichols said. “It’s going on the market. Prices are skyrocketing. Real estate is taking o% there. The owner says I can get an inside deal on the place. I’ll clean up.”
Israel sat on his bed, still groggy.
“Then there are the gemstones we looked at,” Nichols said. “From the guy with the motorcycle.”
Israel nodded.
“But I’m strapped at the moment,” Nichols said. “I’ve only got a couple of hundred grand in cash.”
“What do you need?” Israel asked.
Nichols held Sam’s gaze.
“Ten million dollars,” Nichols said. “In cash. Right now.”
“You know I love you,” Israel sighed. “I’ll give you anything I have. I have no problem lending you ten million. But there are two problems. Number one, the money in Postbank isn’t all my money. A lot of it belongs to my investors. Number two, what if I can’t get into the market? What if the Postbank deal doesn’t happen, like last time? I needed that tranche from the last deal for my fund.”
Nichols desisted—for the moment. The day was spent tending to last-minute arrangements with Barthe and Mirsky. That evening, Sam met Bob and Ellen for dinner.
They ate in a pub in Mayfair, one of the ordinary places catering to tourists. Pints of beer and hamburgers were ordered. Israel had discovered that the dark and milky stout made by Guinness mixed well with his opiate painkillers. Five or six sips of stout and his back stopped hurting and he entered a kind of blissed-out oblivion.
“There’s something about me I really didn’t want to bring up,” Nichols said. “I have a solution to the ten million. But it involves a very secret side of me. You have to swear to never tell a soul about it.”
Nichols took a breath.
“You can trust me,” Sam said reassuringly.
“There is something I have in my possession that is very dangerous,” Nichols said. “It can be collateral for the ten million. You’re going to take possession of it. But you can’t tell anyone about it. You can’t talk about it at all. Not to anyone. It can get you major fucking dead real quick. I want you to hold it until I give you the ten million back.”
“I don’t need collateral from you,” Israel said. “If you tell me you’re going to give the money back, I know you’ll give me the money back.”
“No, I can’t do it any other way,” Nichols said.
“Okay,” Israel said. “So what is the collateral worth?”
“A hundred million.”
“You’re going to give me ten-to-one security?”
“If things go really bad, then it will only be worth #fty million,” Nichols said. “But you’ll still have five-to-one.”
Nichols wouldn’t say what the collateral was. But Nichols was drinking, and when he drank he was indiscreet—or at least that was the impression he wanted to create.
Nichols said he hadn’t told Sam everything about the Federal Reserve bonds he planned to retrieve from Yamashita’s hidden caves in the Philippines. Pausing to make sure no one in the pub was listening, Nichols said he already had one of the boxes. It was stored in a vault in London. The box had belonged to the family of Chiang Kai-shek, but Nichols had been trusted to take possession of it. The box contained $100 million in Fed bonds. Sam would take possession of the box as security for the $10 million advance against the fees Nichols was about to earn from the trades.
Sam had a demand before he agreed to the deal. There was something he wanted from Nichols in return—something that he’d been nagging Nichols about since they first met.
“I’ll give you the ten million on one condition,” Sam said. “You have to show me the film.”
“What film?”
“You know what fucking film I’m talking about.”
“Five hundred people have been murdered because of that film,” Nichols said.
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br /> Sam was not to be denied: no JFK assassination #lm, no $10 million. It was Nichols’s turn to concede.
A screening was arranged in Sam’s suite at Claridge’s. A video player was brought to Sam’s room by housekeeping and hooked up to the flat-screen television. To see the film properly and in perfect detail, Sam created a miniature darkroom by draping the heavy night curtain over the television.
“Bob was standing next to me, helping me by pulling the curtain more taut so I could see better,” Sam said. “Bob was always giving me fatherly advice like that. He wanted us to go somewhere better to screen the videotape, but I didn’t want to wait. If I was going to watch it in my room, he thought I should at least do it properly.”
Nichols played the twenty-seven-second clip for Sam, not once but over and over again. It was just as Nichols had said. The “real” Zapruder #lm included seven frames showing Secret Service driver William Greer slowing the car and turning and shooting President Kennedy at point-blank range. Sam thought he could make out ten or twelve distinctive gunshots peppering the presidential motorcade, forever disproving the single-bullet theory of the Warren Commission. The grainy and grim footage was familiar—the car speeding up and slowing down, the movement of the Secret Service agents, the jerking of the president’s head when he was shot in the throat, how Jackie Kennedy tried to leap out of the car. The First Lady had seen it all, Nichols explained, but she had been told that if she ever talked her children would be killed. The #lm was terrifying in its implications. Sam had seen the truth: Lee Harvey Oswald had not killed JFK. The Mafia and the CIA had collaborated. The assassination had been a coup.†
“The story was never covered because the press is controlled by the government,”
Sam recalled. “The networks, the wire services, the New York Times—they’re all under the direction of the CIA. They all agree to keep certain covert material hidden from the people. But the #lm was absolutely authentic. I could see it for myself. In super–slow motion you see that there was something in the driver’s hand and then it went back into his jacket. That was the altered film.”
“Why can’t we bring this out?” Sam asked Nichols.
“They’ll just say it was doctored,” Nichols said. “Then they’ll kill whoever is involved.”
THE NEXT MORNING, Israel and Nichols took a taxi to Rector Street near Piccadilly Circus. They entered a nondescript building, passing a security guard. This was the home of the London Safe Deposit Company, known as the “Queen’s Vault” because British royalty stored their most precious jewels there. Israel and Nichols got in the elevator. To Sam’s surprise it went down, not up, lurching to a halt in a bunkerlike sub-basement. At the far end of a long corridor was a door with a camera with a retina scanner attached. Nichols put his chin on the rest under the camera, and his eyeball was digitally scanned. Nichols pushed a button and the door opened. Down another !ight of stairs was a thick slab of bulletproof glass, behind which sat a friendly elderly Englishman with a Cockney accent. The clerk cheerfully signed Nichols and Israel in.
Nichols said that Israel wanted to rent a safe deposit box as well. The clerk found that the box next to Nichols’s happened to be available. The price was #ve hundred pounds for one year. Sam paid for two years in advance—for the rest of 2004 as well as 2005.
The clerk led Israel and Nichols down another hallway to a large silver Chubb walkin safe—the kind of safe Sam’s ancestors had once used to store the Israel family fortune in New Orleans. Nichols’s safe deposit box was taken out, as was Sam’s empty box.
Nichols waited while the clerk left to provide them with privacy. Once he was gone, Nichols opened his safe deposit box and removed a blue shoulder bag. Inside the bag was a laundry bag from the Shangri-La Hotel, a chain of Asian luxury hotels. Nichols then pulled an antique brown leather and metal box from the laundry bag. The box resembled a briefcase in dimensions. It was crusted with rust. The seal said, “Federal Reserve of the United States” in the same font as the American dollar. It looked just like the briefcases Sam had seen in the photographs, back when Nichols had #rst told him about Yamashita’s gold.
“This is incredible—” Sam said before Nichols hushed him.
“We’ll talk later,” Nichols said.
Israel polished the seal with his hand. There were numbers on the case: M. BOX NO. 000120
S.C. NO. 1224-22
P.D. NO 11-22
A.C. NO 103-12-179992
Sam gingerly lifted the case and found it was surprisingly heavy, as if it were lined with cement. The rust made it look antique, as if it had been exposed to the elements for many years. The lock was vintage 1930s.
After placing the case in Sam’s safe deposit box, Nichols summoned the clerk, who opened another smaller safe deposit box and then exited again. In this box was a videocassette recorder with a protective cover on top. Inside the VCR was a copy of the Zapruder #lm—the “real” one. Following Nichols’s instructions, Sam placed the VCR in his safe deposit box and they left.
Outside, the two men walked through the streets of London without speaking. Both were careful to see that they weren’t being followed. As they crossed through Piccadilly Circus, Nichols told Sam how he’d obtained the briefcase. A Swiss lawyer he’d contacted was an intelligence operative retained by the Chinese government to deal with the sale of an entire vault #lled with Federal Reserve notes—billions upon billions upon billions of dollars’ worth of bonds. Not the actual Chinese government but the “quasi” government of Chiang Kai-shek’s exiled ancestors, the Mai Wahs.
“You can never open this box,” Nichols said. “If you do, you’re opening Pandora’s box. It is rigged with explosives. If it isn’t opened at exactly the right angle, in exactly the right way, it will blow up and you’ll be dead.”
“What happens to the box after you repay me?” Sam asked.
“You keep that box,” Nichols said. “I expect to be getting more of them soon. But you can never tell anyone about it. If something happens to me—if I get killed—someone will eventually contact you and tell you what to do.”
“What about the Zapruder film?” Sam asked.
“That’s for your own protection,” Nichols said. “Now you’re in all the way up to your ass. There’s no looking back.”
ON JULY 13, $10 million was transferred from Sam’s account in Postbank to an account in the name of Robert Booth Nichols. In sealed testimony years later, Nichols would describe what he did with the money Israel gave him, even as he claimed it had been a perfectly legitimate transaction, not a con#dence game. First, the money had been quickly wired to a series of accounts in Singapore, London, and Liechtenstein, before the German authorities could attempt to stop the transfer. Flush with his windfall, Nichols had then diced up the $10 million among his associates. Many were people Sam had never met. An Asian man who had acted as an intermediary in getting the Federal Reserve bonds received $200,000. The attorney Nichols had used to authenticate the MTN agreements was paid $50,000. So it went as Nichols gave cuts to the bit players he’d used along the way.
In all, Nichols doled out $1.4 million. This covered his expenses—hotels, airfares, meals, drinks. There was also the overhead of establishing the big stores, like paying o%
security guards at Barclays in London. Then there were payments for Kumar and the stunt con man who’d faked his own death in Hamburg—the man with the exploding turban. No checks were issued or records kept. In Nichols’s world everything was done in cash.
Even after taking care of his comrades, Nichols had done extremely well. As he’d told Sam, he’d purchased a luxury condo on Kahala Beach. But he didn’t limit his real estate purchases to Hawaii. Until then, Nichols’s only assets had been twenty acres of crocodile-infested rainforest in Australia. Now Bayou’s investors’ money allowed him to purchase a beautiful piece of land in Prescott, Arizona, for $1.5 million and begin making plans to build a million-dollar home on the property. As a cash reserve, he kept $2 million in a bank in Sin
gapore and $1 million in his HSBC account in London. It was more than enough money to keep himself in the manner to which he was rapidly growing accustomed.
Nichols’s income for the year 2004 was exactly $10,000,008. The extra eight dollars came from residuals for his role in the movie Under Siege. Naturally Nichols paid no income tax—since he’d been instructed by alleged CIA operatives to never pay tax because of national security. Only now there was a more quotidian explanation: How would the American government ever find out about the $10 million?
In the end the big con had gone perfectly: telling the tale, playing the big store, using the turban as the cackle-bladder for the convincer. The #nal step in the long con was called the blow-o%. It was a critical moment. A method had to be devised for Nichols to depart the stage without causing suspicion in Sam. Ending a con without the Babbitt’s notifying the law—or even realizing that he was the victim of a con#dence game—was exquisitely di"cult. “In the most sophisticated cons, the doe may ever after remain unaware that he has been bilked, merely registering the a%air as a gambit that failed,”
Luc Sante wrote in an introduction to a reprint of The Big Con. “The Cheshire-cat aspect of the long con merits attention. Humor is never far from the heart of the con.
The con which hoists the victim by his own petard combines formal elegance, careful imitation of legitimate enterprise, and rough justice into what can only be called parody.”
Such was the case with Sam. The secret market was real, Sam believed. So were the Federal Reserve bonds Nichols had given him as collateral for the $10 million.
Returning to the Queen’s Vault the day after he had taken possession of the Fed box, Sam removed the briefcase and inspected it more closely, taking photographs with his digital camera. He didn’t dare try to open it, fearful that it was booby-trapped and would explode. He was giddy with excitement at the world he now belonged to. The con was complete. All that remained was for Nichols to come up with an excuse to quietly leave London and disappear into a comfortable retirement dividing his time between Hawaii and Arizona. “Exit Robert Booth Nichols” would be the stage direction as the curtain came down on his bravura performance.