After we finished playing video games, Mr. Spielberg took us for a cruise around the lot in his golf cart. My father was so excited on the other line of the phone when I called him that night and told him about my afternoon. “My little movie star!” he exclaimed. “By golly, Steven Spielberg . . .” I beamed, knowing how much I’d impressed him. I’d been in Hollywood only three weeks and was hanging out in Mr. Spielberg’s office.
I was never conscious of the kind of privilege I was around or the fact that I got whatever I wanted. I was growing and being shaped inside a bubble of wealth where everyone I surrounded myself with appeared to accept it as normal. Normal. I believed it was normal. Because it was. It was all that I knew.
-3-
The Trial
Six months had passed since the FBI arrested my father, and it was now summer. Mara, Chloe, my mother, and I were piled into the Range Rover and heading to the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Battery Park, where we would stay for the duration of the trial. My father had flown up a few weeks earlier to prep with his attorneys, spending sleepless nights reviewing documents and depositions in the hotel conference room. We drove to save money, and when Mara questioned him before we left about why we were staying at such an expensive hotel, he replied, “Because we got a good deal. Not a lot of tourists want to stay downtown right now.”
The financial district was desolate and abandoned as we made our way down Greenwich Street, passing the metal fence encompassing what remained of the World Trade Center. I saw enormous tractor-trailers bulldozing and digging up dirt and construction workers yelling at one another back and forth in their orange hard hats and yellow vests. I thought about loss as I remembered sitting in religion class when the principal called for an emergency school meeting, watching on television the collapse of the second tower into the crescendo of death, and the rumbling of F-16s over my bed that night. Yet, still, I had no grasp of what loss really meant.
For the entire five-hour drive from Washington, DC, to Manhattan, my sisters and I never fought. Instead, we reminisced over our childhoods and all of our favorite memories. It was as if we were searching for all the reasons to hold on to life the way that it was, all the memories of our past, so it would make everything that was happening okay. We remained lighthearted, skating along the surface of any real emotions, hiding behind laughter, too afraid to accept any kind of reality, as everyone was unsure of our family’s fate.
Later that night, my father’s attorneys paced back and forth with their hands in their pockets in front of the glass window of our hotel suite. You could see in the distance the twinkling lights of Lady Liberty standing dignified with her raised torch of freedom, mocking us.
“No makeup, no jewelry of any kind, simple colors, collared shirts, and conservative skirts,” said Mr. David Kenner, one of my father’s attorneys. Mr. Kenner was from Encino, California. Exceptionally tan, a silver fox with more hair spray than Dolly Parton, too-perfect teeth, and looked like he had had way too much plastic surgery. He was known for representing Death Row Records and getting Snoop Dogg acquitted of murder charges. I thought it was a good sign. I asked him toward the end of the trial, “So, who killed Tupac, and who killed Biggie?” He looked at me and walked away. He didn’t think it was funny.
“It is very important that the jury and the judge like you,” Mr. Alvin Entin said. Mr. Entin was my father’s other attorney. He was from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and loved to wear different-colored suspenders. Mara, Chloe, and I sat on the edge of the bed, nodding our heads up and down like three little puppet dolls. Innocent and humbled bait waiting to be fed to the jury and the judge with tears in our eyes. We were being written into their presentation and were now part of the game plan.
My mother sat in the chair across from me; the loss of color in her cheeks was apparent. She wasn’t wearing her usual burgundy Chanel lipstick, and she was stripped of any jewelry, except for her diamond eternity band. My father stood next to her. For a minute, I studied his furrowed brow. I could tell he was nervous and trying to hide it. Then I looked back at my mother again, who looked back and forth between us girls. I could tell she was trying to gauge our reactions. She looked embarrassed, and scared, her expression one of an apology. But she never said a word. She wouldn’t dare interrupt my father or his attorneys, who were tracking us, making sure we would obey. And we did.
The next day, when we pulled up to the US District Court for the Southern District of New York at 500 Pearl Street, I stepped out onto the sidewalk and gazed up at its enormity. Orange barricades reading “Property of US Government” surrounded the grandiose building. Scattered groups of protestors stomped in circles below the steps shouting things I don’t remember. Men with leather briefcases in suits, ties, and tasseled shoes walked by as if the protestors were invisible. We did too, my mother, Mara, Chloe, and I, clad in our khaki skirts and collared shirts, conservative yet bland, intentionally ambiguous and unassuming as we tagged behind my father and his two attorneys, who, in their Brooks Brothers suits, carried brown file folders under their arms.
It was my first time inside a federal courthouse. It felt sanctified, with its high ceilings and Grecian-style architecture, like the inside of a cathedral. But instead of being a place where faith lives, it was where ours would be lost. We breezed through security, having been told to leave everything, including our cell phones, at the hotel. My mother carried our IDs in her wallet in case we needed them. Once we passed through security, we waited outside the courtroom in the empty hallway, where even the smallest heel of a shoe left an echo. The bailiff opened the double doors, and Mr. Kenner directed us to our seats. We sat behind Dad, who made his way to the defendant’s table in front of us. We were separated from him by a brown gate.
Mr. Steven Glaser and Ms. Diane Gujarati, the assistant US district attorneys, entered. They wore crisp black-and-white pantsuits. A law clerk followed behind them, pushing a metal cart with organized file boxes. They looked young, hungry, and ready to impress the judge.
Then the jury entered, and it hit me how powerless we were. My family’s fate was now in the hands of twelve strangers.
When they sat down, the room became excruciatingly quiet before the bailiff stood up. “All rise.”
The Honorable Denise Cote entered, gliding like a goddess toward her towering podium. She was petite, with short gray hair, and her robe was long like a pastor’s except black. I overheard my father and Mr. Kenner talking about her the night before. She was presiding over one of the cases in the WorldCom scandal, at the time the largest accounting fraud scheme in US history. They were paying close attention to her rulings. “No bullshit” was the adjective used to describe her.
“You may be seated.”
I was having trouble listening to her opening remarks. I kept wondering about her personal life. Was she married? Did she have children? Boys? Girls? How old? What was she wearing under that robe? Did she have sex? Had she ever been in trouble? Was she ever wrong? I needed something, anything, to strip her of her power and make her human.
“Mr. Glaser, you may proceed,” Judge Cote declared. The prosecutor stood up, carrying a legal pad close to his chest. He strolled casually back and forth before the jury as though preparing for a monologue onstage.
May it please the court, counsel, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, this is a case about a crooked lawyer and the lies that he told to collect a million-dollar fee. That crooked lawyer is this man, Thomas Prousalis Jr. He is a lawyer who specializes in advising small companies that want to sell their stock to what is called an initial public offering, or IPO. You will learn during this trial that Prousalis was hired by a small internet company called BusyBox to help them sell their stock to the public in an IPO.
Now, in a written brochure about BusyBox, Prousalis lied to investors about the size of his fee. You see, Prousalis understood that if he told investors that his fee would be a million dollars, given the small size of this deal, that would raise serious red flags for investors.
You are also going to learn, ladies and gentlemen, that at the last minute, as the deal was about to go down, things went wrong. It looked like the deal was not going to happen. So what did Prousalis do? He came up with a secret plan. A secret plan to rejigger the whole deal. Prousalis’s plan was bad for the company, and it was bad for investors, and it involved a whole series of lies—lies about how much money the company was planning to raise in this IPO and lies told by Prousalis that he had received approval from regulators to go ahead with this plan and not tell investors about it.
Why did Prousalis do this? Because if the deal didn’t close, Prousalis did not collect that million-dollar fee. Why was that million-dollar fee so important to Prousalis? Well, by that time, spring of 2000, Prousalis had lost millions of dollars in the stock market, and at the same time, he was leading a fancy lifestyle. He had a mansion in an exclusive Washington, DC, suburb. He had a two-million-dollar personal jet that he liked to fly around. Prousalis needed the money. So without investors knowing anything about his enormous fee and his secret plan which drained BusyBox of cash that it desperately needed to survive, the IPO went forward, and investors bought stock in this company.
Unsurprisingly, ladies and gentlemen, you will learn that about a year after this IPO, BusyBox declared bankruptcy. Prousalis, on the other hand, did not suffer the way that other investors did. He managed to dump his IPO stock for hundreds of thousands of dollars. And during this trial, ladies and gentlemen, we will prove beyond reasonable doubt that this man, Thomas Prousalis, used his skill, expertise, and his cunning as a lawyer to cheat investors and that he is guilty of conspiracy and securities fraud as charged in the indictment.
Now, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to take this opportunity to reintroduce myself. My name is Steven Glaser. I am an assistant United States attorney here in the Southern District Court of New York.
I wanted to see the look on my father’s face. But I could see only the back of his head, which he kept down, staring at the yellow legal pad before him. Chloe picked at her fingernails next to me. I was too afraid to look over at Mara on the other side of my mother, who appeared stoic, like she was prepared for the worst. She didn’t seem surprised by the opening statements, and it irked me. I wiped my sweaty hands along my khaki skirt as a flood of rage soared through me, glared up at Mr. Glaser, and thought, Liar. He didn’t know my father. This was not the story of a crooked lawyer. My father was a good man, a self-made man who would never compromise his integrity, his family, for the sake of a business deal. For the sake of money.
Mr. Kenner rose from the defendant’s table and began his opening statements. He didn’t have a “secret plan of the government’s” to counter my father’s supposed “secret plan.” He discussed things like SEC filings, registrations, IPOs—number after number, technicalities that he claimed were legal, things hard to understand unless you were a banker, lawyer, investor, a Wall Street type. I resented my expensive education and that I didn’t understand any of the issues being addressed. I felt lost in a haze of monotonous math where nothing made sense. I didn’t know what securities fraud was, or wire fraud, or money laundering, or any of the things we saw on the news that summer along with the other cases, like Enron—something to do with energy or telecommunications; things that made the world go round—and Martha Stewart. I just knew that a lot of innocent people lost money, lost life savings, lost their jobs. I didn’t think it had anything to do with my father—that it was any kind of foreshadowing or indication of what was to come. America was just beginning to reclaim her safety, her security, floating in a decade lost without any kind of an identity, where Facebook still belonged to privileged college students. It would be years before the near collapse of America’s financial system, the bursting of its housing bubble, Bernie Madoff, the greatest financial fraud in world history, exposed.
It was one morning in high school: I remember my father was sitting in front of his laptop at the breakfast table, staring at the television screen on the wall in the kitchen. I looked up. A former Enron executive had just committed suicide, and I thought about the Great Depression, and what I had learned in my American history class. Suicide had been a theme, a tragic topic of conversation. Suicide rates fluctuated depending on how the US economy was doing. My father’s eyeglasses were slid down to the end of his nose, and the look in his eyes—it was as though he had left our world. I never asked why.
I had given up trying to follow the numbers and charts being shown on the projector screen. Instead, I stared at and observed each member of the jury. All of them appeared bored and uninterested. In the middle row sat a young woman in a red sweatshirt. She looked like maybe she went to New York University or the New School. In another life, we could have been friends. There was no chance she understood what was happening either; I was sure of it. She nodded off at one point, her head slumping over before she woke herself up. I didn’t blame her. If my father’s life weren’t on the line, it would all be such a bore to me. I was convinced that not a single jury member understood what on earth was going on. But I was very aware that my father was teetering on the edge between incarceration and freedom, and I had a hard time accepting that his destiny would be determined by individuals who didn’t seem to understand or care.
Until we broke for recess, everyone was bored and lost in “Government exhibit 101, government exhibit 102, government exhibit 103,” blah blah blah, and more charts with more numbers projected on a giant screen and words spewing from Judge Cote’s mouth like “overruled” and “sustained.” The way she said “sustained” was particularly irritating to me: she held the s with her tongue, while her inflections traveled upward, like she enjoyed it. Like it was a song to her.
“Bring in the witness,” she continued.
Bernie Carl, who had bailed out my father after the FBI arrested him, was one of the original investors in BusyBox. He filed a civil suit against the directors of the company after he lost more than $800,000 and the company went bankrupt. I don’t know whether Bernie knew once the investigation began that all fingers would point back to my father, culminating in the federal investigation and his indictment, but it did.
Having been a lifelong friend of the family’s, Bernie did not want to testify against him, but he was subpoenaed and forced to. He walked down the center aisle in his tailor-made Brioni suit, escorted by Mr. Glaser. He glanced at Mara, and a humble smile crossed his face, trying to comfort us from afar and sorry for us all at the same time. When I was twelve, and their family moved to London for a year, Andrew, Bernie’s son, wrote me love letters nearly every week. He was ten. I kept them in a little box tucked away inside my yellow balloon curtains so no one would find out.
I could hear Mara sniffling next to Mom. Alex, Bernie’s daughter, was one of her best friends, and Joan, Bernie’s wife, had stopped returning my mother’s calls after he was subpoenaed, so I didn’t understand why he was still acting as a loyal friend to my father—even lending him money—if my father had been the reason Bernie lost so much money. I decided there were two possible conclusions:
One: Bernie knew he was guilty but supported my father out of a sense of loyalty, or guilt. After all, my father got in trouble as a result of Mr. Carl’s civil lawsuit against the directors. And the truth was, even though Bernie suffered over a $800,000 loss, it didn’t put a dent in his personal bank account. He was worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Had he not filed suit, the government might never have noticed what my father was doing.
Two: Bernie believed my father was innocent. He believed he entered into business with bad guys and was used as a scapegoat for the deal to get done. And when the plan failed, everyone pointed the finger at the lawyer to save his own ass.
It would be years before I discovered the truth. But I was looking for a reason—any reason—to believe in my father’s innocence, and Bernie was proof.
Mr. Glaser approached the witness stand. “Good afternoon, Mr. Carl.”
“Good afternoon.”
“Mr. Carl, were you friends with Mr. Prousalis in the early-to-mid-2000 time frame?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And were you familiar with his hobbies at the time?”
“Yes.”
“And what were some of those hobbies?
“Tom was a former air force fighter pilot, and I think maintained his interest in aviation. And we both shared a considerable interest in sports cars and automobile racing.”
“Are you familiar with whether Mr. Prousalis ever had an airplane?”
“Yes.”
“And how were you familiar with whether Mr. Prousalis had an airplane?”
“We talked about it a lot, and there were occasions when one of our children had to go somewhere, and Tom was very kind in getting them off to summer camp together.”
“I’m showing what has been marked for identification government exhibit 202 and government exhibit 200. Do you recognize government exhibit 200?”
“Yes.”
“Can you tell us what it is?”
“It is the interior of an airplane.”
“Do you recognize government exhibit 202?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Can you tell us what it is?”
“It is the photograph of an airplane.”
“Do you know what type of airplane?”
“I think it is a King Air C90.”
“Are you familiar with the aircraft?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And do you know if that was one of the aircrafts Mr. Prousalis owned?”
“I believe he had one of the same type, yes.”
There was nowhere else in the world my father would rather be than flying in his airplane. He always said his officer training school days were some of the best of his life. I imagined those days like scenes out of Top Gun, where he was Tom Cruise, showing off, doing flips, and rolling in F-16s, driving all the girls wild. I asked him once why he loved to fly so much, and he said, “Because there’s nowhere else in the world where you can feel as free.”
After Perfect Page 3