The Collectibles

by James J. Kaufman

  “But, Andrew, what’s our solution?” Preston demanded.

  “Our group has reviewed this, not only among ourselves, at length, but also with our commercial people, our real estate people, our financial people and our bankruptcy . . . advisors. Although they are not actually our people but a firm specializing in the actual handling of bankruptcy matters. While there have been some differences of viewpoint among the groups, the ultimate consensus is to file for protection under Chapters 11 and 13 of the Bankruptcy Code, with an individual filing under Chapter 7 of the code to follow for you and Marcia.”

  Hearing the name of his wife jarred Preston and added a new dimension to his growing fear. He wished he could stop the words rushing out of Andrew’s mouth.

  “As you are aware, Marcia has personally guaranteed the debt for all of the stores,” Andrew said in a low voice. Preston slowly nodded.

  “Except East Bay,” Casey mumbled.

  “Yes, except East Bay. But again, in the overall picture, that does not make a material difference. The problem is that in the filing of a Chapter 11 proceeding, which deals with the businesses only, there probably will not be enough unencumbered assets to survive the filing and be of use to you. Even if there are sales, the trustee in bankruptcy will be doing the selling. It will take years to go through it, and the banks do not have to wait at all before going after you and Marcia on the notes – and pursuant to the Personal Guarantees – without waiting for the results of the suits foreclosing on the collateral. The only thing that will stop the tide is bankruptcy. By law, all the creditors will have to stop hounding you. They’ll still be there but will have to work through a creditor’s committee. And the Trustee.”

  “If we file for individual protection under Chapter 7, these damn banks will take everything we have. We’ll lose our Trump Tower condo, our home, and we’ll lose all of our stores and all of our real estate. What’s left? Personal belongings?”

  “You have no choice, Preston. Besides,” Andrew said, playing his last card, “your best chance for keeping this civil is bankruptcy.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” Preston asked, knowing at the same time exactly what it meant.

  Andrew entered into another lengthy lawyer-like dissertation, more in the nature of an Artful Dodger disclaimer, including why Chapters 7 and 11 might not work depending on how the SOT was viewed.

  “Are you telling us we could actually go to jail over this?” Casey asked.

  “Well, we assume that the money that would have otherwise gone to the bank to reduce the interest and principal on the loan for the flooring line went back into the business in one form or another. That the monies were used for operations and other legitimate corporate purposes. Any non-corporate use exacerbates the problem. Private parties, the Lear jet, personal yachts . . . . ”

  By this time, Preston, having heard enough, had already stood and was heading for the door. He turned to Casey, moving his hands to instruct him to pack his papers in his briefcase.

  “So what you’re telling us is we’re screwed and there is nothing you can do about it. Where have you been?” Preston said, putting his hand on the large brass door handle and looking over his shoulder. “You’ve had no trouble billing the shit out of me. Probably paid for half this office. Come on, Casey, let’s get out of here.”

  Riding down in the elevator, Preston slammed his fist against the elevator door, and turned to Casey. “You know what really pisses me off? We keep these guys high up in their fancy offices with all the glass, but in the end, they tell us to go down instead of bailing us out. I want you to find a smart attorney with guts who can figure out ‘how to’ instead of ‘why not.’ And I want you to find him now!”

  The elevator door opened, and they marched out past the green marble walls, their shoes clicking on the marble floor.

  Chapter 6

  “Okay. I get it. What you want me to do is find a lawyer who specializes in automobile financing and understands SOT?” Fred Drucker asked Casey.

  “I want you to do much more than that. Look, you’re an experienced head hunter, right? I want you to talk with lawyers around this country who have experience in asset-based financing, automobile dealerships, commercial real estate transactions, banking, litigation. I want you to develop four or five solid recommendations for a bright and savvy lawyer who is an experienced litigator, understands business, and understands how to get the damn job done. A fighter. A fucking legal warrior. With balls. Get it?”

  “Mr. Fitzgerald, you’ve got to learn to get over being so shy,” Fred said. “Try to speak your mind.”

  “Where’s the coffee?” Casey asked, getting up and looking around.

  “Actually,” the recruiter said, after pouring coffee from the silver pot on his credenza, “I know a man who was in the Navy who really was a warrior, and, in fact, is now a practicing lawyer somewhere in the South. I don’t know what kind of law he practices, but I can tell you he’s a leader, in fact a former commander, and he knows how to deliver. Surprisingly, he’s a really nice guy. I’ll check it out and find out what kind of law he practices, and maybe he can lead us to the right man.”

  “Okay. Just get it done. And after you find the right guy, have one of your investigators check him out. Mr. Wilson wants to know everything about the people he hires. Everything. Get it?”

  “Yes, Mr. Fitzgerald, I understand. I’ll get back to you shortly,” Drucker replied.

  Preston rode up to his co-op on the thirty-eighth floor without seeing any of the people in the Trump Tower elevator. He takes my company’s temperature and then tells me we’re gonna die and there’s nothing he can do about it.

  Marcia was listening to McCullough’s John Adams while ironing one of Preston’s Faconnable shirts when she heard the door open and slam shut. “I’m in here, darling,” she called.

  Preston sauntered to the bar, poured himself a Chivas Regal on the rocks and collapsed into his Italian brown leather chair, propping his feet up on the matching ottoman.

  “Why don’t you have Elsie do the ironing? That’s what we pay her for,” Preston shouted in Marcia’s direction.

  Marcia took off her head-phones. “I iron your favorite shirts, Preston, because you don’t like the way they come out when Elsie does them, or when I send them out. Now, what’s bothering you, Pres?” She unplugged the iron, trudged in to the large den, and slumped down on the ottoman. Marcia was in her late-thirties with dark brown hair and effectively applied make-up that made her look even younger. Her body reflected hours of working out in the private Trump Tower health club.

  Preston watched Marcia as she sat down, giving particular attention to the way Marcia’s body filled her brown wool skirt and sweater outfit.

  “What are you doing today?” he asked, catching a whiff of her perfume.

  “Lunch with the girls at Daniel. How was your morning?”

  “Oh, same old. Meetings. Met with Andrew Brookfield.”

  “Really? How is old Andrew? Elegant as ever? Did he have his French cuffs on?”

  “You don’t like Andrew, do you?”

  “I don’t know. He reminds me of a couple of guys I worked with when I taught at Columbia. He’s supposed to be a big-shot lawyer from an old line firm, Harvard and all of that, but I find him a bit of a snob. He needs to lighten up. Why were you seeing him?”

  “We’ve got some business problems with the companies. He called Casey and thought we should go over the financials.”

  Looking at the drink in Preston’s hand, she said, “It’s a little early, even for you, isn’t it? How serious are the problems?”

  “Nothing for you to worry about,” Preston replied. From the look on her face, he knew that she would worry anyway, particularly about his having talked her into signing personal guarantees, against her will, on all the corporate debt. He remembered all the nights when he’d assured her, “It’
s just a formality.”

  Preston abandoned his drink and headed out.

  “Are you telling me everything, Preston? I really feel as though you’re holding something back. We’re in this together, aren’t we?”

  If she finds out how bad this is, and that I have not protected her . . . we’ll be in real trouble . . . she’ll freak out . . . she’ll leave . . . I need to talk with her, but not now. What a mess.

  “I’ve got a luncheon meeting at the Four Seasons Grill Room and then more meetings all afternoon at the Manhattan store,” Preston called over his shoulder. “If Casey calls, be sure to have him get me on my cell.”

  Chapter 7

  Even though Preston was in a meeting, he opened his cell phone.

  “Yeah, Case, what have you got?”

  “Talked with Fred Drucker, the legal head hunter at Antel. He thinks he has a positive search, but I’m not so sure. You want to hear it?”

  “We need help. Go.”

  “Turns out he knew a guy in the Navy named Joe Hart, who was a submarine commander and is now an attorney in some hick town in the South. Drucker was going to get a short list of attorneys this guy would recommend to do the job. As a matter of course, he checks the guy out first. Five out of the six recommend this guy. They’ve all sent him work, heavy stuff, you know, the kind of cases they either can’t handle or don’t want to take on the risk. If he wins, they’re heroes. If he loses, it’s his fault. They don’t know how the hell he does it. But he does it.”

  “What specifically does he do?” Preston asked.

  “He looks at the same case they looked at, the background and financials, collateral, equity, that information. Then he figures out where he wants to go. They say he cuts through it and persuades everybody involved – even though they’re all fighting with each other – to follow his plan. It really doesn’t matter what the case is, as long as he’s interested in taking it. It’s not about money with this guy. If he needs to, he litigates, and he wins. But he’d rather do it without litigation. In fact, one of the lawyers I talked to told me a story about Hart defending one of seven above-ground swimming pool companies in a plaintiff’s case in Federal Court in Syracuse. It seems that some idiot got drunk and dived from a second-story balcony into a four-foot pool, fracturing his skull and breaking his neck. He’s now a paraplegic and will be in a wheelchair the rest of his life. Hart makes a motion for summary judgment before the judge and before any depositions are even taken. The thing that pissed the other defense lawyers off is that he won the motion.”

  “Why were they upset? Weren’t they all on the same side?”

  “Yeah, they had a lot of respect for what Hart did from a legal point of view, but what pissed them off was that he kept each of them from making over $200,000 in fees defending the case. It took a lot of guts.”

  “Did you ask how he got the judge to throw the case out?”

  “Yeah, the way he did it was he compiled the sworn affidavits from all the witnesses that showed that the plaintiff was drunk out of his skull and caused his own injury by diving head first into a four-foot pool. He showed that the failure of the pool companies to warn that the pool was only four feet deep was not what caused the injury. Something about proximate cause or some other lawyer crap.

  “Then Hart presents a financial study on the cost to the plaintiff, to all the defendants and to the court itself if the court waits until all the depositions of all the parties are taken by all the lawyers, which he projected to take over a year and a half, which apparently hadn’t been done before. His cost projection was in the millions. He challenged any of the lawyers to dispute the projection of the costs, and they couldn’t do it. So it went ‘uncontroverted.’

  “The bottom line is he convinced the judge to throw the case out right then. Not only that, the plaintiff appealed, and this guy Hart wrote his own brief and argued the appeal in the United States Court of Appeals right here in the city and won. And get this, he’s done some heavy lifting for various mega-dealers around the country, straightened out some pretty big messes.”

  “Interesting,” Preston said. “I wonder why we haven’t heard of the guy.”

  “He’s not your garden-variety lawyer. He only takes about one in ten cases. He doesn’t advertise. He gets called in by the big firms, decides if he wants to take the case, and if he does, he gets in and out and sends the client back to the big firm. The big firms don’t want to advertise that he bailed them out and he’s happy to keep a low profile. He doesn’t even have a website.”

  “So have you talked with this guy?”

  “Well, that’s the problem. We don’t know where the hell he is.”

  “I thought you said he’s in . . . well, some town in the South. Why can’t you narrow that down?”

  “We did that. The town is outside of Charleston, a place called Braydon. We know where Hart lives, but we don’t know where Hart is.”

  “What?” Preston demanded. “I don’t get why it’s so difficult to find a lawyer practicing in Braydon, South Carolina.”

  “Well, here’s the part that gets really bad. It seems Hart’s wife was killed in some random drive-by shooting. Can you believe that shit? He took it really hard, which I can understand, and he took off.”

  “Took off where?”

  “Someone said something about the mountains, which makes no sense to me. We can put a PI on it and send him down to where the guy lives and see what he can find out, if you want me to do that.”

  “Casey, your man Drucker has a full investigative report on this man, right? Where is he from? Where was he born? Where did he grow up?”

  “Believe it or not, this guy’s from New York.”

  “If he’s from the city and such a big shot, why haven’t we heard of him?” Preston said. “Something’s wrong here.”

  “This guy is from upstate, and I don’t mean Westchester. The boonies. But there is something wrong.”

  “What?”

  “We’ve got the best lawyers right here. Why should we go chase this guy? Besides, he’s got problems, and we don’t have a clue where he is. We’re wasting time looking for this guy. Even if we find him what have we got? I think it’s crazy.”

  There was a long pause on the line.

  “Preston?” Casey asked.

  “Yeah, I’m here,” Preston said. “Let’s think this through. From what you’ve told me this guy’s a fighter, a former Navy commander. He does this kind of work, apparently well. He’s not like other attorneys, sure as hell not like ours. You say he tries not to litigate . . . but when he has to, he kicks ass. That sounds just like the kind of guy we need.”

  “I don’t know.” Casey said. “Anyway, we don’t know where he is.”

  “You said he’s gone some place in the mountains. Some place in the mountains,” Preston repeated. Where? Where were those mountains my father dragged me to? “Where does the investigative report show he’s from, Casey? Where did he grow up?” Preston asked again.

  “Just a minute,” Casey said. Preston could hear him shuffling through papers. “Here it is, Mineville, wherever the hell that is.”

  “Hang on a second, Casey,” Preston said, as he pushed his mind back further and further. “I’ll call you back.”

  Preston excused himself from the meeting and went back to his corner office on the forty-fourth floor of the General Motors Building. He walked up to the glass and stared through the floor-to-ceiling windows. It was a clear morning and he could see the East River and part of the Hudson River, the George Washington, Triboro, and Queensboro bridges, the sun shimmering off the water, the buildings and the planes approaching and leaving LaGuardia in the distance. He loved that view, and he loved being up there. He didn’t want to lose it. His thoughts turned to his mother and then to his father. He kept pushing back, further and further in his mind. He was not sure what he was searching for, but he
knew there was something he was missing. Then he remembered his mother’s words that horrible night when she told his father to leave. Some reference to his father spending time with him. Then it hit him. “There is the business about those trips way upstate in the mountains.” Preston recalled one trip with his father, a guide and the guide’s son. Or maybe it was his nephew. Whatever, Preston hated being dragged up there, the whole wilderness thing. He vaguely remembered the old man and the kid. They were pathetic, but they did know the mountains.

  Preston called Casey back.

  “I may know where he is,” he said. “Get a helicopter. You and I are going to Mineville.”

  “Wait a minute, Pres. Mineville is where he grew up, but, again, we don’t know where he is now. I have no information as to what mountains he’s in. There are a lot of mountains: in the Carolinas, Virginia, the Appalachians, the Poconos, the Adirondacks, the Catskills. And that’s just in the East. Maybe he went out West, who the hell knows? How are we going to find him? And if we do, how do we know he’ll help us?”

  “We don’t have a choice; we’ve got to find him. If we do find him, I think he’ll help us.”

  “How the hell do you know that? You act like you know this guy.”

  “I might. Years ago there was a kid my age in the mountains. I think his name was Joe. He lived with the old man, the guide. There was something about his father not being around. He had a different last name. It could have been Hart. We went hunting with them. He wasn’t anybody but . . . well, if he’s the guy I’m thinking of, maybe I’ve got a hook. You know what I mean?”

  “Well, not really . . . but . . . whatever you say, Preston.”

  Chapter 8

  “Okay, Casey,” Preston said, looking at the map. “Follow Route 9 North. It’s about fifty miles or so. We’ll start there.” He pointed to Mineville.