Breach of Trust

by David Ellis

  “Sure.”

  “So these guys are going to come in, they’re going to give you the lawyer rap, and then you’re going to figure out how to get my guys those jobs. Right?”

  “Right,” I said. “You’re the man.”

  AND MAC WAS ESSENTIALLY correct in his prediction. We met with a guy named Gordon. I couldn’t remember if that was his first name or last, or maybe he just went by one name like Bono or Madonna. He was a pudgy guy with a shock of black hair on top and droopy cheeks. He was the deputy counsel to the Division of Personnel and Professional Services and Other Assorted Bureaucratic Quagmires, or something like that.

  “You’ve got two problems with these jobs,” he said. “First, the veterans’ preferences are absolute. Each of the jobs you’re seeking to fill with these people on this list of yours? They’re right here in the city. There are dozens of veterans up here who are on a list for jobs like these. All of them would start with a preference. You have to consider them first and give them a weighted score.”

  “What’s the other problem?” I asked.

  “The other problem is that some of these positions, we’ve already taken applications and administered tests, and the people you want for these jobs will have to score higher on the tests.”

  I looked over at Mac, who shook his head. Not good. Apparently we weren’t confident relying on the intellectual acuity of the people Harmoning wanted us to hire.

  “Veterans are sorted by county?” I asked.

  “That’s right.”

  “Are there counties with no veterans applying?”

  “Are there—well, probably,” he said, thinking about it. “We have over a hundred counties in this state. There are probably counties that don’t have any veteran applicants, yeah.”

  “And these five different agencies we’re talking about here,” I said. “Would any of them have offices in those counties without any veteran applicants?”

  Gordon blinked at me. “You’re talking about moving the jobs to counties with no veterans applying?”

  “I am.” I felt a small pain in my gut just saying it. But it was my role to do this, to fuck over the veterans to get the jobs for these people Madison and Mac wanted hired.

  “Well, you can’t—” Gordon looked at me and then at Mac. Gordon knew the law, meaning he knew that it was against the law to try to skirt the veterans’ preferences. But he also knew that Brady Mac was his boss, and I came from the governor’s office. Each of us outranked him.

  “He’s asking you to check,” Mac said. “Check to see if these jobs can be moved.”

  Gordon’s eyebrows arched and met in the middle. He looked at me for assistance. I looked away. I wasn’t enjoying this, not one bit.

  “By the end of the day,” said Mac.

  “And what if they can’t?” Gordon asked.

  “Well, let’s talk about that,” I said. “Suppose we wanted our people in these jobs and we couldn’t locate the jobs in a county without veterans applying. Or suppose other people have already been interviewed and taken tests. How do we do it? How do we get our guys in?”

  Gordon shrugged. He didn’t know, or he didn’t want to help us. A sheen of sweat appeared on his wrinkled forehead. The two people in this room who outranked him were asking him how to bend and twist the law. Gordon may have been a bit of a stiff, but he seemed like an honest guy.

  “Aren’t there jobs that don’t require tests?” I asked.

  “No,” said Gordon. “I mean, other than internships.”

  “Internships. You mean, like, college kids?”

  Gordon nodded.

  “How does the law define an ‘intern’?” I asked.

  “It doesn’t.”

  “An ‘intern’ is whatever we say it is?”

  “Right.”

  “We can create an ‘internship’ whenever we want?”

  “Well—I guess so. Sure.”

  “An ‘intern’ can hold the job indefinitely?”

  “I—well, I suppose so. Yes.”

  I looked at Mac. He seemed to be following.

  “We can pay an ‘intern’ whatever we want?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “So if we turn a job into an internship, we can hire whomever we want and pay them whatever?”

  Gordon leaned forward. “But these jobs aren’t internships, Mr. Kolarich. I mean, here.” He looked at the piece of paper. “Associate supervisor for administration in the Board of Education. That’s not an internship.”

  “Maybe it is now,” I answered. “I mean, it is if we say it is, no?”

  Gordon looked like he’d swallowed a bug. By the time he left Mac’s office, he’d stained both of his armpits and probably lost about five pounds of water weight.

  “What an asshole, that guy,” Mac said to me. “This guy forget who he’s working for?”

  “He’s just doing his job,” I said.

  “Yeah, well, let’s see how long he has a job.”

  “You’re not going to fire Gordon,” I said.

  Mac looked at me. I could see him mentally run through his diagram, himself up at the top, me several notches below. “And why aren’t I going to fire him?”

  “Because I said so. You fire him, you fire me.” I opened my hands. “You want to fire me, Mac? Be my guest. I’ll figure this out for you, but you’re not going to run this guy Gordon out of the office. You’re not.”

  I left the office on that note. Looked like I wasn’t going to be counting Brady MacAleer as someone whose trust I would gain. But there was only so much I could tolerate. I began to wonder how long I could wade in the swamp with these assholes.

  I FOUND GORDON in his office an hour later. When he saw me, his posture went rigid. It wouldn’t have surprised me if he’d peed his pants, too. Fortunately, he was behind his desk.

  “Listen, Gordon,” I said. “I understand that you were troubled by our conversation. Here’s what I want you to do. I want you to write me a memo explaining that we can’t deliberately avoid the veterans’ preference laws. I want you to put it in writing and give it to me and me only.”

  He stared at me, a deer in the headlights. “And Mr. MacAleer fires me.”

  “No. That’s not going to happen. He’ll never see the memo. Just me. You need to cover yourself.”

  Gordon took a deep breath and nodded slowly. “Is he—really going to do that? Move the jobs around and create internships?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. It won’t be your decision, and I want you to be able to say that it wasn’t your idea. Because it wasn’t. Okay?”

  He was off-balance. He didn’t know me. And this kind of stuff, it clearly wasn’t his game. He was a bureaucrat, an honest one.

  “It didn’t used to be like this,” he said.

  “I know.” I patted the door and walked back to my office.

  70

  I SPENT THE REST OF THAT DAY AND EVENING REVIEWING all the state statutes on this stuff, most especially the veterans’ preferences. The next morning, I met with Brady Mac and Madison Koehler in her office.

  “Good news and bad news,” I said.

  Madison rubbed her eyes. “The good news first,” she said. I’d have gone the other way.

  “The good news is that three of the agencies we need—Transportation, Education, and Corrections—have offices in at least one county where there are no veterans applying. So we could hire these people for jobs in those counties and not have to deal with veterans.”

  “What counties?” she asked.

  “Two in Norfolk County and one in Summit County.”

  “Those are downstate,” she said. “Rick Harmoning’s people live up here. That’s no good.”

  “So we hire them for jobs down there and then transfer them, almost immediately, up here. They’ll already have the jobs so we don’t have to deal with veterans’ preferences. A job transfer doesn’t count.”

  She looked at me, then Mac, and nodded. “Okay, so for three of the five agencies, we get them
jobs by moving the jobs to counties without veterans waiting in line.”

  “Right. And then move them back, once the job is theirs.”

  She rolled her hand for me to continue. “What about the other two?”

  “The other two agencies—Commerce and Community Affairs and Public Health—we’re fucked,” I said. “But we can hire those people as interns.”

  “Interns? That’s not going to work. These people don’t want minimum-wage contracts. They want full-time employment with a salary and benefits.”

  “It will work,” I said. “We hire them as interns at the full salary they’d receive as full-time state employees. We can do that. There’s nothing stopping us. We can pay them whatever we want. And the law says we can hire an intern into a full-time position if they successfully complete a six-month probation period. The veterans’ preference doesn’t apply to them.”

  Madison thought that through. “So they get the job now, with full salary, and after six months they become full-fledged state employees with benefits?”

  “Exactly,” I said.

  She seemed okay with that. “And the bad news?”

  “The bad news,” I said, “is that everything we’ve just discussed is illegal. We aren’t supposed to do any of this. The law says that we must give a veteran’s preference to all of these jobs we’re trying to fill. It says we must take ‘every reasonable measure’ to ensure veterans are given their rightful preference. We’re doing the opposite. We’re taking every measure to consciously avoid the veteran’s preference.”

  Madison put down the pen she was twiddling between her fingers and sat back in her chair. “I don’t want to hear that.”

  I’m sure she didn’t. But it was essential that I say these things. It had to be clear that I was helping to orchestrate an illegal scheme. Otherwise, the crime-fraud exception to the attorney-client privilege didn’t apply, and everything we were discussing might be deemed privileged and unusable to the prosecution in court. Plus it made the case airtight, when the jury listened to the recording of this conversation. Madison couldn’t claim that she was relying on advice of counsel when her counsel was telling her, up front, that their plan was illegal.

  It was one of many times when I took a moment for inventory. I was getting pretty good at this. And what a talent: I was opening doors for people who, if they chose to walk through them, would be rewarded with an indictment from a federal grand jury. I was, for all practical purposes, sending people to prison. I was a loaded weapon. I was like a roach motel for criminals.

  “Well, my job is to make sure that you hear that,” I answered Madison. “I’m a lawyer. I tell you what the law says. It just so happens I’m also telling you how to circumvent it.”

  Madison seemed unhappy now. “So what the hell does this mean?”

  “It means,” I said, “that if you’re going to do what I suggest, be careful about it. Because it’s illegal. Paper the file. Make a point of needing these people in those downstate counties. Something convincing. And then paper the file again, explaining that with the budget crunch, you have to consolidate or something, and move these people up here. Same thing with the internships. Just create a few internships and maybe—maybe don’t start them at the full-blown salary, because it will be too obvious. Just make it something decent, and let them know, six months from now, they’ll be getting full pay and benefits.” I looked at each of them. “Bottom line, make sure that if anyone asks, they can’t prove that we were doing this to fuck the veterans.”

  Madison made a face. She didn’t like my stark description of what we were doing. Criminals never do. They rarely like to talk about what they’re doing out loud. I mean, what I’d said was spot on. The public policy of this state was to thank people who had risked their lives for this country in armed conflict by giving them a small bump in job preference; it was a mandatory state law, and here we were, doing everything we could to circumvent that policy. It made me sick. My only consolation was that I was nailing these people to the wall, courtesy of a recording device in my coat pocket.

  “Give us a minute, Mac,” said Madison.

  “Sure, Chief.” Like the dutiful soldier he was, Brady Mac dragged his knuckles out of the office.

  Madison fixed her stare on me. “You don’t like this,” she said.

  “It is what it is.”

  “That’s exactly right. It is what it is. You don’t win election to the highest office in the state by just hoping that good things will happen.”

  “A civics lesson.”

  “A life lesson,” she said.

  I didn’t answer.

  “I don’t have time for consciences,” she continued. “You want to be mother superior, do it on someone else’s time. There’s the door, any time you want to walk out.”

  “You firing me?” I asked.

  “I’m telling you that I don’t want to see that look on your face again. Get on board or leave. Is that clear enough, sport?”

  “One thing I’ll give you, Madison: You’re always clear.”

  “Good, then.” Her computer beeped, which I think meant an email message had arrived. She turned to it but kept talking. “Today’s my last day in the office until after the primary. We’re going all out now. Good work on those jobs. That’s exactly the kind of creativity we need from you. Now I’ll want to hear that you’ve wrapped everything up on that supreme court appointment.”

  “I’ve already set up some interviews with candidates,” I said.

  “But George Ippolito wins.” She turned her head and looked over her glasses at me.

  Yes, of course, one of the worst judges I’d ever stood before would be the winner of my faux interview process to select the next member of our state supreme court.

  I walked back to my office and went to work on the supreme court appointment. I got a call at two-thirty.

  “The governor’s in the city today,” a receptionist said. “He’d like to meet you.”

  71

  THE GYMNASIUM, PACKED TO FULL CAPACITY OF ABOUT two thousand, simultaneously went up in a roar at the announcement of Governor Carlton Snow. The governor appeared from the hallway, doing his typical gubernatorial calisthenics—wave, thumbs-up, point, and repeat—as he moved toward the center of the basketball court, encircled in purple for the high school’s nickname. He was wearing a button-down plaid shirt and blue jeans, which from what I had gathered from watching the news and reading the papers—I was paying more attention to such things of late—was the governor’s trademark look on the campaign trail.

  There were kids in the audience but it was mostly adults, the racial mix being approximately two-to-one, black to white. We were on the city’s south side, at Duerson High School. The place was badly in need of refurbishing, but the gym was in pretty good shape. One of the guys I played ball with had come from Duerson, but it was my first time in the building.

  “Thank you for the very nice greeting,” said the governor. “Usually, this time of year, when you hear Snow’s coming, it’s bad news.”

  I sensed this was not the first time the governor had cracked that joke, but the audience liked it. In a corner not that far from me, where the reporters who were following the campaign were gathered, a couple of them traded glances that indicated they’d heard the line more than once.

  I was standing next to Hector Almundo, dressed resplendently as always, who had actually arrived with the governor but came over to me. He’d given me a brief rundown. Today’s theme was education, and the governor was unveiling a plan to add more teachers to the city schools by expanding gambling—adding a new casino just outside the city—and using some of the state’s share of the gambling revenues for funding.

  I was aware of the fact that we had some casinos in this state but I’d never visited one, nor had I stopped to consider the moral ramifications of legalizing gambling at all. I guess if I’d thought about it, I’d say, don’t go if you don’t want to play. But the point seemed to be that gambling carried with
it some unsavory baggage like prostitution and addiction, and the people who seemed to play the most—the ones looking for the big score—tended to be the people who could afford it least.

  “Well, these people seem to like his proposal,” I said to Hector, leaning into his ear.

  “These people are teachers,” he said back. “That’s who he’s doing it for.”

  Ah. Rallying the base. “Why spend time courting people who are already voting for you?” I asked.

  Hector looked at me and smiled. Oh, the naïve child was I. He leaned into me but had to speak up as the crowd erupted in applause. “This is just the setting, J. He’s doing it for the cameras. These campaigns are mostly television these days. Or Internet. Same thing. Plus G-O-T-V.”

  I didn’t know what the hell that meant. “That’s different than regular TV?”

  His smile turned to laughter. “Get out the vote,” he shouted over the din. “The more excited they are, the more they make sure that they and their friends go to the polls. We need a big turnout in the city because Willie’s doing well downstate.”

  The governor went on for more than thirty minutes. He was good at what he did. He knew how to punctuate his lines, and he knew how to connect with the audience. He had that ridiculous politician’s smile but they all did, so it didn’t strike me as a handicap.

  When it was over, I followed Hector and became part of the entourage. There was the state police detail and Madison and some other people, including a guy whom I recognized from the photo Chris Moody had showed me as William Peshke. We filtered into three stretch limousines that were part of a cavalcade, and before I knew it I was sitting next to Hector and this Peshke guy. And I was sitting across from Madison Koehler and Governor Carlton Snow.

  The governor put out his hand. Madison squirted some sanitizer in his palm and he rubbed his hands together voraciously, like he was about to settle down to a big meal. Then he took a sweaty bottle of water from her and took a long swallow, smacking his lips with satisfaction when it was over.