“There’s a happy ending, Doc. Now you use that money to repay your loan.” I didn’t mention the UBS interest fees. Why spoil dessert? “Now you’ve got a total of seven mil; five declared and two undeclared. And guess what? There are no tax consequences for taking a loan, especially from yourself! You can use that legit five mil any way you want. And when you come over to merry old Europe, you can use the other two mil for vacations, partying, buying pretty baubles for your wives. Hell, you can buy a yacht if you want and park it in Cannes.”
“I get it,” said the Soprano dude. “If the Feds come nosing around, you’ve got open paperwork on a declared account. They can’t look at anything else you might have ’cause you’re protected by Swiss laws.”
“Bingo,” I said as I winked at him.
“You really know your stuff, Mr. Birkenfeld,” the dentist said.
“That’s my only talent, Doc.” I grinned at them, lifted my cognac, and said, “You know, Geneva is beautiful this time of year.” (With me, Geneva was beautiful at any time of the year.) “You really should consider a visit.”
You’ve already guessed at what happened next. It happened after every one of my field trips.
A middle-aged American male, always wealthy, usually bored, shows up at Geneva airport, and from there he’s on Mr. Birkenfeld’s Magic Carpet Ride. There’s a black Mercedes sedan with blacked-out windows waiting, which whisks him off to the Hotel Richemond, where there are fresh flowers and tropical fruit in his fabulous suite overlooking Lac Léman, along with a box of Frigor Swiss chocolates. I pick him up at seven p.m., expressing how sorry I am that his wife couldn’t make it, and suggest he should buy her a nice present. First we have dinner at Le Comptoir, a five-star classy joint with amazing French cuisine. By nine he’s had a few drinks, so I suggest just checking out the sexy girls at Velvet. It’s a very upscale cabaret, which happens to have a “dance” stage off in one corner. There we’re joined by my buddy from London, Ladjel Jafarli, an Algerian-born investment banker who looks like a young Omar Sharif and has a wicked sense of humor.
I also know lots of the girls at Velvet. All of them are “working girls,” Russians, Czechs, Poles, a convenience I’ve taken advantage of on occasion—strictly business. Some of them are just “girls who wanna have fun,” and they’re all gorgeous. By midnight, there’s this tall, blonde, friendly Czech chick standing behind Mr. Client’s chair, massaging his shoulders and whispering God-knows-what in his ear. I wink at her. She winks back. That means I’ll take care of her later. Ladjel yawns and says, “Bradley, your lifestyle is going to kill me, and so would my mother if she knew where I was!” I laugh and say, “I’ve got to get a move-on too, buddy.” Both of us get up and I throw a thousand Swiss francs on the table. “Martina, darling,” I say to the girl. “Will you please make sure Mr. Client gets back to la Paix all right?”
“Of course I will, Bradley!” By the time Ladjel and I are out the door, she’s perched on this happy dude’s lap. In about an hour she’ll be giving him the ride of his life.
In the morning when I pick him up, Mr. Client looks like the proverbial canary-eating cat. He’s in a dream state as we drive over to 16 Rue de la Corraterie in one of my Ferraris, where I escort him and his hefty briefcase into the lobby and across a polished marble floor, past towering pillars, tall windows girded with wrought-iron bars, and security cameras everywhere. We ride the elevator to a lovely private receiving room. A redheaded girl walks in with a silver tray piled with fresh croissants, fruit, and espresso. Another blonde girl shows up pushing a bill-counting machine on a rolling cart. She’s wearing a tight silk blouse, a short gray skirt, and has endless legs ending in heels. Mr. Client opens his briefcase and hands her two fat stacks of hundred-dollar bills. She smiles and runs his money through the bill-counter like a manicured machine-gunner. Brrrraaaaap! “It is two hundred thousand,” she says to me as she carefully stacks it all up and rolls away with the money. I then hand Mr. Client a small sheaf of forms and contracts, which he barely reads, but I make sure to get his signature in all the right places.
Then we walk down a long corridor to a desk at the end, perched on a plush Persian rug, where a security guard in a nice suit and tie smiles and opens a gleaming brass elevator, and we take a ride two stories underground. This next chamber looks like a VIP reception area at Fort Knox, with another Persian carpet, leather and chrome chairs, Ming vases, surveillance cameras, two female processing clerks behind a chest-high counter, a huge time-lock door, and past that, four subterranean floors of polished steel safe-deposit boxes. Some of those boxes are large enough to hold a framed Monet, while others are designed only for small gems of great value. The minimum annual rental fee for the smallest box is 500 Swiss francs, but that doesn’t faze Mr. Client and he goes for a larger size. He produces his passport and fills out a small white card, which has the number of his account on it and his code name, randomly chosen by computer. He then signs the card and receives two silver safe-deposit keys. Another guard appears, locks buzz, keys jingle, and we’re escorted into the vaults, where Mr. Client, his briefcase, and his large polished box have a private moment together in a sealed room. For all I know, he’s got gold bars or bottles of Ecstasy to stash in his box. But who cares? He comes out with his briefcase empty. The clerks recover his safe-deposit key; that’s the last thing he needs to be carrying around. If he wants access, he’ll have to show up again.
I drop him off at the airport and promise I’ll see him in the States next trip. He’s got quite a spring in his step—probably still thinking about Martina and whatever the hell she did to him the night before. I grin, roar away, and take the rest of the day off. That two hundred thou was just a good-faith deposit. In a month he’ll be wiring $3 million into his numbered account.
Score! Just another day in Swiss Paradise.
Over the course of my career as a Swiss private banker, I’ll see all sorts of things that my clients trust I’ll forget. Sometimes they show me what they’ve got, to get my advice on what to cash in or keep, but sometimes I think it’s just to gauge my reaction. I see gold and silver ingots, grape-sized pearls, currency from every country on earth, rare stamps, fat emeralds, and bearer bonds. One guy has half a million bucks in cash and six different passports. He could be an intelligence operative, a drug dealer, or an assassin. I don’t even blink. When a client has something large, like a priceless work of art, he doesn’t come in through the front door. I call security; the painting arrives in an armored truck and is driven straight to an underground garage and whisked to the vaults. I have clients who, once they’ve signed on, never want to be seen at the bank again. I meet them at their hotels in Geneva, confirming they’re my clients and it isn’t a setup, and receive their withdrawal instructions. Then I show up later again with the cash. More than once I’m walking around Geneva with a million bucks in a briefcase.
I gain a reputation as a discreet, knowledgeable banker, a man to be trusted. One client calls and asks if I’ll go to Italy to meet his close friend, a man who has questions about numbered accounts. When I agree, he gives me the guy’s description and a password phrase, no name. I take the train and find the guy in a hotel lobby in Milan, sit down next to him, and say, “Weather’s nice this time of year.” He smiles and says, “Yes, but I always carry an umbrella.” He’s middle aged, well built, with an indiscernible accent. For an hour he asks me about Swiss secret account procedures, then he hands me an envelope. “For your troubles,” he says, and he leaves. I open it on the way back to Geneva. It’s 10,000 Swiss francs in cash, a “consulting” fee.
There were times when I pinched myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming.
By the end of that first year at UBS, most of Igor Olenicoff’s cool $200 million had shown up in his numbered accounts and was getting structured through offshore companies and trusts per his request.
Just to be clear about that eighteen percent, it didn’t mean I’d be getting that size a chunk off the top of any Net New Money I
brought in. If that were the case, with Olenicoff’s nut alone I’d have cleaned the table of $36 million and retired to buy myself a hockey team somewhere. What it did mean was that I’d be getting eighteen percent of any revenue made with that big figure. So, for example, UBS was charging Olenicoff three percent to manage his $200 million, which is $6 million, and I was getting $1,080,000 out of that. Whenever Olenicoff invested any of his nut and made a profit, which of course I encouraged, I got my cut for that too. On top of that, the combined portfolios of all my other clients amounted to another $200 million, so bottom line I was making eighteen percent on the fees, securities sales, loan interest, currency transactions, and profits on $400,000,000. My book was about double the size of most other bankers on the desk. In banking, as with other things, size does matter. And since you can’t take it with you, I made sure to enjoy it.
I like fine watches. Hey, everybody’s got an Achilles’ heel. I was really craving an Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Offshore T-3, the same watch worn by Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 3. So I went over to their showroom and plunked down $25,000. I also had a thing for good cigars, and since the Davidoff showroom was three blocks from my flat, I used it as my personal humidor and they’d call me up whenever they had fresh boxes of Romeo & Julieta Churchills or Partagas #4 Robustos flown in from Havana. I like fine clothing too, but I’m not a fanatic; just had to look the part. My suits were Italian Brionis, and the dress shirts Egyptian cotton from Jermyn Street in London. Got my custom-made alligator shoes with matching belts in Bangkok, so I guess I looked pretty slick. But the prices weren’t outrageous, maybe $1,000 per outfit, and I only had ten.
But my flat at 20 Cours de Rive? That’s where I put in some serious bucks. A guy’s got to have his man cave; but if he’s a private banker and entertains, he’d better look like a financial wizard who’s not afraid to splurge. Just to set the tone, I had a porcelain sign custom-made for the front door, with a skull and crossbones and the words “Strong Ales and Loose Women.” The place had fifteen-foot ceilings, with tall French glass doors leading out to two balconies. The floors were Hungarian-point parquet, I’d adorned the carved marble hearth on my fireplace with antique brass cherub andirons, and the living room was “guarded” by a pair of Indian sculptures I’d shipped back from Mumbai. My two sofas were the centerpieces; thick green leather softened with Persian pillows, very comfy for my female guests. They also seemed to enjoy the huge horse-trough tub in my bathroom, in which the water was always crystal blue because it was pure mountain water. The kitchen was Italian marble, modern, and all its appliances, plus my living room stereo and TV, were the best I could find in Geneva. You’re probably wondering about the bedroom. It was big, with two high-paneled doors and a king-sized bed on steroids. I bought only satin sheets; girls don’t like scratchy.
Which brings me to Thais, the girl I was seeing at the time, and for a long time after. She was Brazilian, worked in the fashion industry, and we’d met at a party somewhere in Geneva. Thais had long dark hair, a curvy figure, and a beautiful smile with brilliant white teeth. Like most sexy women in Geneva, she dressed provocatively, walked with incredible style, and she had this mixed Portuguese-French accent that drove me crazy, in a good way. Her skin was light brown and felt like a Gordal olive just plucked from a jar. She really appreciated those satin sheets.
Thais had boundless energy and was ready to party, anywhere, anytime. So, when I finally made my biggest purchase, without telling her exactly what it was, she showed up at my place dressed warmly, as I’d suggested; tight jeans, warm boots, a frothy sweater, and a mink jacket, packed for a weekend trip. At the time I was driving a Ferrari Maranello, a $250,000 twelve-cylinder beast I’d bought for a wealthy friend in Asia (yes, with cash), and we hopped in and roared off for Zermatt. Even after parking the car, taking the cog-wheel train, and climbing a few hundred stone steps, she still wasn’t sure what was up, until we got to the magnificent rustic Swiss chalet I’d just closed the deal on. I thought she was going to faint when we walked inside. Nothing was in there yet except for a high-pile carpet in front of the enormous picture window, with the stunning precipice of the Matterhorn framing it from top to bottom. She dropped her bag and gasped.
I’m a big fan of Austin Powers, and I smiled at her and said, “Does this make you Matterhorny, bay-bee?”
We wound up on the carpet.
Looking back on it, I think that day was the apex of my career in Swiss banking. I was making tons of money and my life was a ’round-the-clock party. My clients were mostly harmless, wealthy Americans who just thought the government was overtaxing them and then spending their hard-earned money on dumbass programs about which they had no say. Couldn’t really argue with that, and these guys were very pleasant. On the very rare occasion when an investment went south, they’d just shrug and toss me more money. I was glad not to be working on the Russian or Chinese desks, where if you fucked up a trade you could wind up facedown in the Volga.
I slept very well at night, and, as I’d grown accustomed to, rarely alone.
PART II
CHAPTER 5
BURNED IN BERN
“You can’t spend your whole life worrying about your
mistakes. You fucked up, you trusted us.”
—OTTER, ANIMAL HOUSE
SPRING 2005
By my fourth year with UBS, I knew I was walking barefoot on the rim of a volcano.
Not that I wasn’t enjoying myself, but I couldn’t help looking down at my feet on occasion and swallowing a gasp. Up here in the rarefied air where I worked, the sun was bright and the feathery clouds were trimmed in gold. But way down there somewhere, chains rattled, dungeons reeked of sweat, and a pool of molten lava boiled and bubbled.
In Switzerland, where I lived and labored, not a damn thing I was doing was even slightly illegal. Hell, it was all encouraged. But over there in America, if the authorities discovered the high-stakes game I was playing, along with every other private banker at UBS, I knew they’d see me as a thief and a rogue. The balancing act was starting to take its toll.
And something was nagging at my conscience. The Global War on Terror and I had started our gigs together. Now we were engaged on two fronts, Afghanistan and Iraq, and the American body count was climbing. I had my doubts about Bush and his boys dropping the ball in the hunt for Osama bin Laden and going after Saddam Hussein instead, but I’ve never liked armchair generals so I figured they had their reasons. Yet many Americans at home were silently suffering, thousands of Moms and Pops sending their sons and daughters off to war and dutifully paying their taxes. In my long back-and-forths to the States I’d had lots of time to think about the people I was helping to not pay their share, while the tax man’s axe fell on those who couldn’t afford it. I knew that the largest corporations and most powerful people in the world were quarterbacking it all, making it happen, aiding and abetting their fellow fat cats. And here I was, helping those One-Percenters shirk their tax obligations while regular folks hefted the burden. It was starting to bug me. That’s right; even a hard-ass, cynical, take-no-prisoners Boston banker like me.
Of course, my American clients loved me. Who says you can’t buy love? I was making them richer with every tick of my Swiss cuckoo clock, as well as catering to every request, no matter how unusual, to ensure their happiness. And my clients comprised only a small percentage of American tax-evaders stashing their nuts in the UBS nest of secret numbered accounts. All in all, I had about 150 clients in Birkenfeld’s Big Black Book, thirty of whom were North Americans. But across all the bank’s branches in Zurich, Lugano, Geneva, and elsewhere, UBS had—hold on to your wallets—19,000 American clients enjoying offshore secret numbered accounts. We’re talking billions with a “B” here, folks. That’s a lot of tax revenue not going for beans and bullets.
It wasn’t pretty and it wasn’t fair, but I still wasn’t about to give it all up, join the priesthood, and go abstinent. God forbid. And yet, this Robert DeNiro line from a film cal
led Ronin kept popping into my head.
“I never walk into a place I don’t know how to walk out of.”
Truth be told, I didn’t know how to walk away from it all, and I wasn’t quite ready.
Here’s why …
I’m standing on the balcony of a seventh-floor luxury apartment, overlooking the undulating hills and twisting streets of Monte Carlo, Monaco. It’s late May in the French Riviera, the sky’s crystal blue and sunlight’s glinting off pristine white sails tilting in the majestic harbor. That harbor’s full of multimillion-dollar mega-yachts, packed gunnel to gunnel like gleaming white whales, their decks sporting pastel umbrellas like fancy summer cocktails and beauty queens in bikinis rubbing cheeks with Greek shipping tycoons, many of whom are old enough to be their fathers.
There’s a ripping whine in the air like the sound of a squadron of fighter jets, and then a tight gaggle of 900-horsepower Formula One racing cars comes blasting through the tunnel right below the balcony, and the crowd of spectators in the stands comes to its feet as David Coulthard takes the lead in a McLaren Mercedes that looks like a blue and white Star Wars X-Wing spaceship. Coulthard’s going to win this one, which is fantastic because I’ve got money on him, and so do lots of the folks in the flat.
I’ve rented these glorious digs using UBS money for the entire weekend leading up to Friday’s race. And naturally I’ve invited a handful of clients and their very wealthy friends to enjoy the race from my spectacular view. Leaning on the balcony to my left is a young Italian movie starlet with flowing black hair and a Sophia Loren body. She’s sipping Cristal and gripping my arm with excitement. To my right is Carlo Bandini, a big film producer from Rome and the girl’s sugar daddy of the moment, who’s grinning and enjoying a view that’s much better from here than from his yacht in the harbor. Behind us in the flat and all along the balcony are the rest of my invited clients, past, present and future, plus a couple of my buddies who love fast cars, French nightclubs, and young pretty girls who crave the limelight. They’re all bloated on the amazing gourmet cuisine prepared right there in the kitchen by a private chef I’ve hired for the weekend.
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