I cut him off. “I’ll talk about one client.”
The room went silent and they all stared at me.
“Abdul Aziz Abbas,” I said.
“And who might that be?” Downing asked.
“An Iraqi national, lives in New York City. He’s actually a personal client of my boss, Christian Bovay, but I had access to all his records. As a matter of fact, he’s such a big dog that Bovay has a separate telephone line in his office, just reserved for Abbas. It’s like the red phone from the Kremlin to the White House.”
“And that’s unusual?”
“Unprecedented,” I said. “Nobody but Bovay was allowed to answer that phone. I know because, when I was fairly new at the bank, it was ringing off the hook and Bovay wasn’t there. So I walked into his office and answered it. A foreign-accented voice on the other end of the line exploded at me. ‘Who is this and why are you answering this phone?!’”
“All right,” Downing grunted. “And what sort of holdings did this Abbas have at UBS?”
“Four hundred and twenty million dollars in six numbered accounts. Plus, he’s got a $40 million duplex condo on the forty-sixth and forty-seventh floors at the Olympic Tower complex in downtown Manhattan.”(Exhibit 15.)
Matthew Kutz whistled. “That’s a freaking lot of money.”
“That’s right, Mr. Kutz. You’re starting to get it. And just think, we had nineteen thousand such clients in our Swiss branches.”
“And how did this alleged undeclared account holder make his money?” Karen Kelly asked. I actually had her attention for the first time in two days.
“He made his money through illegal oil sales with Saddam Hussein’s regime, and he’s the single largest account holder on the American Desk.” Christian Bovay had confirmed all of this to me.
I understood, of course, that the actual names of clients should not be revealed without a subpoena or other legal compulsion to speak about it. However, I had no qualms in voluntarily spilling these particularly filthy beans. After all, this was a post-9/11 world, and this guy Abbas had terrorism written all over him. Sorry, my Swiss friends, but terrorism trumps Swiss banking secrecy. In fact, many in the Bush administration thought that the 9/11 attacks were aided by Saddam Hussein. So the prosecutors at the DOJ in Washington, DC, of all people, would want to know this … or so I thought.
By this time, I had all of their undivided attention. Their eyes were riveted on me, waiting for what I might say next.
“Oh, there’s one other thing you should know.”
“What’s that?” Downing asked.
“I understand that Abbas is good friends with Rudy Giuliani.”
It was the proverbial needle-across-the-record moment. Downing, who is from New York, immediately thrust his open hand at my face and said in a loud tone, “We’re not interested in non-Americans!” I tried to interject, but he kept repeating this mantra, almost in a panic. It was like a child plugging his fingers in his ears, shutting his eyes tightly, and humming loudly to avoid unpleasant news.
Not interested in non-Americans? This bank is run by non-Americans, you dumb jackass, I thought. Downing was obviously full of shit. This had struck a nerve in him. There was something there. Giuliani was his homeboy, and was way up in the presidential polls. I suddenly saw the three Feds in front of me as dumbass monkeys: See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil.
Okay. I moved on to another area of which Downing & Company were completely ignorant.
“Here’s a way that you can checkmate the bank on the first move of the game.” I told them that six months from then, in early December 2007, the Art Basel Exhibition would be held in Miami. “UBS is the main sponsor of this event, and they do it for one reason: to have their private bankers on the American Desk fly in from Switzerland and recruit wealthy Americans to open secret Swiss accounts. And those employees will be flying in under UBS America’s cover. Make no mistake about it. UBS America is neck-deep in this.”
I wasn’t even sure that Downing was hearing me. He was still shaken up by the Giuliani thing. But I went on.
“I know the names of each UBS private banker who is flying to Miami, in which hotels they’ll stay, their cell phone numbers, and their email addresses. All of them will falsely indicate on their customs declarations that they’re traveling for pleasure instead of for business, in violation of US law. They are all instructed to do this by the bank. Each of them will be carrying UBS-issued encrypted laptop computers and BlackBerrys. Those laptops contain the account data on their respective clients, and each one of these bankers has up to two hundred American clients. You get your hands on those laptops, and it’s game, set, match.”
I slid a large spreadsheet across the table, with all the hard intelligence I’d just enumerated: full names, cell phone numbers, and email addresses of each of these UBS bankers, along with the hotels they’d be staying at.
“Here’s your master list,” I said. “It’s a post-9/11 world. You guys can monitor almost anything going on almost anywhere on earth. This is a piece of cake. All you have to do is take these names and interface with Homeland Security. You’ll know exactly when they’re flying in, and you can intercept them either at the airport or at their hotels, along with their laptops and BlackBerrys. But you have to move in very quickly and in a highly coordinated manner, because the laptops and BlackBerrys have ‘panic buttons’ that, when pushed, immediately wipe the devices clean of all data. You can’t let these guys have an opportunity to push those buttons. It has to be a quick takedown.”
Downing and Kelly had the facial expressions of paper-pushing bureaucrats, that “don’t tell me how to do my job” look written all over them. You know the look. It’s the same one you see while standing in a painfully slow line at the registry of motor vehicles or the post office. But I took one more shot at getting them to understand I was handing them the largest winning lottery ticket of their lives.
“With each banker having up to two hundred accounts, you’ll easily have the data of over a thousand American UBS account holders in one fell swoop!”
“You watch too much TV,” Downing blurted out. “That’s Hollywood.” He immediately dismissed the entire idea. But TV had nothing to do with it, and I hardly even watch TV. Downing clearly didn’t want to utilize methods that he hadn’t thought of first. Hell, I might actually get credit for this—instead of him! We can’t have that!
Make no mistake about it. This plan would have worked. The US law enforcement authorities would not only have had the account data on over 1,000 American account holders at UBS, but several of their private bankers in custody as well. The bankers could then have been squeezed for more information, corroborating the stuff I’d already given to the DOJ. Slam dunk, right?
Wrong. Suddenly that was it. Meeting over. Downing and Kelly stood up and marched to the door, with Kutz following along like a confused puppy.
“We’ll give you one more shot at this,” Downing snapped at me and my attorneys. “Come up with some serious information about American tax-evaders, and we might consider your needs.”
Then they were gone. Shortly after that, we were too.
“What the fuck was that?” I fumed as the three of us managed to stuff ourselves into a cab.
“I think maybe you scared them,” Rick said.
Rick nodded. “That thing about Abbas and Giuliani. That had to be the one name you gave them? Jesus, Brad.”
“Well, if they can’t stand the heat,” I said. “At least that’ll give them a taste of what I’ve really got here. Maybe now they’ll want to deal.”
“Fingers crossed,” said Rick.
“Listen, gents,” I said. “I’m giving them one more shot, and that’s it.”
But that shot was a dud. The next session took less than an hour. Matthew Kutz wasn’t there, and Downing and Kelly behaved as if they’d gone to confession and their priest had warned them to stop dancing with the devil. Hector and Moran tried one more time to get me some sort of subpoena
or grant of immunity, but Downing acted as if he were deaf.
“We’re going to examine all these documents thoroughly, and then we’ll advise you of our position.”
“When can we contact you?” Paul asked.
“Don’t call us. We’ll call you.”
“Sounds familiar,” Rick muttered.
And then we were out on the street again. I’ve felt disheartened once or twice in my life, but this was one of my low points. I’d come all this way to hand-deliver a victory to the American taxpayer and a tar-and-feather party to the outrageously corrupt Swiss system, and all I’d gotten was a kick in the ass. Honestly, I felt bitch-slapped.
“This isn’t going to work,” I said to my lawyers. “Let’s take this to someone who’s going to listen. Let’s take it to the US Senate.”
“The Senate?” Rick stopped walking and looked at me. Then he pointed over to Capitol Hill. “You mean those guys?”
“That’s right. Get me a subpoena to testify before the US Senate. Do that, and I’ll give those senators the whole shebang, client names included—addresses, phone numbers, names of their yachts and girlfriends and racehorses. Those DOJ goons can go fuck themselves.”
“Okay, Brad. We’ll try it,” Paul said. “Where are you going to be?”
“Back home.”
“In Geneva?”
“Yeah, at the moment I’m feeling more at home back there.”
I took a taxi to my hotel. I felt totally exhausted, as if I’d run a three-day marathon wearing lead boots. And I was pissed as hell. I walked into my hotel room, and for a moment I felt like trashing the place as if I were Keith Richards on coke, which probably seems redundant. I tore off my stupid suit, had a stiff whisky from the mini-fridge, and was about to go out to a park somewhere and smoke a big fat Havana when my cell phone buzzed.
What fresh hell is this? I wondered as I picked it up. But then I smiled. It was my buddy from London, Ladjel Jafarli.
“La-djel!” I forced a vocal smile. “How are you, buddy?”
“Very fine, Brad. And you?”
“Livin’ the dream.”
He laughed. “I don’t suppose you happen to be in the States. I’m in Washington attending an executive off-site conference.”
“Really?” I thought fast. I’d met Ladjel in Morocco during my stint for Barclays, and he was super discreet; but I still wasn’t going to tell anyone what I was doing. “I’m down here too! Been hunting-gathering in Virginia.”
“No! Is it by any chance all wrapped up?”
“Like a Christmas present.”
“Tell you what, Brad. Let’s go to Cancún for some R&R.”
“Great idea! I’ll book flights for us.”
“No need. I’ve already taken care of that.”
It took about a nanosecond for me to accept. I sorely needed a break, a head-clearing, and jetting off to Mexico for a few days sounded to me like a shrink’s prescription. I told him where I was staying.
“Excellent!” he said. “Pick you up in two hours.”
On the button two hours later, a long black limousine pulled up in front of the hotel and Ladjel jumped out and pumped my hand, his white teeth gleaming in the sunshine. Algerian born, he had wavy black hair and eyes that made girls swoon, and having been raised in Geneva he was fluent in French. A wonderful guy and generous friend, much like Mario Staggl or Sanjay Kumar; a guy I knew I could trust and have great fun with.
However, I didn’t dare tell him what I was up to. We drove off to Dulles, all smiles and ready to party. Ladjel knew I was out of UBS and he’d also heard about my lawsuit, but I could tell from our exchanges that he knew nothing about my internal whistle-blowing, and certainly nothing about what I was actually doing in Washington. I said, which was true, that I’d started working for a friend in private equity and planned to make that my new game. He had plenty of ideas and contacts, and we chatted about all the possibilities.
When we got to Dulles the limo drove right past the terminals and around to the private jet park, where a gleaming white Citation X was sitting on the blazing tarmac. I laughed.
“I thought we were going commercial.”
“Don’t be bourgeois!” Ladjel said. “What’s the point of being a high roller if you don’t use ‘The Bird’?”
So we jetted off to Cancún, just the two of us in that gleaming steel tube with its camel-colored leather seats, two pilots, a very comely flight attendant, and plenty of scotch. Ladjel’s firm in London didn’t own the airplane, but they had “private jet shares,” which meant the sleek beast was at his disposal. While en route, he booked us into the Ritz-Carlton, a five-star resort at the tip of Cancún. I remember that four-day adventure as a swirl of green, pink, and blue. Emerald palm trees bowed over the manicured grounds, swaying in the Atlantic breeze as we drank by the pool. Pink hues were everywhere; the tablecloths, lounge chairs, the stucco bridge leading to the yacht basin, and the sun-pinkened skin of beautiful, well-off women. The bay was crystal blue, and we sailed on it, dove in it, and I felt as if the water was rinsing the creepy slime of Washington from my body and brain. Ladjel and I talked about business, fun, and girls, but still I never mentioned the real purpose of my recent foray in the US capital. We laughed a lot, had fun, and then finally surrendered to life’s requirements and got back on the jet, rested, suntanned, and ready to face our next challenges.
Per US regulations, private jets entering American airspace from Mexico have to set down at the first available airport for Customs and Immigration checks. So we landed in El Paso, where I couldn’t help remarking to Ladjel on the absurdity of ICE’s efficiency at the airport, while just a few miles south of us Mexican “drug mules” were fording the river and easily slipping past the Border Patrol.
“Yes, your country has some very interesting theories on border security,” he remarked.
“Washington doesn’t give a damn about the border,” I said. “They’ll take votes from anyone who can pull the lever, even if he just killed the mayor of Juárez.”
The jet sat on the tarmac for a while, and then two uniformed ICE agents came aboard. They looked at my US passport, gave it back, and then perused Ladjel’s Swiss passport.
“Please step out of the aircraft, Mr. Jafarli,” one of them said. “This won’t take long.”
Ladjel shrugged and got up, while I grinned, toasted him, and kept on sipping until he came back after about fifteen minutes.
“So, did they do a thorough cavity search?”
“No,” he said. “I was supremely grateful to not have to bend over. But it was a bit odd. They copied my passport, asked a few harmless questions, and let me go.”
“Well, you do look like a terrorist, got a Swiss passport, live in London, and you’re a Managing Director at Credit Suisse. A high-class bad guy, but definitely dangerous.”
A few hours later we landed at Dulles. I thanked him profusely for the getaway, promised to repay him somehow, sometime soon in London, and after a bear hug we parted ways. He jetted off to England, and I booked the first seat I could get to Geneva. I was feeling renewed and no longer so worried about my misadventures with the DOJ. I figured there were plenty of other agencies and people in Washington, much smarter folks who’d appreciate what I was trying to do. We’d just have to find them and turn that page.
A week went by. Having heard nothing from Hector and Moran, I finally got itchy and called them up, from a pay phone of course.
“Anything from those dickheads at the DOJ?”
“Nothing yet,” said Paul.
“So, what’s happening with the Senate?”
“We’re working on it, Brad.”
“Well, work a little faster, Paul. I’m not getting any younger over here.”
I hung up, frustrated. They were nice guys, but that’s not a quality you necessarily want in a lawyer. It didn’t give me that warm and fuzzy feeling having to coach these dudes on what to do, who to go to, how to come up with creative approaches. But they were sti
ll the only “non-conflicted” attorneys I’d been able to find, and at least they seemed honest.
A couple of days after that, my cell phone buzzed in my flat. It was Ladjel calling from London, and he sounded uncharacteristically tense.
“Brad, I just got off the phone with someone from Compliance at UBS.”
“You’re starting to keep bad company,” I quipped, not yet getting the tenor of his tone.
“You may not have any friends at that bank anymore,” he said. “However, luckily for us, I still do. Listen, someone sent them a letter, allegedly from me. But as God is my witness, it wasn’t from me. Give me your fax number.”
“What’s this all about, Ladjel?”
“You’ll see shortly, and you won’t like it.” Then he added, “And Bradley, watch your ass.”
I gave him the number and he rang off. A few minutes later my fax machine came to life and spat out a single page. I looked at it, and as I read it I felt the heat flooding my legs and scorching my chest. It was addressed to the Legal department of UBS Headquarters, Geneva, and here it is, verbatim.
July, 2007
UBS AG
c/o Wealth Management and Business Banking
for Legal Department
2, Rue de la Confederation
CH-1204 Geneva
Dear UBS Geneva:
I am informing you of your Wealth Management/Key Clients ex-employee, Bradley Birkenfeld, attempting to cause a malicious legal problem against your bank.
Recently, in spite of your sealed Swiss Court settlement with his employment, he has knowingly attempted to contact US Justice Department authorities to divulge proprietary bank procedures that may be in violation of US laws.
To date, the US Justice Department, Washington, DC, office is considering issuing subpoenas to certain UBS bank officials as well as the bank itself. And to reward him for such whistle-blower initiatives.
Please check with your lawyers on Mr. Birkenfeld’s vindictive and unprofessional actuations, as he resides in our Switzerland.
I assume you shall keep my contacting you in strictest confidence. I am also a Swiss citizen.
Sincerely,
Lucifer's Banker Page 17