by Jake Needham
We were just in front of the Ambassador Hotel when a pudgy local man broke out of the pack of touts that habitually lay in wait there to ambush passing male tourists. He approached us in an odd, crablike gait, scuttling almost sideways.
“Massage, boss? Many sexy girl.” The tout poked a tattered brochure toward Barry. “Take look?”
Barry didn’t say anything, but he turned his head very slowly and looked at the man. The tout didn’t say another word. He just jerked the brochure away and darted back to the safety of the other touts. I could feel the men following us with their eyes as we walked on by and I wondered what the man had seen in Barry’s face that frightened him so badly.
“That was when Jimmy got an even bigger idea,” Barry continued as if nothing had happened. “He was sick of getting screwed by banks, he told me. He had the $50,000,000 I’d just stolen for him already sitting around in offshore banks, less my cut of course, so he told me he figured this was his big chance.”
I just listened.
“Jimmy wanted his own bank. I knew of one that was available and I thought we could get it for close to the $50,000,000 that I’d scammed out of Texas State. Jimmy told me if I’d throw in my $10,000,000 with his $40,000,000 and could do the deal for that amount, he’d give me a free hand to run the bank and a thirty-five percent shareholding.”
Now I was staring so hard at Barry I stumbled over an uneven joint in the sidewalk that jutted up unexpectedly in front of me.
“What are you telling me here, Barry? The Russian mob not only asked you to buy a bank for them, but to put some money into the deal yourself and become their partner? And you did it?”
“I didn’t become partners with the whole fucking mob, Jack, just with Jimmy Kicks. Don’t go all hysterical on me here.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“Serious as shit, Jack. A chance to own thirty-five percent of an international bank and run it however I wanted to? I’d have been nuts to say no.”
“How could you even think of fronting for the Russian mob, Barry?”
“Now don’t get so high and mighty on me, Jack. We both crawled out of the same fucking pile of crap. You took your way out, I took mine. What the hell’s the difference?”
“That’s the second time you’ve tried the say that we both took the same road, and this time I’m not going to let it slide. There’s nothing remotely similar about the choices you and I made, Barry. Not a damned thing.”
“Tell me the difference.”
“The difference is that I didn’t fake a suicide and go into business with a bunch of Russian mobsters.”
“No, Jack, that’s not it.”
Barry produced the faintest of smiles.
“The difference,” he said, “is they didn’t ask you to.”
ELEVEN
WE PASSED A McDonald’s that was closed for the night. Barry abruptly left the sidewalk and climbed the half-dozen stained concrete steps that led up to the darkened entrance. When he reached the last step, he turned around and sat down, looping his arms around his knees and lacing his fingers together.
“Was that Wilkins in the swimming pool?” I asked as I climbed up and sat down next to him.
“Who the hell do you think it was, Jack? The fucking tooth fairy?” Barry sounded genuinely annoyed. “Look, Wilkins was a dead man anyway. You don’t steal from somebody like Jimmy Kicks and then tell your grandchildren funny stories about it.”
“So you let them kill Wilkins to cover for you, and you took off.”
“Jack, I didn’t fucking let Jimmy Kicks do anything. Harold was going to get gutted. That’s all there was to it. Jimmy offered to use Harold’s body to fake a suicide for me and give me a clean start if I’d do the bank deal for him. It was just that simple.”
Barry looked off into the darkness and for a moment I wondered what he was seeing there.
“What bank did you buy?” I asked eventually.
“The Asian Bank of Commerce.”
I stared at Barry. The ABC was a very minor Philippine bank that would have been utterly unknown had it not been making headlines over the past few months with sensational allegations of corruption on a grand scale. The cast of characters rumored to be involved was colorful if a touch familiar: the usual contingent of corrupt government officials, fabulously wealthy sheiks, shady arms dealers, out-of-control intelligence agencies, and Asian criminal gangs. In fact, about the only international villains who hadn’t been getting press in connection with the ABC were Russian mobsters.
“How could you buy control of the ABC for the Russian mob without anyone finding out?” I asked.
“It was no big deal. I set up a string of shell companies to hold the stock and some corporate cut outs that kept anyone from tracing its real ownership. I used a private investment fund registered in the British Virgin Islands, a venture capital group in Luxembourg, a Panamanian shipping line, two Hong Kong insurance brokers, and a whole bunch of companies that owned companies that were in partnerships that owned other companies. Hell, Jack, you know how it’s done. You’re better at putting together that sort of stuff than anyone I ever knew. Except maybe me.”
“You sound like you’re proud of what you’ve done, Barry.”
“A little, I suppose. It was a cute deal. I did a hell of a job.”
I just shook my head and said nothing.
“Oh for God’s sake, Jack, lighten up. You know the old saying. Every man loves the smell of his own farts.”
In spite of myself, I had to laugh. “Did you just make that up?”
Barry shrugged. “Old Icelandic proverb.”
I chuckled again and shifted my weight on the step. I knew I should just keep my mouth shut, but I was curious.
“So how did you deliver the bank to Jimmy?” I asked.
“It wasn’t too tough. When the peso went down the toilet a few years ago, the ABC was fucked. They tried to sell some convertible bonds to raise capital, but the market just laughed. My shell companies scooped up most of the bonds for a couple of cents on the dollar, then we converted them all into common stock.”
“And that gave you control of the Asian Bank of Commerce.”
“Only nobody knew it because we used about thirty different companies to buy and convert the bonds. It looked like a whole bunch of different companies each had a small piece.”
I doubted that. It certainly wouldn’t have looked that way if anyone was paying attention. On the other hand, Manila wasn’t much of a financial center and Barry had probably struck on one of the best places in the world to find exactly the right combination of credibility, stupidity, and greed he needed to make his deal fly. What passed for the banking authorities in the Philippines were mostly local politicians, none of whom would have particularly cared what Barry and his friends were actually doing with the ABC as long as they were taken care of.
The gist of the story that Barry had told me was beguilingly simple, but the implications were breathtaking. On the surface, he had just bought a broken-down bank that was operating in a reasonably respectable place and used a string of untraceable shell companies to control it. As a practical matter, however, Barry had done nothing less than hijack an entire country as a front for a gang of Russian mobsters.
“It sounds to me like you and your new pals are on the train to glory, Barry. So why are we having this conversation? I can’t believe you’ve discovered a sudden need to confess your sins.”
“Well…” Barry rolled some words around in his mouth for a few moments, but he didn’t seem to like the taste of any of them. “It’s this way, Jack. The bank’s wiped out. Somebody scammed us.”
He said it exactly like he was pronouncing a death sentence. For Barry, it probably was.
“In the last three months we’ve lost more deposit money than we can cover from capital. I swear to God I don’t know who took it, but eventually Jimmy’s going to decide it was me.”
I could feel a chill coming off Barry. He glanced past me towar
d the street and I turned and followed his eyes. The tall woman was standing on the sidewalk about fifty feet away. She was looking into some shop windows and seemed to be paying no attention to us at all.
“They’ll get me, Jack. If I can’t fix this, they’ll get me; and it doesn’t matter a fig how many people I have out there protecting me.”
“This is going a little fast for me, Barry.”
“Yeah, it went a little fast for me, too. But listen up now. Once you know what I’m about to tell you, there’ll be no turning back.”
“It’s not a question of turning back. I’m not going anywhere.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” Barry shrugged. “But you’ll know what I know, and that will make you a threat to them.”
“I’m not a threat to anyone, because in just about a minute I’m going to get up and walk off.”
“No, you’re not.”
“I’m not?”
“Not a chance, Jack. I know you. You wouldn’t miss the rest of this for the world.”
I sighed and motioned vaguely for Barry to continue. What could it hurt just to listen?
“Whoever hit us, they got to us through our overseas depository accounts and drained most of our foreign currency holdings. About $180,000,000 disappeared a couple of months ago. Poof! Just like that. Somebody cleaned us out and then burned us to cover their tracks. That’s when all that shit about the bank started turning up in the papers.”
“$180,000,000?”
“Give or take.” Barry nodded slowly at me. He did it carefully, like a man with a really bad headache. “As a practical matter, Jack, it’s like this. The Asian Bank of Commerce has been robbed. Somebody else’s crooks fucked my crooks.”
I would have laughed, but I didn’t have the heart.
Barry stood up and stretched, then he went back to walking east along Sukhumvit again, moving slowly with his head down. I stood up, too, and walked along next to him, keeping pace. Barry seemed to have lost interest in conversation, which was okay with me since it gave me a chance to think.
I had always operated on the assumption that I had a fairly sophisticated understanding of the Asian financial scene. Finding out that a regional bank, even a modest one, had been taken over by Russian mobsters came as a considerable surprise to me, to say the least.
Regardless of Barry’s confidence that he had perpetrated his coup in complete secrecy, I doubted that. I was absolutely certain there had to be quite a few other people around who knew all about it. It was a common enough conceit among foreigners doing business in Asia that they had some kind of advantage over the locals and were invariably a step or two ahead of them. That was a presumption that many people I knew had ultimately come to regret.
Government officials, particularly those in Third World countries like the Philippines and Thailand, might seem sleepy to foreigners, but in my experience most bureaucrats around the region had a shrewd eye for opportunity. They were usually far from stupid, even if they played the part of bumbling provincials. I didn’t believe for a moment that every one of them had missed Barry’s little ploy. Of course, as long as the arrangement wasn’t general knowledge and the payoffs kept arriving regularly—tea money was the polite euphemism used in Asia for the practice of such official bribery—no one would make a fuss.
There were still an awful lot of screwy things about Barry’s story. It was unlikely, probably impossible, for vast amounts of money to have disappeared from ABC accounts all over the world at exactly the same time without the active collusion of somebody inside the bank. How could Barry not have thought of that since that was exactly the way he had scammed Texas State Bank in the first place? But he didn’t seem to have thought about it; or if he had, he chose not to mention it to me.
“So what does Jimmy have to say about all this?” I asked after a while.
“Are you fucking kidding me, Jack? You remember Harold Wilkins? He only lost one million dollars and you know what happened to him.”
“In other words, you haven’t told Jimmy?”
“No fucking way, man. No way he’d believe I wasn’t scamming him. Why do you think I’m hiding out in Bangkok?”
I glanced back at the woman again. She was about fifty feet back, right where she’d been since we left Foodland.
“So what are you going to do, Barry?”
“The way I figure it, I’ve got only one chance. I have to find that money and prove to Jimmy that I had nothing to do with it disappearing in the first place.”
All of a sudden Barry stopped walking and pointed his forefinger at me.
“You know more about international banking and money laundering than anyone I know, Jack. I need your help.”
“Me? You want me to help you find your money?”
“Money’s hard to hide. It always leaves footprints. A guy who knows how can follow them anywhere. You’re the best there is, Jack, so you’re my guy. I need you to find the footprints and tell me where they lead.”
“You have got to be kidding me,” I said.
Barry looked back at the woman trailing us and held her eyes briefly. Then he lifted his left index finger and pointed to a pedestrian bridge just ahead of us that crossed over Sukhumvit Road to the Sheraton Hotel. Immediately she walked toward us, passed by without a word, and started up the concrete steps to the bridge. Barry kept his eyes on me.
“Come on, Jack. You can do this. Help me here. I’m twisting in the wind.”
“Look, Barry, even if I was willing to help you, and even if I somehow found the bank’s money, what good would it do? Somebody else would still have it and you’d still be screwed.”
“Yeah, but you haven’t heard the rest of my plan yet.”
The woman was about halfway up the steps, walking lightly on the balls of her feet like someone poised for a fast take off. There was no one within earshot, but Barry leaned slightly toward me anyway as if he wanted to be certain he was not overheard.
“After you find the money,” he whispered, “I want you to steal it back.”
Then Barry turned away, jogged up the steps, and caught up with the woman near the top. I just stood there and followed them both with my eyes as they crossed the bridge and disappeared into the Sheraton. I was too dumbfounded to do anything else.
TWELVE
THE NEXT MORNING I overslept. I showered and dressed as quietly as I could in order not to wake Anita, got the Volvo out of the garage, and made straight for Starbucks. With any luck, I could soak up enough caffeine and sugar to set me up nicely for my ten o’clock class. The course was a real yawner, even for me—a lecture series on the application of American securities regulations to capital raisings in the United States by foreign companies—and I assumed my students really hated it. Today in particular, without a caffeine high and a sugar buzz I didn’t have a hope in hell of getting through it.
There were some people I knew who vilified Starbucks as an American corporate giant heartlessly homogenizing the unique cultures of the world in the headlong pursuit of profits. Strangely, I had noticed that the people who put the most energy into their vilifying were generally other Americans, mostly the kind you met abroad who were trying way too hard to be perceived as high-minded citizens of the world rather than just Yanks on the loose. I liked Starbucks. The coffee was good, the food was okay, and the chairs were comfortable. If that made me a closet imperialist, I could live with it.
It was a nice morning again by local standards. The night winds had come and gone and they had left behind a dazzling blue sky without the usual layer of brown crud to spoil it. I whipped up Ploenchit Road and pulled into the McDonald’s parking area just behind the Grand Hyatt. Smiling at the brown-uniformed security guard who came over to check me out, I transferred a red one-hundred-baht note smoothly into his lightly sweating palm.
“Korp khun maak krap.” Thank you very much, I told him. Then I went on my way ignoring the prominently posted signs that said the parking was for McDonald’s customers only. That was something
I had to admit I loved about Thailand. The joyous, unrestrained air of corruption that permeated everything made life pretty simple once you learned to go with it.
I selected a plump cranberry-and-bran muffin, got a grande low-fat latte, and carried them both to a window table looking out onto Ploenchit Road. Someone had abandoned a copy of the Bangkok Post on the table and I flipped to the front page to skim the headlines while I ate. Reading an English-language newspaper in Thailand was always an adventure. Reading a Thai-language newspaper was probably an adventure, too, but I couldn’t read Thai nor could any other foreigner I knew, so I wasn’t absolutely sure.
When I first moved to Bangkok, I discovered that the Bangkok Post wasn’t anything at all like an American newspaper. The usual fare of graphic crime stories and breathless accounts of various groups demanding special treatment, preferably at the expense of other groups, was largely if not entirely absent from the pages of the Post. Instead, the Post seemed to make do with photographs of watch shop openings and incoherent stories about Thai politics, although I was never certain whether it was the stories or the politics that was more incoherent. When I got through reading the Post, which seldom took more than ten minutes, I was usually pretty certain that nothing much had happened anywhere in the world that was of any significance at all. That always put me in a good mood.
My head was buried in the sports section when I heard a familiar voice at my elbow.
“Sawadee krap, Ajarn.” Good morning, Professor.
Jello’s real name was Chatawan Pianskool and I had never been absolutely certain what the source of his nickname was. I always surmised it might have something to do with his physique, but I wasn’t sure. Jello was a big man with a prominent potbelly, which was unusual for a Thai. He was one of those guys a lot of people took lightly when they first met him since he was almost a cartoon of a jolly fat man, but that didn’t seem to bother Jello. On the contrary, it was something he frequently turned to his advantage.