by Howard Fast
“But they could. When a company becomes the size that Wabash is today, you don’t need fifty-one percent for control. But the fact is that they did not sell a share of their own stock. Instead, they bought. They bought and bought their stock back into their treasury until they had established what we call a very thin float, that is, a limited number of shares on the market. According to the specialist on the floor, that is the man at the Exchange who makes the market on Wabash, over eighty percent of the stock is now owned by the company.”
“Then the answer to my question is Listerman-Reed?”
“I’m afraid not, Lieutenant. We have only begun our journey through the jungles of high finance. We should note that when Listerman-Reed bought Wabash, they were buying a fairly small outfit. Today Wabash is enormous, the largest agency of its kind in America, and while the stock sells for sixty-one dollars, the company earns only two dollars a share. Which means that Wabash is selling for a fraction more than thirty times earnings. That is,” he continued, seeing the blank look on my face, “two dollars of earning per share, and they have never paid a dividend. It’s the very narrow float and this ups the price as well as the pattern of earnings. They have millions of shares, most of them owned by Listerman-Reed, and vast profits which Listerman-Reed uses to expand Wabash, not only in branches and personnel, but with every scientific advance that might be useful. Nevertheless, Listerman-Reed does not own Wabash—”
“Hold on. You said they did.”
He had the waiter take our plates away, most of the food uneaten. Harvey Crimshaw was delighted and excited—because, as I sensed, he was opening a problem that had bugged him as well as me.
“Yes. They do and they don’t. Listerman-Reed is privately held, not a public corporation. Yet it’s not privately held. It’s a laundry machine. You know how money is laundered?”
“That, I do know. The mob instructs us on that.”
“Well, the purpose of Listerman-Reed is to launder power, that is to be an innocent-appearing instrument in the laundering of power. Who owns Listerman-Reed also owns Wabash, with its huge private army of thugs—I say that advisedly, although their guards are used by businesses all over the country.”
“That,” I said, “is interesting. I’m going to call you Harvey now. That, Harvey, is goddamned interesting. And it’s legal?”
“Just as legal as can be.”
“You can create an industrial army of armed men, no limitations on size, and it’s perfectly legal?”
“Perfectly legal. And profitable too.”
“Harvey,” I said, “how long have you been brooding over this?”
“Brooding?”
“A moment ago, you specified a huge private army of thugs. That, if I’m not mistaken, is somewhat libelous. I just don’t see a respected part of the financial establishment dropping a line like that. Also, how come you sit there like the city’s number one expert on Wabash? When Oscar asked you to have lunch with me, he had no notion of my interest in Wabash.”
“Or you of my interest in Wabash—by golly, you are one suspicious gentleman.”
“My trade.”
“Name’s Harry?”
“Harry.”
“Now look, Harry. We have customers who trust us more than they trust their wives or their mothers. They give us money and tell us, Put me into a stock. They don’t tell us what stock—usually. But sometimes they do. Or they say, Why don’t you put me into Wabash? Wabash splits and doubles every few months, they say. And we tell them, Hold on now. Wabash is selling thirty times earnings. We think that is imprudent for serious investment. We can buy some of the finest companies in America, or in the world for that matter, for six or seven times earnings, and they pay dividends. Wabash doesn’t. Well, when sufficient customers complained that we had denied them the privilege of becoming rich by refusing to put their money into Wabash, we decided the time had come for some special research and analysis. We did not like what we found, but neither could we put our finger on anything illegal or anything that we could bring to the Securities Exchange Commission. But I found sufficient evidence to justify my use of the word thug.”
“This becomes, as Alice would say, curiouser and curiouser.”
“Even to the point of a lieutenant of detectives who quotes Lewis Carroll.”
“My wife teaches English at Columbia. It rubs off. You still haven’t told me who owns Wabash.”
“We passed that. Listerman-Reed owns Wabash. The question now,” Harvey Crimshaw said, “is who owns Listerman-Reed.” He was enjoying himself. He paused to ask my desire and then told the waiter that we’d both have brandy, specifying Napoleon and mentioning that the Harvard Club dispensed the real thing, not one of the endless imitations. I decided that one brandy would not incapacitate me for duty, but I must admit that I felt a wave of guilt at the thought of Fran eating a frankfurter from a wagon outside the public library while I, with any number of people pledged to kill me, drank valid Napoleon brandy at the Harvard Club. Harvey Crimshaw, on the other hand, appeared to have no guilts or qualms at all. I was sure that he was picturing himself relating this adventure—for research can’t be very exciting—to a group of friends around a dinner table. I decided to puncture that immediately.
“Harvey,” I said, “before we go any further, I must say that this discussion can’t go to anyone else. I have to be very firm on that point. No mention to your associates, your friends, or your wife. We’re talking about a deadly disease. It’s too easy to become dead.”
He considered that for a long moment, and then he said, “You’re very serious, aren’t you?”
“Damn serious.”
Harvey was no fool. “You used the word killed about Ellis Wabash.” He paused. “What do you suppose happened to Henson?”
“Heaven only knows.”
“He didn’t do anything illegal. He made a large killing in the market. When people do that, they don’t drop out of sight. Henson must have had a lot of offers.”
“I’m sure he knew things he shouldn’t have known. Maybe he tried to use some of those things.”
“Hold on—that sounds crazy. Harry, I’ve spent all of my adult life in the financial community, and that kind of thing is the stuff of Hollywood. We are a sober and law-abiding bunch. Oh, we may bend the law a bit and now and then we throw enough weight around Washington to change it to our advantage, but we don’t—”
He did not finish his sentence. Perhaps the thought was too unsettling to be spoken aloud. He sipped his brandy and stared at me.
“Who owns Listerman-Reed?” I persisted.
“Home base. You see, Harry, as I mentioned earlier, Listerman-Reed, a privately held company, owns Wabash—that is, a controlling portion of Wabash stock. But the question of who owns Listerman-Reed is something else, quite. The owner has no other connection with the company than the one hundred shares of stock that the company issued when it was incorporated by Stephan Listerman and Betty Reed in 1922. They were young people, just married. Stephan Listerman owned a small family boatyard at Woods Hole in Massachusetts. Betty Reed’s family made skis in New London, Connecticut. A few years after they married, the fathers of both died, and the youngsters decided to combine the business. For the next fifteen years, the business barely managed to stay alive. Then World War Two came and Listerman-Reed began to get orders for lifeboats. As our merchant marine fleet expanded from virtually nothing to the largest cargo fleet in the world, Stephan Listerman, now running the company while his wife raised children, controlled his share of the expansion, both prudently and intelligently. They built good lifeboats and they amassed a good deal of wealth, and after the war they played a major role in the field of sport and pleasure equipment. But boats remained their major source of income, pleasure boats, special boats for the America’s Cup races, sport boats and yachts—good boats, as good as any built in America.”
I nodded, leaned back in my chair and closed my eyes. Harvey’s hour had passed but he made no move to wind up
our lunch or leave the table. Patiently, he waited a minute or two before he asked me whether I was asleep.
“Hardly.”
“Thinking? I have to close my eyes to put something together.”
“Yes. Oh, yes. Tell me, Harvey, did you ever do jigsaw puzzles? Fran and I love them, especially when we’re on vacation. Not the kid puzzles, but puzzles where you have no complete picture to go by. You drive yourself crazy—and then, suddenly, you recognize the picture. It’s always one small piece.”
“And you found the piece?”
“The L.R. Sweetheart.”
“What on earth is the L.R. Sweetheart?”
“They call it that. Nobody thinks of Listerman-Reed, any more than they think Columbia Broadcasting System when they say CBS. The L.R. Sweetheart is a boat, a perfect beauty of a boat, thirty-seven-feet long, sleeps four, and can outrun a Coast Guard cutter. Manufactured by Listerman-Reed.”
“Are you going to tell me how and why?” Harvey asked, his tongue hanging out, at least in a manner of speaking.
“You read it all in the papers—even in The Wall Street Journal. Friend of mine, Finelli by name, he calls the station house and tells me something has come up that he has to move on immediately. He needs at least four more detectives, plainclothes. I ask him why doesn’t he find some uniforms and undress them, but he has some explanation about no time for that, and since one hand washes another I agree. Fortunately, my boss, Captain Courtny, wasn’t there. Finelli is over on the West Side, not far. Four of us pile into a car, unmarked, and ten minutes later we meet Finelli and his boys at Seventy-eighth Street and Riverside Drive. The West Side marina is at Seventy-ninth, right down under the highway at the river edge. Finelli tells me that he was tipped on a boat tied up at the marina, a big boat called the L. R. Sweetheart. Finelli spaces us out on the various paths leading into the marina, paths that go under the express highway, and to make a long story short, we close in on the boat and pick up two guys and their bimbos, and one billion, two hundred million dollars’ worth of cocaine. Twelve hundred million dollars, street value, one of the biggest drug collars in history.”
“Wow!”
“You can say that again. Of course, it was Finelli’s collar, so all we got was an assist and a small reflection of the glory; and myself, a good dressing down from Courtny, my captain.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s a miserable bastard, and couldn’t see himself left out. Claimed I should have found him and consulted him. But that’s beside the point. The point is that this was a Listerman-Reed boat, carrying cocaine that came from—oh, God forgive me, I will go to whatever hell is reserved for stupidity.”
“You’ll find a lot of friends there,” Harvey said, “myself included. Of course, I read the story and never made a connection between L.R. and Listerman-Reed. You know about the cocaine.”
“Yes, it came from Santa Marina.”
“And apparently you should have remembered that yesterday or a week ago. A very strange man you’ve turned out to be, Lieutenant, an unusual cop or maybe not. I don’t have much to do with the police. But I still haven’t told you who owns Listerman-Reed.”
“Listerman sold it?”
“That’s right. Ten years ago, Stephan Listerman was seventy-four years old, in fairly good health, and still very much in love with his wife. At least, so people said. He had built a very special forty-foot boat, and he and his wife were going to cruise around in it and enjoy their twilight years. A nice thought. Two good, solid New Englanders, having lived a useful life, putting out to sea. So they made a deal and sold their company for forty-one million dollars. Not a bad price.”
“And who bought it?”
“Ah,” Harvey said, “don’t you want to hear what happened to the Listermans?”
“I can guess. Not that I want to. How did it happen?”
“You can guess, can’t you? Do you know, Lieutenant, I am sitting here in the Harvard Club in the heart of what I have always considered the most civilized city in the world, and I’m beginning to be very much afraid. I don’t like the feeling.”
“Welcome to the club.”
“My youngest child, little boy of six, had a puppy. It developed meningitis and we had to put it away. He was brokenhearted, and he said to me very accusingly, that it was easier to kill it than to fix it.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “It’s a way to solve problems. What happened to the Listermans?”
“Their boat blew up—down in Florida. Their lawyer, a close friend, and their daughter were with them. No survivors.”
“And it just happened,” I said slowly, “that only the lawyer knew who the purchaser was.”
“Yes, it just happened.”
“And the money? The forty-one million dollars? It had to be drawn on something. It had to be paid—otherwise, the company would go to his heirs. Did he have heirs?”
“Two sons.”
“When your outfit does research, they do it.”
“That’s how I earn my bread. No, there doesn’t have to be a check or money. Whoever bought the company bought it with forty-one million dollars’ worth of bearer bonds. United States government bonds. No way to trace them, and the bonds were on deposit in the vault of Listerman’s bank.”
“Back to square one. Is that what you are telling me? I don’t believe it. Do you mean that a large company, a transaction of forty-one million dollars can take place and not be recorded?”
“Absolutely. The law doesn’t require it.”
“A whole different set of laws down there in Wall Street. A pharmacist must keep a record of every prescription he writes. We keep a record of every stolen article we repossess. But you lads can sell giant companies and keep no record at all.”
“Really? Then how about the billion dollars’ worth of cocaine? As I seem to remember, it disappeared. Quite a scandal.”
“Something else entirely. Anyway, that was not the city cops. It was the feds who mislaid it. Come on, Harvey, we haven’t been sitting here for two hours for you to tell me that you don’t know who owns Listerman-Reed.”
“Who owned the boat at the marina at Seventy-ninth Street?”
“No papers, nothing. The two bums who were running it claimed they picked it up secondhand in Santa Marina. No way to trace that, not in Santa Marina. But, Harvey, that wasn’t my turf. I like to think that if it had fallen in our lap, we would have made more out of it. Maybe Finelli could have too, but his captain, a cretin by the name of Hallihan, just took his hide off for not calling in the feds and involving our precinct, and then Hallihan handed it over to the feds. This happened two years ago. A lot happens. You forget.”
“I can understand that.”
“What about tax returns. They have to file returns. They have to be signed.”
“Not by the owner. The president of the company or the manager can sign—the owner doesn’t have to appear.”
“So that’s it. You sat here for two hours in this goddamn Harvard Club, and from the beginning you knew damn well that you could answer my question.”
He had the upper hand now. He grinned at me. I began not to like him as much as I had before.
“I answered your question. I told you who owns Wabash, which is what you asked me. And I never said I didn’t know who owns Listerman-Reed. I don’t lead people down the garden path. You never asked directly.”
“What’s the difference, Harvey? You’re involved now. I’m sorry I had to drag you into it, but you’re in it. All right—straight on: Who owns Listerman-Reed?”
“The funny thing is that the isolation and concealment of that ownership was nearly perfect. I got the answer from the son. When Listerman went off on that boat trip, he told his oldest son, Ernest, to go to his house and pick up a small suitcase he had forgotten. Now understand, no word of the buyer had passed Listerman’s lips. His son had pressed him on that point, but Listerman said that he was not certain, and until he was certain, he did not want to discuss it. Evidently, the
purchaser was certain that Listerman did not know who he was. The purchaser acted through his lawyer, as an agent with power of attorney. Now in some manner—the son doesn’t know how—Listerman discovered who the purchaser was. Most likely, he knew someone who knew the lawyer who acted as agent, and possibly this is why Listerman was killed.”
“No. This man clears his trail, always.”
“Yes, perhaps. But when the son went for the suitcase, he saw a small notebook, leather-bound, in which his father made notations. He thought that his father might want it with him, and he dropped it into his pocket. Then when he delivered the suitcase, he got to talking with people who had come to the party on the yacht and forgot all about the notebook. When I spoke to the son in the course of our investigation of Wabash, he mentioned the notebook. I suggested that we go through it, which we did. I guess with all the grief and problems surrounding the death of his parents and his sister, he forgot all about the notebook. In any case, he considered it of no importance. The name of the purchaser was not vital to him.”
“But you found it in the notebook,” I said.
“That’s right. No proof, Lieutenant, but a name that fits everything. Listerman dealt with the principal’s lawyer, a rather shadowy fellow called Sienta—Marco Sienta. I say shadowy because as far as I could determine, Sienta has only one client. Evidently, Listerman came to the same conclusion, and the notation in his little reminder book, as near as I can remember, read like this: Forty-one million—very decent price. Prefer to deal with the principal. It must be Porfetto.”
“Give me that again, please, Harvey—slowly.”
“Prefer to deal with the principal. It must be Porfetto.”
“Porfetto. I know the name—damn it, where?” I slapped my hand against my head, and evidently that shuffled some tired brain cells. It came back to me. “Gave a swimming arena to Los Angeles for the Olympics.”
“That’s the boy. He wallows in good works. As a matter of fact, he’s guest of honor at a big fund-raiser in support of the Olympic team. Our firm bought a table, one thousand dollars, seats ten. One of our partners won a bronze medal in the ancient days.”