Jennifer’s voice was precise, tired, but determined as she recounted the delays in launching her signed contracts and strategized around how to get them off the ground. Her thought, effort, and bad luck were evident in the hundreds of pages of detailed call reports, weekly narratives to the management team, and pipeline reports that all the salespeople used to track and report on imminent sales.
At Ryder Trucks, Jennifer’s client, Dorothy, was diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer, and when she returned to work, priorities had changed and we needed to re-spec the contract. At UPS, implementation of our contract was delayed while the company negotiated a new contract with the Teamsters, and there seemed to be several staffing challenges despite a few good telephone conversations we had with Rob, Jennifer’s client there. (“Hang in there,” Rob told my colleague Sandy. “We’re slow to get started, but once we do, we move fast and we see a lot of future potential for you guys here.”) At Delta, Jennifer reported spending freezes—hardly a surprise.
At least at Rare Hospitality, things were plodding along, if just barely. Jennifer had arranged a conference call with our new client, Harry Day, the VP of Business Research, to get the member recruitment and community launch process underway. But a half-hour before it was scheduled to start, Jennifer called, sounding grim and breathless, to say that her husband was having chest pains, and she was taking him to the hospital. “I can’t be on the conference call,” she said, “but you go ahead without me. I’ll tell Harry to call you directly. I am so, so sorry…”
Amazingly, she followed through. Harry, a terse man with an exceptionally low voice, called from his cell phone as he was in transit between meetings.
“I know Jennifer wanted to be on this call,” I said as we were signing off, “and I’m sure she’ll move mountains to join us next time.”
“Yup, she’s a real trouper,” Harry said.
August – September, 2002
In which bad luck stalks the worthy
In the year following the 9/11 attacks, we, like most people in the country, felt breathless and claustrophobic, like we were hiking on the ocean floor and literally moving at a snail’s pace. Nonetheless, by the end of August, Jennifer brought in signed contracts from Home Depot and Coca-Cola amounting to another $500,000 in business, making her once again our most successful salesperson in a slack and skittish market.
But then Heidi, our new client at Coke, didn’t have time for us because Coke no longer had time for Heidi. “She’s been laid off,” Jennifer reported in a phone call in early September, her voice quivering with frustration. “She was one of a bunch of people laid off, and our project is back in limbo while they redo their marketing budgets.”
She wasn’t the only frustrated one. In fact a few of us were confessing our suspicions to one another in hushed conversations.
“It’s just too weird,” Sandy insisted. “Jennifer’s like Pig-Pen. She’s got this permanent cloud of chaos swirling around her.”
The next week Cheryl had a half-day conference call with Jennifer in which they reviewed each of her accounts in detail. Cheryl was tough, insisting that Jennifer supply Sandy’s team with the names and contact information for every client so that we could work with them more directly and efficiently. She also persuaded Jennifer to get some of these clients to agree to be billed in advance to compensate for the cost of their delays.
This meeting seemed finally to yield results. On Jennifer’s instructions our bookkeeper, Janet, mailed out invoices to three clients. She scheduled two trips in the upcoming two weeks for Cheryl to come to Atlanta to meet senior client contacts.
But on September 20, Jennifer cancelled the first of Cheryl’s two meetings. “Schedule changes,” she explained, and forwarded to Cheryl an email containing the client’s apologies. Then on September 26, the date of Cheryl’s second set of meetings, Jennifer left her a frantic message that her brother had been killed in a surfing accident, and she was running to be with her family in California.
Some of us whispered, some flat-out snickered, but Cheryl took word of this tragedy completely seriously. The company sent Jennifer flowers, and in a silent reproach to us for our cynicism, Cheryl forwarded to all of us the tearful voice mail Jennifer left her in response.
“I got home to Atlanta this morning and saw the flowers you sent, and it just unlocked all the tears I’d been holding in all last week in California,” Jennifer’s hushed message began. “This has been so hard,” she went on, her voice breaking, “so hard,” she sobbed, “and I can’t begin to tell you how much everyone’s support has meant to me. I’m blessed to be working with a company like this.”
“Well, color me asshole,” I wrote to Sandy in an email after listening to it.
“Maybe, maybe not,” she shot back.
October 17, 2002
In which an investigation is mounted
Cheryl was not immune to the skepticism that had mounted from a whisper to a steady murmur and issued a memo to the management team. She began by stating the facts—that Jennifer had basically closed about ten accounts for over $1.5 million, and yet none of those accounts had generated any revenue or cash yet. Needing to feel that she understood the worst-case situation, Cheryl had worked with Scott to create a financial scenario in which several of Jennifer’s clients just disappeared and others continued to stall. The result was alarming. Within six months, we’d need a series of miracles, including an additional infusion of venture capital, in order to make payroll.
She acknowledged what so many of us had begun to express, but upon digging into the details, concluded that:
“… there is sloppiness here on Jennifer’s part, related to nailing down dates, etc. However, I have worked with Jennifer for a long time, and she has always brought in solid numbers. Most of the time, the more I dig in and press for information, the better I feel.”
October 23, 2002
In which the shit hits the fan
Six days later Jennifer called to say that the kick-off meeting with our newest client, America’s Finest Chicken (AFC), had been postponed.
Cheryl was out of town, but in her absence the rest of the management team conferred and decided that Janet should call the person to whom she’d sent the AFC invoice on the pretext of introducing herself and see if she could figure out what was going on.
An hour later Scott signaled us to return to the conference room.
“They’ve never heard of us,” he said without preamble and without affect.
“They’d never heard of us?” Sandy asked in disbelief.
“Nope, and a half-hour after we called, their lawyers called us back and warned us to cease and desist from trying to collect payment or we’d face legal action,” Scott answered flatly. “I’ve told Janet to go through the list and call the accounting department at every single one of Jennifer’s clients to see if any of them are real.”
We arranged to reconvene at 1:30.
“Ten for ten,” Scott announced a few hours later. “They’re all fake.” He ticked off what he and Janet had learned about each of these “clients” in the past few hours. Most were actual people, high enough in their companies that their names and titles could be harvested from corporate websites. Others were completely fabricated.
Contracts were forged. The total $1.5 million in sales was made up.
Our investors had financed us and we’d based spending on contracts and revenues that we didn’t have.
October 24, 2002
In which the truth becomes inescapable
At a company-wide meeting the next morning, I scanned the faces across the table from me. All eyes were on Cheryl as she broke the news, some jaws already visibly tightened, torsos erect, like people watching an execution. Meg began to shake her head in disbelief. Cheryl paused for a sip of water, and I could hear Lynn’s chair creak beside me—nothing else.
“I wish I cou
ld tell you why she did it,” Cheryl said, “but I can’t. She blames it on obsessive-compulsive disorder. I don’t think that explains it.”
“Was she getting commission?” I asked.
“No, that’s the strange part. She was, however, working for Accomplish Now for the last ten months during which she was also working for us.”
“No way!” Sandy gasped.
Cheryl looked at her, grinned tightly, and nodded.
Scott’s usually gray face turned strawberry red as he asked, “But how did she do this? Did she have collaborators or conspirators or—what’s the word—accomplices? Did she have accomplices? I mean we spoke to Harry Day. We spoke to Heidi at Coke. We spoke to all of these clients. How did she do this?”
“Well, she—” Cheryl suppressed a hysterical giggle. “I told you this was an amazing story, right? She had a speech synthesizer that she attached to her telephone.”
“Shut up!” squealed Sandy, while the programmer next to her started to sing The Twilight Zone theme. But others snapped instantly into shocked silence. Another programmer sitting at the back of the room hugged herself and quietly chanted, “That is so sick. That is so sick.”
“But what about the invoices I sent?” Janet asked. “I mean some of the names on these contracts, some of the people I sent invoices to, were real people!”
“Yeah, well, Jennifer would tell you to send the invoice, then she’d call the client—or rather, not the client—and tell them that you’d made a clerical error, that they were going to get an invoice from us, and that when they did, they should just throw it out.”
“Son of a bitch,” Janet exploded.
The meeting continued in bipolar fashion, with the mood swinging wildly from barely contained hysteria (“Maybe I should call Jennifer and say, ‘Hi, this is Harry Day,’ ” Meg suggested) to fear (“Are there going to be more layoffs?”) to horror (“She’s got little kids. What kind of household are they growing up in!”) People peppered Cheryl with questions, but most of them were variations on the same theme: How could this have happened? How could Jennifer have gotten away with it for so long? And above all: How will she be punished? Will we sue her? Is it a criminal offense? How will she be made to pay for this?
But I found myself unable to share in this lust for revenge. Somewhere in Cheryl’s narrative I’d realized that if Jennifer hadn’t made up these contracts, we probably never would have gotten our last two rounds of financing. Without her fraud our company would probably have collapsed a year earlier. So instead of speculating about whether bogus email constituted interstate mail or telephone fraud, about whether she had enough assets to make suing her a worthwhile endeavor, I found myself looking guiltily around the room, feeling more like a collaborator than a victim.
Epilogue
Jennifer’s case finally came to trial in 2005. She was charged with wire fraud, and after blaming Cheryl in her trial for putting too much pressure on her, after thanking God and her pastor for helping her see the way back to the light, she eventually pled guilty. She was given three months’ house arrest, five years of probation, and ordered to pay $70,000 in restitution to Coopernation.
But the outcome does nothing to explain the cause. Was Jennifer a sociopath? Was she so successfully able to defraud Coopernation and Accomplish Now because she lacks some essential genes or synapses needed for a conscience?
Perhaps, but that only explains her. How did we let this happen? How did we let her get away with it for as long as we did? And why, according to newspaper reports, did Accomplish Now continue to employ her even after being informed by federal prosecutors that she was under investigation, and later pay her $43,000 in commissions on two fictitious contracts she claimed were worth more than $400,000?
It was hope, irrigated by a subterranean stream of self-interest. We all watered Jennifer’s twisted roots for so long because we needed her to prosper. And in late 2011, as we stumbled through the economic ruins wrought by systemic greed and self-deceit, it was a dynamic that looked increasingly familiar.
In response to an online post about her trial shortly after it ended, Jennifer wrote: “I know God knows the truth and I know that God has forgiven me, regardless of those who have not and will not. I am very thankful that I have only one judge in this life and it is not the media or people who are mad at me for the mistakes I have made in the past.”
Jennifer looked to God for much the same permission that we, her enablers, offered her. But sadly, she didn’t have to look skyward. She’ll find that kind of license much closer to home.
Laterna Magika (2009)
Over forty years after Expo 67 ended, I finally got to visit the Czech Republic, on a trip that was almost a pilgrimage. Of those members of my Aunt Anne’s family who didn’t die in Auschwitz, many did so in the Czech concentration camp of Theresienstadt. Visiting that city, seeing her family name in haunted, spidery script on the wall of victims in the Pinkas Synagogue, seemed like a way to honor her memory. And walking through the old cemetery in the Jewish Quarter, I honored my father’s as well. One of the consequences of being confined to a ghetto was that the Jewish residents quickly ran out of burial space. So, in the one graveyard that was permitted them, the tombstones cluster and tumble, and an estimated 100,000 people are buried in layers, fifty centimeters apart, twelve layers deep. But the serenity of the place is uncanny, and like an ethnobotanist who imagines entire societies from ancient seeds and pods, my family—aunts, uncles, grandparents, and parents—made a new kind of sense to me. Standing in the old cemetery ten months after my father’s death, some odd dissonance about him finally clicked into place. He knew that he straddled the old and new worlds, knew that he carried and had to find a way to honor both the suffering of his ancestors and his right to self-invention.
Prague and invention—the two were coupled in my mind. Kafka had lived there, shaking off the weight of his father’s expectations and inventing a new genre. The Golem—a mythical Frankenstein-like creature who protected the Ghetto Jews from anti-Semitic attacks—had been shaped from riverbed clay there. The democratic movement that had flared there—the Prague Spring, in 1968—had been doused but not defeated, and triumphantly revived. This was a country that had elected a playwright as president.
And Czechoslovakia was the birthplace of the Kinoautomat, which after all these years, had only gained luster in my memory. On our second night there, my husband and I went to the Laterna Magicka, which had been the inspiration for Kinoautomat. With its crinkly gold façade, the building looked like a wrinkled Easter egg wrapper. The décor also teetered between cool and simply gaudy. Stairways were bordered with lapis-colored glass, spear-like lights hung from the ceiling like stalactites, and hammered metal sculptures in the shape of snail shells and other organic forms rose up out of the floor and newel posts, glowing with dimpled amber light.
Next to it stood the National Theatre, gold-domed, stately and grand—the architectural opposite of Laterna Magika. I was struck by the duality of Prague. Castles and spires and charmingly crooked facades of four-hundred-year-old houses lined the old city’s narrow, winding, and climbing streets. But surrounding the fairy tale quarters, where the poor and working class people lived, the wide roads were pocked by Soviet-era cinder block housing and stores, boxy and beige, adorned only by the debris of candy wrappers blowing in the gray wind.
We felt that desolation, a sense of the modern turned shabby, witnessing the performance that night. Through music, dance, skillful lighting, and films of looming rock and pounding ocean and listing ships projected onto multiple screens, we were shown the story of Odysseus, without words and with considerable drama. Had I not been expecting magic, I probably would have admired the harmonious coupling of artistry and technology. But I was childishly hoping that the dancers would enact what had only ever been true in my imagination—the miracle of two dimensions hatching a third, the sight of a human being emerging from the s
creen, listening to what we in the audience had to say, and then melding back into it to do our bidding. Instead, I was simply an audience member viewing a performance.
At intermission, my husband and I sipped wine and half-heartedly praised the production, neither of us quite ready to surrender to our disappointment and leave the theatre. Instead, we wandered around it. Dotting the lobby and staircase walls were photographs, most in black and white, commemorating the Velvet Revolution that overthrew the Czech Communist Party in November and December of 1989. Most of them showed encounters on a small, intimate scale. I looked at the young men gathered around a large urn of hot coffee under a streetlamp, admiring their looks, wanting to be in their energetic company, and the gap in age and decades disappeared. I felt that same sense of shifting time looking at another photo of a young man standing on a roughly assembled wooden stage, smile wide and fist high, addressing the crowd.
In the picture above him were three older men in caps and a middle-aged woman, her tufty blonde hair blowing in a wind so frigid it almost pierces the picture frame, facing off in somber debate. They were my age too, my age now. Their seriousness moved me, as did that of an old lady in another photo, hunched but immaculate in a stylish leather car coat and knit hat, striding purposefully toward the camera, unstoppable.
This theatre had been the headquarters for the Civic Party, a loosely structured, non-hierarchical group formed in large part by the dissidents who had been calling for freedom of speech since the Prague Spring of 1968, and been imprisoned and harassed ever since. On November 17, 1989, riot police had violently suppressed a student demonstration on this street, just outside this theatre’s walls. By November 20, the protestors’ ranks had swelled to half a million.
We must hold on, we must be cautious, we must intensify the pressure on the governing circles, said a framed translation of a manifesto issued by the Civic Party on November 25. It is the only possible way the half-opened door can be opened wide. We believe that the social movement in our country is irreversible, that the desire of our citizens to live in freedom and dignity will prevail. On November 27, practically the entire population of the Czech Republic held a two-hour general strike. On November 28, the Czech Communist Party relinquished power and called a general election. A month later, Vaclav Havel, whose plays, essays, and imprisonment had celebrated and inspired this rebellion, was sworn in as president.
This All-at-Onceness Page 19