Authors: Peter Spiegelman
“No problem,” he said. “They’re in their office?” She nodded. Neary and I got up, and I thanked Compton for her time. She gave me a quick, distracted handshake, and started clearing papers from her desk.
I followed Neary back down the main corridor, to an adjacent corner of the floor. We walked into another office, about the size of Compton’s and nearly as bare, but outfitted with two desks. Two men were sitting at them.
“Mitch, Bobby, sorry to wake you. Cheryl nominated you guys to give a quick demo of the doc system,” Neary said. The two men chuckled and stood to shake hands and introduce themselves.
Bobby Coe was a ruddy, balding guy, somewhere in his late twenties. He was about my height, but stockier, with a round, open face, and large blue eyes behind wire-framed glasses. What little hair he had left was strawberry blond and short. He wore khakis and a red plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up over his beefy, freckled forearms. Neary had said most of his guys were ex-feds, and maybe Coe was, but he looked more like an ex–park ranger.
His office mate, Mitch Vetter, was about the same age as Coe, but shorter, about five foot ten, and not as heavily built. He had dark, wavy hair, worn long in a vain attempt to hide the thinning patch on top. His face was pale and narrow, with thick brows and dark eyes set close around a prominent nose. He had a heavy beard, and his five o’clock shadow was barely lighter than his close-trimmed moustache and goatee. He wore black pants and a dark blue shirt, and he did look like an ex-fed—the kind you’d send to infiltrate a crew of Jersey wiseguys.
“Yeah, Cheryl told us,” Vetter said. His voice was surprisingly high, and he had a heavy New York accent. “Step this way.” Vetter sat down and spun his computer screen toward us. Neary and I pulled up chairs, and Coe came around and perched on the edge of the desk. Vetter had a browser running in a window on his screen.
“Cheryl gave us the basics, so you can cut to the chase, Mitch,” Neary said. Vetter nodded.
“Cool. This is the search engine for our document database, and this is the main query screen,” he explained. “With this you can filter through the whole database to find, for example, all the documents that were generated by the loan department on July 23, 1994.”
His fingers flew over the keyboard as he spoke. He entered search criteria into several labeled fields that appeared on the screen. I could decipher the meanings of some of them, like “document date” and “author,” but others, like “req loc ref,” were gibberish to me.
“This isn’t running on the Internet, is it?” I asked.
“No way,” Coe answered, looking aghast. “It’s running on an intranet we’ve set up. That’s like a private Internet.” Vetter clicked a button labeled “Search,” and almost instantly the results appeared in the form of a list.
“See,” Vetter pointed at the screen. “We got 124 items in all. We show the first twenty on this list. We can pick one and read the abstract.” He highlighted an item and clicked another button. A new window opened, displaying a couple of paragraphs of text. “Or, we can see the original.” He clicked another button and another window opened, this one containing the image of a document on MWB letterhead. It looked like a letter to a client.
“And if we want, we can then go and find any other documents that reference this same client,” Coe said. Vetter demonstrated. The engine came back with 568 items, the first twenty of which were displayed on the screen.
“And if you need to find everything written by a particular person?” I asked.
“No problem,” Vetter said, and he showed me.
“And for all of the items in the database, you keep track of where each one was found?” I asked.
“Yep,” Coe answered. We were all quiet for a while.
“And you also use the system to keep track of who has requested which documents?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah. Everything gets logged—including who made a request, the date they made it, what they asked for, what we sent them in return, and when we sent it,” Coe said.
“What about searches like the ones you just ran?”
“Online queries? Those get logged too—‘everything’ means everything,” Coe said.
“Can you search for documents based on who has accessed them?” Vetter and Coe looked at each other for a while. Finally, Coe spoke.
“If you mean finding every document that, for example, Special Agent John Doe has requested—sure, that’s easy. Like I said, if someone asks us to send something, we record who, what, where, and when on the system, and we can query on those things. If you mean finding everything that, say, I’ve accessed online, that’s doable too, but not as easy. And not everybody could do it. It would mean searching through the log files, and this search engine doesn’t look in those.”
Vetter had swiveled around to look at me with the beginnings of curiosity. He drummed his fingers slowly on the desk, waiting for more questions and wondering. But before I could ask anything else, Neary suggested that we let them get back to work. He got up and thanked them and headed for the door.
Chapter Eight
“Too many questions?” I asked, when we were back in the hallway. Neary nodded.
“Vetter’s antennas were starting to wiggle,” he said.
“Sorry. I liked that system, though. Seems like it could tell me a lot about what I’m interested in. Documents written by Nassouli, documents found in his office, everyone who’s asked to see them.”
“We’ll get there, don’t worry. Besides, I can answer some of those questions, without any system,” Neary said. “You want all the documents found in Nassouli’s office? It’s a real short list. Nothing, not a scrap of paper—not unless you count a yellow sticky pad and a box of tissues.” I must have looked puzzled.
“We think he had himself a little shredding party before he hit the road,” Neary explained. “Some of the other execs did the same, and it didn’t make Shelly and her crew very happy when they figured it out. Speaking of which, you want to know who’s been asking for Nassouli’s documents? The feds will top that list. Until a few months ago, they were all over anything that had to do with him. They got copies of everything he wrote or was copied on or that made reference to him.”
“And what happened a few months ago?”
Neary shrugged. “I don’t know, exactly. Five, six months ago, it just stopped. No more requests. No more noise about him at all from the feds. And they get a little prickly on the topic. Not that I press.”
“So . . . what, you think they found him?” I asked.
“You never know with those guys,” Neary said, and raised his eyebrows. “Maybe we should call Freddy and ask. He’ll be happy to share. Come on upstairs. You can have a look at the Parsons people, and then we’ll poke around on the system.” I followed him back through the metal door to the reception area and the elevators.
The fourth-floor reception area was identical to the third, except for the guard behind the desk. This one was a heavyset white guy in his middle fifties, with a florid face and reddish hair that was going fast to white.
“Hi, Tim,” Neary said. “He’s with me—signed him in downstairs.” Tim nodded, and Neary opened the metal door with his card key. Four had the same square doughnut layout as three. It had the same forest of shelves and the same abandoned feel, too. I followed Neary to another corner, and another cluster of offices. He gave me some more background as we walked.
“Like Cheryl said, Parsons mainly does the liquidation work. The committee brought them on first thing, even before we got here. They’ve got forty-plus people here in New York, and probably another sixty or seventy in the other offices around the world. The partner running the engagement shows up here for an hour or two every month, and spends most of that time schmoozing the management committee. The real guy in charge is Evan Mills. Sort of an asshole, but a bright guy, once you get past the aging preppy thing.” Neary gave a little laugh. “Hey—you two might have a lot in common. He should be around here somewhere.”
We walked into a conference room. It was long and windowless, painted white and very brightly lit. Half a dozen computers had been set up on the metal and plastic conference table, and three men were gathered around one of them, peering at the monitor. They looked at us but gave no greeting.
“Mills?” Neary asked.
“Project office,” one of the men answered and gestured with his thumb. The three heads bent again to the monitor.
I followed Neary next door, to a room that was more walk-in filing cabinet than office. It was about eight by ten feet and fluorescent-lit, and nearly all the wall space was covered by shelves. Most of the shelves were filled with big, white loose-leaf binders labeled “Time Sheets” and “Expenses.” Some bore the Brill logo, but most were stamped with the Parsons and Perkins chop. A small metal desk was jammed into the back of the room. Its top was crowded with a computer, a telephone, a fax, in and out trays, stacks of blank forms, and, just now, a pair of worn deck shoes.
The shoes belonged to a young man sprawled in the chair behind the desk. He had a telephone handset propped on his shoulder, and a big white binder in his lap. He was listening to someone, and he rolled his slightly bulging gray eyes at us in exaggerated boredom. He ran a hand over a broad forehead and through a tangle of blond hair. Then he smiled and made a “yackety-yak” hand gesture and shot Neary with a thumb and forefinger. Besides the deck shoes, he wore baggy khakis and a navy blue sweater over a blue striped shirt. His sleeves were pushed up over wiry forearms, and on his wrist was a thick metal watch that looked like it had been carved from the instrument panel of a fighter jet.
On closer inspection, the man aged a dozen years. There were streaks of gray in the blond hair, and a web of fine lines around his eyes and his wide, almost lipless mouth. The hint of color on his sharp nose was from broken capillaries, not sunburn. I put him at forty, plus or minus. He ran a hand through his hair again and spoke into the phone.
“Yes, Mrs. Cleaver, we’ll get that over right away,” he said with mock sincerity. “And then will you let the Beav come out and play?” He listened some more and sat up quickly. His hand tightened around the phone, and he answered back with venom, “You think this is a bad attitude? Come down here and talk to my people. They haven’t had expenses reimbursed in over two months because you and your fucking bureaucrats can’t get the paperwork right. My attitude is nothing compared to theirs. I’ll resend the damn file, but—trust me—this is the last time we’re going to have this conversation. The next time I’m taking it up with the engagement partner, and you can explain to him why you keep fucking this up.” He slammed down the phone, and as soon as he did all traces of anger disappeared.
“What clowns. Trying to get accounts to process expenses, it’s like dealing with the fucking IRS,” he chuckled to himself. He put the binder on the desk and stood, stretching. He smiled at Neary and put out his hand. “It’s J. Edgar himself. How’re you doing, Hoov?” They shook. Hoov?
Neary smiled, with only a trace of strain, and made introductions. “Evan, this is John. John—Evan Mills. I’m giving John a little tour of the operation, and I was hoping you could give him a quick overview of what Parsons is doing.” Mills gave me a surprisingly strong handshake.
“Anything for you, Hoov, you know that. You another fallen G-man?” Mills asked me. I smiled but said nothing.
“Not saying, huh? Eyes only, need to know, you could tell me, but then you’d have to kill me—I get it.” He laughed and moved past us, into the corridor. Neary and I followed. Mills walked, and reeled off a practiced chatter as he went.
“I assume Hoov has given you the basics of who does what, right? So you know that Parsons is focused on the liquidation work. That’s meat-and-potatoes forensic accounting. But what does that mean, really? I always say that forensic accounting is like archeology, but not as messy, and you don’t get to camp out. They’re both about collecting a million tiny, unremarkable pieces of dirt, to build a picture of something from the past. In this case, the thing we’re rebuilding is MWB’s balance sheet.” Mills liked the sound of his own voice, and didn’t pause or even glance back at us as he spoke.
“I’m guessing you have no accounting background. No one does, except accountants, and even they’re not happy about it. So I’ll keep the jargon to a minimum. A balance sheet is basically a tally of a firm’s assets and liabilities. The assets are what it owns; the liabilities are what it owes. Creating this takes some sweat, but it’s not usually rocket science. For a bank, tallying the assets is a matter of adding up the outstanding loans that it’s made, plus cash or securities due to the bank from trading activity, plus whatever it has in its vaults—that could be cash, or stocks and bonds, or gold, or any number of things. And then you add in any cash or securities it has in accounts at other banks or custodians.
“Toting up the liabilities is the flip side. You look at any loans the bank has taken out, cash or securities it’s holding for clients, bonds or commercial paper it’s issued, whatever it owes from trading activity, and anything in its vaults that belongs to someone else. That’s basically what we’re doing here. Of course, with MWB there are complications.” Mills led us to the kitchen alcove. He poured some poisonous-looking stuff from a glass coffee pot and leaned against the counter.
“You guys want? No? That’s probably smart. Okay. The first and biggest complication in all of this work is the number of different legal entities—different financial institutions—that were under the holding company’s umbrella. The sheer number of names whose activities we have to sift through makes things much more difficult. Also, the MWB people were lousy record-keepers. I don’t know if that was by design or just incompetence, but it’s amazing they were ever able to pass an audit.” He drank some coffee and made a face.