by Adam Mitzner
Will scanned the seven enumerated items, which were so dense with legalese that he doubted he understood more than half of it. But he got the main point: he was giving up every right imaginable by talking now, and Maeve Grant wasn’t giving up a thing.
“What happens if I don’t sign this? I mean, it says this interview is voluntary. Does that mean I can decline?”
Bloom smiled. “It is voluntary, but Maeve Grant expects each of its employees to cooperate fully with any inquiry. Therefore, your refusal to answer our questions right now would have . . . negative repercussions on your employment status.”
In other words, it wasn’t voluntary at all. If Will didn’t submit to this interview, he’d be fired.
The last of the Cromwell Altman team, the youngest of them, a woman whose name Will no longer remembered, rolled a pen toward him.
“Should I have a lawyer here?” Will asked. “If for no other reason than to balance out my side of the table?” he said with a chuckle, hoping to break the tension at least a little bit. But apparently none of the faces he was looking at found the comment amusing.
Bloom answered for the group. “I can’t stop you from walking out of here and calling a lawyer. All I can do is tell you that Maeve Grant would prefer to hear your answers without a filter, and lawyers are often significant barriers to getting the truth. Also, time is of the essence. Maeve Grant is requesting your full and complete cooperation now. Not sometime in the future when you retain counsel. So, once again, although you are obviously free to leave and retain a lawyer if you want, the company would view your refusal to answer our questions at this time to be noncooperation.”
“Which could have negative repercussions on my employment status,” Will said.
“Yes, that’s correct,” Bloom confirmed, still without even the hint of a smile.
Will took the pen and signed his name. His signature looked shaky, which was a clear indication that he was making a mistake by not shutting this down right now.
26.
Three hours later, Will walked out of Billingham’s office, exhausted. As soon as he returned to his own office, he shut the door and called Gwen. He asked her if he could take her to lunch.
She asked him where they should meet, but he told her he’d like to see her office. If she thought that was odd, she didn’t say so. Instead, she ended their call by thanking him for such a pleasant surprise.
When Will stepped off the elevator into Taylor Beckett’s main reception area, he was greeted by near life-size oil portraits of Ulysses Taylor and Thomas Beckett. Their full beards and bow ties marked them as men of a bygone era, but the rest of the space was strikingly modern: black-and-white photography on the walls, furniture that would have been at home in a boutique SoHo hotel.
Gwen had apparently been given advance notice from lobby security of Will’s arrival, because she appeared even before he could tell the receptionist his name. Will’s demeanor must not have betrayed how he’d spent the morning, because Gwen didn’t seem to realize anything was amiss.
“Mindy,” Gwen said to the receptionist, “this is my boyfriend, Will Matthews. He decided to surprise me with a visit and take me to lunch. Isn’t that sweet?”
Mindy confirmed that it was indeed sweet of Will, at which point Gwen led Will down the corridor to her office. On the way, they passed a few of the partners’ offices. They were about the same size as Will’s workspace at Maeve Grant. Finally they came to rest in a much smaller room, not any larger than Will’s cube had been.
“This is me,” Gwen said. “It’s where all the legal magic happens.”
The desk was built-in and industrial. A single guest chair was piled high with binders.
Will shut the door behind them. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of cash. “Here,” he said, handing Gwen a one-dollar bill.
Gwen looked at the bill like it was some type of dead bug. “No offense, Will, but I’m not a hooker. If I were, it would take a lot more than a dollar.”
He placed the buck on her desk. “I want to retain your legal services, and this makes it legit.”
She laughed. “Who told you that?”
“Is that not the way it works?”
“On television, maybe. In real life, not so much. You can keep your dollar and retain me for free. Technically, there needs to be something in writing, but that can be signed later.”
Will didn’t fully understand whether this meant that Gwen was now his lawyer. “I need to tell you some stuff, and . . . I want it to be within the attorney-client whatchamacallit.”
She rolled her eyes, clearly still not appreciating the urgency behind Will’s presence. “This is serious, Gwen,” he finally said.
“Okay. Poof,” she said, making a magician’s gesture with her hands. “We are now covered by the attorney-client whatchamacallit. Move the binders to the floor, sit down, and tell me what’s so serious.”
He did as directed. Once they were both in position—Will in the guest chair, Gwen behind her desk—he began.
“I just came from a meeting with the firm’s general counsel, a guy named Jack Billingham. They called me up there this morning. When I got there, in addition to Billingham, there was someone else from the GC’s office, another lawyer, this woman from HR, and some people from an outside law firm.”
Gwen now appreciated that this was no laughing matter. Her expression clearly indicated she was concerned.
“What law firm?”
“Cromwell Altman.”
Gwen scrunched her nose slightly.
“Is that bad?” Will asked.
“It’s not good. It means that Maeve Grant is making a financial investment in the investigation. They wouldn’t be so quick to do that if they didn’t have some concerns. Do you remember the lead lawyer’s name?”
“David Bloom.”
This time she nodded. “He’s a former Assistant US Attorney. Which most likely means there’s some problem that Maeve Grant thinks might be criminal.” Then, as if it was an afterthought: “Did they fire you?”
“No . . . at least I don’t think so. They didn’t take my ID card or anything.”
“I think you’d know if you’d been fired.”
“I was in a daze for much of the meeting, to be honest. But I don’t think they fired me.”
Gwen reached for a legal pad near the corner of her desk. “The thing we need to do now is make as complete a record as possible about what they said to you and what you said to them,” she said in an all-business tone.
“Mainly it was about how Sam earned the money he invested with me.” She scrunched up her nose again, prompting Will to ask, “What?”
“It means they’re looking at money-laundering issues. What did you tell them about the source of funds?”
“That I understood Sam had varied business interests, mainly having to do with private equity funds across various sectors. I told them I knew he also had significant real estate holdings, but I wasn’t involved in that. I also told them that the payments always came in by wire, and that I vetted them through the Cage. Nobody in Compliance raised any concerns with me, and so I thought it was all good.”
“Did they show you any documents?”
“About a million of them. The new-account forms for every account I opened. The incorporation docs for each of the shelf companies. The wire transfers for the deposits.”
“And what did they ask about them?”
“With the wires, did I know where the money came from? I told them that I read the wire confirms, but beyond that, I didn’t know. Then they’d ask if I knew how the money was earned. I said no. With the companies, did I know who was behind each one? I said that I knew who was on the reported forms. Then they asked if I knew whether this or that company was a subsidiary of another company. I said not offhand, but if it was listed that way on the form, then I did know. That kind of thing.”
Gwen nodded along, but the grimness of her expression made clear to Will that this was as
bad as he thought. He could only imagine how her face would look if she knew that money laundering was the least of his worries at the moment.
“Did they go through the spiel about them not being your lawyers?”
“Yes. And how I’d be fired if I didn’t cooperate. Or if I wanted to retain my own lawyer. They actually made me sign something that said that. And they were pretty clear that I shouldn’t discuss what they mentioned with anyone. That if I did, they’d fire me. Can I ask a stupid question?”
“Sure.”
“I know that money laundering is taking illegally obtained money and washing it so that people can’t tell that it was illegally obtained. I just don’t know how I was doing that by what I did for Sam. I thought you did it by buying a cash business and funneling money through it. Like in Breaking Bad. He did it with a car wash. And in The Wire it was a photocopy place.”
“Those are old-school ways. There’s a limit to how much you can launder through a small, all-cash business. If you need to clean tens of millions of dollars, you do it through related-party transactions.”
“What does that mean?”
“I had a money-laundering case last year. The way it was done there—allegedly—and I cannot stress the allegedly enough because this guy is still a client of Taylor Beckett—was that my client owned all these companies and real estate and art and other stuff, and he was working in tandem with another guy.
“They would sell stuff back and forth to each other at inflated prices. So let’s say my client has this town house worth four million. He’d sell it to his buddy for eight million. So now my client has a four-million-dollar gain. He ends up paying capital gains tax at fifteen percent on that, but he doesn’t care because that’s less than a million bucks, and he probably has offsetting losses anyway to avoid the tax. The important point is that he now has eight million in cash.
“When someone—a bank, for example—asks, ‘What’s the source of those funds?’ he says, ‘I sold my town house.’ And then my client returns the favor and launders the buddy’s funds. Allegedly. So the buddy sells my client his Picasso—a piece he’d bought for seven million—but my client pays twenty million for it. And they can do that all day long. The buddy might even sell the same Picasso back to my client for thirty million the next year and launder another ten million that way.”
What Gwen described fit in with the trading he’d been doing for Sam—moving stocks in closely held corporations with no public trading price from one LLC to another. Will had assumed that the price being paid was fair market value, and that the contra-party was a bona fide buyer or seller. He now saw that neither assumption was probably correct. For all he knew, Sam controlled both the buying and the selling LLC in every transaction.
“Sam might have been doing that with me,” Will said. “I never second-guessed the value of the things he bought and sold in his accounts. A lot of it was illiquid positions in private equity funds.”
“Even if that’s what he was doing, for you to be guilty of aiding and abetting, you’d have to have known that’s what was going on. Intent is very difficult to prove. After all, high-net-worth people trading illiquid positions is a big part of Maeve Grant’s business. It doesn’t always mean criminal activity.”
Will took a moment of comfort from Gwen’s defense, but that was all it took for him to realize that there was a gaping hole in it. “Damn. What about my apartment?”
“What about it?”
Will’s heart was racing. “I’m such an idiot. After the ten million Maeve Grant loan came in, I wired it to Sam’s account. He handled everything about the purchase of the apartment. So I don’t know if he put the purchase price down as nine million, or something much higher.”
“Didn’t you sign the sale contract?”
“I only saw the signature pages. The seller was an LLC of some type, but the page I saw didn’t list the purchase price.”
Gwen considered this for a moment. “If he is laundering money, then I think it’s likely that the actual sale contract would reflect that you paid twenty or thirty million. Even if you only transferred ten million to his hedge fund friend, Sam could still report that he received the proceeds of the sale by some other transfer—maybe his hedge fund buddy wired him thirty million on that same day—and that would look like clean money he received from you in a bona fide, arm’s-length transaction.”
Will felt like he was going to be sick all over Gwen’s desk. “I’m so screwed, Gwen.”
Gwen’s poker face wasn’t good enough to disabuse him of the notion that she concurred. He was screwed.
“One step at a time,” she said. “Maeve Grant didn’t fire you. That means they haven’t reached any conclusions yet. But I don’t want to sugarcoat things either. I’m certain that this is going to become a law enforcement issue, if it isn’t already. So this is a very serious situation.”
Needless to say, he understood that only too well. Gwen still didn’t understand it nearly enough. She still had no idea that he was likely an accessory after the fact to murder, or at the very least guilty of obstruction of justice by hiding Sam’s body.
He wanted to share that piece too, so that they finally wouldn’t have this enormous secret between them. He was trying to find the words when she continued in her lawyer voice.
“I’m sure Cromwell Altman told you this, but don’t tell Sam anything. In fact, you have to assume that any conversation you have with him or anyone connected to him—and that includes Eve too—is being recorded by the FBI. Come to think of it, that’s likely why Sam’s been so distant lately. He’s either already on the run or he’s flipped and is now cooperating with law enforcement.”
Will took some solace that these seemed like the two most likely scenarios to Gwen. Of course, that was because she’d believed Will when he told her that the reason they hadn’t seen Sam and Eve over the past few months was because Sam had a busy travel schedule.
The FBI, on the other hand, knew that they didn’t have Sam in custody. That meant their assumptions would be that he was either on the run or dead.
“There’s something else, Gwen,” Will finally managed to stammer.
She held up her hand like a traffic cop, directing him to stop. Gwen looked back at the crumpled dollar bill on her desk. “I need to give you the speech that all clients get at the outset of a representation.” She waited a beat, as if trying to remember the words. “Now that I’ve been retained, the privilege means that I cannot be compelled by court process—that means a subpoena—to reveal what you said to me, and I cannot voluntarily offer that information to anyone. Similarly, you cannot be compelled to reveal what you told me. However, under certain circumstances, the attorney-client privilege would not apply, and I would be duty bound to reveal what you tell me to the authorities. Ongoing crimes or threats of violence, for example, may not be protected under the privilege.”
He wondered if Gwen said this because she knew that Sam was dead, and that was why she was emphasizing this point. But she couldn’t know that. It was like she’d said—just the rote speech all clients are given, a prophylactic measure to ensure that she wouldn’t be compromised.
Either way, Will ended up in the same place. He’d already said enough. To tell her that Sam was dead would involve her in the crime of obstruction of justice, which would remain ongoing for as long as Sam couldn’t be found.
Will would have to figure this out on his own.
27.
Taylor Beckett had 102 partners. Thirteen were women, which oddly enough placed them high on the list of Big Law firms with gender diversity. Of the baker’s dozen who had won the ultimate prize, ten were in “soft” departments, the ones that didn’t involve true battle: trust and estates, tax, entertainment, environmental, appeals. Corporate had one female partner, and litigation had two. Among the litigators, it had been twenty-seven years between the elevation of Nancy Stein and Kristina Tiernan’s election to the partnership, which had happened just two years before Gwen joined
the firm.
While Stein’s accomplishments were impressive—ranging from first woman at the firm to argue before the Supreme Court to first woman to chair the litigation department to first woman to receive the ABA award for outstanding achievement—she was hardly a role model for the younger set. She’d never married, and as far as anyone knew, she had no life outside the firm.
On the other hand, Kris, as everyone called Kristina Tiernan, had not only a life outside the firm but a picture-perfect one at that. She was married to an English professor at Columbia who looked like a model, judging by the black-and-white wedding photo she kept on her desk. They had three children under ten years old, two boys and a girl. Although it had happened before Gwen’s time, everyone at the firm knew that Kris had been elected to the partnership while she was on her final maternity leave. Some said that she was actually told about the vote while she was in labor, although Gwen assumed that was one of those apocryphal tales that allowed the firm to be on the right side of “gender issues.”
“You have a second?” Gwen asked as she leaned her head into Kris’s office.
Gwen was already aware that Kris didn’t have a second. The price to be paid for having it all was that you never had a second. It was more the rule than the exception that Kris emailed her team after midnight.
“Sure, Gwen. What’s up?”
Gwen shut the door behind her and took a seat across the desk from Kris. Unlike the associates’ offices, which were outfitted with built-ins, the partners decorated their offices with an extremely generous budget. For the most part, they were man caves of one kind or another. Dark and foreboding, with aggressive-looking artwork. Being in Kris’s office was like walking out of a superhero movie and into a rom-com. Her furniture was light, and her kids’ finger paintings were taped to the walls as the office’s only artwork.
“I’m sorry to bother you about this,” Gwen said, “but it’s a mix of business and personal. I need a reality check.”
