JM01 - Black Maps

by Peter Spiegelman

  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.

  “Those are the main problems, but we’ve had others to deal with. For example, the MWB traders were very active, so there were lots of deals still unsettled when their charter was yanked. We had to sort through all of those. Finding MWB’s cash and securities accounts at other institutions was another pain. We had some statements to work from, but ultimately we had to canvass all the firms that provide those services, to see if they had any accounts for MWB. And then there were the vaults. You’d be amazed at what they had in there. And let’s just say that a lot of it was of questionable provenance.” Mills smiled to himself and shook his head.

  “So, once we piece together the balance sheet, then what? What do we do with it? Well, all the liabilities are somebody else’s assets. And no sooner had the regulators shut the doors on this place, than those folks started lining up with claims. To validate those claims, we’re reconstructing MWB’s activities with each of the claimants. It’s excruciating work; the more complex cases go back years and involve thousands of transactions.” Mills drained his cup.

  “That’s it. In a nutshell, that’s what we’re doing, here in New York and in the overseas offices too.” He folded his arms across his chest and looked quizzically from one of us to the other. “I don’t know what else there is to tell.” I looked at Neary, and he looked back at me. Neither of us spoke.

  “How do you do it?” I asked. “How do you go about putting the pieces together?”

  “The mechanics of it?” Mills looked at me and shrugged. “One of my teams is down the hall. You can hear it from the horse’s mouth.” We followed Mills out of the alcove, back along the corridor, to the conference room Neary and I had peeked into before. The same three men were there. Mills spoke to all of them.

  “Troops, let me tear you away from your labors for a moment. You all know Hoov, from Brill. This is his friend, John,” Mills paused dramatically and looked at me, “Mysterious John. He has some general and very quick questions for you, and then you can get back to the salt mines.” He turned to Neary and me. “Here you have Stan Greer,” he pointed to a pale, thin, bespectacled man with straw-colored hair, wearing a blue plaid shirt, “Charlie Koch,” a heavyset, freckled redhead wearing a Jets
sweater, “and Vijay Desai,” a slim, dark Indian man, wearing a bright red sweater over a black shirt. They looked slightly annoyed at the interruption and a little uneasy—in part, no doubt, due to Mills’s introduction. “Mysterious John,” indeed. Mills looked at me.

  “Evan has described, generally, what kind of work you’re doing here. But I’d like to get some idea of how you actually go about doing it. Maybe you can start with how you’re organized—who does what?” They looked at Mills and then at each other, uncertain about who should talk. Mills looked bored and gave them no help. Finally, Desai jumped in.

  “You know we’re doing balance sheet reconstruction and claims evaluation?” he asked me. I nodded. “The balance sheet work is done by teams of people, all accountants with a lot of audit experience, usually three to six people on a team. We’ve split up the different MWB entities and assigned a set to each team. They work on the balance sheets for their assigned entities, plus they review the work from other teams as a quality check. We’ve got separate groups working the claims. Usually two to four people per team on those.”

  “And where do they start, what are they working with?” I asked.

  Desai kept talking. “Mainly they’re looking at data from the bank’s general ledger systems and its other record-keeping systems. And at filings MWB made with regulators over the years, with the Fed, the State of New York, the Comptroller of the Currency, and so forth. Ultimately they go back to source documents—account applications, trade tickets, confirmations, loan agreements, statements, correspondence with clients, those sorts of things. We go to the document system for all of that.”

  Mills looked at his watch and then at Neary. “Hoov, if there’s nothing else, I’ve got stuff to do, and so do these guys. Unless you want me to start billing you for consulting work.” Subtle as it was, we took that as a hint to go.

  Neary and I said our thanks and headed for the elevators. At the door that would take us to the guard station I looked back and saw Mills, standing motionless at the end of the long corridor, watching.

  “Kind of an annoying bastard, isn’t he?” I said, as we waited for the elevator.

  “Yep,” Neary agreed.

  “Not much of a tour, either,” I said.

  “Not much,” Neary agreed, “but then, we weren’t paying for his time. Come on, we’ll have a look for your documents.”

  It was after five o’clock when we returned to the third floor, and the dim views through the windows had darkened to night. Lights shone in the buildings nearby, and the floor seemed more deserted than ever. I followed Neary to a small office. The dark wood desk was bare except for a PC and a phone. Neary sat behind the desk, switched on the PC, and pulled the keyboard in front of him.

  “Pull a chair around,” he said, and I did. He typed quickly, logging into the network and bringing up the browser. When the search-engine page was in the browser window, he sat back and looked at me.

  “So this is where we play ‘I’ll show you mine if you show me yours,’ ” he said. I looked back at him, silent. He continued, “I’m doing the driving here,” he pointed to the keyboard, “and if you don’t give me something to search for we’re not going to get very far.”

  “You could always let me drive,” I said.

  Neary snorted, “That’s not going to happen, John. I’m out on a limb just having you in here, so unless you open up a little, this is where we stop.” We looked at each other in silence. Neary wasn’t trying to strong-arm me, but he wasn’t bullshitting me either. I had a choice to make. I nodded and pulled out my notebook.

  “Everything I’m interested in is dated eighteen years ago. Let’s start with letters from Nassouli, with dates in February of that year,” I said. He nodded and started typing. The engine came back with twenty-one documents that met the criteria. I scanned down the results list. None of them were the ones I was looking for. The dates were wrong, and so were the topics. Neary looked at me, and I shook my head.

  “We’re zero-for-one,” Neary said.

  “Actually zero-for-two,” I said. He shrugged.

  “What’s next?” he asked.

  “How about letters to Nassouli dated . . .” I checked my notes again, “March eighth through March fifteenth that year.” This time, the engine found eleven documents. And one of them jumped out at me. Neary saw me staring.

  “Something?” he asked. I nodded.

  “You going to tell me which one, or do I have to guess?”

  “Show me the first five,” I said. He clicked on each one, and each time he did a new window opened with an abstract of the document he’d picked, and an image of the original.

  Mine was number three. It was the letter from Pierro to Dias, informing him of the establishment of the credit line. It was identical to the one in the fax. According to the abstract, the original had been found in offsite storage, in files from the correspondent banking department, specifically in the files of its former chief, Alan Burrows.

  “Who else requested these?” I asked. Neary pointed and clicked a few times.

  “Just the feds, about a year ago. I told you, they want anything involving Nassouli.” We were quiet for a while.

  “That it?” he asked. I nodded. “So, two of them we don’t have, and no one besides the feds has accessed the third. Nothing here tells me that this shop was the source of your documents, John. I think you’ve got to look elsewhere.” I put away my notebook and leaned back.

  “You guys find documents from Nassouli’s files in offsite storage?” I asked.

  “Some, yeah,” Neary answered warily.

  “So he didn’t call the offsite stuff back for shredding, huh?”

  “No time, I’d guess,” said Neary.

  “The documents I’m asking about are pretty old—old enough to have gone to offsite storage. But you didn’t find any of them there. How come?” Neary thought about this, not happy with where I was headed.

  “Beats the hell out of me. Could be he never sent them offsite, and they got shredded with the rest of his shit. Could be he didn’t give a damn about them, and tossed them years ago. The MWB people weren’t that good at record-keeping.”

  “So I keep hearing. But it could also be the documents were here, and never made it into your system,” I suggested.

  “Bullshit,” Neary said. He sighed heavily and shut down the PC. Then he leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands across his stomach and looked at me. “What else can I tell you?” he asked. I thought about it for a while, not really sure. The office was silent except for air coming through the ceiling vents in a conspiratorial whisper.

  “This and the fourth floor—that’s all that’s left of MWB in New York?” I asked.

  “Pretty much,” Neary answered. “Nearly everything else has been cleaned out and sublet.”

  “Where was Nassouli’s office?”

  “On forty-four, one of the trading floors.”

  “Anything left there?”

  “Not for long. They signed a sublease on it last week, and construction starts week after next. Equipment and files are long gone. There’s not much left to see, but you can have a look if you want.”

  We went to the lobby, switched elevator banks, and rode up to forty-four. Another uniformed guard greeted Neary and buzzed us in. Neary took a big ring of keys from his desk as we passed. We went through a metal door and down a short corridor. This floor was the same shape as the lower ones, but had been built out very differently. A band of small offices ran around the doughnut’s inner edge. They were windowless, but had glass walls that looked out on the rest of the floor. More, larger, offices ran around the outer edge. These also had glass walls, but they had windows as well, and sweeping views of the harbor and the uptown skyline. Sandwiched between the glass offices was the trading floor itself—five rows of long desks, separated by narrow aisles, running down each side of the doughnut.

  If the lower floors had had an abandoned feel, this one seemed vandalized. The offices were nearly ba
re, with only some scarred furniture and the occasional moving box remaining. The blinds and drapes that had covered the glass walls lay in heaps in some offices, and in others hung twisted and askew. The carpeting was stained and torn in many places, and in many places was missing altogether. Rows of acoustical tile were missing from the dropped ceiling. The light fixtures that weren’t mangled on the floor were mostly dark. The forest of technology— screens, keyboards, elaborate phone consoles—that usually covers any trading desk had been cut away from these, leaving behind a tangle of exposed cable and some cleaner patches on the filthy desktops. The trading desks themselves were like junked cars, gutted and left for scrap. The air was cold and stale and smelled vaguely like a bus station.

  We picked our way across the trading floor to a big corner office. It had its own little waiting area and a glass-walled conference room adjoining it. Neary found a key on the ring and unlocked the door. This office was in better shape than the others. The drapes and carpets and light fixtures were intact, and the furniture that remained—a massive teak desk, topped in polished stone, two huge credenzas, and a set of teak bookshelves—looked undamaged. Neary stepped to the windows to take in the view.

  It was spectacular. To the north, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Manhattan Bridge, the sweep of FDR Drive running along the East River, and a chunk of the Brooklyn waterfront—all glittered in the clear night. To the east there was more of Brooklyn, the shadowed mass of Governor’s Island and the distant lights of the Verrazano, across a dark expanse of harbor. We looked out in silence.

  “Nice views, but not much else,” Neary said after a while. I looked around the office. A large moving box stood, unsealed, on one of the credenzas.

  “What’s in the box?” I asked.

  “Stuff Nassouli left behind when he split. Desk doodads, those Lucite tombstones from some deals they’d done, and a bunch of pictures that were hanging on the walls, mostly of himself at parties.” Neary reached into the box and took out an eight-by-ten color photo, nicely mounted between glass plates. It showed people at a party, a high-end one. The men were in black tie, the women in shimmering, gauzy things. I recognized the Temple of Dendur, at the Metropolitan, in the background. In the foreground was a man I took to be Gerard Nassouli.