“Did he do that?”
“Of course not. But a clever lawyer can conduct Lorraine’s examination so that Larrimer comes out the saint and Lorraine the sinner. She pulled a gun and shot Larrimer’s goon, after all, and she would have shot Larrimer. He was terrified for his life; he never meant to hurt her; he had only her well-being at heart. He was filled with regret, remorse, and a yearning to repair the damage and ease the suffering he caused. And she was about to shoot him.”
“But he stole all that money,” said Pauline.
“And he will probably be convicted of some charges,” said Louis. “His lawyers expect that, and will conduct their entire defense so that it lays the groundwork for his sentence to be light. Larrimer will have a jury trial. He saw what happened when Madoff was sentenced by a judge. He’ll plead not guilty and try to push the blame onto others. And the cancer—he supposedly has cancer—the retribution payments he made for whatever reason, all that will be brought into play early in the trial and kept alive until the end.”
“You think the cancer is a lie?”
“I think it might be similar to his remorse. He may have cancer, but not as serious as his lawyers make out. He’ll go to prison in Tennessee or some relaxed place, if he goes at all. He’ll be a model prisoner and will be paroled after a couple of years.”
A breeze came up and rattled the umbrella and the table. Louis stood up and carried the lunch dishes inside. Pauline looked out across the garden. It needed some attention after all the rain they had been having.
LXI
DIMITRI HAD ALL BUT DISAPPEARED, as far as Louis could tell. In fact, Dimitri had been probing here and there, like a desperate animal, trying to find a way to Larrimer. He still had someone watching Lorraine. He knew where Louis was and what he was up to. He had even showed up on surveillance film more than once outside the building where Larrimer was confined in luxury.
“Is like fortress,” he told his associates at Gazneft. And it was, with twenty-four-hour police guards, plainclothes surveillance, cameras, you name it. The members of the Gazneft board were not mollified.
The day the trial began, Dimitri visited the courthouse, but realized he couldn’t get anywhere near Larrimer. And even if he could, what good would it do? If he killed him or had him killed, he’d never get the money. Never.
* * *
The trial unfolded more or less as Louis had predicted it would. After eighteen months of delays concocted by the defense for various reasons it got underway in the Federal District Court in Manhattan. The courtroom was packed with spectators and press. St. John was thinner now. His skin was pale; his hair was going gray.
As the trial began Wallace Jimrey, who had elected to conduct St. John’s defense himself, let it be known that St. John was undergoing treatment for his cancer. “But,” he insisted, placing a hand gently on St. John’s sagging shoulder, “he assures me, Your Honor, that, though the treatment continues, he is now strong enough to proceed. He wants a speedy trial in the interest of justice for all.”
Jimrey realized full well that a jury of rich money men was beyond the realm of possibility, but he did his best to assure that those selected for the jury were not against acquiring wealth.
In their opening statements the prosecution made St. John out to be the worst villain that had ever walked the earth, and the defense presented him as someone who had been carried away by the opportunities for wrongdoing presented in a self-regulating capitalist system. “Free enterprise is exactly what it says it is,” said Jimrey. “And being free, it is full of pitfalls and temptations into which St. John Larrimer”—and here Jimrey rested his hand on St. John’s shoulder—“allowed himself to be lured.”
The prosecution then began its case by presenting a parade of financial experts and bankers who, after describing in detail Larrimer, Ltd.’s wrongdoing, expressed their sincere contempt for St. John Larrimer. “He has sullied not only his and his family’s name, he has sullied the name of American investment banking. We at Goldman Sachs have always operated, not only by the letter of the law, but with a conscientious concern for our clients and the American people. We feel ourselves to be serving a sacred trust.”
“What Larrimer has done,” thundered a former World Bank president, “is nothing less than to undermine the world’s faith in the American financial system.”
After two days of such presentations, followed by testimony from the most egregiously cheated of St. John’s victims—the widows and orphans, so to speak—the prosecution rested.
The defense rose to present their case. They did not contend that St. John was innocent of wrongdoing, only that what he had done, while technically criminal, was in its essence—the acquisition of money from unsuspecting clients—no different from what other bankers did. And to prove it, they called a number of reputable economists and scholars of various political persuasions who, when pushed, had no choice but to admit, one after the other, that free market capitalism was essentially a giant pyramid scheme. Of course, the defense did not mention that this was St. John’s own theory, which he had laid out in one of their strategy sessions. At that moment, Jimrey had recognized the bones of their defense strategy: St. John was guilty of nothing more than free market capitalism.
In a daring gambit to drive the point home, Jimrey called a number of St. John’s victims to the stand. The first was Father Ian Wilson.
“Father Wilson would you remind us, please, of the amount of money your foundation lost to Larrimer, Ltd.”
“The Heartfelt Foundation lost approximately sixteen million dollars through our investments in Larrimer, Ltd.”
Larrimer’s attorney pretended to leaf through his notes. “Did you say sixteen million? The SIPC report you filed said you had lost twenty-one million dollars. How do you explain that disparity?”
“Well, the initial report was filed as soon as the fraud was made known to us. A more recent examination of our books has, thankfully, allowed us to revise the amount downward. We now believe it to have been sixteen million dollars.”
“I see. And I presume you have filed an amended report with SIPC.”
“We have only recently discovered the disparity. We will report is as soon as we have completed our audit.”
“Father Wilson, did you receive anything from Mr. Larrimer in repayment for your losses?”
“We received five million dollars in bonds. I assume from Mr. Larrimer, although there was no indication on the package who had sent it.”
“When did you receive these bonds, Father Wilson?” The witness shifted uneasily on his chair.
“Please answer the question,” said the judge.
“It was … about eighteen months ago,” said Father Wilson.
“I see. Then I assume you must have reported the receipt of that money to SIPC within the thirty days the law requires. Is that correct?”
“Um, well, we missed the deadline. All our time has been taken up just trying to save the foundation, so we overlooked the deadline—”
“So, then, can I assume you have filed the report by now?”
“We will as soon as—”
“Father Wilson, I can’t help but notice that you are quick to file reports when you lose money, but not all that quick when you receive it.” The prosecutor objected vigorously, the judge sustained the objection and instructed the jury to disregard the defense attorney’s remark.
“Father Wilson, I have one more question. When speaking of the Heartfelt Foundation you have repeatedly used the word we, the first person plural pronoun. Who is the we you refer to?”
“Well, once our finances were so severely decimated by Mr. Larrimer’s fraud, we had no choice but to curtail expenses severely, so—”
“Father Wilson, is there anyone else in the employ of the Heartfelt Foundation besides yourself?”
“As I was saying—”
“A yes or no will suffice, Father Wilson.”
“No.”
“Thank you, Father Wilson. I hav
e no further questions at this time.” The prosecution chose not to cross-examine.
Lorraine Usher was called, and the treatment she received was not any kinder. “Isn’t it true, Ms. Usher, that Mr. Larrimer sent you negotiable bonds for the entire amount he had taken from you?”
“Yes, that is true, but—”
“And is it not also true that he did so out of a sense of deep remorse?”
“That is what he said, but—”
“But you do not believe that he was motivated by remorse and the desire to make amends?”
“No, he—”
“So, is that why you shot his driver and threatened to shoot him?”
And so it went with witness after witness, each of whom was shown to be no less venal, or greedy, or malevolent than St. John had ever been.
St. John had not taken the stand, but he was permitted to make a statement before the jury began their deliberations. He said, in essence, that he expected to be found guilty and to be punished for his moral laxity. “I have fallen,” he said, “about as far as a man can fall.” And while he did not have the faintest idea how far a man really can fall—he knew nothing about Abinaash, or the millions like her—his contrition appeared to be sincere. The jury was out for six days and found him guilty of most of the charges against him, but they also saw his efforts at restitution as a genuine effort to right the wrongs he had committed. They even offered a plea on his behalf to the judge who was to pronounce the sentence.
The judge—not “Fingers”—was not entirely persuaded by St. John’s contrition. But he did find the jury’s sentiment convincing that St. John’s sentence should reflect both his guilt and his efforts at retribution as well as his previous contributions to society. The trial had been widely covered on television and in the press. St. John represented something novel in the annals of crime, particularly white-collar crime: a convincingly remorseful crook. He had been a villain, but now he was redeemed. The press rolled out the Saint Paul on the Road to Damascus analogy again and again, even playing on his name. “SAINT ST. JOHN?” wrote the Post.
St. John was sentenced to five years in prison, with time already served—meaning his time in the luxurious penthouse apartment—reducing his sentence to three and a half years. He declined to appeal the sentence; he pronounced that he found it fair punishment for his crimes and misdemeanors. He was to serve his sentence in California so that he could be near his sons. He would be eligible for parole in eighteen months.
St. John was a model prisoner. Religion had never been of interest to him, but now he seemed to find God, or God found him. St. John read the Bible from cover to cover, and on Sundays he conducted Bible study for the other inmates, who were mostly small-time drug dealers and other nonviolent criminals. Most of his fellow inmates, all people without the means to have ever invested in Larrimer, Ltd., knew him only as a genuine gentleman who was concerned with their spiritual well-being and their final salvation.
“What kind of a name is Sinjin?” they asked.
“Just call me John,” he said.
St. John was released on parole after eighteen months and allowed to serve out his parole in his penthouse apartment on Park Avenue. He was also allowed to purchase a new suite of offices on Fifty-seventh Street. Not surprisingly, the parole board was suspicious about his purpose, but once he explained that he intended to launch a charitable foundation called New Beginnings, they were willing to allow it.
“We’ll have a close eye on you, Mr. Larrimer,” said the parole board chairman. “We’ll have complete and total access to your accounts, the members of your foundation’s board, and a thorough account of all your business dealings.”
“I would expect nothing less, sir. I think you will be amazed.” They looked skeptical when he said that, but in fact they were amazed. St. John designed New Beginnings as a partner to, and intermediary between, business and nongovernmental agencies whose purpose was to improve wages and working conditions in factories around the world, starting in Mexico and Pakistan, but then expanding to all of Latin America and Asia. He hoped, he said, in partnership with his allies—he had already made contact with the Clinton Foundation, the Gates Foundation, and many others—to accomplish no less than the elimination of child labor, and the end of the exploitation of women and of poverty among the working men and women of the world.
He was invited to appear on 60 Minutes. The interview took place in his Fifty-seventh Street offices. He wore a modest Glen plaid jacket with an elegant tie. Gone was the pocket square. He sat at the Andrew Carnegie desk, the only remaining trace of Larrimer, Ltd. to be seen.
“St. John Larrimer,” Charlie Rose intoned, sounding like the voice of doom, “a lot of the people watching this right now are going to be asking, ‘Why? Why should we believe this rich man. What does he even know about poverty?’”
St. John looked straight into the camera. “I know,” he said, “that it needn’t exist. Poverty need not, should not exist.”
LXII
WITH THE PASSING OF MONTHS and now years, the anger of the Gazneft board members who had lost money to St. John Larrimer had begun to diminish. For one thing, Gazneft had become an even larger entity, taking over pipeline, oil drilling, and natural gas companies, not to mention several banks of its own. Measured against the amounts of money they were now raking in, the 2008 losses seemed less dire. Moreover, some members had left the board for even more lucrative enterprises. They just wanted to put the whole sorry experience behind them. Everyone except Dimitri, that is.
Dimitri could not let it go. He would be working along just fine, overseeing an acquisition or an expansion, when suddenly he would disappear. He would turn out to be off somewhere following yet another lead, trying another tack. And eventually he would come back to the board to report what he had discovered. But it always ended up amounting to nothing.
“Forget the money, Dimitri Adropov. It’s gone.”
“It’s not gone,” said Dimitri.
“Okay, then where is it?”
“Larrimer has it. He still has it.”
“You’re neglecting business, Dimitri. We have bigger things going on than the fucking money. You chose the EisenerBank; they lost the money. It’s over.”
“It wasn’t me that chose that bank,” said Dimitri. This was true enough. The man who had was no longer on the Gazneft board. It was not even certain he was still alive. In fact, Dimitri had opposed using EisenerBank. It was run by a bunch of innocents. “You thought that was an advantage, having a bank run by children. Remember, Vasily? Well, how the fuck did that work out?
“Now!” he said and raised his finger with a dramatic pause, capitalizing on his newfound, if brief, advantage. “Now that Larrimer’s giving money away in his so-called foundation, I can get to him and get our money back with interest.”
“Yeah, how? You can’t even get near him. You never could, and you never will.”
“Don’t worry,” said Dimitri. But it was a good question.
It looked like the end of the line for Dimitri Adropov. He had tried everything, and nothing had worked. Carolyne had flown the coop for who-knew-where. Jeremy Gutentag had been worse than useless. And Dimitri didn’t dare go near Lorraine Usher. He could send somebody else, but what good would that do?
“Don’t worry,” he said again. He turned his back on the board and gazed from the window overlooking the great Gazneft works that he, Dimitri Adropov, had built and was now about to lose. The relentless push of time and fate: that was all Dimitri had left. Without an earthquake, a war, a tsunami, a rampant toxic cloud, a pestilential epidemic, something, anything to shake things up, his story was over.
At that exact moment, as though a prayer were being answered, a small asteroid entered the earth’s atmosphere at a speed of over eighteen kilometers a second, which is fifty times the speed of sound. Small in the case of an asteroid means the size of a railroad car. Its ferocious velocity caused it to explode in a tremendous fireball twenty-three kilometers ab
ove the city of Chelyabinsk with the concussion of an atomic bomb. It was captured on a thousand automobile dashboard cameras and shown all over the Internet. It was written about in newspapers and broadcast on television around the world. It was the first recorded asteroid strike on the earth that had caused human injury and death.
The explosion shattered windows and caused buildings to sway all over Chelyabinsk. People were knocked off their feet. Irina Adropov, Dimitri’s aged mother, standing at the sink peeling turnips, was cut on her hands and face by flying glass. She crossed herself and fell to the floor. Surely it was the end of the world. The members of the Gazneft board seated around the table were showered with flying glass and debris, their cigarettes torn from their lips. Dimitri, standing facing the window, got the worst of it. He was thrown to the floor. When he looked up and could not see, he reached up and found puddles of blood where his eyes had been.
At the Fyodorov Microsurgery Clinic in Moscow, Dimitri emerged after six hours of difficult surgery. A short time later he awoke in a private room. His mother, Irina, was at his side. Three days later the bandages were removed from his eyes. Special dark glasses were placed over his eyes before he was allowed to open them.
“You will see light and shapes to begin with, and with time your vision should improve, although it remains to be seen how much of your vision you will get back. What do you see now?”
“I see light and shapes,” said Dimitri. He turned toward Irina. “I see my mother.” She took his hand in hers and pressed it to her cheek.
Over time Dimitri’s vision stabilized and he was given prescription glasses to wear. The lenses were tinted because he remained sensitive to light, and they were very thick, making his eyes appear smaller than they really were. Instead of softening his looks, the glasses emphasized his reptilian aspect and made him appear even more menacing than before.
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