Money to Burn

by James Grippando

  Eric said, “Is there something you’d like to add, Sonya?”

  “I’m concerned,” she said.

  My stomach churned. I didn’t know where this was headed, but I suddenly recalled that it was within Saxton Silvers’ protocol to fire someone so long as there were more than two people in the room. At least I still had clients to go with me.

  Thank God I didn’t drink the Kool-Aid.

  “Concerned about what?” I asked.

  She came to the edge of her chair and leaned toward Eric, hands folded atop her knees. It was her I’m-talking-to-the-president-and-only-to-the-president posture.

  “Here’s the thing,” said Sonya. “Michael’s in management-an officer of the company-with access to inside information. He sold his shares the day before the firm publicly announced another twenty-two billion dollars in subprime write-downs. That could trigger an SEC investigation for insider trading.”

  “But I didn’t sell anything. An identity thief liquidated my account and moved the money offshore.”

  “But if I’m the SEC, your explanation raises an obvious question: Who controls the secret Cayman Islands account? In other words, are you operating behind a cleverly crafted financial and corporate shell game to avoid going to jail for illegal insider trading?”

  “I hear what you’re saying,” said Eric, shaking his head. “But that’s a very cynical view.”

  Sonya said, “I’m not making any accusations, but from a regulator’s standpoint, the timing of the sale and resultant profit seem a little too convenient.”

  I checked the TV on the wall. The audio was muted, but Bell was still on the air and the breaking-news banner proclaimed that Saxton Silvers’ stock was down another thirty dollars per share-about ninety dollars for the day.

  “Do the math,” said Sonya. “How many shares did you hold, Michael?”

  “About ten thousand and change.”

  “So the difference between selling yesterday and selling today…about a million dollars, right?”

  Her theory couldn’t have been further from the truth, but the implication still gave me chills.

  “Look, I didn’t do anything wrong,” I said. “I have no idea who accessed my account, and I have no clue where that money is headed. Why would I use the firm’s outside counsel to enlist the help of the FBI if I was the one behind the scheme?”

  “As I recall,” said Sonya, “hiring Cool Cash and going to the FBI was my idea.”

  Her remark made me bristle. “What are you trying to say?”

  “The fact that the firm called the FBI won’t stop the regulators from being highly suspicious about the timing of your ‘identity theft.’”

  I showed her my hand. “What about the package I got this morning? You and Brewer told me not to talk to the FBI, and I talked to them anyway when they came to check out the elevator. Is that what a crook does when he’s hiding something?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “The fact is,” I said, “I didn’t know about the additional subprime write-down that was going to be announced today. Eric just told me about it ten minutes ago.” I glanced at my mentor. He looked ashen. “Isn’t that right, Eric?”

  He breathed in and out, staring at the television.

  “Eric?”

  “I just did the math for myself,” he said. “I lost two-hundred-forty million in the last forty-five minutes.”

  I ran a hand through my hair. “This is insane.”

  “It also changes things,” said Sonya. “It no longer seems appropriate for the firm to have its outside counsel dealing with the FBI on your behalf.”

  “Why not?”

  “Conflict of interest. Saxton Silvers shouldn’t use its lawyers to represent someone who might be accused of illegally trading its stock.”

  “My life savings are disappearing deeper and deeper into the international banking system with every passing minute and you want me to change lawyers now?”

  “The FBI has already been alerted. Agents are on the case. There’s really nothing more for you to do on that front. It’s only a question of follow-up.”

  “Now you’re pissing me off, Sonya.”

  “Calm down, Michael,” said Eric.

  “No,” I said. “I’ve done nothing wrong, and without the proper follow-up, I could lose everything!”

  “We all could,” said Sonya, “if we don’t get our hands around the bigger crisis.”

  Eric’s gaze drifted back toward the television screen. “Three hundred million,” he said, muttering in disbelief. “Now I’m down three hundred million dollars.”

  There was a knock on the door frame that rattled the glass. Before Eric could ask who it was, the door flew open. Kent Frost burst into the room. Eric’s assistant had him by the arm, having failed to keep him from entering unannounced.

  “Eric, I need you right now,” Kent said.

  Kent Frost was a few years older than me, but we’d started at the firm around the same time and had competed for Eric’s praise for almost ten years. Each year in December, without fail, Kent made it known throughout the firm that his annual bonus dwarfed mine. Frost ran the Structured Products Division, and his specialty was collaterized debt obligations made with subprime mortgages. He was the shameless recipient of the award given at the banquet I had gladly missed for my surprise birthday party.

  “What is it?” asked Eric.

  “A new wrinkle,” said Frost.

  “Don’t tell me,” I said, trying not to scoff. “You left off a zero in the twenty-two billion?”

  Kent glared. Up until six months ago, he had at least tried to hide his contempt for me and anyone else who disagreed with him. That all changed in October, when I aired my view that with one out of every five mortgages in America being “subprime,” the whole market was a ticking time bomb-another one of those “Fonzie schemes,” as Papa called them. Admittedly, criticizing the business activities of a sister division was overstepping my authority, but if the subprime guys refused to rein themselves in, someone had to blow the whistle.

  “Eric,” said Frost, “this is private.” He meant it was not for my ears. Eric nodded.

  “Holy shit,” said Sonya. She was looking at her BlackBerry.

  “What now?” asked Eric.

  “Our stock was at ten times normal volume in the first hour of trading. At this pace, we could be looking at seventy million shares by the end of the day.”

  Eric massaged the bridge of his nose, as if staving off a migraine. “One thing at a time. Kent, take a seat. Michael, we’ll talk later.”

  Frost entered. I started toward the door, then stopped. The firm’s subprime crisis had to be the president’s priority, but I needed someone to focus on a problem we could actually fix-mine.

  “One more thing,” I said.

  The three of them waited, but I paused. That blowhard Chuck Bell had told the world that the Saxton Silvers’ investment advisor of the year violated every securities regulation imaginable to cash out before our stock went into free fall. The market was now tanking, and, when the dust cleared, it was entirely possible that none of us would have anything left but our reputations. I had the right to clear mine-to tell the truth that my identity was stolen. End of story.

  “What is it, Michael?”

  Eric was definitely feeling the stress. Now was not the time to ask for permission. Later, I’d ask for forgiveness.

  “Nothing,” I said. “We’ll stay in touch on this.”

  14

  I CAME TO MY SENSES IN THE ELEVATOR. OF COURSE I WANTED TO take my case to the airwaves and give everybody hell, not just Chuck Bell. But I also still wanted to have a job at the end of the day.

  Keep your cool, Cantella.

  It was the Kent Frost effect. The guy just had a way of setting me off.

  Fortunately, our paths didn’t often cross. The subprime alchemists worked in their own building, three modified apartments on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The official name was the Structured Products
Division, but everyone called it the CDO factory-collateralized debt obligations. I’d gone there only once, last October, just to check things out. Luckily, Frost had been out when I arrived. I got thirty minutes alone with his financial engineer-a Twinkie-eating, twentysomething geek named Wayne who spent every waking hour staring at trading screens. It positively thrilled Wayne to find someone willing to listen to him talk about what he did all day long. We went straight to the latest data, and Wayne gave me a primer on the sixteen million subprime mortgages in Frost’s CDO factory.

  Frost had his suppliers all over the country: banks and mortgage companies that loaned money to people like that Bahamian taxi driver Ivy and I had met in Miami-borrowers with credit scores under 500 and no money for a down payment, no income to make their mortgage payment, and no business having a credit card, let alone a half-million dollars or more in subprime mortgages. The lenders didn’t worry about it because they immediately sold those toxic mortgages to Frost and others who pooled all of them together into mortgage-backed securities. Frost didn’t worry about it because the theory was that not all the mortgages would fail, and Frost spread the risk even wider, taking little slices from lots of different mortgage-backed securities to create CDOs, which he sold to really smart investors like insurance companies and pension-fund managers. The smart investors didn’t worry about it because they controlled the global pool of money-about seventy trillion dollars-and they were earning 10 percent returns instead of the measly 1 percent that the Fed was offering on T-bills and other safe investments. If the really smart investors wouldn’t buy them, Frost still didn’t worry, because little towns in places like Norway or Iceland would. They were always looking for “safe” investments, and Frost had no trouble getting the Triple-A stamp of approval from the rating agencies, who based their ratings on mathematical formulas that assumed home values would continue to rise 8 percent annually in perpetuity. That was like an insurance company writing life insurance policies based on actuarial tables that assumed the insured would never get sick, never get old, never die. All I could figure was that those rating geniuses had been under the influence of triple shots of tequila.

  “I’m getting a little nervous,” Wayne had told me, “because we’re starting to see something we’ve never seen before. Borrowers defaulting on their very first payment. It’s weird.”

  It wasn’t weird. It was the burst of the housing bubble. Taxi drivers in Miami who counted on flippin’ one flippin’ condo to pay the flippin’ mortgage on their next flippin’ condo suddenly couldn’t flip a flippin’ thing. I started to explain this to Wayne, but that was the moment Frost returned to the CDO factory, physically pushed me aside, and chewed out Wayne for showing me the data.

  “Get the fuck out of here!” Frost had told me.

  The “conversation” had gotten much uglier than that, ending with me charging out of the factory and swearing on my mother’s grave that I was “not going to stand by and watch one greedy son of a bitch fly the plane into the side of a mountain.”

  It may not have been the perfect metaphor, but with Saxton Silvers stock in the tank this morning on the heels of yet another subprime write-down, it just about summed things up.

  “Forty…two,” said the mechanical voice in the elevator.

  That was my floor, but I decided to stay in the car and pushed nineteen. Sonya had pulled Cool Cash off the trail of my stolen money, but she’d put no restriction on my using the firm’s internal security force. This was a sensible application of the “Better to ask for forgiveness” rule.

  “Going…down,” the elevator voice said.

  As the doors were closing, I spotted a familiar old man in the reception area. I couldn’t believe my eyes, but I hit the Open button too late, and the elevator started downward. A flurry of button punching brought the car to a stop. I got off on forty and ran up two flights of stairs, but the reception area was now empty. I hurried down the hall to my office and found him standing at the window, taking in the view of Midtown.

  “Papa?”

  He turned. “Surprise!”

  I went and gave him a hug. “What are you doing here?”

  “We’ve come to celebrate your happy birthday, of course.”

  Papa never celebrated just birthdays; it was always “happy birthdays,” as if the two words were a single, inseparable noun.

  “Got here for free, too,” he said. “Remember those frequent-flier passes you gave us?”

  “You were supposed to use those for a trip to Europe.”

  “Been there once before. Ended up having a pretty miserable time at a beach called Omaha.”

  I heard the toilet flush in my private bathroom, and Nana stepped out. It was her first stop wherever she went: big heart, small bladder.

  I gave her a kiss, and the three of us shared a group hug. It had been three months since I’d last visited them in Florida, the longest stretch in years. They never seemed to change, which was what I loved about them. The bruise on Papa’s forehead, however, was definitely new.

  “What happened there?”

  “Ah, nothin’.”

  Nana busted him. “Your grandfather isn’t seeing so well at night lately. Refuses to get his eyes checked. Walked straight into a lamppost.”

  “Ouch. That had to hurt.”

  He leaned closer, as if to let me in on a secret. “It’s all about attitude, dummy.”

  We shared a smile. He truly lived by that creed. When throat cancer left him with just one-quarter of a single vocal cord, he had to train himself to speak in a voice that no longer sounded like his own. Naturally, Papa had been the first to joke about sounding like Marlon Brando in The Godfather.

  “So cancel your noon appointments,” he said. “It’s your happy birthday, and we’re taking you to dinner.”

  “You mean lunch?”

  “No, I mean dinner. When you get to be my age, dinner is at noon.”

  My heart sank. For the first time in my life they had pulled off a surprise like this-and they couldn’t have picked a worse day.

  “Papa, I’m really sorry, but-”

  “No excuses. Your grandmother and I are taking you to the finest Italian restaurant in New York City.”

  In my book, that meant Il Molino, but Papa was the kind of guy who could win the lottery and still agonize over buying a new pair of shoes every two years. On a day like today, it made me realize why they called his the greatest generation.

  “We’re doing Sal’s Place,” he said. “Marie, give Michael his happy birthday gift.”

  Nana pulled a teddy bear from the shopping bag on her arm. SAL’S PAL was stitched on its big belly, and when Papa poked it, the bear sang out like a mechanical Dean Martin: “When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie-”

  “That’s amore!” sang Papa.

  It was suddenly impossible to breathe a word to him about my identity theft. “Papa, I promise we’ll do lunch together, even if we have to order in from Sal’s and eat here in the office. But the next two hours are crazy for me.”

  “You do what you gotta do,” he said-one of those expressions that really did make him sound like the Godfather.

  My phone chimed with an e-mail from one of my analysts. “Check out FNN,” it read. A sense of dread came over me as I switched on the television in my office.

  “Wonderful,” said Nana, “I can watch my soaps.”

  “Uh…exactly,” I said, handing her the remote. I promised to return as soon as possible, then bolted down the hall to the nearest conference room. FNN was playing for a handful of staff who looked seriously worried.

  “Is that Chuck Bell on the trading floor?” one of the secretaries asked.

  It was. Chuck Bell had taken his show from the studio and was broadcasting live from the floor in the New York Stock Exchange. The commotion behind him naturally lent an air of excitement to “this special edition of Bell Ringer.”

  Another signature FNN banner scrolled across the bottom of the screen, the knife-to
-the-heart update once again punctuated with the cover-your-ass question mark: “REPO LENDERS NOT RENEWING OVERNIGHT LOANS TO SAXTON SILVERS?”

  “As I first reported in October,” said Bell, “the internal crisis at Saxton Silvers is personified by two of the president’s protégés, Michael Cantella and Kent Frost. It seems Cantella was talking in Volke’s right ear while Frost had his left ear. It all came to a head early in November when a blast e-mail went out from the residential mortgage desk to the banking industry, announcing that Saxton Silvers was getting out of the subprime business. Sources tell me that Michael Cantella was a major force behind that announcement, even though he had no direct role in the subprime business.”

  Bell was dead-on accurate-and I was beginning to get a little nervous about his “sources.”

  My cell rang. It was Eric from his office. He had me on speaker.

  “You watching FNN?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I need you there.”

  “What?”

  “That bastard Bell will try to corner one of our traders and get him to say something live and on the air that’ll make this worse than it already is. I need somebody I can trust to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

  I needed to meet with Saxton Silvers’ director of security and-now that I didn’t have a lawyer-do my own follow-up with the FBI.

  “Bell’s not allowed to interfere with the floor traders,” I said, knowing immediately how lame that sounded.

  “Well then, he’ll fucking follow them to lunch. Damn it, Michael. All I need is someone I can count on to go downtown and stop Bell from pulling off an ambush.”

  “I’ll do it,” I heard Kent Frost say over the speaker. I didn’t even know he was still there.

  “No, I’ll do it,” I said.

  “Good, keep me posted,” said Eric.

  He hung up, and as I hurried to the elevator, my cell rang again. It was Papa.

  “Michael, you know I never pressure you, but Nana just noticed that these ten-percent-off coupons I got for Sal’s are good for in-restaurant dining only.”

  “Papa, something’s come up. I can’t do lunch.”