Turn of the Century

by Kurt Andersen

  The problem for the prosecutors is that Ben Gould seems to have committed no federal securities crime. He learned about the hack fortuitously, by overhearing the hackers at George and Lizzie’s party (“the May 19 Zimbalist-Mactier event” is the FBI term of art), and had in no way conspired with the perpetrators, or met them, or spoken to them. It looks as if he simply did not violate the 1934 Securities Exchange Act, the federal law against insider trading. For a day or so, the Post exclusive about the Saturday cliché tally prank at Newsweek (GOLDEN GOULD HACKED MAG IN ‘83) looked to his lawyers like a problem. It appeared the same day that the Journal quoted Ben gushing to a friend that he’d “bagged two hundo, man”—traderese for $200 million. The U.S. Attorney in New York would love to indict him—if not for securities fraud then at least for wire fraud (the phone calls buying and selling Microsoft stock), or for violating the laws against the manipulation of the stock market. “Hey!” Ben said to his lawyers about those two crimes, “that’s practically the stock trader’s job description right there!” But the consensus among the federal bar (as well as the guests, night after night, on Geraldo Rivera’s TV program) is that it would be a stretch for the government to indict Gould, that a conviction might make new law but the case would probably be thrown out. And Washington, buying into that consensus, has overruled the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District. GORE GOT GOULD GOLD, the Post headlined its page-one story about Ben’s “lame duck Xmas gift from the administration” the other day, which suggested that Ben’s years of contributions to Democratic campaigns had put the fix in at Justice. A class-action suit has been filed against Bennett Gould Partners on behalf of Microsoft shareholders (erstwhile shareholders, in fact, the ones who sold in the frenzy of November 29 during the hoax), which Ben knows will cause several million of his new two hundo to disappear in legal bills. But on Wall Street, as a result of his spur-of-the-moment, end-of-the-day, $19 million magnanimity to Sam Zyberk, Ben Gould is God.

  Hank Saddler may yet be indicted. Unlike Ben, he tried to contact the hackers after overhearing their scheme at the May 19 Zimbalist-Mactier event. Even stupider, he posted his chat room message right in the middle of the hoax, GATES AND BALLMER OF MSFT ARE DEAD! which NASDAQ caught with the surveillance software it uses to monitor internet chat rooms and bulletin boards for disinformation intended to push stock prices up or down. The government is worried they won’t be able to prosecute anyone successfully. But somebody must be prosecuted. Hank Saddler is the most indictable, so he will probably be indicted. As far as Hank is concerned, he’s already suffered enough. On the thirtieth of November, the day after the hoax, before he knew he was in trouble with the law, WinWin.com sent him an automatic e-mail message informing him that he was being dropped from the WinWin.com Winners’ Circle, as of the end of the month, because of his “November trading reversals,” but that he would be welcome to continue making WinWin.com electronic trades “on a regular low-cost commission basis.”

  George and Lizzie have been investigated too. “You’re a business associate and/or personal friend of Michael Milken, Mr. Mactier, isn’t that correct?” a twenty-seven-year-old assistant U.S. Attorney asked George during one of his afternoons in the stifling, fluorescent room down on Foley Square. The prosecutors became particularly interested in Lizzie after they discovered that Mike Zimbalist (“aka Meshuggah Mike the Manipulator,” according to an old FBI file) was involved in a faked seaplane accident in British Honduras in 1951; that her stepbrother, Ronnie, was a former cocaine dealer and DEA informant; and that her signature on the federal probation affidavit concerning Fanny Taft’s employment was forged by her assistant. (On Inside Edition, Alexi volunteered to “go to the electric chair to prove Lizzie’s innocence if that’s what’s necessary.”) But yesterday the prosecutors conceded to George and Lizzie’s lawyers that, no, they haven’t developed any evidence at all that either of their clients had been aware of the hackers’ plans, or profited from the hoax. (George and Lizzie hired separate lawyers—“just like JonBenét’s parents,” Zip Ingram said.) The same assistant U.S. Attorney who pressed George on his close friendship with Milken also questioned Sarah and Max about their participation in the May-19-event discussions, but the derisive press coverage (KIDDIES GRILLED IN HACKER HOAX) actually hastened the prosecutors’ decision to leave George and Lizzie alone. “The children do not have a problem,” the family’s lawyers assured them. Both George and Lizzie have been struck over the last month by the comforting vagueness of that lawyer’s locution—“We need to determine if you have a problem,” “You may have a problem,” “We think you don’t have a big problem.” As it turns out, no one in the family has a problem.

  Everybody in the world knows that Fanny, Humfried, and Willibald are the hackers. Everybody knows they violated various federal and Minnesota statutes. Fanny has tried to stay out of the limelight. But the Germans have consented to be interviewed by any newspaper (the Post: GERMAN HACKER’S COMMIE YOUTH) or magazine (Time: ANTI-HEROES) or TV program (Diane Sawyer: “Willi and Humfried—was it your intention to hurt America?”) that calls. Because they’re young and skinny and bright and have little beards and cute accents, America is treating Hummer and Willi as mischievous, magical, lovable imps. They’ve appeared on Jay Leno’s and David Letterman’s shows. On Letterman, Humfried used Dave’s desk telephone to set off the burglar alarm system at the home of a CBS executive, live on the air. They are careful, of course, never to admit explicitly to the Reuters hack, but the giggles and the coy, convoluted questions and answers are all part of their particular form of celebrity, a kind of feel-good O.J. lite. “Now, Willi—may I call you Willi?—if I assume that a guy like you, but not you, would feel pretty darned great after he’d tricked the entire free world into believing that Bill Gates kicked the bucket, would you agree with me?”

  Everyone knows they committed crimes punishable by years in prison. But the public seems not to care at all, a new death-of-outrage which William Bennett has been following the Germans from TV studio to TV studio decrying. The hackers didn’t intend to hurt anyone, neither Gates and Ballmer nor the panicky shareholders. The news service computer system was back up and running by four o’clock the same day, and now that Reuters has proposed hiring Willibald and Humfried, according to the Times, “as security consultants, on a short-term basis,” popular opinion has exculpated them entirely. The other victims of the crime (or “victims,” as the word is routinely styled in news stories) are not exactly sympathetic figures. No one feels very sorry for Gates or Ballmer, or for the greedy stock speculators who rushed to abandon the company instead of grieving over the deaths of two flesh-and-blood human beings.

  The FBI has been unable to find any hard evidence of their crime: no disks and no hard drives, no incriminating e-mails or printed documents or telephone records. And the government lacks any real leverage with which to split Willibald from Humfried or turn either one against their American friend. When an FBI agent told Willi he might be deported, he asked her cheerfully and more or less in earnest, “Does that mean you pay for the plane ticket?” And after three weeks of conversations with Fanny Taft, the prosecutors were unable to persuade her to sign a cooperation agreement. She would not flip. In one of their discussions with the U.S. Attorney, her lawyers had sketched pretty clearly the secret information concerning certain senior federal officials that Fanny hacked out of the Kennedy School computer at Harvard in 1998. But whether that influenced the government’s decision not to prosecute, her lawyers just don’t know.

  Lizzie looks up from The Way We Live Now, the Trollope novel. “Oh, God.”

  George looks up from the thick, perfect-bound Home Again holiday catalogue, which he’s been reading for the last half hour instead of The Death of Artemio Cruz, the Carlos Fuentes novel he’s been trying to read for a month. “What?”

  “We never ordered the present for Zip. The plum pudding globe.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Good boy.”

  And they re
turn to their reading. George and Lizzie’s lawyers have said it would be a mistake for them both to go to the Caribbean for Christmas. And they are exhausted by the prospect of driving all the way up to Lake Marten. So they are at home on Christmas Eve, the children all snug in their beds, George and Lizzie sprawled leg over leg on the old couch in their bedroom in their converted cocoa-and-coffee warehouse at the Seaport.

  She slaps the Trollope down on her chest. “What was that?”

  “I didn’t hear anything,” he says, not looking up. “Johnny, probably.”

  Then he lifts his head and meets her look. Although it is an event from the depths of his Lost Time, George does remember leaving Johnny’s corpse duct-taped in the Prada shopping bag on the street.

  “There were two light thuds, one right after another. All the way downstairs.”

  “Did you do the alarm?”

  She shakes her head. They both look at the clock, and listen. At midnight the alarm system switches on automatically. It’s only half past ten.

  George says, “If it was a burglar, he’d—”

  “Shhh.”

  They hear nothing.

  “Santa,” he whispers.

  “Shhh!”

  They hear nothing.

  Lizzie whispers, “You know I’ve always worried about break-ins on holidays because they think you’re gone.”

  “Doesn’t that mean we should talk in normal voices, so he’ll know we’re here?”

  “Go downstairs and check.”

  George rolls his eyes, waits two seconds, and then swings his legs off her and the couch. Scanning the room, he sees her fancy new ice-climbing ax behind the TV, grabs it, and creeps out to the landing.

  Lizzie hops up and heads to the closet. She needs a cigarette. The trouble is, she hasn’t smoked at home since the summer, and she’s forgotten her last hiding place. Standing on tiptoe, she reaches back on the stationery shelf, then steps left and tiptoes higher to feel around George’s old-vinyl-LP shelf. She knows what she’s touched the instant she touches it, but doesn’t know for sure it isn’t a toy until she slides it forward and brings it down.

  George has a pistol. He must have bought it while she was in Asia. It disgusts her, like vermin, like a snake. She is scared, frightened retroactively, to imagine he was ever nutty enough to buy a gun. She stands in the closet, holding it by the trigger guard with two fingers, staring at it, wondering what George’s addled plan was. Shoot Mose? Shoot her? Shoot himself? Shoot her and then himself, like some tragic, stupid, drunken off-duty cop in the Bronx?

  “I’ll get it for you,” she hears George say. “But I’m honestly not sure where it is.”

  George is talking to someone in the hallway. He is talking to the burglar.

  Lizzie peeks out. Across the bedroom and out the door she sees George. He’s still holding the ice ax, stepping slowly, cautiously sideways and backward down the hall toward the stairs to the fourth floor. He disappears, and then she hears the burglar—

  “I need the cartridge. It’s my key asset.”

  —before she sees him step into view. It’s Chas Prieve. He’s holding a hunting knife.

  “That’s the only one left now,” she watches him say, “and I really need it. It’s my key asset.” He steps out of view, following George. And she hears him say, “I deserve to hurt her. You probably don’t know she sent Malaysian thugs after me? She did.”

  “Listen,” Lizzie hears George say, his voice fading as he moves down the hall, “we’re going to find your disk in my office, and you’ll be fine. Okay?”

  “No, she actually did. She had them threaten me and take all the things from my hotel room.”

  “I doubt that.”

  They’ve moved too far down the hall for Lizzie to make out Chas’s reply clearly, but she can tell that he’s getting more distraught. She hears “King Harold” and either “Wong” or “wrong,” followed by the heaving creak of the first step up to the top floor.

  Chas Prieve is deranged, and he’s broken into the house, Lizzie repeats to herself disbelievingly as she steps out of the closet, across her bedroom, and toward the doorway, quiet as she can be. (“Walk like a Mohican, in the movies,” her father used to tell her when they went hiking in the mountains behind Malibu.) Chas is deranged, and he has a knife, she repeats to herself now as she presses against the wall by the door and inches her face out to look down the hallway. He has a long, ugly knife, and he’s heading up to the children’s floor.

  No.

  “Chas, stop right now, Chas. I mean it.” She is in the hallway, pointing the .38-caliber WiseWeapon at her former West Coast marketing and sales vice president.

  She has startled him. He points the knife at her and with his free hand grips the bannister like a railing on a ship in rough seas. His expression has turned from missionary zeal to rage and fear, as though Satan herself has appeared. George worries that Chas might lunge past him toward Lizzie, and steps up onto the first tread to block his way back down.

  “Just let me go get the disk, Chas,” George says. “It’s yours, and you can have it.”

  But Chas is staring at Lizzie. “You will not triumph, Lizzie Zimbalist. You and the Mose forces.”

  The weirdness of his language makes her pause.

  “Chas?” she says. “This is not some fucking video game. I don’t know what Mose did to you, or what the Malaysians did, or anybody else. But I didn’t have anything to do with it, whatever it was. I didn’t even know about that disk until a few weeks ago.”

  “The cartridge is my only remaining asset.”

  “You come down here, Chas. George will go get the disk, and come back and give it to you. You come down here.”

  Chas shakes his head—quick, tiny, frightened shakes. “I trusted you before, Lizzie.” He starts climbing again slowly, glancing back and forth behind him at George with the ice ax and Lizzie with the gun.

  “Chas!” she says, sidling toward the stairs and holding the pistol with both hands, like she’s seen in the movies, “I’m serious. You stop.” She takes a step toward the stairs, raising the gun a couple of inches as she gets closer to keep it aimed on him, stops, then takes another step, raises the gun, stops, then another.

  George sees that she’s feeding the dementia by threatening him. He knows Lizzie has never fired any kind of gun, and won’t be able to shoot Chas. George continues his creep up the stairs right behind him, Chas taking a step and pausing, George taking a step and pausing.

  The three of them could be performing a postmodern dance piece.

  “George, get back out of the way,” she says. “Chas, I’m about to shoot you.”

  Chas turns away from her and starts up the stairs faster.

  Lizzie tries to aim low, and pulls the trigger. Nothing happens. She pulls the trigger again, and again. Nothing happens.

  Chas is up on the dark top landing now, even more agitated, looking for George’s office, heading toward LuLu’s and Max’s doors.

  “Come on, stop,” George says, right behind him.

  Chas doesn’t, and George swings the two-pound, two-and-a-half-foot-long climbing ax at Chas’s back, grazing his butt. Chas turns and crouches, grunting and stabbing underhanded at the air between him and George (like he’s seen in the movies). George swings the ice ax like a tennis racket as hard as he can, backhanded, toward Chas’s right hand, the knife hand.

  The knife drops and Chas screams. Whimpering and cursing, holding his hand and splattering blood, he rushes past George, past Lizzie, and down the stairs.

  “Give me the gun,” George says to his wife.

  They slowly follow Chas down two flights, but stop when they hear the front door open. They don’t hear it close. Upstairs, they hear floors creaking, doors opening, a “Mommy?” and a “Dad?”

  “You go call 911 and be with the kids,” George tells Lizzie, “I’ll stay here in case he’s still downstairs.”

  “It’s not loaded,” she says.

  “No, it is loaded.
But it’s a smart gun—only I can shoot it. It’s programmed for me to say ‘Ready to fire’ into the chip on the handle to make it work.”

  In fact, before George finishes his sentence, he hears and feels a little servomotor whirr and click inside the WiseWeapon. They both stare at the gun, as if it were alive, as if it had hissed. “I guess it’s ready to fire now,” George says. The quarter-second whirr repeats, but not the click.

  50

  Between Christmas and New Year’s, the news wants either to be freakishly happy or freakishly grim; either glorious acts of good Samaritanism involving people of different races and children surviving an avalanche by creating bubblegum-bubble air pockets, or else a doped-up bus driver mowing down a dozen carolers and the accidental execution of a rural family by federal agents with the wrong address; either Frank Capra or Oliver Stone.

  The news this jubilee season has inclined toward the former. Even the biggest bad news story is not really very terrible. On December 26, Mose Media Holdings announced it was selling all its TV stations to Barry Diller, laying off fourteen hundred employees, and declaring Chapter 11 bankruptcy. “Although the MBC as a broadcasting network will sign off permanently at midnight December 31,” the Mose press release said, “it will be reborn immediately as Reality Channel, an extraordinary new tripartite concept in cable programming.… During the day, Reality Channel’s ‘Sunlight Daypart’ will feature New Age and holistic lifestyle and entertainment programs; followed by a four-hour prime-time block (the ‘Wake! Daypart’), which will feature in-depth coverage of the passings of the celebrated, based on the hit MBC series Finale; followed in late night by the ‘Camelot Daypart,’ featuring documentary nostalgia from the Sixties and Seventies about bygone and beloved American newsmakers, such as the Kennedys.” The cable channel reincarnation strategy looks dicey to most analysts quoted in the newspapers, although they variously agree that because Harold Mose is a bold, shrewd visionary whose buccaneering contrarianism has succeeded in the past, his reinvention of Mose Broadcasting cannot be dismissed out of hand. One example of his visionary shrewdness, The Wall Street Journal story said, was “his creation of asset-backed securities based on television programs such as the MBC series NARCS, which was still a top-rated show last spring—allowing Mose, in effect, to count his chickens before they hatched and sell them before they died.” Still, the price of Mose Media Holdings’ stock dropped more than 80 percent in one day, from $221⁄16 to $4⅜. (At Key West, Lizzie’s startlingly accurate, yearlong stock-price graph line lost its bead and kept heading south-southeast; it is now in the Lesser Antilles.)