When The Butterflies Come

by Rosemary Ness Bitner

  “He showed you that?” Mac was taken aback. His bushy white eyebrows normally overhung his piercing blue eyes like cliff outcrops over two caves, with two sparkling blue sapphires set within. But now the cliffs lifted as his hands went to the rear of his wizened head. Mac began a thoughtful, time-buying, head-scratching effort. The eyebrows returned to their normal position, except his forehead was in a frown and his eyes squinted.

  “Well yes. Our agreement is that I change my career, work to build the companies. When David dies, he leaves the operating companies to me. That’s the deal, but David didn’t give me a copy of the codicil. He returned it to its envelope and put the envelope back into the safe deposit box. I keep wondering if I should ask him for a copy, but my dilemma is that he’ll take that as a sign of mistrust, and you know we’ve split serious money before on a handshake.”

  “Yeah, I know all about that. I’ve talked to him before about using contracts, but that’s just how he is. It’s an old-school sort of thing with him. You know, the best deal is a handshake between two honest men.” Mac’s hands lifted as he shrugged.

  “That’s not what they teach in law school, but there’s a lot they don’t teach in law school.”

  “So this is just his way?”

  “It is for all the years I’ve known him.”

  Mac wore his poker face now and maintained strict silence about preparing the second codicil that made no mention of leaving the companies to Bob. His stomach churned, but he dared not show it. Playing games with a will codicil is something Marvin would never do. Listening to Bob describe the names of the signatories, which included four of the partners in Mac’s law firm, greatly concerned him. It was only a draft that he’d given David to review and comment on, not a final witnessed codicil. There had been no such signing of signatures. He would have seen that in the firm’s records, which he maintained as firm general counsel. This was a serious matter. Behind the poker face was a conscience that waxed angry. David has possibly forged the signatures of four of my partners. If I bring this up to him, we could lose the UGGA account which is a big chunk of our business. Plus, I have no proof that what Bob is saying is true. While he retained his silence, his mind was spinning for a solution to his dilemma. How can I be ethical to my client and remain without conflict? I can’t let my firm get caught up in abetting a fraud if that’s what’s going on here. I think I see a way to help Bob.

  Mac was at heart one of the world’s few good guys. That was why he became a lawyer in the first place; he didn’t like to see anybody getting screwed. He was an outlier among lawyers and rejected out of hand the notion that layering was just a game of separating clients from their money. He was a throwback to the morals of a hundred years before.

  “So we’re talking about this why?”

  Mac sought to draw Bob out, as all good lawyers do, but even knowing what Bob was telling him, he could never know the whole story of the codicil because David never told Mac about his pledge to Marvin. David’s normal practice was to never allow any one person to see the entire picture about anything. No lawyer ever knew the complete picture of his dealings. That was, for him, an essential business principle.

  “Well, that codicil is all that evidences our agreement. I don’t want to work for my whole career and find out it’s been misplaced, accidentally destroyed, accidentally superseded, or that some bank was torn down or a bank vault somehow burned. You see my dilemma?”

  “I hear you. I’m in an awkward position here. I am his lawyer. I drafted that codicil he showed you. I can’t be conflicted, you know that, so don’t ask me to intercede in this matter on your behalf.”

  Mac leaned back in his chair, his head bobbing up and down. The gray matter in that old skull was as fresh and imaginative as a twelve-year-old boy’s. Mac’s eyes smiled with their mirthful Irish twinkle before he flashed a friendly grin.

  “David said you have a deal, so you have a deal. That’s all you need to know, Bob.”

  “I can place trust in your assertion?” Bob was stretching an old friendship.

  “Tell you what, Bob. You pick up lunch as my payment for my advice to you just now as my personal client. That’s a deal we have with each other, and your copy of the lunch bill is your proof we met and I advised you. Now you can trust my advice. You have a deal with David.”

  Bob knew Mac’s heart, and all his burdens of doubt lifted. He believed he could trust David, even though Mac stated that he could trust Mac’s advice. If Bob’s emotions weren’t clouding his thinking, he would have noted that Mac never said he could trust David. Bob’s reasoning was that if Mac thought he should not put his trust in David, wouldn’t he have told him to go back to David and insist on a copy of the codicil? But he didn’t. Bob lay to rest Estella’s warnings that arose like Appalachian mists and slipped through the back doors of his mind.

  Once again Bob set out with great enthusiasm to build the UGGA fund.

  KNOW-HOW

  Time rolled along. Bob covered the nation in his travels, finding small broker-dealer firms and persuading them to carry the fund. He also shook the tree branches of the larger national firms wherever he could talk his way in the door. Occasionally he found a sales representative with an independent maverick streak who would sell a fund even if it wasn’t on the big firm’s approved list. Bob’s little fund could never pay those big firms enough reciprocal commission trade kickbacks to get any shelf space, but every once in a while there was a rep who would stay after hours, after the sales meetings, to listen to his pitch. Even though the branch managers threw up their standard barriers to block his contact with the branch’s salesmen, he made it around those barriers often enough.

  He took in pizzas and put notices on the salesmen’s cars to meet at a local spot to get free pizza and hear a great story. Some attended his meetings, and some sold the fund to clients. He was building a giant snowball and it was picking up momentum as it rolled downhill, gathering adherents. He gave free tickets to a movie to receptionists to tell him which sales rep would be receptive and productive. Often enough, the front receptionist would set up a private meeting with him and the rep. If the effort resulted in sales, she received more movie tickets. It all took a lot of hard work. Thousands of flights, over a hundred cities visited, many of them several times. Many pairs of good wingtips were worn out and many white shirts replaced.

  In addition to the initial contact and sales job, there was the task of maintaining data on each sales rep: what they liked and didn’t, their politics, religion, married or not, what the spouse was involved with, kid’s names and data on what the kids were doing. Whatever glimpse into the personal or prejudice was revealed, Bob made it his business to keep a record of it. Thus, whenever a salesman called the fund with a question, Bob picked up the phone with notes in hand. The rep was always made to feel like a valuable personal friend joined with Bob in the never-ending mission to bring good investment management to the world’s ignorant unwashed masses.

  Top sales reps were flown into Plaintown for sales meetings. Many were entertained in Vail, Aspen, or Estes Park at the world-famous Stanley Hotel. The previously declining fund was still small by industry standards, but it became a growing presence in the marketplace.

  The fund attracted a cult following, created by differential sales literature which contrasted a fully managed fund with a family of fund funds, where there really was no overall asset management responsibility because each investor was expected to move their money into the right mutual fund at the right time. There was no one who could be held responsible if somehow that movement at the right time never happened.

  In effect, the sales effort sharply differentiated the fund from its competition and sales reps who understood how to sell the differentiation were well compensated up front with a healthy commission. Having no hidden fees was a strong product sales feature. The fund became, in many respects, the actualization of the story every child knows of The Little Engine That Could.

  Through relentless h
ard work and continued good performance, results piggybacked upon the halcyon years when the fund was stuffed with gold stocks, the fund grew from a puny dot on the landscape twelve million in asset-sized fund to a respectable midsized billion dollars in asset-sized fund. The worth of the operating companies grew from less than a quarter million dollars, including furniture and pencils in inventory, to a healthy thirty million.

  Everybody in the firm heard the music of success. The whole office staff went on lavish junkets to seaside resorts and Las Vegas. Paychecks fattened, offices were upgraded from early vintage dirtbag to lavish French provisional. The company garage boasted ten new cars. Every good news item that came in was celebrated with another office party, complete with entertainment, and better than the previous party.

  Bob continued taking plane rides and pounding pavements for sales. The fund was approaching two billion dollars in assets. The businesses made over five million dollars annually, but growth now slowed.

  Performance actually nose-dived into the bottom ten percent ranking of all growth funds in existence, and there were now about ten times more growth funds in existence than when Bob first started selling. There was a second problem that impeded growth. The business model of one fully managed fund was losing market share to the multiple funds or family of funds business models. Salesmen saw themselves more in control of clients and the clients’ monies when they had the power to move the clients’ monies around. If a fully managed fund underperforms what another broker is doing with client monies by moving monies from fund to fund, then the credibility of the fully managed fund’s ability to manage becomes suspect.

  Bob entered David’s office. “We’re losing the battle for market share. Our credibility is in question because many of your stock picks haven’t worked out. I think it’s time we revisit our past decision to not have multiple funds. If we keep the trajectory our assets are on, we’ll slip back to under a hundred million in assets.”

  David was well aware of his performance. In actuality he was trying to underperform all competitive benchmarks. He entertained the thought that if he woefully underperformed the average fund, Bob could get discouraged and quit to go elsewhere. After all, Bob had developed good industry contacts and could likely find himself a great position with a larger fund group. If that were to happen, he could simply destroy the replacement codicil, leave Bob nothing, and give the companies to Israel when he passed away or sell them and keep the money for himself. No one would ever be the wiser. As an alternative, David considered just selling the companies, living off the proceeds, and giving the remainder of his estate to Israel. That would sort of satisfy the promise he’d made to Marvin and the various rabbis who knew about the promise, especially the one who kept a copy of David’s pledge to Marvin in his temple’s safe.

  Bob gave David hints about getting his performance up, but David was at the point in his life where he just wanted to live in peace with his animals in his barnyard. Instead of being candid with Bob and making a breakup deal, he decided it was time to put Bob to the ultimate test of his loyalty as a son of sorts and as a salesman. Besides, Bob was a gentile and David felt no duty to give him any relief from his part of the deal, even though David never intended to honor his own part of the bargain. He came up with a diversionary ruse to keep Bob fully engaged in selling.

  “I see your sales are declining. I know performance hasn’t been red-hot lately, but a great salesman finds a way to overcome every obstacle and keep sales moving forward, despite temporary setbacks. I know you’re working hard. I know you’re on the road two weeks out of three, but I’ve analyzed your sales results and I see a way for you to increase sales above where they are, despite the current performance.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  “Well, sit down.” After Bob was comfortable in one of the swivel chairs, David looked up at his ceiling and brought his hand up to his chin, scratching it in thought before he spoke. “When I looked at the names of the salesmen who sell the fund, I noticed something in particular that jumped out at me. There’s not a single Cohen or Stein or Gold or Schwartz or Unger or any other Jewish name among them.”

  “We have some Jewish salesmen. There’s Sampson, Silver, Melon, and a Roth among those names.”

  “But proportionally you have maybe five percent Jews selling the fund and ninety-five percent gentiles. There’s a subtlety you should know. There’s no such thing as a Jewish salesman any more than there’s a Catholic or a Muslim salesman. A salesman who is a Jew is a Jew who is a salesman. Jewish refers to a tradition, like a Jewish tradition, not a person.”

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean to offend.”

  “Forget it. You’re not offending. But it just goes to show that you don’t understand the Jewish religion. No doubt you say things, do things, by accident without knowing or thinking about what you’re doing when you’re in front of a sales group and you’re turning off the Jews.”

  “How can you be so sure of that?”

  “Numbers don’t lie. Half the people in the financial world are Jews. Here I am, a known Jew with a gentile salesman who I treat like a son, and I only see him getting about five percent of his sales from Jews.”

  “Well, can you give me some pointers? Should I take lox and bagels to my sales meetings? Or how about if I take matzo ball soup?”

  “Don’t be a wiseass. This is serious. We’re missing sales you should be picking up. It’s in the numbers.”

  “Okay. I see it. But what is there to do about it?”

  “It’s like this. All things being equal, if a Jew salesman likes our fund about the same as another fund, but the other fund has a Jew wholesaler out selling that fund, the Jew sales rep is going to give his sales to the Jew wholesaler’s fund. That’s just how it is.”

  “You need to tell me why that is.”

  “It’s because of our persecution complex. We’ve had the living shit kicked out of us since the pharaoh in Egypt made slaves out of us, since the Spaniards had their inquisition that murdered us, the Russians had their pogroms that killed us and displaced us, the Nazis committed genocide, the Romans committed genocide, the Latin Americans came to our homes and made us disappear. We’ve got a victim complex. Can you blame us?

  “When a Jew salesman sees another Jew selling something, he thinks maybe that Jew had a relative who got killed off way back when along with a relative of his, so there’s a natural empathy those two Jews will have for each other. That’s what you must overcome. Everybody already has sales relationships. Women understand that to bag a guy they need to break the guy’s existing relationship with another woman, right? Sales are the same way. You need to first undo the existing relationship. Now can you see the uphill fight you have? How does a guy like you, whose ancestors probably killed the Jew’s ancestors, break a relationship the Jew already has with another Jew?”

  “It seems impossible when you put it that way. I feel terribly sorry, as a gentile, for what happened to all the Jews, especially from the Nazi era. Understand, I was only born in the month the war ended. I was a baby who couldn’t even talk, much less kill anybody. I don’t see how a Jew could think I’m responsible for what happened.”

  “You’re not seeing it. They do hold you responsible because they think that you think about them the way your parents and ancestors thought about their parents and ancestors. They are actually terrified of you, partly resentful of you, partly angry and vindictive toward you, and partly jealous of you.”

  “I don’t get the jealous part. Jews in America tend to do pretty well.”

  “Jealous because you don’t have to worry about some anti-Semitic asshole killing you because you’re a Jew. My God! You really don’t see these things, do you? You just think everybody in America is equal and sees everybody else as equal too!”

  “No, actually I don’t. I have my half-orphan complex. I’ve talked to you about it the year we first met. I used to have issues with that, still do to some extent, but the way you treat me, like a father would
a son, has helped me with that quite a bit. You figured out what made me tick. Now I feel like I’m special. I’ve never felt special before. I didn’t mean to focus this on me. I know there are people who don’t feel they’re equal to everybody else.”

  “You’re right. Your problem is how to break that Jew-to-Jew relationship. How are you going to get into that Jew’s head and get him to sell for you?”

  “Being a Jew, I’m sure you have the answer. What am I not doing?”

  “It’s like this. In order to gain the trust of a Jew, you need to be able to empathize with other Jews. You must be able to think like a Jew. In certain circumstances, you need to act like a Jew and behave as a Jew would behave. In order to think and act like a Jew, you need to know all about Jews. You need to know the history, the religion, the customs, the holidays, and the subtle differences between the Ashkenazi Jew and the Sephardic Jew. In order to think as a Jew, you need to become a Jew.”

  “What’s the difference between an American Ashkenazi and an American Sephardic Jew?”

  “The Sephardic are allowed to put peanut butter on their matzo, but the Ashkenazi aren’t allowed to put peanut butter on their matzo.”

  “Ha! Wait a minute.” Bob’s mind caught up to what just passed into his ears. “Did you just say that to get Jews to sell the fund I’d have to become a Jew? Change my religion?”

  “If you’re serious about building this company, yes. You committed to giving it a hundred percent. In order to pick up the sales you’re leaving on the table, you’re going to have to be a Jew. That’s the only way you’ll relate to the Jews. You can still act like a gentile around salesmen who are gentiles, but around Jews you must be another Jew.”

  “But I don’t look like a Jew. I have blue eyes and blond hair. I’m a lot taller than most Jews. My bone structure, my body frame is much bigger. Most Jews will know I’m not a Jew.”