The Hazards of Good Fortune

by Seth Greenland

  Just before lunch, she looked up from the trial transcript she was notating and saw her secretary standing on the well-worn rug in front of her desk. Kelly was always starving herself on a trendy diet, and Christine had given up trying to discern whether the perpetually pained expression on her subordinate’s face was dismay or hunger. Where was the operative from Kronos Cyber Security? Surely, he would provide more impactful information than her secretary. This assessment proved wildly inaccurate because when the DA asked Kelly what she wanted the young woman took a deep breath and informed her boss that a Caucasian police officer had just shot and killed a naked black man.

  THE ACE, W.A.C.E. AM

  NEW YORK SPORTS TALK RADIO

  WITH SAL D’AMICO AND THE SPORTSCHICK

  SAL: You’re listening to the ACE, W.A.C.E., with Sal and the Sportschick. We’re talking D’Angelo Maxwell. You’re on the air.

  CALLER #1: Yo, Sal, Mikey from Bayside, longtime listener, first-time caller.

  SAL: Hey, Mikey, how you doing?

  CALLER #1: Bayside, represent!

  SAL: We all love Bayside. What’s your question?

  CALLER #1: My question is I think Dag is, like, the most overpaid guy in the league.

  SAL: Not a question. Sportschick, you agree? Is Dag Maxwell the most overpaid? I mean, they’re all overpaid.

  SPORTSCHICK: The market determines their value, Sal.

  SAL: I respect you, Sportschick, but you don’t know what you’re talking about. What kind of message do these player salaries send to kids?

  SPORTSCHICK: What’re you, a socialist?

  CALLER #1: Trade his lazy ass.

  SPORTSCHICK: He puts up big numbers, Mikey.

  CALLER #1: He’s a lazy overpaid bum. I’m not saying he doesn’t have a lot of inborn talent, but he’s a thug.

  SPORTSCHICK: Why is he a thug, Mikey? Because he has a lot of tattoos?

  CALLER #1: Have you watched him play? Guy’s a knucklehead!

  SAL: Thanks for calling, Mikey. Tito from Staten Island, you’re on the air.

  CALLER #2: Hey, I’ve been on hold for an hour.

  SAL: What’s up, Tito?

  CALLER #2: The team don’t make the playoffs, they got to trade Dag while he still has value.

  SPORTSCHICK: Dag Maxwell on the block, Tito? In the NBA, you need a superstar to win.

  CALLER #2: You see him showboating last night? He hits that last shot, then instead of getting back on D he’s firing pretend guns in the air like it’s a riot.

  SAL: I don’t like the violent imagery. What’s the fascination with guns?

  SPORTSCHICK: Come on, Sal. Sanitary Solutions is like the Roman coliseum. He’s a gladiator playing to the gallery.

  CALLER #2: Guy has good instincts, but he doesn’t think. I’m saying Dag should be in the circus, not the NBA, and he should take Gladstone with him.

  SAL: You don’t like Prince Jay?

  CALLER #2: He trades away half the team to get Maxwell, and the guy’s an idiot. Gladstone knows nothing about basketball. He should stick to polo.

  SAL: Prince Jay plays polo?

  CALLER #2: If he doesn’t he should. It’s what rich guys do. Meanwhile, have you seen that reality show Dag’s wife is on?

  SAL: Hoop Ladies! That show’s a piece of crap, but my wife’s seen every episode.

  SPORTSCHICK: How’s that relevant, Tito?

  CALLER #2: I’ll tell you how. Guy marries a gold digger; the man has no judgment. None!

  SPORTSCHICK: Lotta hostility toward women today, Sal.

  SAL: Next caller, you’re on the ACE with Sal and the Sportschick.

  CALLER #3: Yeah, this is Antoine from Brooklyn.

  SAL: What’s up, Antoine?

  CALLER #3: My question for you two is why do you use your show as a consistent platform for casual racism?

  SAL: What does that have to do with D’Angelo Maxwell?

  CALLER #3: Every time a white caller wants to disparage him you hear words like “lazy” or “inborn” or “thug” which are all dog whistles that say shiftless N-word. These dudes would be dropping N-bombs on the show if you let ’em.

  SAL: Whoa, whoa, whoa, let me stop you right there, pal. I am not a racist.

  SPORTSCHICK: I can vouch for Sal, Antoine. He hates everyone.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  When Jay stepped out of his front door, he saw a Ukrainian-American man leaning against a late-model Toyota Camry, sipping take-out coffee as he scanned The Real Deal, the New York real estate industry bible. In his late twenties, Boris Reznikov was a junior executive at the Gladstone Group and Jay’s distant cousin. Tall and lanky, he wore a fashionable suit, wool scarf wrapped around his neck. With the mop of dark hair rising from his forehead and round, horn-rimmed glasses, he resembled a young Trotsky.

  “When are we going to move the business to the Bahamas?” Boris asked. This was a running joke between the two of them. “I’m freezing my ass off.” Boris sniffled. Every year he had a mild cold from November until May.

  “You should get a place there,” Jay said. “They need lazy Russians.”

  Boris was not lazy, or Russian, although Jay used “Russian” to tease him. He had been employed by his cousin since graduating from Hunter College as a business major, worked part-time while he earned an MBA from Columbia, and purchased a condo in Stamford, Connecticut, so that he could commute to the city each day with Jay.

  “I’m thinking about it,” Boris said, a memory of Queens Boulevard in his voice.

  Nicole appeared, returning from the stable. While Boris greeted her familiarly, she and Jay barely acknowledged one another. Jay would have liked to share the invitation he’d just received to speak at Aviva’s commencement, to have let his wife know he would be on the platform in a cap and gown with Meryl Streep (whom Nicole loved) but the disconnect he was feeling from her stopped him from acting on the impulse. As Boris backed an imposing Mercedes sedan out of the garage, Jay watched her walk into the house. He appreciated that Boris never asked questions about Nicole. He climbed into the passenger seat and picked up the three newspapers Boris had laid out for him.

  “Tough game last night,” Boris said. “I lost a hundred bucks on your guys.”

  “Don’t talk to me about gambling,” Jay replied, settling in for the ride to the city as Boris tuned the radio to the all-news station. “I don’t want to get subpoenaed and have to testify that my cousin who works for me bets on games.”

  Although the younger man drove, he was not technically a chauffeur. Jay was grooming Boris for an upper-echelon position in the organization. For this reason, he periodically offered to hire a driver, but Boris demurred. In his view, driving Jay was an opportunity.

  When they merged into highway traffic ten minutes later, Boris asked if Jay was ready for the City Planning Commission hearing.

  “Not yet.”

  Although Jay did not look up from the article he was reading in the Financial Times, he knew that Boris was not happy. The company had proposed to erect what would be the tallest building in Brooklyn, and it was to be the first project where Jay had agreed to have Boris at his side from filing the permits to cutting the ribbon.

  “I realize how full your plate is,” Boris said.

  “In more ways than you know,” Jay said, still not looking up.

  “You want me to draft remarks for you to deliver at the hearing?”

  “I like your initiative, but I’ll handle it.”

  Boris had a great deal riding on Jay dazzling the Planning Commission. If everything went as planned, by the time they were done Boris would be a force to be reckoned with, both in the company and in the Hobbesian world of New York real estate. This was a far cry from his origins. He was the American-born son of a Soviet émigré named Marat Reznikov, part of the first trickle of Jews allowed to leave the wor
kers’ paradise at the dawn of detente. In New York, the Gladstone family hired the new arrival as a rent collector, a tough role that required the kind of person attuned to the possibility of violence. Boris’s father was that kind of person. He cultivated the right contacts, branched out, and eventually bought a Brooklyn nightclub that catered to other Eastern Europeans from which he ran various highly successful illegal businesses. Marat, though intelligent, was a brute. Boris was different. A reader of books, a chess player, he lacked his father’s taste for pillage. The elder Reznikov recognized this and wanted his son to make a legitimate living, so he called Jay Gladstone, who gave Boris a job. The young Ukrainian-American made the most of his opportunity. He studied the real estate industry, was familiar with its history, players, trends. Jay liked that Boris drove a Toyota when he could have purchased something flashier.

  The car radio reported that a police officer in White Plains had shot and killed a tenant at Gladstone Village, a complex of apartments built in 1964, and still in the portfolio of the Gladstone Group. The circumstances of the shooting were hazy. The relevant details were that the shooter was white, the victim black and, in a strange twist, naked.

  How does a cop shoot a naked black man? Jay wondered. Especially in the current environment. The Westchester County District Attorney’s office was investigating the incident and the district attorney, Christine Lupo, was expected to announce whether she would seek an indictment of the officer, some poor bastard named Russell Plesko, as soon as the following week.

  Jay said, “I wish it hadn’t happened at one of our buildings. That’s not something you want associated with the family name.”

  “It’s awful,” Boris agreed. “But it won’t affect the property value.”

  Jay was not thinking about the fiscal ramifications. It was his perception that these heartbreaking situations unfolded predictably. There would be a certain degree of clucking on the part of the authorities, and then the DA would soberly announce that the use of lethal force was justified. The anger he felt at the uneven application of justice in America led him to make generous donations to organizations that fought to rectify the problem.

  Jay asked Boris if he thought the cop would be indicted.

  “I hope not.”

  “Really? Why?”

  “Cops do what they do so people like us can sleep at night,” Boris said. “That guy who got killed could’ve shot the cop.”

  “He was naked,” Jay pointed out. “He had no weapon.”

  “The guy could’ve grabbed the cop’s gun.”

  “The police have an obligation to prevent tragedies, Boris, not to abet them.”

  “I’m not saying he deserved it but, man, would you take off all your clothes and run at a cop?” The question was rhetorical. “No, you wouldn’t. Because you’re a responsible citizen who knows what a privilege it is to live in the greatest nation in the world. I feel sorry for the dead guy but, c’mon, what did he think would happen?”

  Growing up with a Ukrainian mother and stepfather in Queens had left Boris with a dim view of humanity. Surviving hundreds of years as Jews in Eastern Europe had embedded in the family DNA a predilection to assume that the least happy conclusion of any situation was the one that would unfailingly occur. In Kiev, Boris’s stepfather was an engineer. In America, he drove a taxi until a bad back forced him to retire. His mother worked as a bookkeeper. As immigrant Jews, it was their belief that in their new country the government would protect them and police, as representatives of the state, were always afforded the benefit of the doubt (unlike in Ukraine). The family thinking: If citizens attack police, the social order will fragment, and anti-Jewish violence invariably breaks out. It didn’t matter to them that this rarely occurred in America. Anyone who reads history knew what could happen wherever Jews were in the minority. Boris’s perspective was not quite as provincial as that of his parents, but he nonetheless considered Jay’s views slightly naïve. To this end, he was the owner of two handguns.

  They were driving on the Hutchinson River Parkway past Saxon Woods, a public golf course Jay and his friends frequented when they were in high school. It had been a long time since he had teed off on one of those fairways. It would’ve been enjoyable to play a round in the spring weather but he needed to get on the phone with Church Scott to discuss Dag Maxwell’s future, prepare for the appearance in front of the Planning Commission, and there was an important meeting scheduled with an official from the union that represented workers in residential buildings. It was a contract year and negotiations had ground to a halt.

  Jay pulled out his phone and checked his email. There were the usual updates from the organizations on whose boards he served, an inquiry from his alma mater about whether he would be willing to fund a new building at the business school in exchange for having it named after him, and a message from someone at the accounting firm employed by the Gladstone Group. This last email contained an attachment consisting of financial documents pertaining to family interests in the gaming industry. A cursory glance at the data led him to wonder if a particular Gladstone Group executive was diverting large sums of money into a personal account. Jay’s first thought was that it could not possibly be the case since the colleague in question was his cousin Franklin, the other co-chairman of the company.

  CHAPTER SIX

  In Alpine, New Jersey, across the Hudson River from Manhattan and north on Route 9, was an eleven thousand square foot stone mansion of recent vintage with twenty-two rooms, a five-car garage, a swimming pool, and a guesthouse. The trees were striplings and the property, purchased by its current owner for slightly north of twenty million dollars, was less than five years old. A tall hedge surrounded the four-acre spread. Security cameras swept the perimeter. Wrought iron gates obscured a circular driveway where a late-model SUV, a Maybach, and a custom-built McLaren preened. This showplace was the home of basketball superstar D’Angelo Maxwell, who could be found in the sunny kitchen talking to his agent, an Armani-suited, athletic-looking young black man with a diamond in his left ear. Dressed in a T-shirt and sweats, Dag leaned against the marble counter, frustration creasing his handsome face.

  “You’re thirty-two years old, Dag,” Jamal Jones said. “Late middle age in basketball years.”

  “I know how old I am, Jamal. It’s not a secret,” Dag said. His chef, an older black man with Chinese characters tattooed on both forearms, stood at the kitchen island and chopped fruit for a smoothie. Dag reminded him to soak the almonds before grinding them.

  “But you deserve respect,” Jamal said, looking up at his client.

  At six foot eight and two hundred and thirty-five pounds, D’Angelo Maxwell dwarfed his agent. His upper torso carved from granite. Arms and neck festooned with tattoos, headband crowning short hair. The highest paid player on his team, he was on the final lap of a four-year deal paying him twenty-two million dollars annually. The numbers he produced—23 points, 6 rebounds, and 3.2 assists a game—were solid, enough to maintain his position in the league elite, but not stellar. He was a perennial All-Star who had never reached the finals or been named first team All-NBA, the highest achievement of every universally acknowledged wealth-generating, sneaker-automobile-energy-drink-endorsing superstar.

  The rap on Dag was that, while his skills were unassailable, he was one of those players who did not make his teammates better, had never, after over a decade in the league, advanced to the conference finals, much less won a championship, so was he really worth a huge investment this late in his career? A team could bank on promise, but observers who closely followed the league believed that Dag was, simply put, not “a winner.” Not a loser, to be sure. His previous team always won a lot of regular season games, but without playoff success that was an increasingly hollow accomplishment. There was a litany of great players who had retired without having managed to win an NBA title, and a growing consensus had emerged among league executives that Dag was destin
ed to join their melancholy ranks.

  Dag heard the talk. Although he had spent only one year at the University of Kentucky before jumping to the pros, he understood the business well enough to know another franchise was unlikely to sign him at his current rate. But it was his firm belief that his aging body, for all of its infirmities—the creaky knees that required icing during time-outs, the sore feet plunged into an ice bath after each game, the lower back that required electric stimulation and the daily ministrations of a masseur—was capable of earning one more epic payday.

  “It’s why I came out to the crib to talk to you in person,” Jamal said.

  Jamal was not an exceptionally gifted basketball player but he had played at the University of Maryland where he had earned a business degree, worked two years for a famous sneaker company, and then parlayed his relationships with the more talented guys he had played with—he met Dag on the tournament circuit when they were teenagers—into his position at the forefront of the sports agent ranks.

  “You got good news?”

  “I think it’s good news.”

  “That Chevy deal we talked about?”

  Product endorsements were worth additional millions but, more importantly, conveyed status. They were essential building blocks of a player’s “brand.” World-class athletes hustled cars and soft drinks. An invitation to be the face of an insurance company that pitched its product to every family in America was ideal. Dag’s most recent endorsement had been for Odor-Eaters, a shoe insert. This gig did not please him despite the munificent amount he was paid for three hours of work. He longed to be among the elite pitchmen; they were endorsing pickup trucks and energy drinks, not Odor-Eaters.