Fixers (7 page)

That’s how I felt as I deliberated Mankoff’s deal. On one shoulder was an imp peddling the thrill of the chase, the sly pleasures of reliving Agency days, plus what I feel I owe Mankoff. On the other is an angel arguing for my upbringing and education, the values that my schools claimed to stand for. Underline that word “claimed,” because at Groton, we fifth- and sixth-formers were expected to help out on alumni weekends, and many’s the time I overheard FDR—surely the school’s greatest alumnus—being cursed as a traitor to his class, sometimes by people born after his death, who’d obviously been indoctrinated by the sort of purse-worshipping, Upper East Side Republican parents and grandparents to whom tax rates were the lodestar of existence. Such people constituted my Yale Daily Themes professor’s definition of the “upper crust” as “a bunch of crumbs held together by dough.”

My father, Groton ’51, wasn’t like that at all. He didn’t seem to care all that much about money, despite the fact that he spent his working hours trying to add to—or at least protect—the wealth of his clients. Like certain of my teachers and housemasters, men my father’s age and younger, he preached that noblesse oblige, looking out for others, was the brightest thread in the Groton fabric, the woof to the warp of “Do unto others …” and that the New Deal was essentially the application of these ideals to the conduct and policies of government.

It was a kind of civic catechism that we were taught, a lesson in moral citizenship, but today its ruling principles appear to have
been relegated to the metaphorical dusty vitrines to which the folks who push the buttons and pull the levers that consign to the wastebasket ideas inconvenient to their self-enriching plans for the nation. I’m talking about ideals like “city on a hill,” “I have a dream,” “Ask not …” and—as I’ve pointed out—almost anything FDR argued for. Pop also saw decent behavior as a practical matter of self-preservation: “Flaunt your advantages long enough, and loudly enough,” he once told me, “and it will occur to someone to come and take them away from you.” The bottom line is that there’s enough residue of this kind of idealistic thinking left in me to cause second thoughts about Mankoff’s proposition.

People are saying that communitarian democracy is withering away into a kind of oligarchic feudalism in which a tiny fraction of the populace ends up with the power and the goodies. Do I want to further that process? That’s the big question facing me. If I do this job for Mankoff, I’ll have perpetrated a fraud on the people who vote for OG, assuming he gets the nomination—no sure thing—and then wins the White House. Whose urging should I heed: the imp’s or the angel’s?

Well, I’ve decided to accept his proposition.

Why? Lots of reasons.

Number one is that I really don’t fancy the idea of Hillary Clinton as my president. It’s not so much her as the thought of her husband trading on his White House connections—and trade you can be sure he will; look at his record since he left the White House, for everything from cash to women. This country really doesn’t need a First Lecher doing shady deals in the Rose Garden.

Number two is the opportunity to see whether I’ve still got game. Once you’ve tasted the heady intoxicants of undercover intelligence work, you don’t forget how great it is to be a guardian of big secrets, to know what others don’t, to deploy skills and resources that can alter the fates of people, institutions, even nations. I like
my day job, but it’s not exactly blood-stirring. Helping to arrange the funding for a Jane Austen workshop at Oberlin, a named professorship at Berkeley, or an Edward Hopper exhibition in Berlin doesn’t carry the same thrills, chills, and technical satisfaction as blowing up the offshore accounts of some especially vile and genocidal sub-Saharan dictator.

Number three plays itself. You can’t really call my mission a bribe. It’s really a wager. In a proper bribe, there are few or no contingencies between cup and lip. What I’ll be doing for Mankoff will be like the bets I placed for my old man when he twisted his ankle playing tennis and couldn’t make it to the $20 window in 1975 when we went out to Belmont to watch Seattle Slew complete his Triple Crown. This is no sure thing. The senator has to knock off Hillary in the primaries to get the nomination, and then he has to win the election eighteen months from now. Suppose Mankoff’s got it wrong; suppose a financial crisis doesn’t occur and the anti–Wall Street issue is a nonstarter. The odds on OG getting it done definitely lengthen, whether we’re talking about winning the nomination or beating whoever the GOP puts up in the presidential election. Maybe the Republicans have their own OG lurking in the wings. Or he can get hit by a bus, or turn out to be a closet pedophile, or there’ll be another 9/11.

So there you have it. If I do Mankoff’s bidding I will be adding a mite of my own to the pandemic of corruption that has afflicted nearly every atom of American public life. If I pass on his offer, I’ll miss out on a chance to remake history. If I don’t pass, I’ll have an exclusive on what will potentially be one of the big game-changing moments in American history, what the chinstrokers in the pundit class will call “an inflection point.” If you have a chance to leave your footprints on the sands of time, my housemaster at Groton used to say, jump with both feet and land hard.

And finally there’s this: if I don’t take the job, Mankoff will
surely find someone else who will. I know this is a lousy reason to pursue a given course of action, but I’m human, aren’t I?

My plan is to limit myself to a personal account of what I do for Mankoff; who I see, who I deal with, what’s said. No personal stuff unless absolutely essential. Nothing about my friends, my love life such as it may be, my lifestyle, my personal metaphysics, or, except when absolutely necessary, my innermost existential yearnings. Apart from weekends or as the result of exigent circumstances, at the end of every day I’ll set down events while they’re hot and fresh. No backdating, redacting, lily-gilding,
pensées d’escalier
. Just plain vanilla accounts of planning and negotiations in which I’m involved, meetings at which I’ll have been present as they happened, recorded as accurately as my memory and as soon as is practical.

All of this is protected by encryption software I’ve installed on this laptop, which itself has no phone, Internet, or Wi-Fi connection. That way it’ll be eyes-only for me—and, of course, depending on what I eventually decide to do with this account, for you, Gentle Reader.

So off we go, friends. Fasten your seatbelts.

As the Lone Ranger used to shout, “Hi-yo, Silver: away!”

That’s “silver.”

As in thirty pieces of.

Future readers of this account may need a bit of background on STST.

The firm was founded in 1903 by Lembert Struthers and Herman Strauss, ambitious young clerks chafing under the yoke of their senior partners at Harriman & Co. and Kuhn Loeb & Co.

They had a very clear idea of what kind of business they would do, and how they would do it, which they laid down in a series of fourteen precepts. The first and uppermost of these statements of principle was this: “We comply fully with the letter and the spirit of the laws, rules, and ethical principles that govern us … and our clients come first” is the exact wording.

I have it on good authority that the passage is displayed wherever one turns in STST’s far-flung empire: when the firm’s traders, whether in Prague or Johannesburg, turn on their Bloomberg screens at the beginning of the day, there it is—the first thing they see in the crawl; it’s posted in every conference and waiting room from London to Hong Kong, in every restroom and vault between Las Vegas and São Paulo; you can’t agree to a deal or take a leak without the noble motto hitting you in the eye.

Let it be said that there are many on the Street who are disinclined to take STST’s pious exhortation of client primacy at face value. Finance capitalism, as it’s called, likes to drape itself in a thick, warming blanket of self-congratulatory tributes to its concern for the customer, but when I listen to some of my clients and read the financial news closely, the more convinced I am that in transaction after transaction after transaction, the STST client who
really
comes first is STST itself. The firm itself rationalized such outcomes during the height of the ’20s boom, when (as would later come out) it was unloading pretty egregious junk on
its customers. Here’s how Struthers put it in his 1927 Christmas letter to the staff: “Our first loyalty is to the client rather than the transaction. Now and then these coalesce, and we can in all honest good faith serve two masters.”

This is apparently STST’s justification for a string of deals they’ve put together with the hedge-funder James Polton that one of my clients has told me about, transactions that strike my untutored sensibility as treading an ethical borderline—which is why I wouldn’t dare bring them up with Mankoff. There is one person at STST with whom I feel safe discussing them: Lucia van der Poole, STST’s head of communications.

Lucia’s become about my closest STST friend, mainly because we’re kindred spirits with somewhat similar backgrounds and because the nature of her work leaves her desperate for someone to whom she can unburden herself. Her remit as senior vice president for communications covers everything that has to do with the firm’s image: media relations and PR. In addition, two years ago, STST added Washington to her portfolio, so she also supervises its extensive lobbying effort, as well as its Capitol Hill and executive branch relationships.

A friend who knows Wall Street calls Lucia “STST’s house agnotologist,” a ten-dollar word I had to look up. Agnotology turns out to be the art (some might say science) of creating and disseminating ignorance. Ignorance, misconception, misperception, disinformation. Confusion and complexity. The essence and core of Wall Street public relations, of most “corporate communications.” Both Wall Street and Washington are heavily into agnotology, and by all accounts, no one’s better at it than Lucia.

Since corporate philanthropy falls under image-building and -control, it was inevitable that Lucia’s and my paths would converge. They did about four years ago, when she and I were both involved in a big dinner at the Metropolitan Museum sponsored by
STST, and we’ve since grown close in the way of friends who see each other intermittently but stay in close touch. We exchange a lot of phone calls. We feel we can trust each other with the latest and hottest gossip.

She’s a bit older than me, turned fifty on her last birthday (she says; I’d add a couple of years), a cultivated Englishwoman of flawless pedigree. Would be totally at home at Brideshead, would know exactly how to conduct herself with the sort of dowager grandee played by Maggie Smith. Her family is prominent and long-descended. One ancestor gave offense to Henry VIII and was beheaded; another was a fleet captain under Nelson; a third went to the Galápagos with Darwin. An uncle just retired as deputy chairman of Royal Dutch Shell, and a cousin is high up at Coutts. She has that special effect on your run-of-the-mill U.S. senator or billionaire—like a witch’s spell, really—peculiar to polished English persons of her type: an aura that suggests fancy country weekends staged around titles, adultery, and hunt suppers. She’s highly educated, read history at Cambridge, where she got what they call “a starred First,” equivalent to our summa cum laude, and speaks several languages. She can talk about anything. Einstein remarked that genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains, which certainly describes Lucia, but she’s not exactly chopped liver in the intuition department.

Physically, I find her appealing. She’s narrow-featured, dark eyes and a Virginia Woolf nose, and model-slim, but with good breasts. An elegant figure set off in all weathers by clothes that explain why her expense budget is a matter of considerable admiration and envy around STST, along with speculation, in which she rejoices, as to who she had to sleep with to accomplish what she does.

She arrived at STST in late 1999, when Rich Rosenweis met her at some “City” function in London and hired her—she’d been a
confidential adviser to the chancellor of the exchequer—to oversee the public-relations/media aspects of the grand opening of STST’s big new London office in Canary Wharf. By all accounts, she did an amazing job—which will come as no surprise to anyone who’s spent time with her. Mankoff was impressed, and lured her across the Atlantic to weave her magic spell over STST’s initial public offering. His timing was perfect. Lucia was ready to leave England. She and her aristocratic husband had grown apart, and he had a mistress stashed at Le Touquet, but divorce was out of the question because it would screw up his entail. Here was a way out. She liked Mankoff’s offer, and liked him, and so to New York she came at the turn of the millennium.

Once in New York, her ascent was meteoric. Today, she’s universally regarded as the public face of STST, almost as well known in terms of “brand identification” as Mankoff or Rosenweis. Certainly she has built up as good a Wall Street/Washington web of information and influence as either of them.

Lucia and I get together a couple of times a month for lunch or a drink. She tells me who’s up and who’s down; passes along the latest hot rumors that the SEC or the Feds are taking a close look at this or that firm or individual; which big respectable bank is said to be doing “no-no” business like money laundering; what’s what on Capitol Hill. Since part of her job is to keep the firm from shitting its own nest, she monitors STST’s e-mail traffic and isn’t above showing me choice bits now and then, in the way that friends who really trust one another exchange secrets too good to keep to oneself. I reciprocate with gossip much less titillating, but it’s the best I can do: things like who’s being considered for a Carnegie Hall or Penn trusteeship; which university, on what terms, is pursuing which private-equity mogul to endow what; which museum director is sleeping with his deputy.

“Ever heard of someone called Eliza Brewer?” I asked her. “A Washington lawyer.”

“Lizzie Brewer? Everyone’s favorite insiders’ insider? Little Bo Peep in chain-mail armor. Why do you ask, darling?”