Whipping Boy (21 page)

True, the prison camp doesn’t allow residents to ski and hike, but its first-rate baseball diamond and bocce courts offset those prohibitions, as do its professional gym equipment and exercise bikes. (At Aiglon, cinder blocks served as leg weights.) Oh, and there’s one more amenity that the school and our federal prisons have in common—foosball.

When I uncovered this parallel perk, an image popped into my head of Cesar crouching down low behind the defensemen of a prison foosball table, firing off bank shots and grimacing like a griffin while hustling cigarettes from tax cheats and embezzlers. The recurring visual eventually triggered a crazy idea: Why not fly out to California and challenge my nemesis to the mother of all grudge matches?

I downloaded the Lompoc Visiting Regulations. Guests, I learned, are authorized to enter the facility with up to twenty dollars
in quarters—more than enough to fund a foosball face-off with the Shiller from Manila. (Any spare change, I decided, would be used to buy vanilla lattes from the prison’s celebrated vending machines.)

I was under no illusions about winning. If I couldn’t outmaneuver Cesar on the Belvedere table, I sure as hell couldn’t take him in Lompoc, where I think it’s safe to assume he had tons of time to train.

As it turned out, my prep work was moot. While plotting out the showdown, I discovered that the Bureau of Prisons only furnishes foosball tables in Texas and Colorado. More consequentially, a one-word update, pulled from the BOP website, derailed any and all scenarios of jailhouse retribution.

“RELEASED.”

According to a federal “inmate locator” launched in the midst of my search, Cesar had rejoined the civilian population on May 6, 2005. And while his liberty was conditional—a probation officer would be monitoring him for another five years—the reaction of my family was not.

“Whoa. Game changer,” Max said when I told him Cesar was out on parole. “Let’s prank him. We can call up and order a dozen pizzas sent to his house.”

Françoise vetoed the idea. “
Hors de question!
He’s a convicted felon. Who knows what else is on his wrapping sheet.”

“It’s called a
rap
sheet, Mom. And he wouldn’t know the pizzas came from us. My computer has a speech synthesizer that can change Dad’s voice into a girl or a robot.”

I let Max down gently. “Sorry, kiddo. Payback by pizza is not an option.”

“Do you know how the Warlpiri at Yuendumu would deal with someone like Cesar?” Françoise said. “They’d spear him.”

“Cool,” said Max. “You have that spear-thrower thing on your desk. I’ll go get it.”

“
Non!
” Françoise said forbiddingly. “No pizza. No spearing.”

In the weeks and months following the news of Cesar’s liberation, I stockpiled dozens of revenge scenarios, not all of which required props. Max’s headmaster, a movie buff professionally mandated to defang bullies, suggested a streamlined response requiring neither pie-shaped carbohydrates nor Aboriginal weaponry.

“Have you considered taking your cue from the guy in
Diner
?” he said.

“I’m listening.”

“Whenever the guy in
Diner
spots someone who picked on him at school, he walks over and—
bam!
—coldcocks him. The guy then ticks the bully’s name off a mental checklist and goes about his business.”

I needed no help when it came to revenge fantasies. I had generated plenty all on my own. The most elaborate involved luring Cesar into a karaoke bar to reenact the flogging scene from
Jesus Christ Superstar
. Except in my adaptation of the musical, Cesar would play the title role and I’d be the one holding the whip.

Karaoke comeuppance, like spearing, prison-camp foosball, and payback by pizza, provided diversion from the substance of my inquiry, but I never for a moment considered taking direct action against the ex-convict I had once roomed with in Switzerland.

Françoise’s Aboriginal spear thrower.

What prevented me from satisfying the retaliatory impulses that had been roiling inside me since 1971? In a word? Risk. What did I know about taking on a felon? Hell, what did I know about Cesar? Françoise was absolutely right. I had, at best, an incomplete knowledge of my former roommate’s wrapping sheet. Maybe the wire fraud conviction was part of a much lengthier, much nastier criminal history. I wasn’t so reckless as to undertake real-world, lie-for-a-lie, screw-unto-others schemes of Hammurabian justice. Armchair investigation was a lot less dicey. In fact, surrounded by the criminal dossiers, rather than the criminals, made me feel in control. I knew it was just a matter of time before Cesar’s story and my story would converge in the pages of a book chronicling the rise and fall of a childhood tyrant.

“It will make an
amazing
novel,” Françoise said.

“I guess.”

“You don’t sound convinced.”

“Well, it
is
a great story,” I said. “A twelve-year-old bully grows up to become a con man. Hooks up with a guy claiming to be the seventy-fourth grand master of the Knights of Malta and a ‘baron’ who wears spats. Helps the bogus royals and their administrator operate a scam out of the biggest law firm in the world. Dupes all sorts of business types to travel the world. But here’s the thing. Would you believe
any
of that if it happened in a novel?”

“What are you saying?”

“It has to be nonfiction.”

“But you’ll change some of the facts, no? To keep the real Cesar out of our lives?”

“How? How can I change the details of an unbelievable fraud without making it sound unbelievable?”

“
Pardon?
”

“What I mean is, I can’t write a
based
-on-a-true-story story because the ‘true’ story is built on lies. The House of Badische was a house of cards. Start monkeying around with any of the ‘facts,’ the whole thing falls apart. It’s a bad idea to make stuff up about guys who make stuff up.”

“At least change Cesar’s name,” Françoise urged.

“To what? Julius? Nero? What good would that do given that the scam is on the web? The trial is a matter of public record. To mask his identity, I’d have to change his name, the name of the bank, the names of the prince, colonel, baron, and duke. Once I do that, the believability of the whole story is shot.”

“So what are you planning?”

“I’m not sure. For the moment I just want to keep digging. I still don’t have a sense of Cesar. Even the basics are in dispute. Goodman thinks he’s American. Laurence told me she thought he might be Asian or Spanish. Glass remembers him being Mediterranean. His lawyer states he’s a naturalized US citizen, but the files include an INS report that contradicts that claim. The Bureau of Prisons identifies Cesar as white. He says he’s Hispanic.”

“None of that changes the fact that he’s a criminal. He just spent three years in prison. Now that he’s out, he’ll be looking for new victims. I don’t want you to be one of them.”

“It’s a bit late for that,” I joke.

Françoise fails to see the humor. “Just promise me you won’t contact him.”

“I’m not an idiot.”

“
Promise
me,” she repeats. “No contact.”

“I promise.”

Following the discovery of Cesar’s release, I became more vigilant about monitoring his movements. It came as a shock to discover that after leaving Lompoc he revived Barclay, the one-man financial group that put him behind bars in the first place. He might have been even more cavalier than that. An Internet archive indicates that his website, barclaycg.org, was updated five times
during
its founder’s incarceration. In the fall of 2005, Cesar deleted his name from the site’s home page and moved the world headquarters of the firm to a studio apartment near the University of San Francisco. Otherwise, it was business as usual. Barclay continued to offer “results-oriented project specific Business Financing, Offshore Company & Trust Formations” to individuals needing loans of $10 million to $100 million. Given his prepenitentiary bankruptcy filing, the $1.2 million restitution order hanging over his head, and the wages paid to federal inmates (which top out around a dollar an hour), it seemed reasonable to assume Cesar was up to his old tricks. And, as I learned from my digital surveillance, some new ones, as well.

Around the same time he updated the Barclay website, Cesar created a subsidiary entity called NextLevel, through which he offered a broad range of corporate services steeped in the language of self-improvement and personal empowerment. The spirit of the offshoot was captured in an inspirational aphorism:

WHAT LIES BEHIND US

AND WHAT LIES BEFORE US

ARE SMALL MATTERS COMPARED TO

WHAT LIES WITHIN US

Cesar credited the motto to Ralph Waldo Emerson, but I did a little checking—okay, maybe more than a little—and determined that the
actual author was a disgraced early-twentieth-century securities trader named Henry Stanley Haskins.
*
The professional dishonor Cesar shared with Haskins wasn’t the only irony to be gleaned from the NextLevel website. The “unique internal map of reality” Cesar offered his clients through something he called “‘Out of Your Mind’ Thinking” also resonated with unintended meaning.

{Courtesy of www.barclaycg.org}

A detail from Cesar’s “‘Out of Your Mind’ Thinking” program.

Soon after launching NextLevel, Cesar further reshaped his online persona by starting a film production company under an alias that made use of his mother’s maiden name. Cesar Augustus Viana became Cesar A. Teague. Although I can’t be sure, I suspect his experiment in pseudonymity can be traced, in part, to the polynomial habits of the Badische boys. Prince Robert juggled no fewer than twelve aliases during his long career as a con man,
^†
the baron at least ten, and the colonel, though less than half the age of his royal confederates, regularly alternated among four names during the Badische loan program. (Government briefs identified him as “BRIAN
D. SHERRY, also known as Colonel Sherry, also known as Prince Brian, also known as Brian Sherry-Berwick.”)

Cesar’s new surname caused me all sorts of problems. It was hard enough to track one ex-roommate. Suddenly, I had to keep tabs on two. Then, a month later, a third alias surfaced. Max alleviated some of the headache by programming an army of search engine bots to send me alerts about Cesar and his avatars.

For almost a year, I obeyed Françoise’s restraining order. Given Cesar’s criminal record, avoidance seemed the only sensible course of action. Then, in early June 2006, one of Max’s web crawlers notified me of a tantalizing opportunity seemingly free of risk.

Cesar, in the role of indie film producer, announced he was organizing a fund-raiser open to the public. The implications hit me instantly. Here was a chance to observe without making direct contact, thus satisfying curiosity
and
spousal injunction. What harm could come from an evening of anonymous reconnaissance?

Predictably, Max and Françoise held opposing views on the merits of surveillance. “You’re going, right, Dad?”

Françoise shot me a look.

“I’m not really so sure I should,” I told Max. “It could be a little chancy.”

“But you wouldn’t have to talk to the guy.”

“That’s true,” I said. “I don’t even have to sign up to attend. Cesar wouldn’t know if I attended.”

Françoise sighed. She knew where this was going. “What if he recognizes you?”

“It’s been more than thirty years since we last set eyes on each other.”

“He might not have pictures of himself on the web, but you do,” Françoise noted.

“Dad can go incognito!” Max proposed excitedly. “He can grow a beard.”

I rubbed my jaw. “Not a bad idea. I could start tonight.”

Françoise’s resolve began to falter. “You wouldn’t make contact?”

“I wouldn’t make contact.”

“And you won’t mention your name?”