Whipping Boy (22 page)

“Of course not. I’ll steal a page from Cesar’s playbook and adopt an alias.”

Françoise rolled her eyes. “And you’ll take someone along with you?”

“You really think that’s necessary?” That question prompted another disapproving look. “Okay, okay, I’ll bring backup.”

I had three weeks to prep for what Max began calling “the recon mission.” I decided to use the time to find out what I could about Cesar’s capacity for violence. That meant another frustrating round of calls to law enforcement officers.

All writers are stalkers. But as any freelancer will tell you, writers on assignment are stalkers with privileges. I pitched “The Search for Cesar” to a magazine editor who had published my stuff twenty years before. We’d lost touch in the early 1990s, after I started writing fiction full-time. While we were catching up over lunch, I learned that the editor was the mother of a nine-year-old girl who had just finished reading my first children’s book,
Leon and the Spitting Image
. The girl liked
Leon
enough to ask her mother for an autograph from the author. The request ended well for both interested parties. The nine-year-old got a signed book, and its author got a magazine contract. Soon after that, public officials who had previously played hard to get began taking my calls.

During his eight years as an assistant US attorney for the Southern District of New York, Timothy J. Coleman prosecuted all manner of crime: racketeering, embezzlement, identity theft, narcotics trafficking. His specialty was corporate fraud. Coleman played a major role in locking up the Enron executives at the center of an accounting scandal that wiped out some $78 billion in shareholder equity. Yet Enron isn’t the case Coleman remembers most giddily when asked to reflect on his career as a federal prosecutor. That honor is reserved for a minor swindle he litigated around the same time.

“Badische was in some ways my greatest case,” Coleman tells me over drinks at a midtown bar. “Never did I have so much fun.”

The six-foot-five-inch Kentuckian, now in private practice, figured out fifteen minutes into his first interview with the complainant, a television executive named Barbara Laurence, that something was amiss. The paperwork she presented—web pages from outfits calling themselves Barclay Consulting Group and the Badische Trust Consortium, a turgid loan agreement signed in green ink, and wire transfers for so-called performance guaranties—all suggested Laurence had fallen victim to a live-action variant of an Internet fraud commonly associated with Nigerian email hucksters.

At first blush, Coleman wasn’t drawn to the case. It raised no interesting legal issues, and the sums involved were “peanuts.” The cost of the investigation and prosecution would greatly exceed the sum Laurence had lost. Coleman could have followed the example set by the Manhattan DA and taken a pass. He didn’t, in part, because he was impressed by the monumental chutzpah of the swindlers.

“I have to admit a measure of admiration for the audacity and manner in which the Badische boys inveigled their victims,” Coleman tells me. “They managed to send their marks to remote locations all over the world. That takes a certain genius and a whole lot of window
dressing. When the Trust needed an accountant, it didn’t scrounge up someone’s brother-in-law to play the part. It brought in a partner from PricewaterhouseCoopers.” And if a multibillion-dollar deed from an imaginary African kingdom required unimpeachable validation, Badische made sure an executive from Merrill Lynch served as a witness at the signing. When lawyers were required, they called on Clifford Chance.

“And the names! Prince Robert. The King of Mombessa. Duke d’Antin. Seriously?”

Those were hardly the kind of people the future lawyer encountered growing up in Falmouth, Kentucky (pop. 2,040), a riverfront town where the kings sold burgers, the colonels hawked chicken, and all the dukes came from Hazzard.

“It was
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
meets
Clue,
” Coleman marvels between sips of a perfect Manhattan.

“Except Badische wasn’t fun and games for Barbara Laurence,” I point out.

“No, that’s true,” Coleman allows. “But that aspect of the fraud intrigued me, as well.” The humiliating apology letters the victims were forced to write and revise (and revise again) suggested to the prosecutor that Badische and Barclay had a taste for degradation, as well as an uncanny ability to “calculate risk and capitalize on weakness.”

I ask Coleman if he considers the Badische boys dangerous. His reply comes in two parts. Yes, if by “dangerous” I mean capable of separating a mark from his money. No, if by “dangerous” I mean violent. When I press him further, he hedges the second half of his appraisal by pointing out that he dealt with Cesar and the bankers while in the employ of the Department of Justice. “That afforded me a level of protection unavailable to civilians like yourself.”

“I see.”

“I had little direct contact with Cesar,” he adds. “If you want to learn more about him, you should be talking to Dennis Quilty.”

“Dennis Quilty?”

“The investigator on the case. He was the one who pushed me to prosecute. He was the one who did all the initial legwork.”

The name takes me by surprise. None of the press reports cite Quilty, and I can’t recall coming across references to him in the trial transcript. Coleman enlightens me. “Case agents tend to keep a low profile—Quilty more than most. He’s no longer with the US Attorney’s Office, but while he was there, Dennis was one of the best. He was finishing up an incredible career when he brought in the Badische case. He really wanted us to prosecute the Trust, and I saw no reason to turn him down. Badische,” Coleman jokes, “was my retirement gift to Dennis.”

Back home I plow through my files, searching for the investigator’s name. It appears on fewer than a half dozen discovery documents, mostly at the bottom of federal subpoenas. The trial transcript indicates that Quilty never took the stand. He only gets mentioned in the court record when witnesses are asked who contacted them from the US Attorney’s Office.

Two days after interviewing Coleman, I give Dennis Quilty a call.

“Detective Quilty?”

“It’s
Investigator
Quilty,” he snaps. “Or was. I’m retired.”

I reach the former case agent as he’s speeding along I-95, somewhere north of Palm Beach. He informs me that he’s late for a golf tournament and that there’s no way he’s going to speak to me about Cesar or Badische or anything else.

“Let me tell you something, Allen, my first boss told me a long time ago. A good fraud investigator never talks to the press and never testifies at trial. His job is to hunt for diamonds, then hand those diamonds over to the prosecutor. It’s the prosecutor’s job to polish them up and sell them to the jury and the public.”

Quilty isn’t rude, but he isn’t exactly welcoming, either. Our conversation lasts about a minute.

A week later, just days before my recon mission begins, I find a
more accommodating source in the Department of Justice, a high-level staffer willing to pass along criminal records on two Badische executives who never took the stand. Neither dossier references Cesar directly, but the milk crate materials suggest that he worked closely with one of the two men and sought legal counsel from the other. Since dealing with Cesar raises the very real possibility of dealing with his associates, it makes sense to read the files closely.

The less sinister of the DOJ jackets documents the professional activities of Duke Eric Alba-Teran d’Antin, the goitrous name-dropping Badische executive with a weakness for silk ascots. From the start, I’d had my doubts about the guy. D’Antin never struck me as “credible”—the term Cesar used to describe the duke when pleading for leniency at sentencing. It seemed impossible that a senior officer of the bogus Trust could be wed to a genuine archduchess.

But much to my chagrin, I had discovered, a few months before, that d’Antin was indeed married to Michaela Maria Madeleine Kiliana von Habsburg-Lothringen, princess imperial and archduchess of Austria. The legitimacy of his matrimonial claims had compelled me to reserve judgment—until, that is, I obtained a detailed account of his criminal record.

In 1993, five years before he joined the Trust, Eric d’Antin fell under the scrutiny of US law enforcement officers by agreeing to launder the illicit proceeds of a South American drug cartel. According to his case file, this is what happened: A middleman named Thomas McMahon presented the duke with “a soft-sided suitcase containing $200,000 in United States currency in ten and twenty dollar denominations.” The duke carried the suitcase into a Manhattan bank, exited minus the money, and informed his go-between that the funds were
on their way to a numbered account in South America. Had d’Antin stuck to the terms of the agreement—he was supposed to wire the $200,000 (minus an 8 percent commission) to its final recipient via a bank in Germany—federal charges against him would have been restricted to “the laundering of monetary instruments.” However, the duke chose a bolder course of action, opting to award himself a 100 percent commission on the funds placed in his care.

{© Dora Espinoza}

Duke Eric d’Antin was up to his ascot in fraud long before he joined the Trust.

It’s hard to know which is dumber: trying to rip off a bagman for a South American drug cartel, or trying to rip off a federal investigator
posing
as a bagman for a South American drug cartel. D’Antin discovered the consequences of the latter folly when McMahon, revealing himself to be an undercover agent working for the US Customs Service, placed the duke under arrest and, because of the failed switcheroo, broadened the charges to include the embezzlement of government funds.

Because d’Antin’s Habsburg in-laws owned estates all over Europe, he was deemed a flight risk and ordered to surrender his passport.
He complied, then promptly obtained new travel documents under an untitled variant of his highborn name. Bogus passport in hand, d’Antin flew to Europe, where he ostensibly stashed his loot, and returned to stand trial in Brooklyn. The jury found him guilty. The stolen funds were never recovered.

That was hardly the duke’s first brush with the law. A decade earlier, Florida prosecutors charged d’Antin with racketeering, alleging that he had woven together an elaborate daisy chain of offshore shell corporations and trusts designed to “skim on taxes.” A decade before the Florida indictment, a British court convicted d’Antin on “forgery, obtaining property with forged instruments and conspiracy.” Scrolling back still further, to 1971, the Italian carabinieri arrested d’Antin for “the fraudulent sale of a corporation and an industrial process for 120 million lire.” That was three years after Swiss authorities detained him for bilking a German businessman out of 150,000 deutsche marks.

The archduchess of Austria appears to have tolerated her consort’s European indiscretions, but her sense of noblesse oblige did not, it seems, extend to American soil. The couple divorced in 1994, soon after d’Antin’s conviction in US federal court. Despite the split, the duke continued to exploit the royal name of his ex, claiming chairmanship of an unfunded charity called the Habsburg Foundation. He did so until his death, ten years later, at the age of eighty-four.

Had the marriage endured, the duke’s body might have been parceled out, as Habsburg tradition dictates, among various Viennese mausoleums—his heart going to one crypt, his viscera to others. Divorce precluded that privilege. Instead, Eric d’Antin was cremated at a franchise funeral home a mile from Newark Airport, his ashes double-boxed without ritual in black plastic and recycled cardboard.

The DOJ dossier does not provide details regarding his memorial service, but d’Antin’s date of death suggests that Cesar wasn’t on hand. Prior commitments in Lompoc, California, would have prevented him from paying his last respects.

The d’Antin case file described the career of an incorrigible rogue, but none of its particulars suggested a taste for violence. The second DOJ file, chronicling the activities of a behind-the-scenes insurance executive and “legal adviser” to the Trust named Richard Mamarella, offered no such comfort. On the contrary, it served as a wake-up call to the dangers I was courting by traveling to San Francisco.

Richard Mamarella joined the House of Badische in 1998, after a chance encounter with Prince Robert at Cooper’s, a New York cigar bar located on West Fifty-Eighth Street. At first glance, Mamarella was inclined to dismiss the prince as “an eccentric old man with a propensity to have one too many.” Another Cooper’s regular, the mayor of New York, allegedly set him straight. According to Mamarella, Rudolph Giuliani considered Robert von Badische “one of New York City’s only royalty.”

Prince Robert wasn’t nearly so standoffish. In fact, he did everything in his power to ingratiate himself to Mamarella, whose business acumen had earned not one but two front-page profiles in the
Wall Street Journal
.