Whipping Boy (34 page)

I call Sherry and request an appointment, withholding, at least initially, the reason for the rendezvous. Like Cesar, he agrees to meet without hesitation, proposing that we join up in the visitor’s center of the American Bible Society, a light-filled atrium on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

The religious setting is only the first of many surprises. When we get together, I discover that the colonel is no longer a colonel. He has mothballed his uniforms and tailored business suits. Gone, too, are the Maltese crosses and military ribbons. He now wears a yarmulke under a golf cap and a lapel pin honoring Yad Vashem, the Jerusalem Holocaust memorial.

“Call me Reb,” Sherry says at the outset of our interview. “Although I am a rabbi, I find the word self-important and pretentious.” The onetime colonel, prince, major, knight, administrator, and ambassador plenipotentiary tells me that he now tends to the spiritual
needs of a congregation of Messianic Jews, blending evangelical Christian theology with teachings from the Torah, an interfaith work-around that allows him to practice a form of Judaism that assigns the burdens of atonement squarely on the shoulders of Jesus Christ.

Soon after we find a spot to sit, under a plaque bearing a quotation from John 10:10—“The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy”—I tell Sherry I have no need for his religious counsel.

“So how can I help?”

“When I was ten, I attended a boarding school in Switzerland. It was both a joyous and traumatizing experience. So much so that I decided to track down my roommates—actually one roommate in particular.”

“Did you find him, this roommate of yours?”

“I did. His name is Cesar Augustus.”

I wait for a reaction.

“That’s his real name?” Reb asks.

“It is.”

“That’s interesting.”

It falls to me to keep the conversation going. “For a while, my search was waylaid by false positives—by men who shared my roommate’s name. There was a flute player, a distinguished professor of electrochemistry, a set designer in Belgium. But it turns out that
my
Cesar Augustus was your”—the word
confederate
is on the tip of my tongue, but I catch myself and opt for a more dispassionate term—“colleague.”

“Oh, yes?” he says after another long pause.

“Yes. And since I’m writing a book about my search for Cesar, it makes sense to talk to you.”

“Your book, is it fiction?”

“No. No one would believe the details of the story, yours or Cesar’s, if they appeared in a novel.”

“The details you
think
you know, Allen,” Sherry snaps. “What you may have read in the newspapers is
not
an interview with me. It’s
not
an interview with the chairman. It’s not an interview with Cesar. Not by any stretch of the imagination.”

There’s no reason to hold back any longer. “Are you saying Badische was legit?”

“Absolutely.”

Sherry senses my disbelief.

“Look. I want to be clear, Allen. I’ve done some things in the past that would have gotten me stoned to death in the time of Moses. But my work on behalf of the Trust and its clients was not one of them. I did nothing wrong. Cesar did nothing wrong. Badische was
not
a fraud. The quote unquote
crime
was nothing more than a contract dispute—the result of one disgruntled client, a woman named Barbara Laurence, who defaulted on an obligation and who used the US Attorney’s Office as her personal collection agency. What she did, and what the prosecutors did, was unjust. Worst-case scenario, the dispute should have been arbitrated by the International Chamber of Commerce in Paris.”

“If everything was on the up-and-up, why did the government go after you?”

“The prosecutor wanted to get a big feather in his cap. He wanted to build a big résumé of convictions so that he could get a job at a big firm and get paid buckets of money. Conviction, Allen. That’s all that mattered. Guilt or innocence was beside the point.
That’s
why we went to prison. The prosecutors twisted what Cesar and I did to fit their charges. Wire fraud? What the
hell
are they talking about?”

“The government argued that you hoodwinked the lawyers at Clifford Chance into using their offices.”

Sherry lets out a rueful laugh. “The top law firm in the world? Filled with the sharpest legal minds? Hoodwinked? How is that even possible? It was Clifford Chance who drew up the contracts. It was Clifford Chance that tallied up the total worth of the Trust based on the individual asset portfolios.”

“Were those assets real?”

“Of course they were real. Not all of them were tangible, but they were real.”

“Including the special deed of trust from the Kingdom of Mombessa?”

“Absolutely. A forestry company from Canada assessed the value of the kingdom at $50 billion—and that’s just for the timber. Minerals and diamonds weren’t even part of the calculation.”

It’s tempting to mention what I find “special” about the deed in question. That its asset valuation is five times the GNP of the region in which it’s supposed to be located. That its capital city, Mondimbi, is a sparsely populated fishing village. That no kingdom called “Mombessa” appears on any map of Africa. Instead, I continue to present the case argued at trial. “The prosecution said there was no king.”

“Not true,” Sherry counters. “I met him. He has a name—Henri-François Mazzamba. He’s a genuine king from the Republic of the Congo, which used to be called Zaire.”

Again, that’s total baloney. For starters, Sherry is mixing up the Republic of the Congo with the
Democratic
Republic of the Congo, formerly known as Zaire. And as for the so-called king? He was teaching at a grade school in Ottawa when he signed his name to the deed.

“What about the other signatory, Prince Robert? Was he the real deal?”

“As far as I know. His family at one time owned BASF. The
B
in the chemical company’s name stands for Badische,” he says, repeating the balderdash the Baron Moncrieffe fed David Glass. “It’s true that he had fallen on hard times, and for a while he was offering knighthoods for $25,000 a piece. But how is that any different from what the Vatican does? Or the Order of the Knights of Malta overseen by the Queen of England?”

“Why didn’t you tell the jury everything you’re telling me?”

“I wanted to, but I couldn’t. My lawyer said, ‘If you testify, you’ll come off like Dr. Evil.’”

“Cesar told me his lawyer said the same thing.”

“Cesar was baffled that there was even a trial. He’s
still
baffled.”

For nearly two hours, I listen to Sherry’s narrative of victimhood. How he was a casualty of incompetent clients. (“None of them could perform.”) Of unscrupulous prosecutors. (“They were scum, no better than human garbage.”) Of a jury misdirected by a prejudicial judge. (“Fourteen out of the fifteen witnesses were on our side. Only Barbara Laurence was against us.”)

“The government spun it like it was a con job kingdom
we
created. But if anybody was a victim of a con job kingdom, it was
us
. Me. Cesar. I was—we were—convicted for crimes we did not commit. We just couldn’t compete with the prosecution’s craftiness.”

It’s tough not to marvel at how uncannily Sherry’s account dovetails with Cesar’s. Both blame the victims. Both show no real remorse. Both express outrage and disbelief that their seemingly minor contract dispute with Barbara Laurence had ended up in federal court. Where their views part company is in the roles they see themselves having played. Cesar portrays himself a hapless liaison with a peripheral connection to the work of the Badische Trust Consortium. Sherry, by contrast, positions himself proudly at its center.

“I was the one who put all the pieces in place,” he boasts. “The one who made it all happen. In a certain sense, I
was
Badische. And I’ll tell you something, Allen. If our deals had gone through, if our clients had been able to perform, I’d be the king of Wall Street right now. People would be lining up at my door with wheelbarrows full of money, asking me to help them invest. Instead, they treat me like I’m a sort of Madoff.”

As he’s making his case, I notice Sherry doing something very weird with his hands. He wraps his fingers around the back of his neck, places his thumbs against his Adam’s apple, and squeezes.

I can’t decide if the gesture is his way of unconsciously asserting that the government had him by the throat or if (again obliviously) he is attempting to stop himself from talking. I suspect it’s a bit of both.

The conversation with Sherry, like the talks I’d had with Cesar, went better than I expected. Sherry had opened up about the fraud, something I never thought possible. After the interview, I retreated to my office and began writing, finally confident that no further communication with him or Cesar would be necessary.

A year went by before I realized that was total bullshit.

Troublesome questions about my conversations with Cesar kept asserting themselves: What stopped me from bringing up what he had done to me? What stopped me from revealing what
I
was doing to him? Why did I pull my punches?

Part of my restraint, I figured out, was rooted in fear. Cesar, I eventually admitted to myself, scared me. And to be clear: it was not the felonious drug-mule-turned-con-man with the Mafia ties who terrified me. It was the childhood version of that man, the twelve-year-old, who filled me with dread.

I was, even on the far side of fifty, still the boy in the tower mimicking the habits of the chamois, bouncing from one spot to another to avoid potential peril.

But that hard-won realization only partly explained why I continually gave Cesar a pass. So much more was going on. I also avoided direct confrontation because of a growing sense of self-loathing. I hated that I had developed an aptitude for duplicity. Cesar had no idea what he was in for; a two-time loser was about to get indicted for a third time, if only in the pages of a book. Although I never thought it possible, I pitied my unsuspecting mark. Curiosity was giving way to compassion. Rancor was getting sidelined by remorse.

By failing to confront Cesar I had failed to confront myself. The story I wanted to tell had systematically undermined the story I needed to tell. Oddly enough, the predicament was captured in the lyrics of “Smooth Operator,” Cesar’s Lompoc prison anthem:

                               
Face-to-face, each classic case

                               
We shadowbox and double-cross

                               
Yet need the chase

It was time to stop shadowboxing and double-crossing. Coming clean was the only way I would be able to end a chase that I started more than half a lifetime ago.

On May 1, 2013, I screw up the courage to give Cesar a call. “We’ve got to meet, and I won’t take no for an answer.”

“Great,” he says amicably. He doesn’t ask why, and I don’t tell him.

Two weeks later, I’m once more in San Francisco, sitting in a Tenderloin café, staring at a framed movie poster for
The Thief of Bagdad
. To pass the time, I read over some of the reminders that I typed into my phone during the flight from Providence: “Avoid parallel lies. No monocles, no knights. Confess the pain.”

When Cesar enters the café, I do a double take. He has bulked up considerably since we last met. The goatee is gone, and so is the rest of his hair. Head shaved, dressed entirely in black, he gives off an Oddjob vibe, minus bowler and mustache.

After hearing about the “personal branding workshops” he’s been running in São Paulo and Mexico City, I get down to business.

“This is very hard even to bring up,” I say, my voice quavering.

Cesar leans across the table. “What’s wrong?” he asks. “What’s happened?”

“Actually, it’s what
hasn’t
happened. I know that you forgot about me after Aiglon, but I—”

“No offense, Allen. There are a lot of people I don’t remember.”

“—but I never forgot you. That’s why I’m here.”

“Really? I assumed you flew out for a book signing or something.”

“Nope.”

“Why not just call?”

“It wouldn’t have been the same. I needed to look you in the eye to say what I have to say. It’s about Aiglon.”

“I get it.”

“You do?”

“Absolutely. It’s like with my wife. One of the reasons she healed from cancer is by coming to terms with certain family issues. Reconciling with her mother and her father face-to-face really helped her. You’re doing the same thing.”

“That’s right,” I say, surprised by his wisdom.

“You know, neurolinguistic programming can be
really
useful in dealing with this sort of thing. It’s an amazing way to reframe one’s perspective. I’ve gone back to the kid I was at Aiglon and told him—told me—that I was loved. That it was my mother’s
intention
to provide the best for me. Of course, I didn’t feel that way at the time, but that is what she intended. It’s what I told you before. Everyone has a good reason for doing what they’re doing.”

“You truly believe that? You believe
everyone
is well intentioned? Prince Robert? Colonel Sherry? . . . You? . . . Me?”

Cesar nods. “Actions may not reflect that intention. But the
underlying intent
is still always good.”

“I’m not convinced. You know what they say about the road to hell?”

Cesar looks at me blankly.

“That it’s paved with good intentions. Look where you ended up. I mean, Lompoc isn’t exactly a holding pen for saints.”

It takes everything I have in me to leap the chasm of silence that opens up between us. “I have to get something off my chest, Cesar. You really did a number on me at Aiglon.”

“Well, lots of kids did a number on me, too,” he responds blandly.

I suppose the “too” could be taken as an acknowledgment of guilt,
but I didn’t fly to San Francisco to squeeze meaning out of vague implication. “You’ve told me a ton of stories of your mistreatment, Cesar. But I haven’t done a good job telling you about mine.
That’s
why I’m here. To say, ‘Hey, this is what I remember. This is what you did.’ That’s what my book is about.”