Whipping Boy (36 page)

“That’s insane.”

“Were you at your trial?”

“Of course.”

“Kearns testified about it.”

“I don’t remember that.”

When I note that the fraud netted some $4 million, Cesar scoffs. “There was no $4 million.”

“Yes, Cesar, there was. Sherry laundered
at least
that much through personal bank accounts all over the world.”

“They weren’t
personal
bank accounts. They were Trust accounts.”

“No, Cesar. They were
personal
accounts.”

“The Trust wouldn’t—”

“Cesar. Listen to me. There. Was. No. Trust. The Trust was a myth.”

“What about the finance committee? The Swiss bankers? The lawyers at Clifford Chance?”

“Window dressing.”

Cesar releases a long sigh. “Okay. Let’s say I’m full of shit. Let’s say I’m totally guilty. That means Sherry’s totally guilty, too. And that he’s more guilty than I am.”

“He
is
totally guilty. That’s why he went to prison. And yeah, he is probably more guilty than you.”

“All I know is I didn’t get paid.”

After sustaining an hour of cat-and-mouse, I look Cesar straight in the eye and ask point-blank, “Were you guilty of fraud?”

“No! I am
not
guilty of fraud.”

“The jury disagreed,” I counter calmly.

“Juries don’t make decisions based on fact. They make decisions based on emotions. But hey, that’s the way the cookie crumbles.”

A huge sense of relief washes over me after coming clean. I have shed the pretense of friendship and have challenged Cesar head-on about his criminal transactions. Of even greater consequence: I have
defended the ten-year-old, or more precisely the ten-year-old has defended himself. He has confronted his childhood menace. Mission accomplished, I tell myself as I leave the café. Case closed. No further action required.

Wrong. Cesar calls soon after we part company. I decide not to answer. I assume he wants to vent. Hell, he has every reason to vent; he was just blindsided with a one-two punch of childhood and adult recrimination.

He leaves a voicemail on my phone. When I play it back, I discover, once again, that he confounds expectation. Here’s a full transcription of his message:

Hi, Allen. Cesar. It’s one fifteen, about. I’m back home. Just realized that the most important thing hasn’t been said. And that is that I apologize to
you
for whatever pain I may have caused. I’m sorry about that. I really didn’t realize until you told me that you’ve been looking for me since ’91, and how important this is
for you.
I fully respect that. I know how it feels because, as I told you, I’m also still dealing with it myself—still looking for closure.

So, I apologize to
you.

I was very nice . . . It was nice to discuss your issues and mine as well. [Badische is] of course painful to bring up again and revisit. But thanks for doing that. We’ll see, we’ll see what happens.

And oh, by the way, Norway was totally my fault. I went to visit my buddy Lars, and he asked me to bring him some cocaine, which I did. Everything was fine until the evening when they arrested everybody. Of course I denied it. The police tricked [Lars] and told him that I’d admitted it. And he thought, me being such a nice guy, that I did. But I didn’t. I brought it [the coke] for him. (I took some for myself—but not much. I’m not a big drug user.) But bottom line is it was my fault. I was in for fourteen months in a country with a different language. It was interesting.

Then I find myself some ten years later back at a trial and
not expressing my side of the story and being very frustrated to this day about not [testifying]. I was advised by five different people not to take the stand. That I would be just too emotional. That the jury would convict me based on my emotions and not because of any facts. Irrespective of everything else, it just doesn’t look good on paper. Half the stuff you’re telling me, I’m not even aware of. Of course, all this comes out after the fact, but anyway. It’s worth talking some more about, certainly for me.

I don’t know if you’re writing anything about it or doing anything about it—probably not—but I hope you get closure on your book. And for yourself. I think that’s very important.

So I just want to call you and apologize for anything that may have happened in the past. It may seem like a long time ago, but it’s still perfectly valid and very important. Because there is no Time. We created—Man created Time. There is no such thing as time.

And I’m happy to be able to assist you. Call me anytime you want to talk further. I’m honored that you came out here just to talk to me. Okay, thank you.

After listening to the voicemail, I find myself overwhelmed by a primal urge to run—an urge I satisfy by scrambling up a hill overlooking San Francisco Bay. At the summit, surrounded by a dozen frolicking dogs and their owners, I replay the message while catching my breath.

I apologize.

Cesar’s simple, all-powerful avowal strikes like a thunderbolt, releasing me from a prison of vengeance that I’ve inhabited since the Nixon administration.

The first few times I listened to Cesar’s mea culpa, I heard what I want to hear. What I
needed
to hear—the remorse of a man whose childhood degradations changed my life forever. The deeper consequences of his equivocal recording only emerged later, back in Providence.

After much deliberation, I figured out what now seems absurdly obvious. The search for Cesar had always been, at its core, a search for someone else. Observing him through a two-way mirror for as long as I had ultimately enabled me to catch reflections of myself in the glass. And who stared back? A victim. An obsessive. A boyfriend. A husband. A father. A journalist. A completionist. A stalker. A frightened five-year-old gripping the hand of a dying father.

Cesar found himself in my crosshairs because of a timepiece once owned by that dying father. Boarding-school cruelties, however baroque, cannot explain my sustained fixation. Nor can the jaw-dropping fraud that landed Cesar in prison. (The dirty-rotten-scoundreldom of the Badische Trust Consortium was never anything more than a detour, albeit one embellished by some truly amazing props.)

Part talisman, part shield, the lost Omega was also—how else to put it?—a time machine, a device that transported me back to a moment when my family was intact and I was profoundly happy.

So forgive me if I reject the notion that there’s no such thing as Time. Without Time, we cannot remember. Without Time, we cannot learn. Without Time, we cannot heal.

When I told Françoise and Max that I was sending Cesar packing, they were overjoyed—for themselves and for me. He, we all agreed, had overstayed his welcome. And they marked his long-delayed eviction by giving me an extravagant gift. I am wearing it on my wrist.

{Courtesy of Edith Kurzweil}

Me, age three. My father took this photo of me in Villars, Switzerland, the year before he died.

An alpine trek lasting some forty years—okay, half that, if one pinpoints its start to my return visit to Aiglon in 1991—is bound to generate a mountain of indebtedness. The list of thanks that follows, while lengthy, is not, I’m sure, complete. I apologize in advance for any omissions.

There has never been anything neutral about my Switzerland. Although this chronicle was born out of trauma, it has been offset by countless acts of generosity rooted in, and routed through, the village of Villars and the precincts of Aiglon College. I spent just 304 days at Aiglon—from September 1, 1971, to the following July 4—yet even now, I can recite the morning roll call of Belvedere (“Aikman, Anderson, Benjamin, Blane . . . Kiefer M., Kiefer T., Kurzweil!” . . . “HERE!”). I am grateful to most, though obviously not all, the boys whose names I carry around in my head. Memories of the school—for reasons made clear at the outset of this book—reverberate like the haunting echo of the mountain yodeler, except that the reverb seems to defy physics by growing louder and more distinct over distance and time. This is due, in no small part, to the hundreds of conversations I have had with many Aiglon alums. Special thanks, in this regard, go to Erik Friedl, Christopher Grove, Doug Hillen, Nino Zamero, Rana Sahni, Wes Green, Andreas Kehl, Harold Summers, Joe Lasheen, Sandro Corsini, Sabina Hickmet, Michael Feron, and the late John Vornle. The catalog of helpful teachers and administrators I encountered at Aiglon is just as long, and includes: Rachel Davies, Joelle du Lac, Karen Sandri, Patrick Roberts, Group Captain Watts, Tony
Hyde, Norman Perryman, Elizabeth and Theodore Senn, Phillip and Bibi Parsons.

Among the witnesses who testified at the trial of the Badische boys and their principal shill, three warrant special mention: John Kearns, Barbara Laurence, and David L. Glass. Each one helped clarify the often confusing testimony generated in
United States of America v. Brian D. Sherry et al
., 01 CR 1043. Yosh Morimoto, another of Cesar’s victimized clients, although absent from the court proceedings, also furnished important insights into the protocols of the Badische Trust Consortium.

Not all those duped by the convicted hustlers wished to be quoted by name. I have honored those requests. However, I have not, despite current editorial custom, “changed names and identifying details.” No facts that appear in this book have been finessed. No identities have been modified. Nothing good comes from taking such liberties—especially when one’s efforts are focused on a narrative steeped in falsehood and deception. Wherever possible I have verified memories and statements—my own, Cesar’s, and those of the individuals dragged into the fraud—against the court record and other reliable sources, both public and private.

While trying to make sense of the swindle, and the federal case that brought it to light, I was helped by three former assistant US attorneys—Timothy J. Coleman, Jay K. Musoff, and Alexander H. Southwell—as well as Dennis M. Quilty, the relentless criminal investigator who pieced together the evidence the government produced at trial. Officers from the US Postal Inspection Service further helped flesh out the criminal activities of the Badische boys. In particular, I am grateful to three first-class postal inspectors: John Feiter, Thomas Boyle, and Thomas Feeney. I am also beholden to two senior partners from the firm of Debevoise & Plimpton—John H. Hall and Mark P. Goodman—and to Mark’s longtime legal secretary, Diane Bletterman.

Dozens of research institutions assisted me during this investigation. Of particular note: the John Carter Brown Library (under the
aegis of its former director Ted Widmer and current deputy director Margot Nishimura); the Rockefeller Library at Brown University; the New York Public Library (and, more specifically, Pamela Leo, formerly of the Center for Scholars and Writers); and the Providence Athenaeum, a once dormant member-supported library recently reawakened under the stewardship of Christina Bevilacqua and Alison Maxell.

Even though a list of photographic credits appears elsewhere, I would like to offer special thanks to: Matt Sherwin, for schlepping to a Manila slum to take pictures of Cesar’s childhood mail drop; Mathias Braschler, for graciously allowing me to reproduce his timeless portrait of the Prince and Princess Khimchiachvili; Harold Summers and Patrick Roberts, for forwarding hi-res versions of images originally posted on the web; Norman Perryman and Bret Bertholf, for permitting me to reproduce their art; Erik Friedl (again), for digitizing stills from the 16mm film he shot at Aiglon College in 1972; Patrick Conner, for his beautifully composed still life of the Cesareum; US Postal Service Senior Technical Surveillance Specialist Larry Ghorsi, for unearthing an image of his colleague Thomas Feeney; Bruce Metcalf of the Augustan Society, for allowing me to reprint a genealogy establishing the ties between “Prince” Robert to Count Dracula—a genealogy that Guy Stair Sainty, with equal aplomb, has discredited; and finally Rob Walker, an illustrator and designer whose digital competencies find expression throughout this book.

I could shorten these acknowledgments by mentioning only those family members who did
not
support the search, but I’m no fool; I know what’s good for me. To all the Kurzweils who gather at my sister-in-law Nancy’s Long Island Seders:
Todah rabah.
To all the Schmidts, Dussarts, and Howorths who gather at Françoise’s Christmas dinners:
Merci infiniment.
Special thanks also go to: my cousin (and West Coast bodyguard) Ruth MacKay; to my mother, Edith Kurzweil, for preserving, among other things, fifteen linear feet of my father’s photo albums, a ten-year cache of his private notebooks,
dealer invoices for every car she has owned since 1965, and pretty much all letters and photographs she has ever received from her children (Ron, Viv, and me) and her stepchildren (Anna and Antonia, Lenny and Peter). Kurzweils and Schmidts tend to be pack rats, a weakness I have shamelessly exploited while piecing together the early sections of this chronicle.