“Any particular story you’ve told, about who I am and why I’m here?” I asked.
“I’ve been vague, and I intend to stay that way. Busman’s holiday is all I’ve said. It’s alright. My people are mostly ex-feds-they’re used to not being told shit. And the Parsons people are all accountants-they expect even less.”
Neary headed for one of the corners, and I followed. We walked into a small office that had been stripped down to the picture hooks. All that remained of furniture was a metal desk, two worn chairs in front of it, and a swivel chair behind it. A woman sat in the swivel chair, gazing at a computer screen. Her fingers were poised over the keyboard, and she had a pen between her teeth. She did not look up when we entered.
“Is now good?” Neary asked.
“Give me a sec,” she answered, without moving. She had several windows opened on the screen. A browser was running in one, and she was reading a document displayed in it. She made some notes on a legal pad.
“There,” she said to herself, and swiveled in her chair to face us. She stood and stuck out her hand. “Cheryl Compton,” she said.
Cheryl Compton was an early thirty-something, maybe five feet tall on her tiptoes and one hundred pounds soaking wet. She had cafe au lait skin and thick, shoulder-length hair the color of dark chocolate. Her face was broad, and her features an attractive mix of African and Asian. Her eyes were large and pitch black, and they flashed with an impatient intelligence, despite the fatigue that lay over them just now. She had a small, square chin and a sharply etched jawline, marred by a little knot of muscle working on one side. Her full lips were pursed. Compton was casually dressed, in gray wool pants and a black sweater. Her only jewelry was a black plastic watch. She pushed a wave of hair behind her ear and sat. We sat too.
“Cheryl joined us about three years ago, from IRS,” Neary began. “And most of her time with Brill has been on this account. Early on, she worked with the Parsons people and the technical guys, setting up the document management system, and now she’s our senior investigator at MWB. And whatever we pay her, it’s probably not enough, because she’s the one who really knows what’s going on around here.” He smiled. Compton rolled her eyes elaborately, but some of the tension went out of her jaw. She turned to me.
“He tells me you’re looking for some background stuff on what we’re doing and how we do it. I can give you the ten-thousand-foot overview, and you can tell me where you want to go from there. I’m assuming you know the basics about MWB.”
“I think so. I’ll call out if you lose me,” I said. She took a deep breath and began.
“Basically, there are three kinds of work going on here.” She ticked them off on her fingers as she spoke. “There’s liquidation analysis, litigation support, and document management. It sounds like consulting gobbledygook, I know, but it actually means something.
“Liquidation analysis is what the Parsons people are mostly engaged in, with some help from us. What they’re doing, essentially, is reconstructing the bank’s balance sheet-on the one hand determining what assets the bank still has, and on the other figuring out what it owes, and to whom. They’ll take you through all the grim details.
“Litigation support is Brill’s responsibility, and it’s just a fancy name for sending documents to people. As you probably know, there are a bunch of criminal proceedings underway against former MWB employees, and more are coming. On top of that, a slew of civil actions are gearing up. That means that every day, day in and day out, the MWB liquidation committee gets requests-orders, really-to produce documents. Task force investigators, the U.S. attorney, defense counsel, civil plaintiffs, you name it-they all want documents-lots of them. If the liquidation committee agrees to the requests-and they don’t usually have much choice in the matter-then we make sure that the orders get filled.” Compton spoke quickly. She’d done this spiel before, and her delivery was practiced. She paused to see if I was still with her. I was.
“Central to these two activities is the third thing we do here: document management. It was the first task we had when we started, and none of the other work can go on without it. When we came on the job, it was like boarding one of those ghost ships in the Bermuda Triangle. You know, where everything looks normal but all the people are missing. Senior management was in jail or on the run, and the people who actually did the work, the traders, operations people, and accountants, had all been let go. And we couldn’t call any of them back, since they were all potential defendants. So we had an empty bank on our hands- a ghost ship. The only things that could tell us what the hell had been going on were the documents they’d left behind.
“But it was a huge mountain of paper, and organized filing was not MWB’s strong suit. To get-and keep-control of the documents we use a set of procedures and a computer system. The procedures are straightforward, even if the work itself isn’t. Every document we find on MWB premises is assigned a unique identification number, and is scanned in to a central documents database. Then, someone reviews it, classifies it, and writes an abstract of its contents, and all that goes into the database too. After that, the physical document goes offsite, to a warehouse out in Jersey we use as a storage center. From then on, any research we or the Parsons people need to do involving that document is done using the document database.” A chiming sound came from her computer, and Compton paused to glance at the screen. She clicked something and continued.
“Say, for example, that Parsons needs to review all the correspondence that took place between MWB and some particular client. Using the system, they can look at it by date, by subject, by department, by a bunch of other criteria-all online. Or say we get a request for documents, maybe from the U.S. attorneys. We use the system to find what they’ve asked for, and we have the guys in the storage center ship the hard copy. And we also use the system to keep track of who has asked for what items, and to record what we send, and where and when we send it.” She paused again, waiting for questions. This time I had some.
“Do only paper documents go into the database? What about e-mail? Or data from MWB’s accounting systems?”
Compton began nodding before I’d finished my question. “Yep, yep-we use all that stuff. E-mail and any other electronic documents go in the database, the same as paper-only we don’t have to scan them. We use their systems, too-their general ledger, their trading systems, their settlement systems-but that data doesn’t go into the documents database.”
“Is everything that’s supposed to be in there actually on the database at this point?”
“Almost. We’ve got everything from the offices worldwide, but there are some documents from offsite storage that we haven’t gotten to yet. That’s a lot of what you see on the shelves out there.”
“So you’ve got documents going back… how long?”
“Nearly thirty years, to when MWB first opened for business.”
“And people need documents going back that far?”
“Well, not so much the feds. They’re focused on more recent stuff, activity within the statute of limitations-the last seven years or so. But Parsons, for the liquidation work, they go back that far.”
“All the work is done here? All the scanning and abstracting and the rest?”
“Yep. It needs to be controlled centrally. Once stuff is on the system, our teams in the overseas branches can access it. We’re all hooked up to a wide area network.”
“And once something’s in there, how do you find it again? Do you need to know the ID number?” Compton grimaced a little at this.
“No. If you knew the number, you could get at it that way, sure, but nobody knows the numbers. Remember I said that part of what we do is classify? We use those classifications to find documents on the database. Every document gets labeled with information about its subject, its date, the person who authored it, and what department they were in, who it was sent to, who got copied on it, its source-meaning where we found it. And a bunch of other tags as well. We can search on any or all of those fields.” Neary cleared his throat.