Next was an internal MWB memo, dated a week after the letter, written from Nassouli to “The Files,” and describing a meeting between him and Pierro. At this meeting, according to the memo, Nassouli and Pierro filled out the French Samuelson credit facility application for Textiles, and they prepared the Textiles corporate documentation, required to establish an account at French.
This was followed about three weeks later by a letter from Pierro to Dias, confirming that a revolving credit facility would be established for Europa Mills. The next document was the list of funds transfers. Each entry consisted of a date, an amount, an ordering party, and a beneficiary. There were well over a hundred of them, listed on two pages, and they spanned a six-year period that began eighteen years ago. Given the context, and the parties involved in the transfers, they seemed to represent drawdowns by Europa Mills U.S.A. against its credit facility at French, and subsequent repayments of the loans, with interest, by Europa Mills’ parent company, Textiles Pan-Europa. If that’s what they were, then in a six-year period, something over $120 million had flowed back and forth between French, Europa Mills, and Textiles.
The final document in the fax was an article from the Economist, an issue late the previous year. It was a piece about the aftermath of the MWB collapse, or one aspect of it. It focused on four different European companies. According to the article, they had all at one time been vital, expanding concerns, but were now just so much twisted metal in the larger train wreck of MWB. They were a few of the many companies secretly controlled by MWB, the story went, which had turned them all into conduits for money laundering. One of the firms listed, its name underlined in the fax, was Textiles Pan-Europa. According to the article, many of the executives of these now defunct companies were missing. Some, like the Textiles senior executive team, had turned up dead.
Pierro moved restlessly around the room while I read, for a while reading over my shoulder. Then he wandered into the hallway, to pace. Mike went to the window again and stood there motionless and silent, his head nearly touching the glass. When I finished, I stacked the papers into a pile.
“So?” Mike asked, without turning around.
“The implication, I guess, is that Textiles was an MWB front, and that they were using the loans from French to wash money-pumping clean dollars from the loans into Textiles’ U.S. subsidiary, and paying off the loans with dirty money from the parent company in Europe.” Mike nodded, still staring into the night. I leafed through the first few pages of the fax again.
“And I guess this memo from Nassouli to ‘The Files’ is meant to be the smoking gun. The credit application and the corporate documents should have been prepared and signed by executives from Textiles, not by the salesman making the loan.” Mike nodded again. The dark glass reflected the smile on his face. I continued. “But there doesn’t seem to be anything conclusive here. Nassouli’s memo is the most damning, but you can’t tell from this if it’s accurate, or even genuine. And there’s nothing that tells us if the loans were arranged before or after MWB came into control of Textiles.” Pierro came back into the room as I was speaking and sat down across from me.
“That’s right,” he said, softly. “Nothing concrete, just the suggestion that I was working with these bastards, and that I was a party to fraud.” I looked again at the message on the cover sheet.
“You think this is blackmail?” I asked them both.
Pierro answered. “Mike’s a lawyer, so he’ll say he’s not sure. Me-I don’t know what the hell else it could be.” Mike still had not said anything, nor had he moved from the window. We were coming to a tricky part now.
“Assuming that’s what this is, how much leverage do they actually have here?” I asked, looking across at Pierro. His chuckle surprised me.
“Hey, I like that. Much better than ‘Are you a crook, Rick?’ Very smooth. But the deal with Textiles was by the book. I did all the homework I was supposed to do on that deal, and on every other credit line and loan I produced. Textiles had everything in order. Did I do business with MWB? Absolutely-lots of it, and so did everybody else on the Street back then. They were big players. And clean players, as far as anyone knew at the time. I knew Gerry Nassouli, and I thought he was a smart, funny guy. He introduced us, and a lot of other firms, to a lot of deals. But that meeting in the memo, the one with Nassouli and the account forms, that didn’t happen.”
“So, what do you want to do about it?” I asked. Pierro answered quickly.
“I want to know who sent this. I want to know what he’s after.”
“If it is blackmail,” I said, “you’ll find out what he’s after soon enough.”
“Yeah, but he’ll be a lot easier to negotiate with if I know who he is,” Pierro replied. I was quiet for a while.
“I’m not sure I follow. Are you saying that you want to bargain with whoever sent this?”
“Yeah, exactly,” Pierro answered. “I want to know what he wants, and if I can work him into something reasonable-and I have assurances that he won’t be back for more-then I’m happy to pay him to go away.” He said this as if it were the most natural, logical thing in the world. I looked over at Mike, who was still by the window, silent. I shook my head.
“Blackmail usually plays out in only a few ways,” I said. “If the victim’s guilty, and the bad guy’s proof is for real, then the victim pays- and usually keeps on paying, because bad guys don’t walk away from a meal ticket. Or else the victim decides to tough it out, and take the heat for whatever it is he’s done, rather than be somebody’s perpetual cash machine. In which case, the bad guy either follows through on his threats or figures it’s too much trouble and goes away.
“If the victim’s clean, then he tells the bad guy to take a hike and he calls the cops. What doesn’t happen is an innocent guy paying up, and trying to make some sort of deal with the blackmailer. The payment alone looks like an admission of guilt. On top of that, you run a risk of pissing the guy off-which may cause him to up his price, or worse. If you’re in the clear on this, my advice is to go to the cops.” Mike turned from the window and came back to the conference table.
“Sound familiar?” he asked Pierro. Mike looked at me and shrugged resignedly. “I told him the same thing when he first came in with this.”
Pierro smiled indulgently, like we were good guys, funny guys, but a little slow on the uptake. “I know what you’re saying, but the fact is I have a lot invested at French, a lot on the table right now that I can’t walk away from,” he said. He turned to me, more serious now.
“That investment is important, John, because I’ve got a big family to take care of. My wife, Helene, and I, we’ve got three kids to raise. And we take care of my folks, down in Boca, too. We also help out Helene’s family-her mom and her sister in North Carolina.” He paused and looked down at the table for a moment. “These people depend on me, John. They look to me, and I’m not going to let them down.”
“I’m not following, Rick,” I said. “If this stuff is bullshit, then you should be fine at French. Your career there shouldn’t be at risk.” He laughed again, but this time there was an edge to it.
“My career there has always been at risk. Maybe you haven’t noticed, but I’m not the typical French Samuelson investment banker. I dress the part now. I got rid of my polyester suits, and cleaned the dirt from under my fingernails, but I’m the odd man out there, and I always have been.
“You know what my old man did for a living? He worked in the yards at the Long Island Rail Road. The old lady was a receptionist, made minimum wage working at a chiropractor in Huntington. I was the first one in my family to go to college-much less get an MBA. There weren’t too many guys with that pedigree when I was coming up at French. It might’ve been different if I’d stayed on the banking side, or gone to the trading floor. There, there were always a few guys like me, some who’d started as clerks or in the mailroom and worked their way up. But not in investment banking.