McVee stood at the window, casting his gaze across Third Avenue toward the Lipstick Building, a thirty-four-story office tower that, to some, resembled a tube of lipstick. The seventeenth floor there was the center of operations for the king of hedge-fund managers.
“A hell of a lot more impressive than the twelve percent Madoff gets you.”
“Bernie’s been very good to us.”
“Unfortunately, Ponzi schemes are illegal.”
“You don’t know he’s running a scheme.”
McVee scoffed. “Ever seen the man’s golf scores? My Palm Beach caddy told me Madoff didn’t play for a year, then he came out and claimed to shoot an eighty-four-one shot worse than the last time he picked up a club, and dead-on his handicap since 1998: twelve. That’s an interesting number, considering his clients have been earning twelve percent returns through two decades of booms, busts, bubbles, bears, and bulls. Even the SEC knows it’s a Ponzi scheme. He’s one of many.”
“Are you telling me this is a Ponzi scheme?”
McVee smiled thinly. “No. That’s the beauty of it. There’s nothing illegal about credit-default swaps.”
“And you’re sure no one will know how much we make?”
“No chance. We made your purchases through a web of derivative instruments that no one can unravel.”
“And the sellers can pay?”
“We’re talking about the biggest insurance companies in the world. All A-plus-plus ratings. Nothing to worry about.”
McVee handed him a summary of the instruments, the cost basis for each, the expected ten-figure payoff-and, most important, the hefty fee payable to Ploutus Investments. Graves inspected it, obviously pleased.
“You’re brilliant,” said Graves.
“I know.”
True, McVee was never modest, but in this case he was really in no position to share the credit for a scheme that had been conceived aboard a sailboat on Lake Como six months earlier. The essence of the plan-bringing down an overleveraged Wall Street investment bank through short selling and rumors on FNN, then cashing in on credit default swaps-had been the brainchild of McVee and one very smart lawyer. A mob lawyer. To be a Ploutus client, all it took was money. Lots of it. From any source. And the deep desire to make more of it.
“Who’s next?” asked Graves. “Lehman? Merrill?”
Another strike was not out of the question. It had indeed been McVee’s decision to target Saxton Silvers, but in the subprime insanity, other firms had made themselves equally vulnerable, borrowing as much as thirty or forty dollars for every dollar of capital they held in reserve, and then using it to purchase toxic NINA mortgages.
“We’ll see,” said McVee. “They can all come down.”
“If that’s the case, I’m curious: Why did you start with Saxton Silvers?”
“I had my reasons.”
“Cantella?”
“Nothing to do with Cantella.”
“I don’t believe you.”
The solicitor’s tone was not merely one of idle conversation, and McVee knew where it was coming from. Just this morning, a story in the Post raised the possibility that Cantella was a fall guy for bigger players in the market. Graves, it seemed, was barking up that same tree, and flat denial would only have made him more curious.
“Okay, I admit,” said McVee. “It was a little personal. For two years I’d been wondering when Wall Street would realize that subprime lenders all over America were ignoring a fundamental rule that’s been around since the Stone Age: You make loans based on the borrower’s ability to repay, not on Wall Street’s ability to repackage them and pass the risk of default up the daisy chain to someone else. But it really hurt that it was Michael Cantella-a guy who didn’t even have direct responsibility for mortgage-backed securities-who sounded the alarm last October and told his firm to wake up and smell the poison. My nephew and his mortgage-lending associates had over nine hundred million in NINA mortgages already funded and in the pipeline, and suddenly there was no Wall Street buyer. It was as if Cantella had finally stopped the music, and I was left without a chair.”
“So this is especially sweet for you.”
“You have no idea.”
Graves seemed satisfied. He rose from the couch, and the men shook hands. Together, they walked down the hall and boarded the elevator. On the ride down, Graves reiterated that the sheikh would be “more than happy” to be the financial muscle behind the next go-round. McVee made no promises. He certainly didn’t bother to disclose that he didn’t really need outside money, that the sheikh was along for the ride only because the mob wanted an oil-rich Kuwaiti to blame on the off chance that Congress would finally drop its obsession with steroids in baseball and maybe even hold a hearing or two on what the hell was going on with Wall Street.
McVee walked them out to the street, where Graves climbed into a limo.
“We’ll be in touch,” said Graves.
McVee watched from the sidewalk as the limo pulled away. His explanation for targeting Saxton Silvers had placated the sheikh’s solicitor, but destroying Michael Cantella was about so much more than money. The obsession had begun last fall, when he received a phone call from Florence.
“She’s alive,” Ian Burn had told him. “She’s changed her look, but we locked eyes just before she ran, and I would bet my life it was her.”
If true, the tip meant Tony Girelli was a liar-he hadn’t turned Ivy Layton into fish food. McVee was skeptical at first, but Burn was adamant that his eyes had not failed him. The way to lure Ivy out of hiding, he said, was to put the people she loved in danger-the very people she had protected by disappearing in the first place. McVee began cautiously, but last November’s sit-down between Burn and Cantella at Sal’s Place had been far too subtle, drawing no reaction from Ivy. Burn pushed for more convincing measures, and it was the anniversary of Marcus’ suicide that had put McVee over the edge. The thought of Ivy living a new life while his thirty-year-old son rotted in the ground was too much. It was then that McVee decided to turn the attack on Saxton Silvers into an all-out assault against Michael Cantella-destroying his marriage, wiping out his personal fortune, making him a traitor to his own firm. Then Ivy blinked. She warned her precious Michael and, in so doing, revealed herself. Tony Girelli-liar that he was-became the first wave of collateral damage. There would be more. But eventually McVee would get Ivy. And make himself richer in the process.
Another limo with dark-tinted windows stopped at the curb. The driver got out and came around to open the rear passenger’s-side door. McVee climbed in, and the door closed.
“Hello, Ian,” he said.
Ian Burn was seated on the bench seat with his back to the soundproof partition. McVee sat opposite him, facing forward, and the limo pulled into traffic.
“My nephew told me about last night,” McVee said.
“Went well,” said Burn.
He was wearing a hooded jacket and dark sunglasses that reminded McVee of the old FBI sketches of the Unabomber.
McVee said, “I’m concerned about the number of bodies.”
“I agree: The Bahamian was a long shot. He didn’t know anything about Ivy. That was a needless one.”
“I don’t care about him. It’s this flurry in my own backyard that worries me. It’s a dangerous cycle. Girelli put a bullet in Bell’s head because Chuck didn’t have the balls to buck a subpoena and refuse to name Mallory’s boyfriend as his source. The boyfriend had to go because sooner or later he would name my nephew. Girelli had to go-well, just because Girelli had to go.”
“Is there someone in that group you wish was still alive?”
“I just want to make sure we’re efficient. You kill these fringe players, yet you let Michael Cantella go.”
Burn removed his sunglasses. The lighting was dim, most of the sun’s rays blocked by the tinted windows. But with the glasses off, the scars on the right side of Burn’s face were evident.