But B-R wasn’t all business. Over the years, it had given much back to the community on which it relied – a notable example being the Lakeford Rose Garden. The three-acre landscaped park was designed to illustrate the evolution of the rose. Starting with ancient species roses, the plantings in the lush park followed the journey of the rose across the globe and through the centuries. Through Asia and China in the years before Christ; thence to the Roman Empire, the Middle Ages and the Crusades; to the celebrated collection at Malmaison, assembled by Napoleon’s wife, the Empress Josephine; and on to the modern roses of the present day. The garden’s more than one hundred thousand visitors each year helped boost, nicely, the local economy.
The Lakeford Clinic and Health Care Services was another of B-R’s community good deeds. A day-care centre, a sport and activities centre for youth, a prenatal clinic, and a number of other charitable works were either fully or partly funded by the county’s number one employer. Since Wolff ’s acquisition of the company, however, no further acts of social conscience were forthcoming.
Baker-Reynolds staff and the townspeople would have been outraged to the point of lynch-mob ferocity had they known exactly how Wolff had managed to gain control of what was considered by economists and financial gurus throughout the US as a model company. Wolff had made certain that the unscrupulous and manipulative pressures he had brought to bear on a certain Baker family board member would never surface. There had been rumours at the time of sale, most related to the confiscatory low price he had paid for the company. There had also been letters and phone calls of protest to the Washington State Attorney General’s office. But the secrets of his threatening to disclose unspeakable sexual improprieties and trumped-up financial duplicity on Baker’s part were as safe and impregnable as a Swiss bank.
The transition – which had received a modest one-column mention on the front page of the Wall Street Journal at the time – had been swift and uneventful. In the years since his takeover Wolff had made it his mission to perpetuate – albeit, sometimes by illusion – the company’s integrity and reputation. Now, as before, to all intents and purposes, Baker-Reynolds was Lakeford. And, provided Wolff continued to conduct the business as his predecessors had, profitably for sixty years, the company and the town would be around for a long time. Roses would always be in demand. Or so it would appear.
Wolff concluded the phone call to his Chief Financial Officer. He took a quick second look over the papers on his desk. Satisfied that he was fully prepared for the meeting, he shuffled them together and placed them in the nearby leather folder. He glanced at his Breitling watch, a gift from the company. It was 9.52, eight minutes before the meeting was due to start. The memo he had circulated three days before, to all B-R corporate officers and department heads, reflected his taste for brevity. It read:
Please plan to attend a special meeting on Thursday, July 3rd, at 10.00 a.m. in the company boardroom.Ira M. WolffPresident and Chief Executive Officer
Wolff sat in the chair, locked his hands behind his head, leaned back and stared vacantly at the ceiling. He’d put a lot of years into Baker-Reynolds. The company had been highly profitable when he acquired it and he had managed to keep it so until recently. Now though, with much fiercer domestic and global competition, he was fighting for his life again. The writing was on the walclass="underline" it looked as though nothing could forestall the company’s collapse. Ironically, he’d played it straight this time, operating the company in an aggressive, yet businesslike fashion, never straying from the path of legitimacy. Despite everything he had done to bolster sales and reduce overhead, profits kept slipping inexorably downward and costs continued to spiral. Red ink was seeping insidiously through the pages of each successive monthly profit-and-loss statement. More loans were out of the question. He couldn’t pay those he had. The banks were now getting testy. If the company were to go under, it could be more than just a financial disaster for him. If the State Attorney General or the FBI started to get nosy, or if a cub reporter decided to resurrect the demise of Baker-Reynolds, it would only be a matter of time before Wolff ’s past would start popping up all over the media.
In a lifetime of constructing creative contingency plans, this time he had none.
He wondered which part of his past they would dig up first. Probably the five years’ incarceration for fraud, he assumed, along with a fine of three million dollars to be used to repay his victims. This was part of the sentence he had received eighteen years ago for an elaborate Ponzi scheme that had bilked over one hundred investors in five eastern states of more than two hundred million dollars. Employing, as one legal mind stated, ‘a brilliantly conceived but legally corrupt and morally diabolical scheme’, Bernard Wolfenden – his real name – was found guilty of establishing phony corporations, creating fake deeds of trust, fictitious balance sheets and other documents to give investors the impression of legitimacy. Even a loan officer at a prestigious bank was on his payroll at the time.
Wolff finally took his eyes off the ceiling, glanced at his watch, and got up from the chair. It was two minutes to ten. It was inevitable, he concluded, that once the name Wolfenden was in the nation’s computer search engines, other unsavoury episodes of his past would ooze to the surface – the Dallas affair, for one. The media would have a field day with that. So, above all else, he had to keep Baker-Reynolds going. He preferred not to think more about Dallas right now.
The meeting started precisely at ten. Wolff insisted on punctuality. Eighteen people were in attendance. The mega-sized boardroom table, more befitting a White House banquet, left little room for anything else in the room. The story was that old man Baker bought it at auction, had it cut in four pieces, and reassembled it in the room. Sundry awards and diplomas – many faded, all with rose motifs – added listless blotches of colour to the beige walls.
At the head of the table, Ira Wolff studied some papers with Jed Harmon, the company’s Chief Financial Officer. There was a stern look on Wolff ’s tanned face. He was fastidiously dressed in a navy pinstripe suit with a lot of white cuff showing. His only noticeable mannerism was the constant need to brush aside the strands of grey-streaked hair that flopped continually across his glaucous eyes.
Wolff handed the file he’d been scrutinizing back to Jed Harmon and walked over to the vacant chair at one end of the table. He placed his hands on the back of the chair and surveyed the room.
‘Okay, let’s get comfortable. Settle down. Lillian, would you close the door, please.’
There was a jockeying of chairs – the casters gliding silently on the thick, wool carpet – a rustling of papers and the room fell silent. Wolff cleared his throat.
‘Good morning, everybody. Nice to see you back in the saddle, Bill,’ he said, glancing across the table at his General Sales Manager, Bill Samuelson, who had recently been on leave of absence. Wolff paused briefly, to make eye contact around the room. ‘These last two weeks I’ve spent mostly with Jed and our auditors. As a result of those meetings, we’ve reached some tough conclusions that you should know about. You’re not getting any sugar with this pill. These are the facts. Eighteen months ago we started to experience a drop in sales. At first the decline was modest but as we entered our peak season sales started to plunge. In the first quarter of this year they were off over twenty-nine per cent.’