White Collar Blackmail: White Collar Crime Financial Suspense Thriller (3 page)

“The return could be north of fifty mil for an outlay of two,” Becker replied.

“It sure makes my milk deal look puny,” O’Brien said.

“Yeah, looks okay, Dermott, but so did that deal ya had Elliot do with the Italian stockbroker. The prick who fed us bullshit inside information,” Borchard said. “Didn’t we end up payin’ him and losin’ millions?”

“We paid Giovani a million dollars for the information, and he invested it in the same stocks he recommended to us,” Becker said. “This is different. We’ll be dealing in facts, not rumors, and if it works, we’ll be able to infiltrate other accounting firms using the same or similar methods.”

“For a fifty mil return it’s worth a try,” Borchard said. “Whatta ya gonna to do about Giovani?”

“Do? I’m not going to do anything. What do you expect me to do?” Becker replied.

“We lost millions, and you paid him a mil for bullshit! Did ya at least get that back? Because if ya didn’t, it sends a terrible message to others who deal with us. It says we’re soft, we can be ripped off, and we’re gonna do nothin’ about it. It’s a bad message. Next thing you know we’ll have stooges linin’ up at the door to feed us bullshit,” Borchard said. “Dermott, you've got a good man in Jack Elliot workin’ for you. Get him to take care of it.”

“He can’t pay us back. Didn’t you hear me? He put the million into the same stocks he recommended to us. I told you when you joined us that the only people we prematurely terminate are those who might pose a threat. Giovani’s not a dying weirdo or an out of control drug addict. He’s no threat to us. We’re not the Mafia, you know.” Becker laughed. “And, unlike the weirdo and the addict, he has a large family. If anything happens to him, there’ll be a lot of questions asked.”

Borchard sat at the end of the table massaging his goatee with his thumb and forefinger. He was an intimidating presence, lean as a greyhound with a swarthy complexion and piercing black eyes. “Prematurely terminate! You fuckin’ silver tongues make me laugh. Why don’t ya call it what it is? Murder. If ya don’t do something about Giovani, I will,” he said.

“Whoa, right there. Brock, we’re not Murder Incorporated,” Ridgeway said. “Giovani can’t and won’t hurt us. His killing would be pointless.”

“I’ll second that,” O’Brien said.

“Perhaps Brock’s right,” Becker said to the astonishment of the others. “Leave it with me. I’ll need a month or so, but I’ll take care of our little Italian friend.”

Borchard stood up and walked to the door. Becker thought the bastard hadn't smiled once, but that wasn’t unusual. He never smiled. “I gotta get back to Chicago,” Borchard said. “Gentlemen and lady, you have a fucked up enforcement policy. I’m relyin’ on you to fix it, Dermott. Don’t let me down.”

As Borchard closed the door behind him, Ridgeway said, “Who the fuck does he think he is? Why do you put up with that shit, Dermott?”

“He’s just flexing his muscles,” Becker said. “Don’t worry about him, Arthur. He’s a big man in Chicago. He’s nothing here. He just doesn’t know it.”

Chapter 3

Montgomery Hastings & Pierce had offices all around the world with each national firm being a separate legal entity. With more than fifty thousand employees, it was large but not a behemoth like PWC or EY. The US arm of Montgomery Hastings & Pierce had offices in every state and was overseen nationally by a democratically elected eleven partner committee. Two members of that committee came from the New York office. The firm was highly respected, private and abhorred any form of publicity. It had been held up to ridicule after the committee declined the audit of Enron and annual fees exceeding fifty million. After Enron collapsed and took huge accounting firm Arthur Andersen with it, the wisdom of the committee’s decision was recognized.

Todd Hansen was glad to see that he hadn’t been missed when he got back to the office. He had three supervisors who reported to him. Two were out on audits, but the third, Wendy Abbott, whom he’d asked to cover for him, gave him the thumbs up as he entered his tiny, eighty square foot cubicle. It had taken six years to achieve this status, and he’d previously occupied one seat at a long desk that would accommodate thirty. He could see the rows of desks from his cubicle, and they reminded him of the production lines of the many factories he’d tromped through. To say that he hated accounting and audit was an understatement, but with good luck and good horses he’d soon be saying farewell to this environment.

He had barely sat down when the intercom buzzed and his boss and one of the national partners, Doug Lechte, asked him to come down to his office. When Todd entered the large corner office, Vanessa Hodge, another audit manager, was sitting opposite Lechte enjoying a joke. “Grab a seat, Todd,” he said, unbuttoning the top button of his shirt and removing his tie. “I was just talking to Vanessa about a reassignment of audit clients between you two.”

As Todd sat down, Vanessa crossed her slender legs and gave him a brilliant smile.

“There’ll be a little bit of interchange between members of our teams,” she said. “It might be fun.”

Todd looked at her and thought
I’d kill to have some physical interchange with you.
He had dreamed about asking her out but had always become over-awed and chickened out. Besides, as far as he knew, she was so determined to make partner, she didn’t have time to date. It crossed his mind that she might be gay, and he thought
what a waste.
She was African-American with the looks and body of a supermodel. Her wavy, shoulder length hair glistened. If that wasn’t enough, she had been blessed with a humongous IQ and was as smart as a whip. “Sounds good,” he said. “When’s it going to happen, Doug?”

Lechte rolled his sleeves up exposing his brawny arms and ran his hands through his cropped gray hair. He was naturally untidy. Some of the partners didn’t like it but dared not say anything. He was the firm’s rainmaker and could converse with cleaners and senators with equal ease. Never one to talk about himself, it was rumored that he had been a champion college football player who could have played NFL had he not torn his ACL. Todd thought himself lucky to work for Lechte. “I think we should aim for the first of December. That’ll give you a few weeks to organize things between yourselves. Does that work for you, Vanessa?”

“That’ll be fine,” she responded. “Todd will have no trouble picking up the status of the audits from my client files.”

Todd had no doubt that was true but wondered how Vanessa and her team would do working on his client files. His work had been deteriorating for over a year, ever since he had started developing his betting system. He wasn’t worried, though. If all went well, the life of being a boring auditor would soon be behind him.

“I’ll leave it with you two to organize, but, Todd, I want you to handle the Marks & Spender and the Hallstrom audits, and Vanessa you’ll handle Crisco and Homewares. You’ll need to coordinate and work together during the overlap period,” Lechte said. “Now get out of here, I’ve got an appointment downtown, and I’m running late.”

As Todd strolled back to his cubicle, he smiled. Doug Lechte was a great guy, but he could be tough, too, and was certainly no one’s fool. There were six audit managers, and Lechte could have selected any one of them to switch assignments with, but he’d chosen the brilliant Vanessa Hodge. Todd suspected that this wasn’t the interchange and reassignment that Lechte had said it was, but rather an internal review by Vanessa of his work and working papers. When he’d entered Lechte’s office, Vanessa had been laughing. Maybe the joke had been about him.

Still, it wasn’t unexpected. He had been devoting more and more time to horses and less to work. Now the chickens were coming home to roost. He had hoped to have a stake of a million before quitting work and becoming a full-time gambler. He hated that description, though, and saw himself a systems analyst exploiting the foibles of bookmaking that others hadn’t been smart enough to decipher. If he had to make a start with just under three hundred thousand, then so be it. He’d proven that his system worked, and now it was time to increase the stakes. If all went well, he’d have a mil within six months.

Todd spent the rest of the day mulling over his future. At exactly five o’clock, he left his cubicle and headed for the elevators. It was the official finishing time of Montgomery Hastings & Pierce, but no one left at that time, well not anyone who wanted to progress, that was. The main office was abuzz, and the long desks were crammed with recently qualified graduates trying to impress their immediate superiors. Managers aspiring to make partner would not leave before eight o’clock, and some of the more ambitious would still be toiling away at midnight. The street lights were already on when Todd left the building, and he walked briskly toward Park Street, little clouds of condensation forming in front of his face.

His fully furnished one-bedroom apartment was on the second level of an old four level building on East 60th Street. The rent set him back more than five thousand a month and was way more than he could afford. However, the burning desire to impress his parents and family overrode more sensible and less expensive options. Despite it being more than he could afford, he loved the lofty ceilings, the king-sized bed and the open kitchen with every conceivable stainless steel appliance. It was only a fifteen-minute walk from the Carnegie Center, but it was dark when Todd opened the door and entered the spacious living room. He flicked the lights on and went to the recently renovated bathroom and splashed water on his face. He could have had a doorman and concierge in one of the high-rises, but it would’ve been half the size.

Todd turned the heat on full blast and grabbed a Budweiser from the fridge. He made himself comfortable on his suede sofa and settled down to do some hard, enjoyable work. With his iPad in hand, he entered the results of today’s race results. It was slow, methodical work and he listed details of positions, track conditions, jockeys, trainers, weights, times, odds, distances and margins. Each category had a simple numerical weighting assigned to it. Once the database was complete, he inputted fields for tomorrow’s races. Then he got to the fun part and ran a scan that produced the forecast results for every race. The results were listed in order of probability, and a numeric rating between 1 and a 100 was assigned to each horse. Todd’s success had come from forecast winners with a rating of 95 or higher.   

Chapter 4

Brock Borchard eased into his first class seat and accepted a glass of orange juice from the flight attendant. As the jet departed La Guardia, he mused about how easy it was to become rich in America. He had only known poverty in Bosnia but had learned the lessons of fear and violence well. Killings in Bosnia were an everyday occurrence, so New York held no fears for him when he disembarked from a merchant ship, alone at the tender age of sixteen. By the time, he was twenty-one he had murdered five men and attempted to murder another. New York became too hot for him, and he took off for Chicago, the best decision he would ever make. He had no education or qualifications, but he was a smart man who sucked up knowledge like a sponge.

It was by chance that Borchard found out about Vulture Inc., and he’d only been a shareholder and director for two years. He was still getting to know his co-directors. Arthur Ridgeway had been doing diligence on a transport company in Chicago that Borchard also wanted to acquire. In normal circumstances when Borchard was bidding against another party, he’d instruct his men to persuade that party that they shouldn’t be bidding. The usual tools of persuasion were baseball bats, but there were no limits to what Borchard would do to win. For some reason, he decided to have dinner with Ridgeway before he broke his kneecaps. At the dinner, Borchard found out about Ridgeway’s record and the business he had built with tainted lawyer, Dermott Becker. Borchard may not have been educated, but he knew what villains were. As he listened to Ridgeway, he realized he was talking to a master, legal crook. Someone who knew enough about business and law to walk the tightrope, and sometimes fall, but with enough know-how and contacts to pick himself up and recover unscathed. By the time dinner was over, baseball bats had been forgotten, and Borchard had agreed to withdraw his bid, subject to meeting Dermott Becker.

Two days later Becker flew into O’Hare for what he thought would be a short meeting with Borchard. He returned to New York seven days later, having reluctantly entered into an in-principle agreement with Borchard to sell him fifteen percent of Vulture Inc. Part of the consideration was Borchard’s cocaine business and his Colombian contacts. Vulture was running cocaine in New York, but the quality and purity was vastly inferior to what Borchard was running in Chicago. Borchard knew his investment was going to be extremely profitable and would’ve been prepared to accept less than fifteen percent. What he wanted to see was how these white collar criminals operated. Once he’d learned all they could teach him, he would buy them out. Should they be disinclined to sell, he would remove them.

He hadn’t been disappointed and had come a long way in a comparatively short time. He remembered his first board meeting when Dermott Becker had said there were a hundred companies interposed between Vulture and ACME. Borchard had no idea what interposed meant, but he wasn’t shy about asking. He’d sat in many meetings where the participants were too embarrassed to ask what they saw as dumb questions for fear of being ridiculed. Brock Borchard had no such reservations and asked any question that came to his mind. Only the brave and the stupid laughed. He’d always known that the mega-rich had international bank accounts but had no idea of their intricacies. Now he could differentiate the pros and cons of Liechtenstein, Hong Kong, the Caymans, Swiss and Irish banks. His businesses now operated under complex corporate and tax structures and Ridgeway had shown him ways to launder cash that defied belief. ACME owned legitimate retail chains comprising more than a thousand outlets and banked large amounts of cash daily. A perfect cover to launder drug monies. When Borchard had asked about the taxes the retail businesses paid on the drug monies, Dermott Becker had said, “We don’t mind paying our fair share of taxes. No one around this table is going to meet the same fate as Al Capone.”

When Borchard got off the plane, he was greeted by a gigantic man with scraggly black hair and a swarthy complexion not dissimilar to his own. “Did ya have a successful trip, boss?”

“It was fine, Farik,” Borchard replied. “We have little time to waste? Where’s the limo?”

“At the front of the terminal with the engine running. I knew you’d be running short of time, so I brought Ahmet with me.”

The limo was in a no parking area, and the rear door was being held open by a man only slightly less monstrous than Farik. “Ahmet, take me to my penthouse and wait while I get changed,” Borchard said. “I’m havin’ dinner with Joe Brereton of the Federated Laborers Union, and I don’t want to be late. Did you get the cash, Farik?”

“Of course, boss,” Farik replied, “fifty thousand in a plain envelope just as you said.”

“Good, and, in case I forget to tell ya later, I want ya to pick me up at five in the mornin’. I’ll need a run, some cool air, and a hard workout after puttin’ up with Brereton’s bullshit tonight.”

It was a bleak morning; the wind was howling, and it was bitterly cold when Farik pulled up at the front of the Rialto Towers in exclusive North Wabash Avenue. Sitting next to him was the third member of the Serbian Mafia, a wiry little man who had changed his name from Dragan Voinovich to Dirk Vaughan shortly after coming to America. A master of disguise, he was the smallest and most deadly of the trio. They saw their boss coming out of the revolving doors wearing a white t-shirt, black tracksuit pants, and Nikes. He immediately started running at a rapid rate, enjoying the feel of the icy wind cutting through his lean body. He lengthened his stride and increased his pace as he turned hard right onto East Ohio Street. A few minutes later he was on North Lake Shore Drive heading to North Beach. It was pitch black, but he could hear the lake’s water lapping up against the shore. He looked down at the stopwatch on his right wrist before glancing at the heart rate monitor on his left. It was reading 185. His doctor had told him that his maximum safe heart rate was 150 beats per minute, but still he pushed harder. He’d completed two miles and knowing that he only had another mile to go, he again increased the pace. His lungs were burning and despite the cold, sweat from his forehead dripped into eyes and blurred his vision. His legs ached but still he drove himself. He was one of that rare breed who loved pain. He knew that he was within range of breaking his personal best time, but the shrill beep from his heart rate monitor warned him that he’d just gone through 190. All it did was drive him harder.

The two men in the limousine following fifty yards behind him wore thick overcoats, and the heat was turned up to the max. Every second morning they watched their boss go through this ritual and on the other mornings he sparred six rounds with a former contender for the light heavyweight title. In the winter when there was heavy snow and the lake was frozen he was forced onto a treadmill. He hated it and on those days his men did everything they could to avoid him rather than feel his wrath.

“He’ll be in a great mood today.” Farik smiled. “I might ask for a raise.”

“Stupid is as stupid does,” Dirk replied.

Farik didn’t respond. There were only two men in the world that he was wary of, and they were both within range.

With four hundred yards to go, Borchard demanded that his body and legs give more. His face was contorted, and the heart rate monitor began emitting a constant beep. He disregarded it and instead focused on his stopwatch, breaking into a full sprint knowing he was about to break seventeen minutes for the first time in years. As his feet touched the sand, he came to an abrupt halt and hit the red button on his stopwatch. Seventeen minutes and three seconds, an outstanding time for a man his age. As he bent over, hands on knees, gasping for breath, he scowled and wondered whether he’d started his stopwatch a few seconds too early. Dirk got out of the limo, the collar of his overcoat turned up around his neck. “Great run, boss. Do ya wanna drink?” he asked, handing Borchard a bottle of water.

“I broke seventeen minutes. There are very few men in the world my age who could come even close to that.” He took a swig from the bottle, dropped to the damp sand, and in one motion did the first of two hundred push-ups. He followed with two hundred sit-ups and then in push-up position, held himself for five minutes. It was five degrees, but the wind chill factor made it closer to minus ten when he kicked his Nikes off, dispensed with his tracksuit pants and threw his t-shirt on the sand. He was wearing a black pair of Speedos, and his body was ripped. His long, sinewy muscles rippled, and his six pack was cut to the max. The scars on his body told a story; one ran across his left arm, another about four inches long crossed his left pectoral, and the largest and ugliest sat just below his Adam’s apple.

He pulled his goggles down before striding into the near freezing water. Without pausing he dived in and surfaced free styling strongly, churning through the water with smooth rhythmic strokes. When he was about three hundred yards from the shore, he turned, took a deep breath and started back, pulling the water through his powerful hands.

As Borchard neared the shore, Farik climbed out of the limo carrying a large towel, a thick white dressing gown, and small bag. “Make sure the heat’s turned off before I get in, Farik,” Borchard shouted.

“It’s done, boss. When have I ever forgot?” Farik shouted back as he picked up the damp and sandy t-shirt, the tracksuit pants, and Nikes. As he bent down, his overcoat opened at the top, and a gust of wind cut through his chest like a knife. He silently cursed his boss’s eccentricity.

Borchard strode from the lake, hands locked behind his head, breathing deeply.

“Good swim, boss?”

“Yeah,” Borchard replied, taking the towel and rubbing his body vigorously. After a few minutes, he dropped his goggles, Speedos and towel on the sand and fully naked, held his arms out so Farik could put his dressing gown on him. “Is that okay, boss?”

“Yeah,” Borchard grunted, striding toward the car with Farik waddling close behind.  

Dirk was holding the rear door of the limo open, a small hand towel over his arm. Borchard climbed in and swung his legs out of the car so that Dirk could clean the sand from his feet.

“They’re clean,” he said, slipping into the slippers that were waiting for him. His water was on the console and the newspapers were sitting next to him on the adjoining rear seat. He picked up the
Tribune
and turned to the sports section. “Let’s go, Farik. I’ve got a lot to get through today.”