Read Online Grand Master by D.W. Buffa - Free Book Online Page B

be
reckoned with, and now, forty years later, supposedly a broken man,
locked away in prison, he still had some of the same electricity,
the same ability to make you want to listen, and believe.
    “Remember that old line about how all
politics is local? It used to be true; it isn’t anymore. Politics
aren’t local; they’re global. No one has yet quite figured that
out. It’s the movement of money. Look, when I was a kid, we
understood the way things worked. If you had trouble, if your
garbage wasn’t being picked up, if you needed some help, if you
needed a job, you went to someone, the ward boss, the city
councilman - maybe someone in the mayor’s office - and they did
what they could. And then, at election time, you returned the
favor. We knew something else, too; we knew that these guys we
elected to office lived a lot better than they could have lived on
the salaries they were paid. We knew the way money changed hands,
the way that if you were a contractor and wanted to do business
with the city - build the new schoolhouse or repair the potholes in
the streets - you made sure some of the profit wound up in the
pockets of your friends at city hall. All politics was local,
because that was where you could make a deal.”
    Burdick’s hand was flying across the page,
taking everything down in a shorthand scrawl of his own devising.
His hand stopped moving. He looked up at Morris. “But you never did
that, made that kind of deal. What changed? Why did you do what you
did?”
    Morris shrugged and looked away. He fell into
a long silence, as if he was not sure even now what had led him to
do the things he had. “Maybe I was greedier than the others; maybe
when there wasn’t much money involved I was too afraid of getting
caught. It isn’t that difficult to turn down a bribe when they’re
counting in thousands; but millions, and all of it safe, money that
will get paid in the form of salaries and stock options after you
retire from Congress and become a board member for some
international financial consortium? That’s something else again.
With that kind of money it’s easy to convince yourself that you’re
not doing anything fundamentally wrong, and that, in any case, you
deserve it.
    “Not really convince yourself, you
understand,” added Morris as he sat down again; “but think that a
legitimate argument could be made for doing what you might have
done anyway, make certain changes that make it easier for certain
companies to compete in the new global economy we keep talking
about.
    “All that needed to be done was to add
certain specific requirements to some major defense procurement
contracts, requirements that could only be met by firms owned and
controlled by the same investment house.”
    “The Four Sisters,” said Burdick, just to be
sure.
    “Yes, of course. But you need to understand
that the money, the serious money, wasn’t in the value of the
contract itself. It was in the advance knowledge that the contract
was going to them.”
    Quentin Burdick knew a thing or two about
Wall Street and the way serious money was made. “The jump in the
price of the stock, inside information - they could buy before
anyone else knew.”
    “Right; and then with the money they made,
they bought other companies; or rather had companies they
controlled do it for them, because The Four Sisters does not exist.
They moved money all around the world. Some of the money they moved
here came from places we supposedly don’t do business with.
    “Do you understand what I’m telling you? The
Four Sisters is a shell game, a way for companies, and countries,
to acquire influence that, if we knew about it, we would never
permit. They’re into everything: television, movies, the whole
entertainment industry; newspapers, magazines, book publishing.
That’s when I started to question what they were doing, when I
threatened to go public and bring it all to stop. And that’s why
I’m here - because they would not let that