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company, and later, after we found it—embezzlement or fraud or bribery or whatever—we’d discover that what the client really wanted was to see if it could be found. Sort of like a game. A scavenger hunt. If we couldn’t find it, neither would the Justice Department. And they always insisted that we bury our findings. Clean up the mess for them and keep our mouths shut. If you didn’t go along with them, they might refuse to pay. And the word would get around that you were, well, maybe a little too fussy. A pain in the ass. Not the kind of firm you could really be comfortable with.
This sort of thing happened far more than we or anyone else liked to admit. Which was why you had to be careful about who you signed up to work for. You didn’t want to find yourself complicit in covering up someone else’s crime.
“This has the potential to blow up in our faces,” I said. I lowered my voice. “There was close to a billion dollars there in cash. Sealed in bricks by the U.S. Treasury.”
“So?”
“So there’s this annoying little law. The bulk-cash smuggling law of 2001. If you’re shipping more than ten thousand bucks in cash, you’ve got to fill out paperwork.”
“Oh, please. Not if the government does it.”
“This wasn’t a government flight. This was a private cargo shipment.”
“The government uses private cargo firms all the time these days. You know that.”
“For a billion dollars’ worth of cash? I’m dubious.”
“Bottom line, this isn’t your problem, Nick. Grow up. Don’t be naïve.”
Now he was pulling out the heavy artillery. There was nothing worse, in Stoddard’s mind, than being naïve about how the world really worked. He had no patience for it.
“I’m not taking a moral position, here, Jay. I’m just saying that this is the sort of thing that ends up splashed all over the front page of the Washington Post, and suddenly we’re dragged into it. First as a sidebar. Then we become our own separate front-page story.”
“Only if it’s truly illegal, which we don’t know, and only if someone talks. Barring that, we’re on totally solid ground.”
“You really do have faith in the ultimate goodness of mankind, don’t you?” The only successful way to argue with Jay, I’d learned, was to out-cynical him.
He laughed loud and long. Jay had a good smile but a lot of gold fillings at the back, and they caught the light. “Look, Nicky. The world’s a dirty place. I’m sure your father could tell you a lot more about that than I could. Give him a call. Ask him.”
He arched a single brow, which was something I’d always wished I could do. Stoddard wasn’t trying to be snide, I didn’t think. He probably just intended this as his coup de grâce, his knockout punch.
“I don’t think they allow incoming phone calls at his prison,” I said. “Though I admit I’ve never tried.”
IF YOU took a really close look at some of the biggest, most notorious scandals of the last thirty or so years, you’d find Jay Stoddard lurking somewhere in the shadows. As an investigator or a fixer or an adviser, I mean. Whether it was the Iran-Contra hearings in the Reagan days or a Canadian media mogul on trial for fraud. Or one of a dozen Congressional sex scandals. And a whole lot more situations that might have exploded into ugly public imbroglios if it hadn’t been for Stoddard’s work.
But you’d have to know where to look, because Jay didn’t like to leave traces. And he always preferred to be on the winning side.
One of the very few times he picked the wrong side was when he agreed to work for my father. Victor Heller was arrested and charged with massive accounting and securities fraud and grand larceny, and being the smart and extremely well-connected guy that he was, he hired the finest investigative firm in the world to assist his legal defense. Unfortunately for both Jay and Dad, the facts got in the way. He was sent to prison for thirty years.
In fact, I’m
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