The Adored (5 page)

Mr. Conetta had this idea: instill in his boys a quest for learning, a desire to find truth. He saw philosophy as a critical subject for students of all ages. He believed in self-discovery and original thought. If the asking of questions was a good method for Socrates as he taught Plato more than two thousand years ago, it would be good for these privileged children of the wealthy. Questions required answers, required thought, and if the questions were posed properly, the boys would search for the answer.

The most fully-developed part of Mr. Conetta’s idea was the Great Questions class, itself a twenty-two-week-long search for truth. The formal class was limited to twenty eleventh grade boys, all of whom had to answer twenty questions—one per week with a paper. And one student per week had to present and defend the merits of their answer. The students found out who was presenting each week as they entered the classroom and discovered the defending student’s name next to the question of the week.

“Why does the stock market always go up?” had Lenny the Liar’s name next to it. That question was one of the few material questions posed by Mr. Conetta, and, as he later explained to Leonard Crane and the class, it was not intended to be a treatise on greed.

It was also in this class that the Brunswick Fund was born.

The Brunswick School began in Greenwich, Connecticut, in 1902 as a school for boys with the intention of keeping them strong and upright as society was seen at the time as getting soft. Along the way it grew to accept five hundred boys from pre-k through high school. The school collectively had the highest per capita income per parent of any school in the world. Along with the aforementioned Sebastian Ball Jr.’s father, there were three billionaires and several others worth hundreds of millions at a time when billionaires were not a dime a dozen. This wealth was the result of both new and old money—the new coming from the finance industry on Wall St. and the old hanging around from the early industrial era of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

With a long history of academic and athletic excellence, the school’s tuition rivals the leading universities in the world. The results were significant: most students progress to these same leading universities. The school’s athletic teams also fared well against much larger rivals and frequently won state titles. Brunswick School also had a strong and proud record of public service, both for the local community and the military. The school affirmed what was possible for young men to achieve. It reaffirmed what was possible for boys four years old at Brunswick as seven toddlers became friends for life. Now, much later, Sebastian Ball, Parker Barnes, Edward March Wheelwright, Gideon Bridge, Kishenlal Moira, Traynor Johnson, and Winston Trout were in personal contact with each other almost every day as they pursued their careers.

Five of the boys grew up in Greenwich, one in Stamford, one town up the coast of Long Island Sound, and one in Darien, two towns up the coast. In the 1990s they came together as the class that would graduate Brunswick and go off to college early in the new millennium. They were inseparable as playmates and classmates. In Mr. Conneta’s Great Questions class, it was Edward Wheelwright who answered the question, “How can students of Brunswick School maintain a close lifelong friendship?” with the answer, “Develop the Brunswick Fund.” It was the question he was chosen to answer and defend. The other six boys who viewed themselves as brothers immediately bought into Wheelwright’s idea. To prove their loyalty to each other the seven persuaded their parents to advance fifty thousand dollars each to open the investment fund. If each student graduated successfully from college, then the parents would advance an additional fifty thousand dollars. The seven had to pay their parents back the full one hundred thousand dollars within five years of graduation. Eddie Wheelwright and Kish Moira were the investment managers of the fund, as seventeen-year-old high school juniors. They took on the duties of monthly reporting to the Brunswick Fund: preparing investment recommendations, providing monthly statements and conducting a monthly business meeting that all seven were required to attend in person or through some form of technology.

Lenny the Liar Crane argued that the fund should be opened to all twenty members of the class. Edward argued that since the seven members of Brunswick Fund had participated in many projects as a team, this was just a natural extension. Edward suggested that Lenny could encourage other members of the class to form a similar fund. After the presentation and as the class dismissed, Lenny sought out other class members to join with him in establishing a similar fund. He had no takers.

Father. Parent, mentor, teacher and friend. Ruler, tyrant, despot and adult. Coach. Disciplinarian. Fathers came in all dimensions. The seven Brunswick brothers had seven fathers, each different and different in their differences. Each of the boys was the only child in their family, and as they grew older, their relationships with their fathers shaped them.

Sebastian Ball Sr. was very similar in style to Arthur Trout. They were exceptionally close to their sons and trusted them the way you trust your best friend—without hesitation. They had each made their sons partners with full authority in their businesses. The Ball, Trout differences? Ball trusted and loved his son Sebastian from the outside. Trout wanted to know what made Winston tick. When Winston was young, Arthur was fascinated that he had helped create such a wonderful, small human being. He knew and loved Winston from the inside. The Balls listened intently to each other and allowed the other full support. But before the listening, they had not a thought of what the other was thinking. Each Trout knew the other intently; they knew what the other wanted to do and would do. They allowed each other that freedom.

Of the seven brothers, it was Parker Barnes who was most troubled in his relationship with his father. Jonathan Barnes insisted that Parker make his own mark in the world through his own efforts, something that the father had not been required to do. Resentment grew in Parker as he found his father distant, dictatorial and condescending. There was an oppression that grew daily in Parker distancing him from fatherly love.

Nothing could have been more opposite than the relationship of Admiral Johnson and his boy Traynor. The support system a frequently absent admiral had in place for Tray was a regimen of self-reliance skills that Tray would carry into adulthood.

Tragedy was the commonality in the lives of the Moiras and Wheelwrights. Captain Kim Moira, hero of the 1971 war with Pakistan, left India for the US after the death of Kishenlal’s mother. Kish’s mother suffered a painful death due to malaria, and it was a terrible sadness for the boy without the mother who loved him so dearly. However, no less dearly than Cynthia Wheelwright loved her only son as she died young at fifty-eight due to pancreatic cancer. The Wheelwrights’ tragedy was compounded by the personal economic collapse of the family fortune, lost by Mark Wheelwright as he kept 90 percent of his fortune in Ocean Bank stock. When the great recession struck, Mark was nearly wiped out. While all seven boys were close at Brunswick, Kish Moira and Edward Wheelwright were among the closest. Later, they both attended Harvard’s College and Business School. And from the time they were seventeen, they managed the Brunswick Fund, very successfully, applying lessons learned along the way. It was the best form of education—take what you learn and apply the very day you learn it.

Gideon Bridge was raised mostly by his grandfather, the head of the family law firm. Gideon’s father, George, would drift in and out of the boy’s life on holidays. Grandfather Roy Bridge and his wife took their daughter-in-law and grandson to live with them after George Bridge divorced his wife for a young woman and became the playboy of Greenwich, spending every waking hour in the company of whichever sports star living in town was not actively playing. In the spring he hung out with a linebacker for the NY Giants, in the summer it was a wing on the Rangers and in the fall and winter it was a pitcher on the Mets. The pitcher and George would always make plans to go to Barbados after October 5th since the Mets were never in the post season. For Gideon it was a life of law. Grandfather Roy Bridge was determined that a Bridge would keep the family law firm alive, and he taught and mentored young Gideon in the ways of the law.

Martha Bridge was somewhat shocked by Gideon’s choice of college: Brandeis University. “Isn’t that a Jewish school?” his mother asked.

“Sort of mom, but it won’t make me Jewish,” Gideon replied after they discussed his application.

“Why don’t you go to MIT, like Winston?” she pursued. “They win Nobel Prizes all the time there.”

“I’m going for the law; their pre-law program is the best. And the sciences, they win more MacArthur Genius Awards than anyone.”

She could see his determination, and she did not want to be discouraging, “It sounds like you’ve done your homework, son. Just don’t come back a Jew.”

Gideon went to Brandeis, and he did not come back a Jew. He came back a Mormon. Of his six closest friends, his “brothers,” three, Gideon, Winston and Edward, were Catholic; Sebastian, Tray and Parker were Protestant; and Kish was Hindu. Religion was in their parents’ day who you were; for the brothers, religion had become what you were and that was quickly fading.

On the day Gideon was preparing for his conversion and induction into the Mormon faith, his mother and grandfather accompanied him to the Mormon Temple. Gideon tried reassuring his mother, “Mom, it’s still Jesus.”

“Gideon, it’s not our Jesus,” she replied.

During the Baptism Mrs. Bridge cried audibly all through the ceremony. She thought to herself, “If you live long enough, everyone will turn on you.”

Not quite, in fact in Gideon’s case, he was a Mormon for exactly one and a half years. He felt that religion should help him see things in a new light. When he performed his mission work in Venezuela, he came away unimpressed and uninspired. The happiest day of Mrs. Bridge’s life was not when Gideon returned from South America, but when he said, “Mom, you’re right, he’s not our Jesus,” and with that Gideon repatriated himself into the open arms of Catholicism, Harvard Law and the Bridge Law firm.

And now all seven brothers were men, embarking on the work of their lives. Kish and Edward had success in investment banking and kept the Brunswick Fund growing significantly. Traynor Johnson completed his studies at the US Naval Academy and became a Navy Seal. Parker Barnes joined the family construction business after graduating from Columbia with a degree in architecture. Winston Trout did likewise joining this father’s solar engineering firm after MIT. And Sebastian Ball Jr., well, the acorn did not fall far from the tree. He went to UPenn’s Wharton School, as had his father, and was able to make money as readily as his hedge-fund-owning dad. Together they made a formidable team, and the son had vision and the guts to support his visions. So these seven boys, each an only child of a wealthy family, became “brothers” at the age of four and inseparable as they emerged as adults.

But as they grew life’s consequences would affect them; in a most dire way for some.

Chapter 10

After a year at the Auburn Prison, CJ Strong had settled into a routine of sorts. He found he could handle the day-to-day business of being a prisoner, but what got to him, what weighed on him like a crushing weight was the coercive nature of every second of every day. The physical place was crushing with its thirty-foot-high grey walls and armed guardhouses at the corners of the yard. He remembered his religious teaching that God was omni-present; in Auburn only the guards were omni-present. Whether in his cell, at work in the prison power plant, when reading to illiterate prisoners over lunch two days a week, playing basketball during his hour and half of “freedom” as an honor prisoner, at meals, in showers, or as he went to sleep at night, the omni-present guards hovered, cajoled, prodded, encouraged, threatened, leered, and occasionally looked the other way. And that was when CJ Strong worried the most, when the guards looked the other way. It usually meant a fight with or a beating by other prisoners was about to occur. It also meant older male prisoners were seeking sex from younger male prisoners. He was terrified of that, the threat of that. In his time there, nothing happened. He had been approached by prisoners; guards had suggested that certain prisoners wanted to see him in the back of the library.

Strong felt the only way he could survive at Auburn was to be like his name: Strong. Stronger. Strongest. He needed to have an iron will to move on, to avoid capitulation, which he learned from reading meant to cede, to yield, to give up or in. He would not. He worked out five days a week in the gym. At six-foot-one-inch tall, he was filling out at Auburn. A slim kid turned much more powerful man. Bench presses, curls, squats, push-ups, chin ups, repetitions, hundreds of reps. Till his arms ached, till they cramped. Thousands of sit-ups until he could pop himself up from a lying position without the use of his arms. In the prison yard, he looked forward to the karate taught him by a great black man, a black belt. The black belt took CJ and two Latino prisoners under tutelage and all progressed quickly with the prison yard sensei conferring brown belts, made in the prison shop, on the three after four months.

Near-freedom came to CJ once a month when Louise Strong took the four-hour bus trip to visit her son. It was what CJ treasured the most. Louise Strong always had been a cheerful force in life and in his life. It had been just the two of them for seven years after his father was shot dead in the pool room in Stamford. They knew each other’s every feeling. And so it was that during the first two years of imprisonment, there were glorious days in the life of Curtis Strong and in the life of Louise Strong—in the lives and hearts that each adored.