Whipping Boy (32 page)

It would be so easy to dispute Cesar’s rambling defense by pulling up the mug shots stored on my phone. But that would be cheap and foolhardy. I need to reel him in slowly.

Our second conversation ends soon after he brings up the fraud. I fly back to Providence knowing I’ll have to put some time between us before we talk about it again.

A year later, I return to San Francisco and arrange another meeting with Cesar. This time I really go to town, booking dinner for two at an upscale Moroccan restaurant famous for its eight-course tasting menu. I figure a meal like that will provide ample time to probe the criminal activities Cesar mentioned in passing at the end of our previous exchange.

The first thing I find myself thinking when Cesar arrives at the restaurant is that his black paisley button-down must be in the wash. Tonight he is wearing a polo shirt with an embroidered eagle, the logo of the aloe vera company that employs him. Unlike the avian emblems associated with Aiglon and Badische, this raptor is posed in a stance of midpredation, its talons clutching at a single word stitched in gold: “Forever.”

After we order drinks, I try to soften Cesar up. “I read your web essay ‘The Art of Persuasion.’ Amazing piece of writing.” I quote a line from memory: “‘Information is power, so gather it well and manage it very carefully.’ That’s excellent advice. It’s advice I plan to follow.”

Cesar acknowledges the compliment with a smile.

“Oh, and dinner’s on me,” I tell him. “I’m on assignment.”

“What assignment?”

“Don’t you remember? I’m writing an article, maybe a book. About Aiglon. About the boys of Belvedere and the men they became.”

“Oh, right,” Cesar says. “Brilliant.”

I pull out pen and paper as the waiter arrives with our drinks. “Do you gentlemen wish a few minutes of face time before we begin building your meal?”

“That’s not necessary,” I tell the waiter.

“Very good. Then let’s get started. Tonight, our chef begins his tasting with a soup course. In addition to the lentil, we have available but not printed”—the waiter interrupts himself to lean forward and reveal with the conspiratorial delight of a black-marketeer—“the cauliflower soup, which we serve tableside, poured over a garnish of two raw almonds, a few dehydrated capers, a little bit of raisin puree, and a crispy fried individual floret of organic broccolini. . . .”

After he completes his oration and we make our selections (anchovies, lamb shank, tuna and squab, etc., etc.), Cesar launches into an account of his recent trip to Spain.

“Barcelona was incredible,” he says. “I wouldn’t mind living there.”

“What would you do?”

“Same as what I’m doing now.” He pinches the eagle on his shirt. “It’ll be my five-year Forever Living anniversary in November. I get a gold ring with an onyx and a little diamond in the middle, and that’s pretty cool.”

“So you’d live in Barcelona and work in the Bay Area? That’s a helluva commute.”

Cesar, the night he talked about his screenplay,
Parallel Lies.

“I could get away with it. I’d come back one week a month.”

“One week in four? Really?”

“I don’t think I could do two weeks a month,” Cesar says, misinterpreting the reason for my skepticism. “But a week I could manage.” He explains how: a German film producer who’s helping him finance a feature-length psychological thriller (“No, not
Parallel Lies,
another project”) told him that if you fly between Barcelona and San Francisco via Zurich in “business class three times, you get the fourth flight free.”

It’s at this point that I write the letters
DQ
on my notepad, a coded reminder to myself that Cesar displays about as much common sense as that other Iberian fantasist, Don Quixote.

“But commuting would only be temporary,” he assures me. “Forever Living has an office in Madrid.”

“How’s your Spanish?”

“Not fluent,” he says. This comes as a surprise, given that his father was Venezuelan. Still, it might help explain why he failed to convince the US Bureau of Prisons to change his ethnicity from white to Hispanic.

“And if the Forever Living gig doesn’t pan out?”

“I found a financial services job in Barcelona. I’ve sent them two emails.”

“That’s right. You’ve done financial stuff before,” I say leadingly.

Cesar nods. “I started my career at Merrill Lynch in ’82. Got my license in securities. Then I became a broker at Charles Schwab. Then I traded currencies. I was the manager for a foreign exchange outfit in the early nineties—before there was any Internet, before the euro. We used Knight Ridder equipment. Viewtron screens. Teletrac
terminals.” (More specifically, Cesar worked for Infoex International, a short-lived day-trading operation that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission charged with “fraud” and “material misrepresentation.”) “I was basically overseeing executives. I wish I could do that again. After all, sales management is sales management.”

“Isn’t selling aloe vera different from trading currency?”

“
Totally
different,” Cesar says, seemingly unaware that he’s contradicting what he just told me. “But what I
really
want to do is more international sales and marketing.”

“Which is what you were doing with that prince you told me about, right?”

Cesar shifts in his seat.

I prime the pump a little more. “That whole business sounded very, very . . .
dramatic
. What happened, exactly?”

“You want to know what happened?”

“I do.”

And so, ever obliging, Cesar opens up about his ties to the Badische Trust Consortium.

Truly I was born to be an example of misfortune, and a target and mark at which arrows of adversity are aimed and directed.

Miguel de Cervantes
,
Don Quixote

Most of the world today is governed by Caesars. Men are more and more treated as things. Torture is ubiquitous. And, as Sartre wrote in his preface to Henri Alleg’s chilling book about Algeria, “Anybody, at any time, may equally find himself victim or executioner.” Suetonius, in holding up a mirror to those Caesars of diverting legend, reflects not only them but ourselves: half-tamed creatures, whose great moral task is to hold in balance the angel and the monster within—for we are both, and to ignore that duality is to invite disaster.

Gore Vidal
, “The Twelve Caesars”

“We used to stay at—where was it in Zurich?—at the . . .” Cesar struggles for a name I have no trouble remembering. “The Dolder Grand,” he says at last. “A six-star hotel on top of a hill.”

It’s a five-star hotel, actually, but I resist the impulse to correct him.

“That’s where we’d have meetings and see clients. The group I worked with was called Badische Anlage Treuhand.”

I fake a confused look.

“
Treuhand
means
trust
in German,” Cesar explains. “Prince Robert von Badische was the chairman of the Trust.”

I start writing.
B-A-D-D—

“No,” Cesar corrects. “It’s spelled B-A-D-I-S-C-H-E.”

“Got it. Thanks. And how did you meet this Prince Robert fellow?”

“Through the administrator of the Trust. We used to do import-export involving urea fertilizers and debt-for-equity swaps on behalf of the Venezuelan Development Corporation in the Lincoln Building. I introduced the administrator to his current wife. He loves Latinas.”

“What kind of company was Badische?”

“A hundred-and-fifty-year-old investment house based in Baden, Germany.”

Hardly. It was a Delaware corporation, established in 1997, operating out of a rent-stabilized one-bedroom on Central Park South.

“What was it like, working for a prince?”

“It was an incredible experience,” Cesar says. “Incredible. I served as Prince Robert’s aide-de-camp on a diplomatic mission to Malta. He even knighted me.”
*

“In Malta?”

“No. The ceremony took place in New York, at a restaurant on Fifty-Fourth or Fifty-Fifth Street, upstairs in the Knights of Malta room.”

I realize at this point that I’m starting to sound like an interrogator, yet I don’t sense Cesar minds. “What did you do for the investment house?”

“I helped clients prepare business plans and loan documents.”

“What kind of clients?”

“High-powered types. There was a German guy who wanted to turn used plastics into new desks.” (If memory serves, he lost about $750K.) “Another guy, from Japan, had this epoxy invention that got hard underwater. I had one client who wanted to start a tire-recycling facility.” (He was referring, I knew, to Masimba Musoni, a Zimbabwean engineer compelled to submit a loan request for $100 million even though he needed only $1 million. With Cesar’s help, Musoni lost his shirt and, soon after, left the United States.)

“How did you vet potential borrowers?”

“There was a whole qualification process,” Cesar says. “These were big,
big
projects, generally requiring loans in the tens of millions of dollars. Project proposals are like a dime a dozen—you can find ’em anytime, anywhere. So one of the things I did for Badische was screen, say, four hundred submissions to find maybe four or five people that were really prepared. That had their act together. That they could put their own money in.”

I suspect the last criterion was the only one that mattered.

“Typically, we’d meet at the top of the MetLife Building, in the boardroom of Clifford Chance, the largest law firm in the world.”

“And if the prince deemed your client acceptable?”

When that happened, Cesar explains, he would shepherd the prospective borrower to “Zurich or France, usually Zurich,” to hammer out funding details and sign contracts.

Again I press for specifics.

“The transactions involved bank guaranties.”

“What are bank guaranties?”

“So say you’re a client. Badische lends you money—more than needed to fund your project. The balance is used to purchase bank notes that mature at a certain rate of interest that end up covering the principal amount you needed.”

“Sorry. I’m not following you.”

“It’s complicated. My understanding of the way it works is that the larger sum is held by the bank that funds the transaction. So they end up earning the interest on the money and end up covering the principal released to you to begin with.”

I’m still confused, but I see no reason to ask for further clarification since I know the whole point of the loan program was to confuse would-be borrowers into parting with their money. I find it interesting that Cesar describes the scheme in the present tense, as if it’s an ongoing and viable loan program. “How many deals did you complete?” I ask.

“None.”

“None? What happened?”

Cesar lets out a sigh. “My clients kept promising me, ‘I have a bank. I have a bank. I have a bank.’ See, it’s the responsibility of the borrower to have a project
and
a bank—and it has to be a ‘top-twenty-five-class bank.’ Not some small branch. The bank, to be acceptable, has to be willing to back things up with a bank guaranty to support this money. Anyway, a lot of banks, I guess, told my clients they could do it—or the clients
thought
they could do it—and they couldn’t.”

“I imagine that frustrated them.”

Cesar brushes aside my concern. “Look. They signed contracts with their attorneys present. Their attorneys double-checked it all out. There was a schedule, a very strict schedule, that everybody had to follow. Everybody was clear on that. Painfully clear. Badische said, ‘Don’t even
think
about signing unless you’re sure you can perform, because after you sign, you have three weeks to present us with a letter from your bank stating you can take possession of the funds.’ You figure the client can do it, right?”

I shrug noncommittally.

“Well, for one reason or another, the client comes back with ‘The bank changed their mind.’ Or ‘They don’t really want to do it.’ Or the client never really had a banking relationship in the first place.”

“So what happened?”

“The shit hit the fan is what happened.”

“Y2K was one of those years where one thing happens, then another thing happens, and then another,” Cesar says grimly.

“I had one of those once a long time ago.” On my notepad I scribble,
Y2K = C’s annus horribilis.

“I ended up getting into trouble with the law because of a woman from New York who lost money to Badische.”

Enter Barbara Laurence. “How much money did this woman from New York lose?”

“A half million dollars. It was a performance guaranty, which she would have gotten back if she and Prince Robert had closed their transaction.”

“But that didn’t happen?”

“No.”

“What did?”

“She complained to the US attorney. Next thing I know, I get a phone call. ‘Hi, this is Detective So-and-So from the US Attorney’s Office. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I’m calling about this and that.’”