First Bank of America had gone from stonewalling me to setting up a meeting. And not just any meeting. A meeting with four of its most senior executives on a Monday evening. Why the big turnout for me? It wasn’t the magnitude of my family’s custom, that was for sure. I was forced to conclude that it was the perk of my job. Financial investigators were a bit like journalists – companies assume we can kick up a stink that could get noticed. Frankly I wasn’t so sure, but you take your breaks where you can. Still . . . four senior executives? They were looking to settle this or kill the problem dead. Either way I figured they were about to show their hand, which was fine by me.
The setting was a plush boardroom high up in Manhattan’s newest skyscraper. Commissioned in the boom days it felt somehow out of place – inappropriate now the world had gone bust. Everything about it was expensive and pristine, virgin almost. From the warroom- length veneered walnut conference table to the Hamptonesque tea and coffee trolley, it felt like everything being used was being used for the first time. Like the wrapping had just come off.
When I entered the room I had been informed that the chief executive officer ‘himself ’ had promised to try and join us on the video-conference screen that virtually covered the top half of the wall at one end. But for now the large hi-tech television showed an empty chair behind a desk in an executive office. If I knew the city correctly, the downtown view behind the CEO’s empty chair suggested his office was somewhere above the current location. God forbid that he should ride the elevator down and join us.
Everybody in the room read the summary document I had prepared. Me on one side of the conference table, the four bank execs on the other. Me in smart leather jacket and jeans, them in tailored pinstripe twopieces, the men with ties.
An owlish banker nodded sympathetically and took off his thick round tortoiseshell glasses with a sigh. ‘Ah, another victim of Bernard Madoff.’
I gestured at the four people across from me. ‘Actually, another victim of First Bank of America.’
‘Sorry?’
‘I don’t quite follow you, Mr Byrne.’ It was the unnecessarily attractive blonde. I assumed she’d been inserted into the meeting to make the client go all soft and gooey. They were trying to push the client’s buttons. This client hated having his buttons pushed.