The Clayton Account (12 page)

When Dick Sweeney returned to work on Monday morning he felt uneasy. He hoped to find a message on his desk confirming that the expected funds had reached Geneva, but somehow the spectre of Tom Clayton refused to go away. He breezed into his office feigning high spirits – the standard New York pose – and exchanged a few words with the receptionist before following his secretary into his room. She went through Dick’s messages as he hung up his coat, and assured him that all matters arisen in his absence were being dealt with. ‘Also,’ she added, ‘Tom Clayton called from London, Thursday. Said he’d call again today.’

Before the lawyer had time to recover he saw the neatly typed memo from his associate: a Mr Isler from United Credit Bank had called in. Just wishing to verify the details of Professor Clayton’s death and that the firm were indeed executors of the estate. Weston Hall had confirmed those matters that were common knowledge, and suggested Mr Isler should contact Mr Sweeney if he required further information. Mr Isler could be contacted at the Broad Street offices of his bank in Lower Manhattan.

Sweeney sat on his chair and stared at the memo.

‘You okay?’ his secretary asked.

‘Yes, yes, I’m fine,’ he replied unconvincingly. ‘I just haven’t got over that lousy trip yet. Look, Mary, I need to get into something straight away. Hold all my calls. Or, if appropriate, give them to Weston. No interruptions till I say so. Okay?’

She nodded her understanding and left the room, somewhat perplexed by her boss’s uncharacteristic behaviour.

The lawyer crossed his hands above his head and reclined his chair, pushing it away from the desk. His eyes cast towards the ceiling without seeing it. Now what? He had warned Salazar, but with clients like that one did not say, ‘I told you so.’

Fifteen years ago, when Eamon Sweeney had retired, he had briefed his son on the Salazar account. It earned the firm good money and besides, Joe was a good friend. Not that Dick had any qualms about taking dirty business. He believed that the world ran on corruption and to him words like
right
or
wrong
– per se – were meaningless. In business, only outcomes mattered: success was good, the means to it irrelevant.

But Dick did draw the line at murder. And he had feared that if ever Michael Clayton – or now, his son – discovered the deception, Salazar might have no such qualms.

In the late 1930s, when Dick was a child, his father and Pat Clayton had been inseparable. Hardly a weekend passed without one visiting the other’s home, with their families. The two friends would drink Irish whiskey until all hours and listen to Gaelic songs. Clayton was a tough man; his smart clothes did not hide the strong physique made tougher by years of street fights.

New York in the early part of the century had been like an ethnic archipelago, each community drawing strength from looking after its own. Clayton’s building company soon made its mark. Some Irish immigrants were doing well and they wanted their own houses. Clayton persuaded them to give him their business. So he built a house here and a car park there, he courted the Church and got to build some schools. With their fortunes made, some of his fellow-immigrants sought to ingratiate themselves with the Anglo establishment by taking their business elsewhere. Clayton reminded them of the treatment meted out by the English back home and questioned the morality of any man fit to call himself an Irishman giving his business to Protestants. If that failed, he suggested that some of his firm’s money went to help the Patriots’ cause in Ireland and that spurning that crusade would not be well received. In one instance, a social-climbing textile importer had placed the construction of his new warehouse with outsiders; no sooner was the site finished than it had burnt down. In Irish New York people knew Pat Clayton was responsible but, as always, sheltered from justice by Eamon Sweeney & Co.

Then in 1919, Congress passed the 18th Amendment. Cresting a misguided wave of puritanical demagoguery, Congressman Andrew J.Volstead decided that alcohol was bad for America and that the nation should become dry. He courted the support of a motley group of factions: the
Anti
-Saloon League, the Evangelical Protestant Movement, the Anti-Alien Front. In January 1920 the Volstead Act became law and within days an illegal industry of previously unimagined proportions was born. Satisfying a national need that was only enhanced by Prohibition, it would also lay down the framework for the drug nightmare that would emulate its methods later in the century. Truckloads from Canada, shiploads from Europe and the Caribbean. Countless tons of liquor smuggled in on the backs of bribes. Soon the first booze barons emerged, those who had the guts and the power to organize the distribution. In Chicago the Italians and the Irish fought it out. Literally. There, a certain Mr Alphonse Capone, a Brooklyn gangster, was said by 1927 to have amassed one hundred million dollars. In Boston the Irish led the market in relative peace, but New York was too big for just one faction and the archipelagos became more clearly defined. Clayton had visited Ireland and secured his sources. Soon any household or speakeasy requiring the Emerald Isle’s finest had to deal with Patrick Clayton.

Which was how he came to meet the young Puerto Rican from the Bronx. Joe Salazar was only eighteen and spoke poor English. He lived by his wits, lending money along the lower rungs of the Hispanic community. At the time he worked for his father, Emilio, who had turned to moneylending with a capital of $3,000, proceeds of a daring raid on a Savings & Loan. He went around the neighbourhoods lending ten bucks here, twenty there, to people who could not borrow from banks and at rates that doubled Salazar’s money every thirty days. When his son Joe turned sixteen, Emilio taught him the business. By his eighteenth birthday the young man derived pleasure from dealing with borrowers who failed to repay on time.

One evening, at the height of Prohibition, Joe had gone
into
an Irish bar. Though not a regular, it was in Salazar’s neighbourhood and he was known. The owner gave him a double Irish on the house, then asked for Joe’s assistance. He needed five hundred for a week.

‘What’s it for?’ Joe asked, and the man pulled a bottle of Bushmills from under the counter.

‘Best stuff money can buy,’ the saloon keeper said, displaying the label.

Salazar made a quick calculation. ‘Thirty per cent, seven days,’ he said, reaching for his inside pocket. The man extended his right hand to seal the bargain and appreciatively took the five one-hundred-dollar bills. Seven days later, Salazar stopped by and collected six hundred and fifty dollars.

‘This stuff?’ Salazar asked, raising the glass he had just been poured. ‘How much you can move?’

‘Right here in this bar?’ the man leaned over to talk to the young man. ‘Ten cases a week, no problem, but –’

‘Not cases,’ interrupted Salazar. ‘Tell me in money.’

‘Two grand a week, no sweat.’

‘Where you buy it?’

‘Hey, Joey!’ the Irishman protested. ‘I can’t tell you that.’

‘You have to,’ said Salazar calmly, ‘if we gonna be partners.’

So O’Malley took Salazar into a booth and they talked business. Next morning they went together to see Pat Clayton and paid cash for five thousand dollars’ worth of whiskey.

By the time the 21st Amendment put an end to Prohibition in 1933, Joe Salazar had long parted company with O’Malley and had taken over the entire Hispanic market in New York, becoming Pat Clayton’s biggest customer. Eamon Sweeney had helped them both. Unlike
the
impetuous Capone who murdered with impunity but ended up locked away for tax evasion, Sweeney taught Clayton and Salazar how to keep books and trade through real and dummy companies. By 1933 they were both rich men. Clayton returned to erecting buildings and Salazar acquired offices in Manhattan, giving moneylending a new dimension.

Then came the war and with it a black market. There was a fortune to be made buying and selling medical supplies, arms and ammunition. Salazar and Clayton joined forces once again, the former putting up the cash – he had lots of outside investors available to him by now – the latter reviving his cross-border smuggling network. And they still had Eamon Sweeney on their side. He warned them about the new federal law enforcers – the FBI could not be bought like local police forces – and against keeping money in America without being able to explain its source. Switzerland was easy in those days. Anyone could open accounts there, no questions asked, and Sweeney had set them up for his two clients. One apiece, different cities, different banks.

Then one day the two men fell out. It was 1944 and America was three years into the war. Tons of morphia were being shipped to the army hospitals in the Pacific and Europe. But morphine was also in high demand as the main ingredient in the production of heroin for the vast recreational and addict markets of New York. Salazar went to Clayton with a business proposition but the Irishman declined. Booze and bullets he did not mind, he had grown up with both in Donegal, but drugs were sold to children. From that moment their differences might have led to conflict. But fate intervened and – nine days after turning down Joe Salazar – Patrick Clayton died of a heart attack.

The following month, when Salazar collected his first
payment
for shipping morphine, he reflected almost sadly that this was the first time in years he would be sending only one payment to Switzerland, instead of the usual two. Then suddenly the idea came to him: Why
not
two? Why not keep Pat Clayton’s account going? The Swiss didn’t know he was dead, and Joe had plenty of copies of his former partner’s signature. So he gave it a try: wrote to United Credit Bank on Pat’s stationery, signed Pat’s name, and asked the bank to transfer $5,000 to the account of a small supplier. Three weeks later the morphine arrived. Joe Salazar had discovered the safest way of handling dirty money – do it in someone else’s name. He closed his own accounts everywhere, keeping only those that related to clean funds. For the rest, at first he used the names of dead men, but soon realized it was not even necessary to do that. So he started using real people: dates of birth, occupations, social security numbers if required. He would use these accounts later to bank the illegal proceeds of his clients’ businesses, for Salazar had learnt that the real money lay in letting others do the dirty work as well as bearing the risks. Salazar had returned to his roots. The backstreet moneylender was now a banker in every sense of the word.

The people he picked to open bank accounts, his ‘ghosts’ he called them, were nobodies. If, unlikely though it was, the authorities ever caught up with them, they could reveal nothing, because they knew nothing. If, per chance, any ghost ever wised up to the deception, what the hell. At this stage in his life Salazar would have neither difficulty nor compunction in having them meet with fatal accidents before they even started to comprehend.

The scheme worked perfectly for years, but everyone has an Achilles heel and Salazar’s was Pat Clayton’s account. In 1944 he also filed a power-of-attorney form, giving full
access
to an unsuspecting Michael Clayton, whose signature he did not know, but then neither did the bank. Joe exercised the power of attorney and kept the account going in the son’s name. Michael had unwittingly become the first of Salazar’s second-generation ghosts. Fifty years later the account had become a crucial staging post along the laundry chain. Salazar secretly mocked the Swiss who ripped him off with their miserable interest payments. Little did they know that Joe’s real return was 10 per cent. Not per annum. Per remittance.

Eamon Sweeney never objected to the arrangement. He felt that Pat would have approved, imagining the Feds expending their energy tracking down illegal money only to find, if anything, that the culprit was dead. But Eamon’s son, Richard, was not happy. He was fond of Michael Clayton and though he knew that ultimately his friend would always be able to prove his innocence, he remonstrated with Salazar to close this particular account.

Now he cursed his failure to press Salazar harder, and decided to approach Tom first. He would have to tell him some of the truth, perhaps frighten him a little, but above all Dick hoped he could get to Tom before the latter had a chance to rock the boat.

He looked at the clock on his wall and picked up the telephone. His first call was to Credit Suisse in Geneva. After identifying himself with the agreed passwords he enquired about a forty-three-million-dollar transfer from United Credit Bank. The bank officer told him that as of that moment no funds had been received. He asked if Sweeney would wish the bank to enquire with UCB, but Dick declined, saying he would call again after checking with the remitting party.

What the bank officer did not tell him was that, as he called up the Sweeney Tulley McAndrews account on his
computer
, the message had flashed before his eyes that any movement or communication connected with this account was to be reported immediately to Mr Guido Martelli.

Dick cradled the telephone and thought awhile. Salazar had said the transfer instructions were sent a week ago. A letter to Switzerland took three days, seven at the outside. The domestic transfer would have been actioned the same day as instructions were received. There was therefore a chance that the order could have been received today. Perhaps this was wishful thinking on his part, but anyway he would give it until Wednesday. Then he would have to either prevent Tom from doing anything silly or, as a last resort, tell Salazar. He decided in the first instance to wait until it was five in Geneva. He would check again then and call Tom if no money had arrived. He had, after all, the excuse of returning Tom’s call.

Within a minute of Sweeney putting down the telephone, the bank officer at Credit Suisse had made contact with Martelli. He did not question the reason for the security chief’s interest, merely reported the time and content of the call. Martelli thanked him and sent his secretary to the basement to retrieve the tape recording of the relevant conversation. Then he called Laforge in Zurich.