Whipping Boy (26 page)

Feiter turns to his colleague. “Tom, what’s in the case file?”

Boyle flips through a folder. “Most of this is administrative crap. Fingerprint cards that should have been forwarded. Hmm. I forgot about that. Looks like your guy got booked by DHQ.”

“DHQ? Is that short for Dennis Quilty?”

“No,” Feiter says. “Division Headquarters—the main post office up on Thirty-Fourth Street.”

“That’s where Colonel Sherry was booked, too,” I note.

“All of ’em were,” Boyle says.

“They had to be,” Feiter adds. “Because of the jet fuel.”

“Jet fuel?”

Feiter jabs his thumb over his shoulder. “Didn’t you notice the giant hole across the street?”

“Giant hole?”

“Turn right when you leave the building. We’re sitting a hundred feet from Ground Zero. When the planes hit, one of the engines broke off and landed a few floors above your head.”

“Holy shit.”

“We were shut down for two and a half years,” says Boyle.

“I was here four days a week in my zoot suit,” Feiter recalls. “Every sheet of paper had to be irradiated, cleaned, tested, and certified safe. We had PO trucks filled with case files going out to a facility in Rockaway Township ten times a day.”

Not for the first time since beginning the search, I feel like a total idiot. How could something like 9/11 have escaped my attention? I check my notes. “The indictments came down about a month after the attacks.”

“Sounds about right,” Feiter says.

“Didn’t that slow things down?”

Boyle reviews the file. “Doesn’t look like it.” He removes a sheet of paper and hands it to his boss. Feiter gives it the once-over before sliding it across the table.

A document I’ve been trying to get my hands on for the better part of two years lands in my lap. The phrase “
MUGSHOT PROFILE
” appears at the top. “
CONFIDENTIAL FOR LAW ENFORCEMENT USE ONLY
” appears at the bottom. The right side of the form is reserved for the arrest photo. The left side registers Cesar’s personal data. One detail catches my attention.

“Find something interesting?” Feiter asks.

“Just an odd coincidence. It says Cesar is ‘5’10”, 190 lbs.’ That makes us exactly the same height and weight. By the way, it says he has no aliases. That info’s outdated.”

“Mug shot profiles are never all that accurate,” Feiter notes.

“What does S/M/T stand for?”

“Scars, marks, and tats,” says Boyle.

“The profile indicates he doesn’t have any. And no prior arrests.”

“Don’t take what that piece of paper says as gospel,” Feiter cautions. “Remember. It was a crazy time. A lot was going on after 9/11. Quilty would know more.”

I slide the arrest sheet across the table, and Feiter slides it right back.

“Keep it,” he says.

“Are you sure?”

“Sure I’m sure. Add it to the collection. I had to deal with my own version of Cesar when I was a kid. I know how memories like that stay with you.”

I am the Law, and the Law is not mocked!

Inspector Javert
,
Les Misérables

In order that Evil shall triumph, it is sufficient that Good Men do nothing.

John Corlette
, founder of Aiglon College, citing Edmund Burke

Of the half dozen federal agents who worked on the Badische case, only Dennis Quilty stuck it out from beginning to end. He was there from the time Barbara Laurence lugged her paperwork into the US Attorney’s Office until Cesar was packed off to FCI Lompoc. He was the only federal investigator who spoke to Cesar before he lawyered up.

If anyone could tell me whether or not my former roommate was dangerous, it would be Dennis Quilty. Yet on more than one occasion the retired investigator refused my interview requests. “Never talked to the press while I was on the job. See no reason to start now.”

During one of my failed entreaties—this was in February 2007—Quilty mentioned that his grandkids were visiting him in Florida. With nothing to lose, I asked if I could send down a copy of my children’s book
Leon and the Spitting Image
. Reluctantly, he said okay. “The book might interest you, too,” I added. “The bully in the story became the con man you sent to jail.”

Leon
did the trick. Two weeks later, Quilty agreed to meet. Once again, my make-believe bully enabled me to inch a little bit closer to the flesh and blood boy who inspired him.

I expected big things from my trip to Florida. I was not disappointed. I was, however, surprised.

Dennis M. Quilty is a tall, slender New Yorker with close-cropped hair and the taut body of an avid golfer who forgoes caddy and cart. After thirty-four years of government work, he relinquished his
service pistol and reached for a set of clubs. When not in use, those clubs occupy the corner of a tidy Mediterranean-style condo that abuts the second hole of a PGA course north of West Palm Beach.

“Mind if I drive?” Quilty says soon after the start of the hard-won interview.

“No problem,” I tell him, sensing it wouldn’t much matter if I did.

“The Quiltys tend to be civil servants,” he begins. “My grandfather was a cop. My father was a heating inspector. I had one uncle who was a New York City detective, one who was a US customs inspector, and my cousin Michael was a New York City fire lieutenant who perished in the World Trade Center attack.”

As a fraud specialist—first for the IRS, then with the Labor Department, and finally for the US Attorney’s Office—Dennis Quilty spent the whole of his professional life hunting down racketeers, check kiters, counterfeiters, tax cheats, snake-oil salesmen, grifters, insider traders, and embezzlers. He shut down Ponzi, pyramid, and romance schemes, faux charities, and debt-elimination scams. Shortly before turning fifty-seven, the mandatory retirement age for all federal agents, Quilty identified, with mild disappointment, one subspecies of swindler absent from his trophy case of “dons and cons.”

He had never bagged a bogus royal.

“I came close a couple of times,” he says. But his investigations into the scams of aristocratic hustlers never met the burden of proof needed to sanction prosecution. That was before Barbara Laurence walked into his office at 1 St. Andrews Plaza.

“I was the first to interview Laurence,” Quilty recalls. “Prosecutors don’t have time to listen to unsubstantiated sob stories. Part of an investigator’s job is to separate the crackpots from the credible witnesses. Laurence wasn’t a crackpot. A loose canon maybe, but not a crackpot.”

The evidence Laurence presented was robust. Still, the sums at stake—substantially less than a million dollars—made it tough to justify
the cost of an investigation. That didn’t faze Quilty. He was convinced that the “Marx Brothers manipulations” of the self-styled aristocrats and their California-based shill would attract the interest of a prosecutor. After all, how many white-collar crimes are adorned with monocles, Maltese crosses, and matching silk ties?

“The trick was to know
who
to get involved, and to get him involved early,” Quilty tells me. Of the 170 lawyers working in his office, he zeroed in on Tim Coleman. Over the years, Quilty had helped Coleman investigate some half dozen cases. Each one ended in conviction. He knew that the slow-talking, fast-thinking assistant US attorney had a soft spot for upper-crust lowlifes. “Come on. Monocles? How could Coleman resist?”

“Clearly he couldn’t.”

“Yeah. Plus, when it comes to casework, I can be pretty determined. I sometimes liken the personality of the case agent to a mongoose.”

I press Quilty to expand the analogy.

“The mongoose is renowned for attacking even the largest and most poisonous snakes. Say a cobra sneaks into the house; the mongoose will attack until either it or the snake is dead. I always considered the fraud investigator a mongoose that hunts snakes.” Quilty’s biological comparison only goes so far. He emends a little later. “The mongoose always knows when a snake slithers into view. The fraud investigator doesn’t. Part of my job was to distinguish the con men from their marks. Sometimes that can be tricky. Fraudsters often claim they’re the victims. (Hey, they’re con men, that’s what they do.) Victims often insist they
haven’t
been duped. (Who wants to acknowledge getting swindled?) On top of which, sometimes genuine victims can themselves be convicted hucksters.

{Courtesy of Dennis Quilty}

Dennis Quilty at the start of his career with the US Attorney’s Office . . .

{Courtesy of Dennis Quilty}

. . . and at the end, working the Badische case—his “retirement gift.”

“It took me a while to figure out who was crooked and who was duped. The bankers, I knew from day one, were all going down. But then you had all the peripheral players. The members of the finance committee. The partner from PricewaterhouseCoopers. The Clifford Chance attorney. There was even an ambassador from South Africa who got taken in. How did all these guys end up getting hoodwinked by an elderly man wearing a monocle, claiming to be related to Vlad the Impaler?”

“Do you have an answer to that question?”

Quilty thinks long and hard before responding.

“Greed,” he says at last.

I ask Quilty how he started the investigation.

“Same as always. First thing I do is subpoena the bank records. The money trail always leads you to the crooks.”

The federal summonses Quilty served all began with a good-natured salutation (“Greetings”) before walloping recipients into submission with a chilling, if florid, imperative: “We
COMMAND YOU
that all business and excuses being laid aside, you appear and attend before the
GRAND INQUEST
of the body of the people of the United States. . . .”

Television cop shows often suggest that grand jury subpoenas are tough to come by. Quilty corrects that impression. “I prepared my ‘invites’ on the computer, hit
PRINT
, walked ’em down the hall, and got ’em signed. Simple as that. My subpoenas flowed like water.”

The documents that flowed back quickly confirmed that most of the executives drawn into the scheme—the Merrill Lynch financial consultant and the senior partner from PricewaterhouseCoopers, to
name but two—were uncompensated, unknowing extras and nothing more. The innocence of the less marginal players—in particular the men on the Badische finance committee—was tougher to establish.

The Badische finance committee included a felonious duke, a retired ambassador, a godson of King George VI, and a writer of historical fiction.

The subpoenaed records, bolstered by depositions, established that most committee members received “consulting fees” ranging from $5,000 to $30,000. Some of the men—Duke d’Antin, for instance—were demonstrably corrupt. Others, like the South African ambassador who credulously drafted the financial tally David Glass used to generate an “attestation” suggesting that Badische managed $90.3 billion in assets, had spotless reputations. The league of extraordinary (and extraordinarily naive) gentlemen also included the Honorable Shaun Plunket, a distant cousin to the queen of England and a godson of King George VI; Count Julien von Heisermann, the grand chancellor of the Knights of Malta (Ecumenical) and a patron of the “Millionaires of the World” Trust, an investment scheme censured by the New Zealand Securities Commission; and “Major” Mark Druck, a novelist tasked with burnishing executive bios on the Badische website, an assignment that appears to have relied heavily on his talents as a writer of historical fiction. Collectively, the finance committee challenged two platitudes commonly invoked when the
topic of fraud is discussed: it proved that you
can
cheat an honest man and that you
can
bullshit a bullshitter.