Chapter 25 - The Margin Call of the Damned
At 9:02 AM Eastern Standard Time, the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange experienced what the financial press would later refer to as the "Blackwood Disconnect."
Arthur James Whitmore sat in the visitor's holding pen of the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Lower Manhattan. He was still wearing the monogrammed Turnbull & Asser dress shirt he had worn to court, though the collar was rumpled and the mother-of-pearl buttons were smeared with gray fingerprint dust.
Sitting across from him behind the scratched plexiglass was his lead counsel, Vance Abernathy.
"The bail hearing is at two," Arthur barked, his face mottled with purple rage. His voice carried through the visitation room, causing the correction officers at the door to shift their batons with quiet menace. "I don’t care what Judge Ramos said about flight risk. You call Senator Holbrook. You call the governor’s chief of staff. You tell them that if I spend another night on a municipal bunk, the contribution checks for their fall re-election campaigns will bounce before they clear the clearinghouse!"
Abernathy did not look at Arthur. His face was gray, the color of wet sidewalk cement. His hands trembled as he opened his leather briefcase.
"Arthur," Abernathy said. His voice was hollow, stripped of the booming theatricality that had earned him eight hundred dollars an hour for two decades. "The checks have already bounced."
Arthur froze. "What did you say?"
"Thirty minutes ago, an institutional recall order hit the clearinghouses in London, Frankfurt, and New York," Abernathy whispered, leaning closer to the glass. "A creditor lien was filed under the 1988 Van Der Berg Master Covenant."
"That covenant is dead!" Arthur roared, slamming his open palm against the plexiglass. "William Van Der Berg died thirty-four years ago! Beatrice signed those rights over to me when we incorporated the holding group!"
"She didn’t sign them over, Arthur," Abernathy said. A tear of cold sweat slid down the lawyer’s temple, carving a clean line through the talcum powder on his cheek. "We just reviewed the original filings from Zurich. The documents you had in the Blackwood Ridge safe were counter-deeds. They were dummy agreements Beatrice gave you to keep you quiet while the primary trust structure was placed in an irrevocable Swiss escrow."
Arthur stared at his attorney, his mouth half-open, a vein bulging across his forehead like an angry blue worm. "What are you talking about? What trust structure?"
Abernathy pulled out a sheet of thermal fax paper that had just been transmitted from his midtown office.
"Whitmore Enterprises has had its corporate charters revoked in Delaware, New York, and Nevada," Abernathy read, his hands shaking so violently the paper rattled. "The primary lender has declared an immediate, non-cured default on the four hundred million dollar liquidity facility. All bank accounts—domestic, offshore, corporate, and private—have been seized by court-appointed receivers."
"My accounts?" Arthur gasped. His chest heaved as though the air had suddenly been sucked from the room. "My personal accounts at JPMorgan? The private portfolio in Grand Cayman?"
"Gone," Abernathy whispered. "All of it. Frozen under the Federal Asset Recovery and Insolvency Act. But that’s not the worst of it, Arthur."
Arthur lunged forward, pressing his face against the mesh speaker until his lips were white. "What could be worse than that? What did she do?!"
"Your family," Abernathy said softly. "The uncles. Richard. Julian. Victoria. Cousin Gregory."
Arthur’s eyes went wild. "What about them?"
"When you told them to put their secondary shares into the Whitmore Sovereign Yield Fund last November—the fund you promised would pay eighteen percent guaranteed?"
"Yes! It was secured by the real estate assets!"
"The real estate assets didn't belong to you, Arthur," Abernathy said, his voice cracking with pity and disgust. "They belonged to the Van Der Berg estate. The moment the recall hit, the Yield Fund went to zero. Gregory’s estate in Greenwich is already under an eviction notice from the county sheriff. Richard’s yacht was impounded in Palm Beach an hour ago. Victoria’s accounts at Merrill Lynch have been seized to cover the margin calls on the short positions you took against the domestic energy bonds."
Arthur sat back slowly. His breath came in ragged, wheezing gasps.
"No," he muttered. "No, no, no. She can't do this. She’s my daughter! She’s a junior analyst! She was scrubbing gravy off her shoes three weeks ago!"
"She’s not a junior analyst anymore, Arthur," Abernathy said, packing his papers with frantic haste. "The court has just appointed the new principal executor of the combined Van Der Berg and Whitmore assets."
Arthur looked up, his eyes bloodshot, wild with the incomprehension of an emperor who had just looked out his palace window to see his own legion carrying a battering ram toward the gates.
"Who?" he choked out.
May you like
Abernathy stood up. He did not look back as he pushed his chair under the table.
"Elena," he said. "Her first executive order was to instruct this firm to withdraw from your defense. You have no legal representation, Arthur. You have no money to hire a public defender. And you have an arraignment in forty-five minutes."
