James Grippando - Money to Burn

From the sound of things in Andie’s headset, Kowalksi was positioned right outside the building.

“Who went green?”

“Local SWAT.”

“Repeat that, please.”

“Local SWAT sniper did not copy the order to hold fire.”

Andie had been in a similar situation before. It seemed that everyone right down to neighborhood crime-watch volunteers had a SWAT unit these days. Usually the SWAT leaders were able to agree and coordinate efforts. Usually.

An unmarked car squealed around the corner, and it screeched to a halt so quickly that its front bumper nearly kissed the pavement. Supervisory Agent Malcolm Spear jumped out and hurried toward Andie at the mobile command center.

“What the hell happened?” he shouted.

Andie looked toward the flaming building just as it exploded.

IT MAY HAVE BEEN A DIRECT HIT, OR PERHAPS MY SHOT RICOCHETED off the floor, skipped up, and punctured the fuel can. Regardless, the explosion threw me out the door and at least another ten yards toward the helipad, which was a good thing. The hangar was engulfed in flames.

And then I blacked out-but only for a moment. When my eyes blinked open, I was looking up at Ivy. Olivia was beside her.

“Michael, can you hear me?” Ivy asked.

It was a feeling I’d never had before-knowing my name only because she was calling me “Michael.”

“Yeah, I can hear you,” I said. I tried to sit up, but Olivia gently pushed me back onto the pavement.

“Be still,” said Ivy. The expression on her face was somewhere between fright and concern; her tone was beyond urgent. “Do you have pain anywhere besides your leg?”

Olivia’s coat was tied around my thigh to stop the bleeding, and before the question, the pain had oddly gone away. But suddenly my leg was throbbing again.

“Just in the hamstrings,” I said.

There was another explosion from inside the hangar, and I felt the blast of heat on my face. Fortunately, we were far enough away to be out of danger. Sirens sounded from somewhere down the road. Olivia jumped up and darted off into the darkness. I could no longer see her, but I heard her shouting for help.

“Over here!”

“You’re going to be okay,” said Ivy.

“This way!” someone else shouted.

A moment later I was looking up at another woman. It gave me a moment of confusion-What the hell is Mallory’s friend doing here?-but then my thoughts cleared, and I remembered that she was an FBI agent. She had paramedics with her, and right behind them was the FBI SWAT unit dressed in full tactical armor. A fire truck rumbled right past us and the firefighters jumped off and went immediately into action. The SWAT guy cut Ivy’s hands free from the plastic cuffs with a serrated knife. As the paramedics checked me out and lifted me up onto the gurney, I heard Andie screaming at two men, one from FBI SWAT and the other wearing a black flak jacket that said SHERIFF in white letters. Both men were shouting back at her. As best I could tell, the plan had been for SWAT to hold its fire until negotiations failed, but there had been a miscommunication. It was hard for me to comprehend a blunder like that, but it would soon mesh perfectly with everything I would read about law enforcement activities directed toward Wall Street.

The paramedics lifted me into the ambulance, and Ivy started to climb inside with me.

“Sorry, miss,” said the paramedic. “You can’t ride in here.”

“You can’t stop me,” she said.

He grabbed her arm. “Who are you?”

“I’m his wife,” she said.

“And I’m her husband,” I said, just feeling a need to say it.

The paramedic was too rushed to argue.

“Hurry up then,” he said.

Ivy climbed inside, and it felt good as she took my hand and laced her fingers with mine. Through the open ambulance doors, we glanced back at the firefighters battling the inferno, knowing that there was no way McVee had survived. Ivy’s reason to run was no more.

The ambulance doors closed, and I looked up at her face. She leaned forward and kissed me on the forehead.

“You feeling okay?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“You sure?”

“Yup,” I said, feeling a little foggy again, another one of those memory flashes to Papa coming on. “Just another beautiful day in paradise.”

I SPENT A COUPLE DAYS IN BED AFTER THE EXPLOSION. NANA WAS a retired nurse, so my grandparents stayed in New York to drive me crazy-I mean care for me. I couldn’t stand watching the television, so Papa brought me a book from the library. An old book-ancient, you might say.

When I was a young boy, Nana worked nights at the hospital, so it was my grandfather who used to bathe me before bed, put me in my Spiderman pajamas, and read to me from Aesop’s Fables as he rocked me to sleep. His personal favorite was “The Ant and the Grasshopper.” As the fable goes, the ant was the disciplined one, storing up food for hard times. The grasshopper was the singing and chirping party animal-er, insect-who blew through summer as if life were one red-hot streak at a blackjack table. And then winter came.

Papa was an ant, a Depression-era immigrant raised on an honest wage for an honest day’s work. We never talked about stocks. The first I’d heard of the Dow Jones Industrials was in fifth-grade social studies class, and I still find it unbelievable that when I was ten the Dow was at 802. That was just fine for ants, but the grasshoppers of the 1980s dreamed of riding in limousines. In the 1990s, it was stretch limousines. Then, in the insanity of the twenty-first century, it had to be a stretch Hummer limousine with a hot tub, a posse, and at least one B-list celebrity with no panties. But ants had no use for any of this. They knew winter would come.

Never had I dreamed that I would be a grasshopper. That all my friends would be grasshoppers. That the entire world would be one big swarming, borrowing, and spending orgy of grasshoppers-a world in which anything worth doing was naturally worth overdoing.

Like I said before: There was a time when people all but worshipped guys like me. Now, of course, they’ve come to hate us. It was understandable; the man I’d worshipped deserved no forgiveness.

Eric Volke was one of Bernard Madoff’s feeders.

I’d had no way of knowing that on the night everything blew up-literally-in WhiteSands’ Hangar No. 3. It came out much later, after Madoff pleaded guilty to the largest investment fraud in Wall Street history and became federal prison inmate No. 61727-054 for the rest of his life.

Only then did I learn the chief purpose of Agent Andie Henning’s undercover investigation at Saxton Silvers. After 9/11, the FBI’s focus shifted to homeland security, and the number of agents investigating financial crimes was cut by more than 75 percent. But Agent Henning presented a simple mathematical formula to her supervisors, showing that Madoff’s track record-10 percent returns or better for almost two decades-was the statistical equivalent of a major-league baseball player batting.960 for the season. She got approval to investigate. Her mission was to expose one of the biggest players to steer investors in Madoff’s direction, and hopefully get him to cut a deal with prosecutors and testify against Madoff.

Virtually none of Madoff’s feeders had conducted any due diligence before dropping to their knees and kissing the ground he walked on. The ones who had were even worse; they knew or at least suspected that he was a fraud and still fed him clients. But a very select few-Eric Volke among them-had known the truth from the very beginning. Over the years, Eric’s “fund of funds” at WhiteSands channeled billions of dollars from charities, pension funds, universities, and others into Madoff’s hands. The payoff for these feeders was enormous, and the warm turquoise waters surrounding a 160-foot yacht at the private island of Mustique could wash away a lot of sins. But the fact remained, Volke and people like him made Madoff’s scam into a colossal catastrophe, a giant Ponzi scheme.