Christopher Reich - Numbered Account

Nick was puzzled, but only for a moment. “My father was referring to Goldluxe?”

Burki smiled queerly, as if displeased that Nick knew so much. “Yes, it was about Goldluxe.”

“Go on.” Dusk was falling. More people streamed into the abandoned station.

“Allen Soufi owned a chain of jewelry stores in Los Angeles: Goldluxe, Inc. He wanted USB to be his bank of record. Take deposits, pay his bills, establish letters of credit to finance imports. Alex asked me what exactly I knew about Soufi, and I told him everything—well, almost everything. Soufi was a Middle Eastern client with around thirty million francs on deposit at the bank. Not a man to toy with. I told your father to do as he says. But, Alex, him listen? Never! It wasn’t long before Schweitzer called and started pounding me for information about your father. ‘What did Alex Neumann say about Soufi? Did he mention any problems?’ I told Schweitzer to get off my back. I said your dad had called once, that was it.”

“What was Goldluxe up to?”

Burki ignored the question. He took out his pack of cigarettes and tried to extract one. He couldn’t. His hand was shaking too violently. He dropped the pack of cigarettes, then looked at Nick. “Kid, you can’t keep me waiting. Now’s the time. Understand?”

Nick picked up the pack of cigarettes, lit one, and put it in Burki’s mouth. “You’ve got to stay with me a little longer. Just till we get to the end of this.”

Burki closed his eyes and inhaled. Buoyed by the blast of nicotine, he went on. “Next time I was in Zurich, Schweitzer and I went out for a night on the town. Armin didn’t have anyone to go home to—that was his choice. My wife had divorced me long before. We started at the Kronenhalle, ran down to the Old Fashioned, and ended the night at the King’s Club, totally bombed, a couple of fancy women on our arms. It was November 24, 1979, my thirty-eighth birthday.”

Nick looked at Burki more closely. The man was only fifty-eight years old. My God, he looked seventy if he looked a day. Despite the cold, a sheen of perspiration matted his features. He was starting to hurt.

“We’d already had a couple drinks when I brought up Soufi. ‘Whatever happened between him and Alex Neumann?’ I asked. I wasn’t really curious one way or the other, just making conversation. Well, Schweitzer turned red, and then green, blew a fucking gasket. Alex Neumann this, Alex Neumann that, arrogant bastard, elitist, above the rules, doesn’t take orders from anyone, out of control. On and on, for an hour. Jesus, did he have a hard-on for your father! Finally, I calmed him down and got the whole story out of him.

“Seems your father met with Soufi once, thought he was okay—no more crooked than the next guy—and set him up with a numbered account. A little later he took on Goldluxe as a standard commercial account. Goldluxe sold gold jewelry, mostly small stuff—chains, wedding rings, pendants, cheap crap. For a while, everything went swimmingly. But soon Alex noticed that these four stores were generating over two hundred thousand dollars a week in sales. That’s eight hundred grand a month, near ten million if they kept it up for the year. I guess your dad went down to the stores, introduced himself, and had a look around. After that, the jig was up PDQ.”

Nick recalled his father’s entry regarding a company visit to Goldluxe. “Weren’t the stores selling jewelry?”

“Oh sure,” said Burki. “They were selling jewelry—a few necklaces here, a bracelet there. But if you want to sell two hundred thousand dollars a week of gold trinkets, you have to move some serious merchandise. These were rinky-dink little stores, maybe a thousand square feet each.”

“So Goldluxe was a front?”

“Goldluxe was a sophisticated operation for laundering large amounts of cash. Now give me my fucking fix, would you? You’re hurting me bad. Just go on up to Gerda and ask her to make me a dose. I can give it to myself.”

Nick was growing cold and impatient. His butt felt like it was frozen to the ground. No way he was going to give Burki a fix now. That would be the end of their conversation. He took out the folded one-hundred-franc banknote and handed it to the heroin addict. “Hold on, Cappy. Keep giving me what I need. We’re almost there. Tell me how the operation worked.”

Burki fingered the crisp note. His dead eyes showed a spark of life. “First you have to realize that Goldluxe was sitting on a mountain of cash that they didn’t know what to do with. They needed a long-term setup that would allow them to deposit all their cash as it came in. Got it?”

“Got it.”

“Here’s how it worked: USB opened a letter of credit on behalf of Goldluxe to a supplier of gold in Buenos Aires for, say, five hundred thousand dollars—that means that when the South American company sends the gold to Goldluxe in Los Angeles, the bank promises to pay them for the shipment. The company in Argentina exports the gold all right, but not five hundred thousand dollars’ worth. Oh, no. They only send about fifty thousand worth.”

“But fifty thousand dollars’ worth of gold is going to weigh a lot less than five hundred thousand worth,” Nick protested. He remembered seeing the company name El Oro de los Andes.

“Very good,” said Burki, raising a finger as if to say “Point, Neumann.” “To make up the difference in weight for our friends in customs, the company in Buenos Aires threw in some lead. No problem. Shipments of precious metals aren’t normally examined by customs authorities. As long as the papers match, and the receiving party verifies that the shipment is good, the bank is cleared to make payment of the letter of credit.”

“So why does Goldluxe want to pay a company in Buenos Aires five hundred thousand dollars for gold they didn’t receive?”

Burki tried to laugh but ended up coughing violently. After a minute he was able to say, “Because Goldluxe has too much cash. They’re naughty boys. They need a way to clean it up.”

“I don’t exactly follow.”

“It’s actually very easy. Remember what I told you before—Goldluxe is sitting on a million dollars in cash. They start by importing fifty thousand dollars’ worth of gold. That’s their inventory.”

Nick was beginning to catch on to the game. “But on their books they list the cost of inventory as five hundred thousand dollars. Just like the import documents say.”

Burki nodded. “Goldluxe has to make it look like their stores are selling a million dollars’ retail worth of gold jewelry. So they mark up the value of the inventory to a million dollars and sell it out the door. By selling, I mean they generate a stack of bogus sales receipts a mile high. Remember they only really have fifty thousand dollars’ worth of gold at cost. About a hundred thousand at full retail markup. They take the phony sales receipts and record them in the general ledger. With their books showing sales of one million dollars, they can take their cash to the bank and legitimately deposit it.”

Nick shuddered, seeing how simple the plan was. “Where was the money coming from?”

“I’ve only seen two businesses that generate that kind of cash: casino gambling and drugs. I’ve never heard of Allen Soufi in Las Vegas, have you?”

Nick smiled grimly. “So the idea is to piggyback the laundering operation on top of the legitimate business.”

“Bravo,” said Burki. “Once the million dollars is in the bank, USB pays off the letter of credit to the company in Argentina—which Soufi, naturally, controls. And the other five hundred grand is banked as Goldluxe’s profit. Soufi wired as much as he wanted to his accounts in London and Switzerland twice a week.”

“Twice a week?” asked Nick.