Judicial Bargain
The hand turning the file folder stopped dead in midair.
Alfie Solomons took off his glasses and polished them against the hem of his shirt.
Then he lowered his eyes and began reading the documents, one by one, with careful attention.
Bank of Cayman - Wire Transfer Confirmation
Date: November 4, 1989
Sender: Theraphosa Blondi Goliath Ltd.
Account No.: 7741-9902-3021
Beneficiary: John Liu - Nominee Account
Account No.: 2190-7306-6589
Amount: USD 4,000,000
Reference: Investment Return - Phase II
Authorized Signature: illegible
...
“Theraphosa Blondi Goliath...”
Alfie let out a groan that sounded almost like a simmering boil.
This file contained records suggesting money laundering through a shell company called Theraphosa Blondi Goliath.
Ledger Summary - Theraphosa Blondi Goliath Ltd.
Confidential - Internal Use Only
1987.03.15 / Cayman → Houston / $1.2 million / Oil equipment imports
1987.09.22 / Cayman → Dallas / $850,000 / Real estate acquisition
1988.02.10 / Cayman → Austin / $2.1 million / Construction materials
1988.11.03 / Cayman → San Antonio / $1.75 million / Consulting fees
1989.04.18 / Cayman → Houston / $3.4 million / Investment return
1989.11.04 / Cayman → [redacted] / $4 million / Phase II
Total transfers (1987-1989): $13.3 million
Beneficiary network: 17 nominee accounts
This nominee-account network and money-laundering ledger belonged to John Liu.
Before my regression, when I worked at Black Diamond, that name had belonged to the man behind one of the massive tax-evasion scandals that sent Wall Street into a frenzy.
In the mid-1990s, when federal prosecutors finally smashed a money-laundering network operating across Texas, he was identified as one of the key figures: a Chinese American businessman.
On the surface, he dealt in real estate and oil equipment imports, but in reality he was a broker who provided laundering channels for small and large tax evaders all over Texas.
Theraphosa Blondi Goliath Ltd. was one of the paper companies he had set up in the Cayman Islands, a crucial gateway in the pipeline that disguised black money as legitimate business profits before funneling it back into the United States.
At the time, the case caused an enormous stir in finance.
The Wall Street Journal ran feature after feature, and Bloomberg published reports that analyzed the cash flow charts in painstaking detail.
I had read those reports countless times.
That was because, when I worked in Black Diamond’s compliance department, this case was used as a textbook example in anti-money-laundering training.
At every new-hire orientation, they drilled us with the patterns to watch for and made us memorize the flow of John Liu’s money, warning us to report immediately if we ever saw anything like it...
And now I can copy one of those patterns exactly.
Everything I had given Alfie was real information, but the document itself was fake.
More precisely, it was closer to a complaint stitched together from every scrap of memory I could drag up from before my regression.
I had effectively “invented” evidence the IRS would not obtain for years.
Vito and Søren had told him:
“We found these papers inside an abandoned warehouse.”
“The warehouse we bought seems to have been used as a meeting place for organized criminals.”
Vito and Søren believed the documents had really come from a derelict warehouse.
“John Liu...”
Alfie’s gaze moved over the typed letters on the page.
“My team has been tracking this man for the past three years. If this is real, then... we might be able to seize one of his laundering pipelines completely. We may even be able to arrest him. You found these envelopes in an abandoned warehouse, you say?”
“Yes.”
“Thank you. I’ll need to verify this, of course...”
I decided to firm up Alfie’s suspicions a little more.
“We did do a bit of our own digging already. If you don’t mind, would you like to hear it?”
“I see no reason not to. Go on.”
“First, we focused on the Cayman bank’s account-number system. The format listed in these documents matches exactly the twelve-digit code system the bank actually used between 1987 and 1990. That system changed in 1991, so if someone forged these papers later, they would have had a hard time knowing that format.”
“Correct. That was my thought as well.”
“And the corporate registration records for Theraphosa Blondi Goliath were rather telling too. When we checked the Cayman Islands corporate registry, we found that Theraphosa Blondi Goliath was a real paper company established in 1986 and dissolved in 1990. The corporate registration number on these documents matches as well.”
“You’ve saved us the trouble of doing this ourselves...”
“The timing of the cash flows lined up too. The transfer dates listed in the documents matched exactly the period when someone using the name John Liu was buying large-scale real estate in Texas. That could be cross-checked through public registry records alone.”
The documents I had created were fake, but the information they contained was entirely real.
Vito and Søren had checked it twice, even three times, so there was no way it was wrong.
What would happen if the IRS began an investigation with this in hand?
They would likely succeed in freezing one of John Liu’s core nominee accounts, and they might even be able to arrest him on top of that.
Even if they managed only one of those things, it would still be the high point of Alfie Solomons’s career in collection and enforcement.
“This is... this is truly the kind of gift I never imagined receiving.”
Alfie Solomons pinched the bridge of his nose and shook his head.
I spoke in a deliberately casual voice.
“Leader. Why do you think I brought these documents here instead of taking them to the FBI?”
“I don’t know. Why?”
“Because I wanted to become your friend.”
“Hahaha—”
At my answer, Alfie burst out laughing.
The stiffness in his posture eased a little, and into that loosened space came an equal measure of goodwill.
I added one more thing.
“The abandoned warehouses I’ve acquired turn up all sorts of documents. I’m still going through them, but... there are a few more tax-evasion cases on this scale.”
“More besides John Liu?”
“Yes. But I haven’t finished verifying them, so I couldn’t share them yet. For now, I’ve only brought you the ones I’m confident in.”
“More! Please share the rest too! We’ll handle the verification ourselves!”
“I will. But there’s a lot of trash mixed in too, so I’d like to filter it a little first... As I said, we’re a new company. If we suddenly get hit with a high-intensity tax audit, our workload will become overwhelming. It could even slow the growth of our core businesses...”
“Understood, Mr. Lee. Let’s be friends.”
Alfie Solomons was a quick man.
He took my hand firmly and shook it up and down.
“A tax audit on Lee Energy will remain under internal review for the next five years. I promise you that.”
“And I’ll keep sending you information on major tax evaders.”
“There are that many things in those warehouses that could become our accomplishments? We may need to join the warehouse auctions ourselves. Hahaha—”
Alfie Solomons seemed half-convinced, half-skeptical that I had uncovered tax-evasion evidence inside an abandoned warehouse, but not enough to press the point. He wasn’t the sort of man who lacked the instinct to know when not to pry.
As the saying goes, nobody cuts open the belly of a goose that lays golden eggs.
Just as truckers used to quietly pay for their gasoline in cash and keep that fact under wraps, the IRS had no hesitation when it came to judicial bargaining.
From Alfie Solomons’s point of view, it would be far better to rake in major results by going after the nominee accounts of tax evaders that were handed to him automatically than to drain massive manpower into digging through me, a man who paid his taxes faithfully, for some shady detail that might not even exist.
In short... there was no benefit at all in attacking me, only losses; if he became my friend, on the other hand, he stood to gain something delicious indeed.
I rose to my feet.
“Then I’ll take my leave. I’ve kept you far too long, and I’m sure you’re busy.”
As I stood and straightened my clothes, Vito and Søren quickly gathered their bags and got up too.
Just then—
“Ah, one more thing, Mr. Lee.”
Alfie called after me.
When I turned, wondering what was up, he grinned.
“When you go back to school, please give my regards to Professor Cromwell.”
“...?”
The familiar name made me tilt my head.
Then I remembered.
When I first heard the name Alfie Solomons, I had thought it sounded oddly familiar, and now I finally recalled where I had heard it before.
Back in class, Professor Cromwell had once said something to me like this:
Sanha. I hear you’ve been running a business lately, and I think I might have a fine little gift for you. One of my old students is a fellow named Alfie Solomons. If you ever happen to meet him, mention my name. He’ll look the other way at least once, whatever it is.
I had tucked it away in the back of my mind, thinking there couldn’t possibly be anything I needed someone else to look away from... and yet here I was, hearing that name in this place of all places.
The power of the Harvard network was stronger than I’d expected.
Politics, business, law, and even the IRS.
With a single keyword—alumni—you could receive help from the most unexpected places.
It really was worth getting into Harvard.
With the farewell of a newly acquired and reassuring senior to see me off, I left the interrogation room.
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