Serpent on the Rock Read Online Free PDF Page B

deal.
    Sherman couldn’t believe it. He sent the same proposal back to Blank with instructions for him to look at it again. Blank stood firm. He had no tolerance for political gamesmanship; he wasn’t about to let a deal he rejected get shoved down his throat. The marketing staff sensed a dangerous battle in the offing.
    â€œGoddamned Sherman is trying to get me to sell this deal again,” Blank grumbled to them in a conference call. To resolve the dispute, he was turning the proposal over to an outside law firm, Kutak, Rock & Huie from Omaha. He would let it check out the matter and decide if Bache should be doing the deal.
    At the San Francisco branch, Sherman fumed.
What kind of organization
was this that a senior executive couldn’t get a perfectly good deal done?
    Sherman directed the brunt of his anger at Jim Ashworth, the tax shelter coordinator for the West who occupied the adjoining office. Time and again, Sherman told Ashworth that he wanted the deal done. It was a good deal. What was the problem? he demanded. But the McNeil deal bothered Ashworth, too, and he said so. As Sherman seethed, Ashworth told him that he did not want to do business with McNeil.
    A few weeks later, Kutak, Rock delivered its findings. The lawyers refused to tell anyone in the tax shelter department what they learned. Instead, they insisted on reporting their findings to John Curran, Bache’s general counsel. Curran met in his office with the lawyers and listened. In about an hour, he emerged with a judgment: Bache would not be doing McNeil’s new partnerships.
    The McNeil deal was dead at Bache. The tax shelter boys had won. Sherman couldn’t possibly reverse the firm’s top lawyer. But they knew the battle was far from over. Their victory could transform the powerful Sherman into a dangerous enemy. The members of the department anxiously awaited any signs of trouble.
    Jim Ashworth hefted a carry-on bag over his shoulder as he hustled through a terminal at the Phoenix airport. He was looking for a pay phone so that he could call the office. It was early 1979, and Ashworth had just arrived on a flight from San Francisco. As a regional marketer, he spent most of his time on the road, visiting brokers at Bache branches in the West. Over a meal or a drink, he would tell them about upcoming tax shelters. Phoenix was just supposed to be another stop on his busy travel schedule.
    To a degree, Ashworth was glad to be getting away from the Bache branch in San Francisco for a while. Since the McNeil blowup, his relationship with Bob Sherman had been strained. Then, just the day before, the two men had bumped into each other at an out-of-town party. Sherman was with a woman who wasn’t his wife. And from the look on Sherman’s face, Ashworth knew the encounter was only going to cause more trouble.
    Ashworth found a bank of pay phones and called to check his messages. Steve Blank had called several times, he was told. His boss wanted to talk to him immediately. Ashworth called him from the airport.
    â€œJim, you need to get on the next plane for New York,” Blank said.
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œTake my word for it,” Blank replied. “You’ve got to be here.”
    Still in the dark, Ashworth booked the next flight to New York. Had he wanted to, Blank could not have shed much light on what was going on—he had been told very little himself. All he knew was that Ashworth, one of his best people, was under investigation by the firm.
    Ashworth arrived at the Bache Manhattan headquarters the next morning and was taken to a white, barren room near the firm’s security department. Leo McGillicudey, the head of Bache security, came in and sat down. The meeting started off ugly, and quickly grew worse.
    â€œMr. Ashworth, you are under investigation,” McGillicudey announced. “We are accusing you of cheating Bache on expense account items. I want to tell you, this is a very serious