The Broker Read Online Free PDF Page A

office.
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    THE bankrupt law firm of Pratt & Bolling now found itself on Massachusetts Avenue, four blocks north of Dupont Circle; not a bad location, but not nearly as classy as the old place on New York Avenue. A few years earlier, when Joel Backman was in charge—it was Backman, Pratt & Bolling then—he had insisted on paying the highest rent in town so he could stand at the vast windows of his vast office on the eighth floor and look down at the White House.
    Now the White House was nowhere in sight; there were no power offices with grand vistas; the building had three floors, not eight. And the firm had shrunk from two hundred highly paid lawyers to about thirty struggling ones. The first bankruptcy—commonly referred to within the offices as Backman I—had decimated the firm, but it had also miraculously kept its partners out of prison.Backman II had been caused by three years of vicious infighting and suing among the survivors. The firm’s competitors were fond of saying that Pratt & Bolling spent more time suing itself than those it was hired to sue.
    Early that morning, though, the competitors were quiet. Joel Backman was a free man. The broker was loose. Would he make a comeback? Was he returning to Washington? Was it all true? Surely not.
    Kim Bolling was currently locked away in alcohol rehab, and from there he would be sent straight to a private mental facility for many years. The unbearable strain of the last six years had driven him over the edge, to a point of no return. The task of dealing with the latest nightmare from Joel Backman fell into the rather large lap of Carl Pratt.
    It had been Pratt who had uttered the fateful “I do” twenty-two years earlier when Backman had proposed a marriage of their two small firms. It had been Pratt who had labored strenuously for sixteen years to clean up behind Backman as the firm expanded and the fees poured in and all ethical boundaries were blurred beyond recognition. It had been Pratt who’d fought weekly with his partner, but who, over time, had come to enjoy the fruits of their enormous success.
    And it had been Carl Pratt who’d come so close to a federal prosecution himself, just before Joel Backman heroically took the fall for everyone. Backman’s plea agreement, and the agreement that exculpated the firm’s other partners, required a fine of $10 million, thus leading directly to the first bankruptcy—Backman I.
    But bankruptcy was better than jail, Pratt reminded himself almost daily. He lumbered around his sparse officeearly that morning, mumbling to himself and trying desperately to believe that the news was simply not true. He stood at his small window and gazed at the gray brick building next door, and asked himself how it could happen. How could a broke, disbarred, disgraced former lawyer/lobbyist convince a lame-duck president to grant a last-minute pardon?
    By the time Joel Backman went to prison, he was probably the most famous white-collar criminal in America. Everybody wanted to see him hang from the gallows.
    But, Pratt conceded to himself, if anyone in the world could pull off such a miracle, it was Joel Backman.
    Pratt worked the phones for a few minutes, tapping into his extensive network of Washington gossipmongers and know-it-alls. An old friend who’d somehow managed to survive in the Executive Department under four presidents—two from each party—finally confirmed the truth.
    “Where is he?” Pratt asked urgently, as if Backman might resurrect himself in D.C. at any moment.
    “No one knows,” came the reply.
    Pratt locked his door and fought the urge to open the office bottle of vodka. He had been forty-nine years old when his partner was sent to prison for twenty years with no parole, and he often wondered what he would do when he was sixty-nine and Backman got out.
    At that moment, Pratt felt as though he’d been cheated out of fourteen years.
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    THE courtroom had been so crowded that the judge postponed the