The Chameleon Conspiracy Read Online Free PDF

for the same government.”
    “No need to be sarcastic,” said David, trying to calm down my mounting temper, which he knew only too well. David himself
     could have a bit of a temper too, but he kept a much tighter lid on his than I did mine. “To the extent that any of it is
     grand-jury material, they can’t share it with other sections of the government working on the civil side of the case.”
    That’s bull,
I thought. “Well, David, as an attorney for the government I can receive certain grand-jury material for use in performing
     my duty. Besides, this case appears to involve bank fraud, so there’s an additional specific language allowing the disclosure.
     Let’s chew the fat here.”
    I could almost hear David’s silent and subtle smile over the phone.
    “You’re right,” he finally agreed.
    “And?” I asked hoping to get support here. “Why is U.S. law enforcement extra-interested nowadays in high-dollar cases, even
     if stale? Have they just remembered it has an international aspect, and the post–September eleventh public outcry made them
     resurrect paper cadavers?”
    “Go figure,” he said, joining in my despair.
    I kept on pressing, “Unless someone at the FBI simply wanted to get rid of these cases to better his or her statistics, hoping
     we won’t cry foul, they’d better tell us what they have,or they’ll find these cases back on their desk in no time, dead and aging bookworms included.”
    “Dan,” said David in his calm voice. “Think about how the Bureau handled the S-and-L cases in the eighties.” I remembered
     it well. Neither the Bureau nor federal prosecutors went after the money looted in bank and savings-and-loan frauds. We went
     only after perpetrators. The statistics we tracked were numbers indicted and numbers convicted. The government wasn’t going
     after the money.
    “True enough,” I said. “Back then we never went after the money. But I never understood why.”
    “One reason, I’d say,” answered David, “was because going after the money would have required separate civil proceedings.
     Decision makers concluded that these would be resource-intensive cases, with little likelihood of recovering anything.”
    His point was that the U.S. government had been leaving millions of stolen dollars on the table, and U.S. taxpayers of course
     picked up much of the tab. Since that time, however, changes in federal criminal law have allowed us to get restitution, in
     criminal prosecutions, of ill-gotten gains resulting from crimes for which we got convictions. I’d been involved in many of
     these cases myself.
    “But that doesn’t explain why the Bureau waited so long,” I said in frustration, David’s compliment notwithstanding. “Maybe
     it landed on the table of this year’s recipient of the phlegmatic agent award?”
    “Let me make some calls, and I’ll get back to you,” concluded David.

C HAPTER F OUR
    Getting David’s help was the easy part. I had been working for him long enough to know he accepted reasoned arguments and
     never dug in his heels in a position proven wrong. But people change when they see retirement coming up. And in any case,
     David would still need to crack some bureaucratic walls. If you spend enough time in Washington, you know that sometimes it’d
     be easier to get a date with a reigning Miss America than to move things faster between government agencies. For sure, I knew
     that I had to get a breakthrough before David retired. With his clout and experience, he could back me up on almost anything.
     But when a new chief comes, things could be different, for better or—more likely—for worse, just because he’d be new on
     the job.
    A week later I went to Washington for a routine staff meeting. After the pep talk, David asked me to stay.
    “I thought it over and made some inquiries,” said David. “The bottom line is that the FBI did have a reason to send us these
     files. But before we go over them, let me call in