Two Jakes Read Online Free PDF Page A

Tierney had run Barnes through
the appropriate databases in New York and California to see if he was
litigious. Nothing. Scarne decided to run Taliger’s name. He hit pay dirt.
    “A
Byron Taliger brought a sex-discrimination suit against a local brokerage
house,” a lawyer at a San Francisco firm affiliated with Tierney’s shop told
him. “It was settled out of court. Taliger claimed he was fired because he was
gay.”
    “In
San Francisco?”
    “Yeah,
I know. The case was never going to a jury. The guy who fired him put something
in an email about Taliger’s ‘lifestyle.’ I kid you not. The settlement was
sealed, but a friend told me it was for a good piece of change. Out here that’s
lawyer-speak for more than $250,000 and less than a million.”
    A
few more questions revealed that the brokerage in question had been accused by
the Government of insider trading. Another easy mark anxious to shove unrelated
dirty laundry under the rug. Scarne was convinced Barnes and Taliger were
running a scam. But how did they get managers to be so devastatingly stupid with
emails? The obvious answer was that the managers were part of the con. Since it
was a stretch to believe Barnes and Taliger planted them over the years, Scarne
suspected blackmail. He asked Tierney to set up a deposition for the manager
who refused to hire Barnes in New York.
    The
man’s name was Alfred Webster and he appeared with both a lawyer from his
brokerage firm and his own attorney. After 15 minutes of typical deposition
background blather Tierney went for the jugular.
    “Was
it Byron Taliger or Jackson Barnes who first suggested the scheme to defraud my
client with this lawsuit?”
    The
mention of Taliger did the trick.
    “I
want to see a lawyer.”
    “You
have a lawyer,” Tierney said. “In fact, two of them.” He waved his arm to
encompass the other attorneys present, both guppy-mouthed.
    “I
want a criminal lawyer.”
    From
there it was easy. Alfred Webster, married with three kids in Colts Neck, NJ,
where he coached little league, frequently stopped for a drink after work and
just happened to run into Jackson Barnes. Webster occasionally, and secretly,
swung from the other side of the plate and was in bed with the suave Barnes
when Taliger burst in, digital camera in hand. SLR, 12 mega pixels, no shutter
lag. Faced with suburban humiliation, he was only too happy to entertain their
scheme. They had, of course, targeted him specifically because he was in the
position to hire people at his firm. As an added inducement, he was promised
25% of the “profits.” After all, he might lose his job for the email idiocy.
    Barnes
and Taliger had run the operation for a decade. New York was their sixth city.
They started out with sex-discrimination, but as they got older added age
discrimination to the mix. They had little trouble finding victims, who soon
became paid accomplices. They concentrated on troubled companies with deep
pockets, and averaged a $600,000 settlement every 18 months or so.
    Once
Webster turned on them, they cut a deal to avoid criminal prosecution. Tierney
saved his New York client at least a million dollars. And he succeeded in
recovering $4 million the pair had bilked from other companies and insurers.
(The two con men were also savvy real estate investors; even in a weak market
they had no trouble coming up with the money for restitution.) He negotiated a huge
bonus for Scarne from the New York brokerage. And since Tierney’s firm received
a third of the recovered funds from the other cases, he made sure Scarne saw a
piece of that as well. The money helped pay for Scarne’s new office but
wouldn’t last forever. Of more permanent value were platinum referrals like
Sheldon Shields.
    ***
    Scarne
had just finished with the Wall Street Journal when he heard the outer
door to his office open. He read both the Journal and The New York
Times every morning and was quite convinced that their respective editorial
writers did not