Manhattan's Ruler: The Return of the Trash Son-in-Law

Unanimous

Ethan was working on the laptop when he came across Linda Shaw. Linda Shaw had been Richard's assistant for fifteen years. He quickly opened a new email and sent her a message.

The email arrived in Linda's personal account on a Wednesday evening. She read it twice, closed her laptop, then opened it again and read it a third time.

Ethan was at the warehouse table when Vincent came in from outside and looked at the screen showing Linda's email account activity.

"She opened it three times," Vincent said.

"She's scared," Ethan said. "She should be."

"Do you think she'll move?"

"She has a son in his second year at Fordham," Ethan said. "She has a mortgage on a house in Westchester she has been paying for eleven years. She is not going to risk either of those things for a man who has never once asked how she is doing outside of whether his files are in order." He picked up his coffee. "She'll move."

Linda replied to the anonymous email at eleven-fifteen that night. Her message was four sentences long, and the last sentence asked what she needed to do.

Ethan typed back his answer and hit send, and then sat quietly for a moment.

Linda started the following Monday. She brought the auditors a folder of documents Richard had specifically told her to keep separate from the main archive, and she told them it had been misfiled.

The lead auditor, a woman named Margaret wrote everything by hand, accepted the folder without comment and spent the rest of the morning going through it page by page.

By Thursday, Linda had given them access to two email accounts Richard had considered wiped and pointed them toward a set of transfers through accounts registered in Delaware and the Cayman Islands.

"She's feeding them everything," Vincent said, watching the secure log Ethan had set up to track the document flow.

"She knows where everybody is buried," Ethan said. "She's been stepping over them for fifteen years."

"Is she going to be all right?" Vincent asked.

"She is going to be fine," Ethan said. "Better than fine. There is a position already arranged at a competitor that pays forty percent more than what Richard was paying her"

Vincent nodded slowly. "You thought ahead."

"I always think ahead," Ethan said.

The auditors worked late every night for three weeks.

The board presentation was on a Thursday morning at nine. David Park had positioned a camera discretely enough that the live stream reached Ethan's laptop at the warehouse in a clean feed.

He watched it on the screen with his coffee going cold beside him and Vincent standing at the window with his arms folded.

Margaret from Pembroke & Associates stood at the head of the boardroom table, going through the findings.

Eight years of fraud. One hundred million dollars removed from the company through fake supplier contracts, expenses that did not correspond to any real service or purchase, and payments to shell companies that Richard controlled through nominees, including one registered to a name that belonged to his college roommate who had been dead for six years.

"The methodology was consistent and repeated," Margaret said, setting down one document and picking up another. "This was not opportunistic. It was structured."

Around the table, board members who had been sitting in Richard's boardroom for years were looking at the presentation screens.

Richard sat at the head of the table with his hands flat on the surface.

"These conclusions are wrong," Richard said. "I want that stated clearly for the record. This analysis is based on incomplete information and a fundamental misunderstanding of how this company structures its vendor relationships."

"Mr. Hargrove," Margaret said, without looking up from her notes, "we reviewed six years of vendor contracts, cross-referenced with corporate registration records and bank transfer documentation. The analysis is based on primary sources."

"Then your primary sources are wrong," Richard said.

Gerald Whitfield, who had been on the board for twenty years , pushed his chair back and stood up.

"Richard," Gerald called, pointing a shaking finger at him."I have known you for a long time and I am asking you, directly and in front of this board, to resign as chief executive effective immediately. We can't continue like this and we are all tired. I think it's time to remove you from the chief executive seat. You are draining this company”.

"Gerald, sit down!"

"I will not sit down," Gerald countered."I am calling for a vote. All in favour of removing Richard Hargrove as the chief executive, effective today, please indicate now."

Every hand at the table went up. Every single one. Richard looked at each of them in turn, slowly, and none of them looked away.

He stood up and pushed his chair in and walked out of the boardroom without saying anything further to anyone.

Ethan sat back from the laptop screen and let out a breath.

"Done," Vincent said from the window.

"One more," Ethan said.

Richard poured himself a drink before removing his coat. Ethan listened through the penthouse feed.

"Tell me," Eleanor said.

"They voted me out," Richard said. "Unanimous."

"The money," Eleanor said. "What happens to the money?"

"Eleanor." His voice was very flat. "The money is what caused this."

"How much is gone?" she asked.

"All of it," he said. "Everything we built is under federal review. Everything."

Richard drank through the rest of the evening and was already asleep on his chair by nine. Eleanor sat across from him in the penthouse.

The FBI arrived at seven the next morning with a warrant and four agents. Richard Hargrove, chairman of Hargrove Industries for thirty-one years, was handcuffed in the lobby of his own building while his doorman watched from behind the front desk.

He was charged with Wire fraud, security fraud, and tax evasion. The bail was set at twenty million dollars.

Richard spent that night in a cell at the Metropolitan Detention Center.

"Are you all right?" Vincent asked from across the room, as he noticed that Ethan was gazing at the ceiling.

"I am thinking about Linda Shaw," Ethan said.

"She's fine," Vincent said. "The offer went through this morning."

"Good," Ethan said. He looked back at the laptop where the news feed was running the arrest story. "She spent fifteen years cleaning up after him. She deserves better than that."

He closed the news feed and opened the next file. Nothing has happened to Serena yet, the heartless woman who ‘killed’ him and stole all his money.

“ And it's time for her to get the taste of her own soup”.