Homeland Elegies(54)
“Retaliate?”
“For the mosque thing.”
When she said it, I realized: Of course. Of course he did.
I don’t know what warmed her to me—whether it was Harlem, or my humble surroundings, or my mother’s photo, or what I would come to suspect: that she was Muslim, too—whatever the case, Zakeeya sat down at the table again, and instead of asking me more questions now, laid out the class-action complaint as she understood it. The SEC was looking into it, too, she said, because Timur had taken out short positions against the debt they’d sold the municipalities. When that debt defaulted, Timur made a killing. All that said, she added, it still wasn’t clear if any laws had been broken.
By now, I felt comfortable enough to hazard a comment I don’t expect many SEC agents would have appreciated: “I mean, honestly, what you’re describing doesn’t really sound any worse than what Goldman was doing in 2010,” I said.
“Your friend’s no Goldman Sachs.”
“That he’s not.”
“Wrong color,” she said as she stood, buttoning her blazer. “And praying to the wrong God. But you didn’t hear it from me.”
*
The suit never made it past discovery. I sought out one of the court reporters who took and transcribed the depositions. She agreed to sell me copies for a hefty fee—$9,700—on the condition that I mask any details that pointed back to her if I ended up writing about the case. As I read through the transcripts, it was clear the decision makers on the various city councils in question had been duped, but more or less willingly. They’d taken gifts, had their “road show” trips paid for by the company, gone to the drunken parties, slept with the prostitutes. A city comptroller took her family on vacation for a week in Cabo San Lucas, most expenses paid; an alderman ended up with season tickets to the local NFL team, despite a ten-year waiting list. In almost every case, it wasn’t just that the fine print hadn’t been properly read: it was that the people doing the reading didn’t even seem to understand the very nature of the underlying security that they were about to purchase. What’s more, many of the “honorable” city officials implicated had already demonstrated less-than-honorable judgment in the allocation of city money; the rent-backed-bond buying spree was just the first time they’d all been burned so badly. As for Timur Capital, Riaz’s sales staff was covered. The fine print in the contracts was certainly convoluted, but unequivocal. The undersigned were duly warned about possible short positions that might be taken out against any or all of the securities being sold.
In other words, there wasn’t a case.
I was startled at the incompetence—even malfeasance—so abundantly on display at the municipal level. It was startling to see in this picture of America a nation so much like the one my parents described in Pakistan, where cutting corners, taking bribes, selling perks—all this was just business as usual. There was no honest way to make a good living back home, my father used to say. Corruption in Pakistan was endemic; escaping it was a good part of the reason he’d wanted to come to America in the first place. If those court transcripts are any indication of the larger state of affairs in American towns and cities, let’s just say my father may have been somewhat too rosy in his take on corruption in this country.
Of course, there’s no excuse for Riaz’s swindle. The resulting deficits in those places hurt the people who live there—hurt their children, their elderly. In one of the cities, the situation was so bad that budgets were cut, a hundred public employees lost their jobs, and bankruptcy was averted only by raising property taxes 30 percent and lowering city salaries—including the mayor’s—to the equivalent of minimum wage, $7.25 an hour at the time. In another, the sewer and parking authorities were sold off to the highest private bidder; so were the water supply and the public parks.
It may sound as if my outrage over all this is muted by the benefit I’ve reaped. It’s not. But it is the first time I’ve been forced to dwell so deeply in a fundamental contradiction of what’s become of our much-vaunted American way. Mark Twain doubted there was a writer yet born who could tell the truth about himself. You’ll have to make up your own mind about me—but I don’t believe I’m offering a defense of either myself or Riaz in stating what I take for the obvious: holding stock in Timur Capital isn’t any different from owning a stake in Nike, or Apple, or Exxon, or Goldman, or VW, or Boeing, or Merck, or any of the storied firms whose shares make up retirement nest eggs and college funds across our divided land, companies known not only for their progressive giving and canny political stances but also for cheating and abusing their workers, duping their customers, destroying the environment, selling goods that don’t work, manufacturing cars and drugs and planes that kill, profiting in ever newer, ever more ingenious ways off the bait and switch of the permanent corporate lie, namely, that the customer—rather than profit at any and all human cost—is king. In this era of capital’s unquestioned amoral supremacy, the only course-correcting moments of clarity—what passes for moral comeuppance, that is—are drops in stock price. Last I checked, Timur was still rising. Nothing unusual, then, about my unscrupulous gains except that I can’t ignore them. Still, I’m surprised Riaz got away with it. Milken did something similar in his own era—brilliant scion of a generation of Jewish fathers shut out by the white-shoe world, avenger of his tribe who found new ways to use debt, dodged the laws, pulled the wool over the nation’s eyes in his quest to torch the WASP establishment. But Milken paid for his rage. He paid dearly. Riaz is just getting richer.