calls to make.”
The young man grimaced, “I don’t think so boss. I think we better talk now.”
Vito paused and took a deep breath, “Great, now what?” he mumbled. “Come on in.”
The two men entered Vito’s very messy office. Piles of green file folders were stacked on the guest chairs, on both corners of his desk and on top of the file cabinets on the back wall. The total lack of organization in his office would be a total embarrassment for most businessmen, but it didn’t seem to bother Vito. He lifted a few of the files from the chair in front of his desk and asked his manager to sit down.
“What is it, Cliff?”
Cliff quickly took a seat as Vito dropped the files on his desk and nestled into his large leather chair.
“I’m here about the Blue and Gates request for the branch filings boss.”
“Yes…yes, what about them?”
“We can’t find Chicago.”
Anything but Chicago, Vito thought. Eyes wide, he shot up in his seat and shouted, “You can’t find what? What the hell are you talking about?”
Cliff spoke quickly, “It’s gone, its not there. We’ve looked everywhere.”
“You’ve looked everywhere?”
“Yes, it’s not here. I’m telling you boss, it’s not here.”
Vito shook his head in disbelief, “We’ve done more than 600 million out of that office this year my boy! A legal firm is asking to audit our files from that office and we can’t find the branch applications we sent to the SEC! Is that what you’re telling me?”
Cliff sunk down in his chair. “I’m afraid so.”
Vito stood and began pacing back and forth behind his desk. “Alex Crane is on a mission to discredit me and we can’t produce the most basic of information. Why, it has to be here. I remember signing the request form.”
Not looking at his boss, Stone opened the file in his hand. “Yes…yes you did. It’s right here.”
He lifted the form from the file and handed it to Vito. “But that’s all we have. There are no market studies, no empirical data on population trends, industrial capacity, and so forth.”
“Can’t we do that now and backdate everything?”
“I asked Jason, in our accounting department, about doing just that and he said it would take weeks to gather that kind of information, especially since it pertains to conditions that existed more that a year and a half ago. And Alex wants copies of the applications in a few days.”
Vito stopped in front of his chair. “Did you ask Jason to explain just how the hell this happened?”
“Well…uh yes, sort of. Jason said that….”
Vito interrupted. “Sort of!”
“Well…uh, yes I did.”
“Damn it, Cliff—spit it out!”
“Uh…he said that Chicago was one of the last branches to be approved. Our SEC connection had approved the other applications sight-unseen. Jason was certain that the SEC wasn’t even looking at the files that we sent them. And with so many things on his plate at the time, Jason never got around to sending in the documentation for branch approval for Chicago. We received an approval form via e-mail that included the branch number. You signed it and Jason put it in the file.”
Vito shook his head, “We have no way out of this. We have no paper trail showing attempts to process the information for the file! We have no e-mail records showing that we had sent the requested information to the SEC. This is unbelievable.”
“I have an idea, boss.”
Vito stopped his ranting and looked hopefully at his young assistant. “Go on.”
“Well, the way I look at it, the SEC has just as much to lose as we do. They are going to have to explain how they gave a branch approval for a large securities dealer without receiving the necessary documentation. It usually takes months and years to get branch approval. It all smacks of political cronyism, which could reflect very badly on the Chairman of the SEC and eventually on the President. If this leaks out, the media would have a field day.”
Vito coughed nervously. “Good point. Go ahead.”
“I would suggest that we stall Alex as long as we can—just tell him we are trying to obtain some necessary documentation from the SEC and they are not cooperating. That will buy us a little time. Then, in the meantime, we could have Jason contact our man at the SEC and explain our predicament and ask him if he has any ideas on how we can deal with this problem. Something tells me he will come up with a solution.”
Vito spoke quietly, almost to himself. “Alex will be very suspicious; he knows how these things work. But it’s far better to have him wondering why we’re stalling than to have him know the truth. It could be, that at the end of the day, nothing will happen. Alex may threaten us, but it’s highly unlikely that a banker from Indiana-polis will try and take on the Federal Government.”
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