Evening's Empire Page 7

  Cesar Romero, with the author’s grandparents, Louis and Belle Lazar

  8

  Not long after the AHI merger, Ed had come back to the office one afternoon to find one of his former sales managers, James Cornwall, waiting for him in his office. Cornwall’s Rolls-Royce had been sitting in the parking lot, a white Silver Shadow with UK plates, a car he’d bought from Warren not long before this. Cornwall stood up when Ed came in, holding a hand to his stomach to keep his tie in place as he rose from his seat. There was something studied about the gesture, along with the expensive silk tie that picked up a deep navy thread in Cornwall’s sport coat. He was tall, with a blond crest of hair slicked back with brillantine. It occurred to Ed that the more compromised a person became, the more compelled he was to draw attention to himself. Or perhaps it was the opposite: the showiness made you a “character,” so colorful that no one, not even the authorities, took you very seriously. Cornwall was a deputy in something called the Sheriff’s Posse, a fund-raising group whose members were entitled to wear silver stars and ten-gallon hats like the lawmen to whom they wrote their checks.

  “We missed you at the party last weekend,” Cornwall said in friendly accusation.

  Ed nodded, shaking his hand. “How was it?”

  “Forty, fifty people. Janet King in a very interesting top.”

  They sat down, both of them unhappy, both of them trying to conceal it. A year ago, Cornwall had been the head of one of the least successful sales offices at Consolidated Mortgage. Now he had a house in Paradise Valley not far from Warren’s, a house with a swimming pool and a tennis court, a view of Camelback Mountain. He had been installed by Warren as president of something called the Great Southwest Land and Cattle Company, a business that since its inception a year ago Ed had been doing his best to stay out of. Great Southwest had been the genesis of Warren’s Consolidated Acceptance Corporation, a way he could bill Great Southwest for all the help it was getting with its operations—its billing, its articles of incorporation, its HUD applications. But the advice and help had never seemed to stop.

  Cornwall had heard about the AHI merger.

  “It sounds like you and Mr. Warren are going your separate ways,” he said, crossing his legs.

  “Not really. It’s just a merger. We’ll still be in charge of our own offices.”

  “But you won’t be working for him anymore.”

  “He won’t have the same control he had, if that’s what you mean.”

  Cornwall cocked his head to one side. “I told Ned that’s the kind of deal that would really help me, and he just smiled.”

  “Yeah. The smile.”

  “I could use the financing more than you could—you know that. If there’s any way you could put in a word for me, I would appreciate it.”

  “We both know how much good that would do.” He looked at Cornwall. “I told Ned that you and Great Southwest should be searching for ways to refinance, but he’s not listening. We both know how that is. I think the real problems are going to come down the road, in six or seven months, so right now the best thing you could do is probably start pulling out.”

  “I was thinking something like that.”

  “I don’t know how much you’re on the hook for personally.”

  “I’ve got a lot of loans out there. A lot of notes with my signature on them.”

  Ed just stared at him. Cornwall smiled ruefully down at his knee. He seemed to be ruminating on his own foolishness but without taking it very seriously. The chain of mistakes was regrettable, but how could he have known, he was just an ordinary person, Mr. Warren had been making the real decisions. That was what he seemed to be telling himself, as if this would somehow mitigate the consequences. Never mind the house in Paradise Valley, the Rolls-Royce, the tennis court and pool. Never mind the huge salary package Warren had offered him right from the start, a man with little business experience and little ability with numbers. It was just dumb luck, the ill fate of someone giving things a go, seizing the main chance.

  Ed turned away, his tongue pressing at the corner of his mouth. “Listen, I was glad to help you out with the HUD reports and the billing and the forms, but I have no say about what Warren wants you to do over there at this point. You know that.”

  “I understand.”

  “You can’t bring me into it.”

  “There’s just this hole opening up, bigger and bigger.”

  “It’s going to get bigger still. Unfortunately, I think that might have been the plan.”

  When Cornwall left, Ed went down the hall to the men’s room. He washed his hands and face and then he brushed and flossed his teeth. He dried off with a sheaf of paper towels, closing his eyes.

  He had gone to the Peach Bowl in Atlanta that winter with Susie, Ted and Elaine Kort, the Minkoffs, the Segals. A few days before they’d left, Warren had come to him with a new business proposition, a way to bill for their expertise without risking any of their capital: a consulting business for other land companies, Consolidated Acceptance Corporation. Their first client could be James Cornwall, who was already struggling with the new venture Warren had set up for him, the Great Southwest Land and Cattle Company.

  What was Warren like, people would ask, and Ed would say that he was a “character,” he was “colorful,” but also “brilliant,” “charming,” a kind of genius when it came to making deals. He always had dozens of them in progress—deals on land developments, commercial real estate, insurance—deals involving half a dozen prominent country club members and their attorneys, but also smaller, grittier deals—deals on soft drink distributorships, vending machines, taverns, liquor licenses, which as an ex-convict he was legally unable to hold. Ed would try to explain the layers of a personality like this, but there weren’t many people who understood the nuances. There was the Warren who had everyone to his house parties—the buffet by the pool, the bartender in his white jacket—the Warren of the bright, cajoling smile, a half circle of guests surrounding him in front of the camera. There was the opposite Warren: the chain-smoker in his tattered golf shirt who scrutinized numbers, bank letters, accounting ledgers, who saw everyone, not least himself, as a little contemptible, a little disgusting in their simple motive of gain. There was the Warren of hangovers and there was the Warren of nights on the town at Rocky’s Hideaway, Durant’s, the Roman Gate Cocktail Lounge—girls in friends’ apartments, girls in the Embassy Hotel. There was the Warren who stopped by Ed and Susie’s house like a bland uncle with a box of macadamia nuts from Hawaii, a case of Baileys Irish Cream, standing in the kitchen, asking Susie about the kids, remembering their names, remembering the toys they played with. He and Barbara would come over for dinner with Ed’s parents and they would talk about the new biography of the Roosevelts, Eleanor and Franklin, about college football, about Diamonds Are Forever, the most ordinary family talk, the Warrens like film stars in the small dining room, distinguishing themselves by their total lack of aloofness. After dinner, while the women did the dishes, the men would drink Scotch in the living room, and then the women would join them for dessert. Even recounting the plot of a movie, Warren would keep everyone so engaged that Ed’s parents, Lou and Belle, would stay late, Warren’s energy becoming theirs, drawing them out, causing them to tell stories of their own, jokes of their own—Warren always laughed at their jokes. It was a strange mix of performance and actual kindness, the performance and the kindness rising to greater heights in an effort to efface their differences. It was not the same Warren who, the next morning, might tell Ed that he had no balls. Nor the same Warren who, the day after that, might tell Ed that he was the brightest person he’d ever met. He was sincere in these contradictions. He saw through people, but he also saw through himself, and this did not leave him sour or disdainful but amused, happily jaded. He had a mildness in his eyes that said, I know something you will never know. Once you saw that look, you didn’t stop thinking about it.

  The Peach Bowl took place in Atlanta, at Grant Field, on the
campus of Georgia Tech. It was ASU’s first national bowl game, the climax of their 10–0 season under longtime coach Frank Kush. It was one of those back-and-forth games that inflames the emotions, as if the outcome were personal and spoke to your judgment, your taste, your capabilities. On their first possesssion, ASU marched seventy-eight yards downfield in only nine plays, ending in a touchdown run by their star back, Bob Thomas, who shimmered through the North Carolina defense like light on the surface of a pool. By the beginning of the second quarter, the Sun Devils were ahead 14–0, but then everything fell apart—a fumble, an intercepted pass—the kind of self-inflicted failure that bears the moral stigma of fecklessness, apathy, laziness. Suddenly North Carolina was ahead and it was halftime. The freezing rain that had made it uncomfortable to sit in the stands all afternoon now changed to heavy snow. “This does not count as a vacation,” Susie said in the line for the restroom, holding a cup of hot coffee. Ed laughed and put his arm around her, slapping her jacketed elbow, and everyone smiled, but they also looked down at the ground. The weather was going to hurt ASU, not North Carolina. ASU relied on speed, and the snow would hobble them. You began to feel a little foolish for not anticipating the loss. With their orange-and-yellow uniforms, with the jauntiness of their nickname, the Sun Devils suddenly appeared like brash newcomers, cursed by a lack of history. They were only talented, nothing else.

  But instead of losing, they won. They racked up three touchdowns and two field goals in the second half—they seemed to do nothing but score in the second half. They trounced North Carolina by twenty-two points. When the polls came out the next week, they stood a good chance of ranking number one.

  Two weeks later, Ed and Warren filed the articles of incorporation for their new business, Consolidated Acceptance Corporation.

  October 4, 1971. The day after they made their trip to Verde Lakes and Chino Meadows, Ed drove Harry Gillis to the Scotts-dale airport. Jack Ross met them inside the tiny terminal with its vending machines selling coffee and sandwiches on rotating disks. Ross, the brother of Goldwater’s son-in-law, was a tall, boisterous crank with a brown mustache and glasses with thick frames made of black plastic. He shook your hand too hard, slapped your back. He seemed like a man playing a mayor in an amateur stage play.

  “You’re not coming with us?” he asked Ed. “Can’t get you up there?”

  “Not today.”

  “Really.”

  “No. I wish, but I’ve got work to do.”

  Gillis flicked his cigarette at one of the standing ashtrays. “What kind of plane do you have?” he asked Ross, who clasped his hands behind his waist and looked out at the runway, his chin tucked in until it doubled.

  “Aero Commander,” he said. “Six-eighty.”

  “That’s a Douglas?”

  “Aero Design. Used to be Douglas, then they formed their own outfit. Nice five-passenger plane. Single-engine prop plane.”

  Through the airport’s high windows, you could see the asphalt lanes on the dried-out beige clay of the tarmac. Ed left them there talking about engines. That was the last moment anyone would be able to agree about. After that, everyone would have his own story about what went wrong.

  An accumulation of statements. A flood of documents, a five-year barrage.

  On October 4, 1971, Jack Ross thinks to write a “personal memorandum” recounting his flight that day over Chino Grande with Harry Gillis of CMS, Japan. Ross thinks to paraphrase Gillis describing himself as “a professional land acquisition specialist and real estate person.” He thinks to mention that Gillis declined an offer to also view the property from the ground—an important claim. Perhaps all of this happened as Ross said it did. Perhaps Jack Ross always wrote such detailed memoranda of his days.

  On September 28, 1972, Harry Gillis gives a deposition in which he says it was Ned Warren’s idea—not his or Ross’s—that they view the property by plane, as opposed to from the ground. He says that previously, in Japan, Warren presented photographs of what he said was Chino Grande, which Warren described as “meadow”—gently rolling acreage easily divisible into five-acre rectangular parcels. A lawyer asks Gillis if he ever in fact actually saw the Chino Grande property.

  “That is a good question, isn’t it?” Gillis answers. “I was told I did.”

  And yet on the flight with Jack Ross, Gillis says, he didn’t see any cliffs or canyons, did not observe a craggy landscape that could in no way be divided into neat, rectangular, five-acre parcels.

  . . .

  On June 16, 1972, Warren writes to his attorney, Philip Goldstein, to explain that subdividing the land into five-acre parcels had not been his responsibility, but rather the Japanese company CMS’s. He writes: “The Arizona Real Estate Department is completely aware of the fact that we sold 40 acre parcels only. I visited the Real Estate Department and spoke with Mr. Talley and Mr. Kieffer. They both told me to advise CMS not to sell five acre parcels without receiving subdivision approval. That day I telephoned CMS and so advised them. They continued to sell five acre parcels after my warning.”

  On September 28, 1972, Harry Sperber of CMS, Japan, gives a deposition about how he learned of the subdivision status of Chino Grande, Arizona: “I asked him [James Kieffer, chief investigator, Arizona department of real estate] if this was true, if this was an illegal subdivision. And he then went on to explain that it was, that they didn’t have a record of the plat, and they had complaints from a few of our clients. And I asked him what he thought, you know, could be done.”

  Sperber then recalls a lunch they had that day, which began with Warren greeting the CMS representatives at the bar with the words, “Are you guys going to sue me?”

  Sperber’s boss, Robert Kaplan, had answered, “Look, we ain’t here to sue anybody. We just want to straighten this problem out.”

  “Well, if you sue me, I’ll deny anything you say,” Warren had responded. Then they had lunch.

  On December 6, 1974, Jack Ross’s lawyer, Jack McCormick, describes to Ross in a letter a conversation he’s just had with a former CMS executive named Dale Hunt. Dale Hunt, McCormick writes, said that CMS was “fully aware” that Chino Grande was not a qualified subdivision when they began selling lots in Japan. According to Hunt, CMS was also “in some difficulty” with American military authorities over other land deals. Hunt acknowledged that CMS had had “an opportunity to inspect the property to any extent they deemed necessary” and that “their inspection was, nonetheless, inadequate.”

  On March 27, 1972, Robert Gunnison of Consolidated Acceptance Corporation gives a deposition about why Chino Grande could never be granted subdivision approval: “Five-acre parcels would require health department approval at both the county and the state level. The county would turn us down because most of the terrain is rock and there would be no percolation for septic tank use…. The state would turn us down because of the slope and angles of the lots… because of the rock and steep slopes, cliffs, road construction would be impossible in most of the area.”

  About a year later, on June 8, 1973, Warren is asked in a deposition how he could have gone to Japan and described such land as gentle, rolling meadows. He responds, “Apparently it was not as represented to me and as I represented it to CMS.”

  “How did the discrepancy come about?”

  “I don’t know.”

  On September 28, 1972, Robert Kaplan of CMS gives a deposition about Ned Warren’s sales pitch the previous year in Japan. “As a matter of fact, he even brought a letter from Senator Goldwater when I saw him the next time.” Kaplan recalls that the letter was “a great help in our selling program.” He adds, of Warren, “It looked like we were really dealing with a reputable guy.”

  On September 9, 1976, he recounts his first trip to Chino Grande and says that the land looked “like goat’s country. Would go up two, three hundred feet, then it would come down sheer.

  “We always hoped there was something we could do, that we could straighten up the land, that we could carve it u
p. I’m telling you, when I saw that land, there was no way.”

  On October 19, 1976, Barry Goldwater issues a press statement saying he has been “unable to determine who among his friends asked him to write a laudatory letter that was used to promote a Ned Warren Sr. land-sales operation among U.S. servicemen in the Far East.” The letter, as far as Goldwater knew at the time, referred to a Consolidated Mortgage subdivision called Chino Valley, near Prescott. It did not refer to the land near Seligman known as Chino Grande.

  The FBI file on Chino Grande is three inches thick—I have another inch of depositions and court exhibits. A patch of desert was viewed from Jack Ross’s airplane by CMS’s Harry Gillis. After that, all that can be done is to triangulate the various evasions. I think it’s almost certain that my father never saw the land at Chino Grande—“goat’s country,” “cliffs.” It was a side deal in a larger deal, it happened quickly, he was in Arizona when Warren made his trip to Japan. My father’s own statements are vague, minimal. It’s as if for a few months in 1971 he was just lazy, or careless, but of course laziness and carelessness are not characteristics that anyone speaks of when describing my father.

  What ends up being called greed doesn’t look like greed, it looks like giving things a go, seizing the main chance.

  9

  Lonzo McCracken was the senior detective in the Intelligence Division of the Phoenix police, the division that handled organized crime. He had a lined face, a straight, nearly lipless mouth, and guarded, close-set eyes. His work gave him ulcers, or aggravated them. He wrote memos for his personal record—obsessive, crammed with detail, each fact locked in his mind to twelve or fifteen others.

  To be concerned is enough to rip your guts out. The alternative, disregard it and go on—, become a part of it by your silence. At times the sins of omission are greater than the sins of commission. This would be brought home with devistating [sic] clarity if you were to sit in my office and watch an older man and his wife crying because their life savings from the sale of their home, their farm, was gone, all that was left represented in a stack of worthless documents. To ignore the problem any longer, I feel would be dereliction of duty.