Chapter 1: The Investigation

“Frank, I am telling you there’s a story here. I just need some time to work out the details,” said Thornton Halifax. Thornton was a writer for Fortune magazine and had been assigned the task of investigating the Gray Family Trust, a secretive international investment firm.

Frank Thomas smiled to himself. He had heard the same two lines hundreds of times over the last thirty years. He was an executive editor at the magazine and if there was one single thing that young reporters knew, it was that the story they were involved in was bigger than imagined, and that they could prove it if they just had the resources. His job was to temper their enthusiasm and determine if there was something to their stories. Usually there wasn’t but occasionally something big would pop.

“I want you to come to my office after lunch. Two. Bring what you have, and we’ll go over it,” Frank replied.

“Two o’clock! See you then! Thanks!”

Thomas hung up, shaking his head, and smiling. At 25, Thornton was still young enough to be eager and enthusiastic. That was good in a young reporter, but he needed to learn to temper his enthusiasm. The ones who didn’t learn how to maintain a balance were the ones who burned out.

Thornton started pulling his project together. Much of what he had developed was found from online sources and archives. He pulled it together into a simple PowerPoint presentation, though without any fancy graphics or text. Once he had the final approval, he could write the story and the graphics department would be able to do add professional-quality artwork.

At two o’clock, Thornton knocked on his editor’s door. He had been standing outside for the last ten minutes; he didn’t want to be late. “Enter!” rang out.

“You wanted to see what I’ve developed, Frank.”

“Come on in, Thorny. Let’s see what has you so hot and bothered.”

“Yes, sir.” Thornton handed over a thumb drive. “My file is on there. Just pull it up and I can go over things with you.”

Thomas took the proffered drive and plugged it into his laptop. Once it was on his screen, he hit a few keys and the presentation appeared on the widescreen monitor on the wall. The first slide simply said, ‘Gray Family Trust’. He handed over a remote control and said, “Okay, Thorny, you’re on.”

“All right! Well, as you know, you gave me the assignment to do a background piece on the Gray Family Trust. What were they invested in? How big were they? Where did they operate? All the standard questions.”

“And did you find the answers?”

“Yes, sir, at least some of them.” Thornton flipped through a series of slides detailing what he had found out so far. “There isn’t a lot of information available. GFT is a private company and is based overseas. They are headquartered in the Cayman Islands, but that doesn’t seem to be anything more than a mail drop at a lawyer’s office. They also have offices in Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Switzerland, and just about any country with low tax rates, zero in some cases, and very strict banking privacy laws. They shuttle cash and assets around like a Monopoly game.”

“What about their investments and holdings? Where are they getting all the cash they shuffle around?” asked Thomas.

Thornton answered, “That one is a whole lot more difficult. They are extremely private. They don’t give interviews. If you call them, they hang up on you. If you leave them a message, they ignore it. They don’t give out photographs or do any public presentations. A lot of what I have figured out is from doing searches on public archives of financial news and investment disclosures. Here’s one example.”

With that he showed several slides related to an investment in an Irish tech company. “If we go to publication, the graphics team can put this all into a big drawing. I was able to trace it by doing a search on the text strings ‘gray family trust’ and ‘gft’ on Irish newspapers and investment journals, and then digging from there.” Thornton then went on to describe the complicated transaction. He had to flip back and forth through a few of the slides to get the details across. The investment, which gave GFT a controlling interest in the company, was funded through bank transfers from the Cayman Islands through a Maltese intermediary and finishing with a Lichtenstein finance company. The ownership position, in turn, ended up in a GFT subsidiary in Jakarta via Borneo. Along the way, taxes were deferred or suspended, and other incentives were made available so that the net purchase price was less than half the reported figures.

“None of this came from Gray. They released no statements or pressers. All of this came in dribs and drabs from the local papers, and I was able to confirm the details in other papers or tax documents.”

“If I am reading this right, at least two departments of the Irish government were competing with each other to see who could give the Gray Family Trust the biggest deal!”

“Three departments, not two,” said Thornton.

Thomas nodded. “Okay, I am following you. We can probably find some more deals like this if we put a researcher on it.”

“You’ll probably need a team. This took me the better part of three weeks. We’ll need to find somebody who will talk, too. That I don’t have yet.”

“No?”

Thornton shook his head. “Two weeks after the deal closed, the managing director of the company died. Heart attack. His original successor disappeared. One of the intermediary bankers had a stroke. A pair of London politicians were run over by a cab late at night. A reporter on one of the stories drowned in the Irish Sea after falling off the Gray family yacht.”