The despicable asshole sat directly across from across me. My one-time high school nemesis was now mostly bald, bespectacled, and appeared life-worn. He was all-too familiar and recognizable to my eyes, but his eyes did not indicate any knowledge of our previous adolescent history.

Bob Osborne had been an all-state receiver and had been a principle key in the school’s 4A state championship. He was courted by many college recruiters and was campus royalty among a football-obsessed culture. Bob was dangerous because he was both smart and an immoral self-serving narcissistic asshole.

I was, as were most of my partners in crime, also an asshole, but we mostly flew under the radar because we were considered both nerds and jocks, and also because we were unrecognizable and non-royals as members of an obscure track team on a campus of over 3000 students. My cohorts and myself considered it our sacred duty to fuck with school administrators and football, basketball, and baseball jocks. Our targets never knew the source of their torments. And the school administration was too stupid and lazy to expend the intellectual effort of induction and deduction that would have been required to catch us in one of our many nefarious acts.

Our group’s feats were legendary among the geeks and nerds. We somehow managed to remain anonymous in spite of, or perhaps because of, the numerous sabotaged vehicles, corrupted records on the district mainframe computers (there were no PCs or racks of servers in the early 1970s), modified academic records, exposed teacher disciplinary hearings, student lockers emptied of contents that were never found, student and administrator vehicles mysteriously removed from the school parking lot - only to be found in a rival school’s parking lot with flat tires or in a police impound, damaged athletic uniforms from the manufacturer, lost bus driver schedules and incorrect assignments for the transport of football and basketball team members to games, framed set-ups for students’ academic cheating supposedly committed by jock royalty and their courtesans, etc etc and ad infinitum.

Us nerd-jocks of the track team had an unlimited and evil imagination, fed by our amoral view of an unfair life and our general disrespect for authority. Every act of arrogance and misbehavior towards innocents and non-royalty by a jock royalty or by a school official was met three or four-fold by our retributory acts. Some of the jocks and school administrators were able to discern the correlation, thusly modulating their corrupt or anti-social behavior; many never made the connection and continued to suffer our retributions.

The man across me from at the conference table, Robert Osborne, had been born with many a natural gift. He largely had successes, some earned through athletic prowess, some through connections with fellow elites, but very little success had resulted from competence or vision or business acumen. He had abused his give of a better than average intellect to subvert legalities and find short cuts.

Bob’s company hired me to design and implement a system that would enable a front end that would shield the source and/or the destination, supposedly for transaction security. I had designed the system to be leaky and to fail in an obscure and untraceable path, and to direct legal culpability at Bob and his solely-owned company. I had also set them up to make it easy to violate various state and federal statutes, which, given his unethical and entitled attitude, had not been difficult.

Bob’s attorney, and the Department of Justice investigator carried the bulk of the conversation, while Bob, myself, and the lawyer provided to me by my consulting consortia, mostly listened. Bob’s lawyer was choking, almost literally, on the stacks of documents, both physical and electronic, that had been presented by the DoJ.

‘Mutt and Jeff’, my nerd group’s identifier for the two outside linebackers, had pushed my fellow track/nerds Adam and Harry onto the wall of hallway lockers.

“Don’t talk to them, and don’t talk to us, faggots. Understand?”

A coiffed-hair, vacuous cheerleader attempted an intervention with the two hairless apes.

“Jase, no. We went to them for help.”

Bob Osborne also wanted in on the apparent fun, thus interrupting the two mentally-challenged jocks.

“What’s up, Jason?”

“Fairy boys were talkin to the girls...”

“Yeah? What for?”

The girl with large tits, again, implored the three jocks.

“Bob, we went to them for Algebra help. They’ve been helping the tennis team with math and science.”

“Yeah? Guess that’s okay. I’m gonna be watching you fags...”

Bob pushed Harry and Adam, with considerable force, into the metal doors. I watched, from a discrete location, with feigned indifference. As the five members of royalty departed through a cleared path, I nodded to my two track team members and fellow nerds.

Two weeks later, Mutt and Jeff were busted with large bags of marijuana in ther lockers and vehicles, subsequently going to juvie for intent to distribute narcotics and controlled substances. Adam and Harry were pleased with the ease of manipulation of the justice and school systems.

Bob’s fate had thus far been left indeterminate, as he had been too clever to entrap. At least until the subsequent withdrawal of an athletic scholarship for a strangely incomplete high school transcript. He eventually made the Texas A&M team as a walk-on after losing an academic year to fixing his high school records.

“Mr Dewhurst, we have fraud, embezzlement, extortion; we have resultant pecuniary profits and predicate acts. In short, sir, this will be a federal RICO prosecution if you do not turn for the state and federal AGs.”

I was initially uncertain as to why a potential federal prosecutor would have a preliminary plea-bargain discussion in front of myself and my lawyer. Most curious, but I could only assume that there was a point being made for my ‘benefit’, and that I was ‘on show’ that they had technical veracity for their evidentuary body, otherwise the legal ethics per the conference setup were dubious; which would be in my favor.

Mr Levine, the Department of Justice rep, did not appear smug and was not condescending. He was simply stating the facts in a direct and simple and workmanlike manner. I saw Daniel Levine as a language engineer. All of his prose, spoken or written, was by design. His speech was more than literal, it was precise.

It was obvious to me that Bob Osborne would have to turn state’s evidence or cop a plea to preserve any chance of a small eventual future without a view through iron bars. I figured that either way, the fucker was going into a federal slammer. I attributed his forthcoming incarceration to my artful use of rope; that is, I had given him enough rope to hang himself. This was important to me because I was not able to believe in a spiritual heaven or hell, viscerally or intellectually. I had adjuged Bob’s soul and was planning to send him to a mortal hell.