'Nooo,' the judge said, 'the matter's closed. Go on now and please finish.'
'For whatever the reason, the Fourmen's Trust thereafter does not appear to have been further enriched by any infusions of capital other than the contributions required to buy out the interests of departing members. Judge Spring was the next to die, after Philip Fox. Then Roy Cames, Junior, liquidated all his family holdings here in order to relocate down south. F.D. Barrow, Walter Fox and Merrion bought out those two shares. Then Barrow died and his son succeeded him. And as I've said, when Walter Fox died his wife Diane took his place.
'So the Fourmen's Trust as it's now constituted has three named shareholder-beneficiaries, two men and a woman. Otherwise the way it's operated stayed the same for coming up on almost forty years now, still turning a neat profit, close to two hundred grand a year. All through those years, right down to the present day, each and every one of the direct beneficiaries of profits earned on the ill-gotten gains that funded the Fourmen's Trust has scrupulously and faithfully reported, as ordinary income, the annual distributions that the trust has made from earnings, and paid all federal and state taxes due very substantial sums.
'But during those years there has also been an indirect beneficiary, Daniel Hilliard. We find in his tax returns for beginning in Nineteen-seventy-three no evidence, no indication, he ever reported as income the amounts by which he benefited from the Fourmen's Trust, or paid any taxes on them.'
'For the simple reason,' Merrion began roughly.
'Shut up, Amby,' Cohen said, spinning in his chair and grabbing Merrion's arm again. Then: 'Your Honor, may I have a word with my client?'
'Certainly,' the judge said. 'Do you want a recess so you can take him outside and talk to him privately?' '1 don't think that'll be necessary, your Honor,' Cohen said, 'but I would like this to be off the record.'
'I'll give you that,' the judge said. 'Off the record. You probably don't mind hearing that, do you, Lizzie?'
'Sweetest words I heard today,' the stenographer said, clasping her hands together, palms outward, and stretching her arms out in front of her, then flexing her back against the chair.
'Look, Amby,' Cohen said. 'I warned you you wouldn't like this; sitting through this and having to keep your mouth shut. And I told you you shouldn't come. But you insisted, said you could do it. You wouldn't let him get to you. So do it. Or if you can't do it, get out.'
Merrion nodded, his face like an outcropping rock.
'I think we'll be all right now to go back on the record again, Judge,'
Cohen said.
'Very well,' the judge said, 'we are back on the record. Mister Bissell, as you were saying?'
'I mentioned just a few moments ago,' Bissell said, unable or unwilling to avoid looking pleased, 'that when Dan Hilliard and Mister Merrion pooled their resources back in Nineteen-sixty to get Hilliard elected alderman, they had several objectives in mind. The third one was to secure good lifetime jobs with the Commonwealth. Hilliard's would turn out to be the presidency of Hampton Pond Community College which with the help of his cronies in the House he tailor-made for himself. But his sinecure could wait; his political star was still on the rise.
'Merrion's situation was different. After a few years as Hilliard's district aide, he began to feel restless. A secure billet had to be found for him. One was. In Nineteen-sixty-six, Presiding Judge Charles Spring, no doubt at the direction of Roy Carnes, acting in turn at Hilliard's request, appointed Ambrose Merrion third assistant clerk of the Canterbury Court. Merrion and Lane later formed a friendship.
'That was Merrion's shrewd move. By all accounts, Lane'd been a heavy smoker all his life, and he also had a serious drinking problem. Soon after he retired, late in Nineteen-seventy, already diagnosed with cancer, his family gave him an ultimatum: either he would quit drinking and undergo a grueling course of radiation and chemotherapy to arrest the disease, if not cure it, or he would have to leave.
'He chose to leave. He estranged himself from his wife and children and moved into an apartment in the three-story building at Sixteen-ninety-two Eisenhower Boulevard built by the Fourmen's Realty Trust, financed with funds its beneficiaries and trustees had skimmed off the courthouse construction. Lane died in October of Nineteen-seventy-two.
'Early in Nineteen-seventy-three,' Bissell said, 'Mister Merrion used a portion of the first distribution he received from that trust, as Lane's heir and successor, to take advantage of an expansion of membership rolls at Grey Hills Country Club. The Club took this action for the first and only time in order to finance extensive repairs and improvements expected to cost more than a million dollars three million today. That was eight hundred thousand more than the club's officers thought it wise to take out of available capital. The only alternative was to open the rolls to enough new members as would be necessary to offset the rest of the cost.
'Most of the old-money members opposed this. The only way to get their consent was to keep the number of new members admitted as small as possible a hundred was the absolute ceiling they would stand for. That meant the tariffs had to be extremely high well over eight thousand dollars a head. The invitation to apply was posted on Groundhog Day.
'If the response left the board of governors chagrined, they had a right to be. Clearly they could've gotten more; the quota was over subscribed before the end of February. The rolls were once again closed, but now Daniel Hilliard and Ambrose Merrion were listed upon them.
'Membership has remained firmly closed ever since, your Honor,' Bissell said. 'For more than twenty years the governors of Grey Hills have been able to run this vast and luxurious resort, really; a famous, groomed-and- pampered, championship golf course on more than three hundred acres of prime real estate, surrounded with every possible amenity; with a seasonal staff of more than two hundred employees, eighty of whom work all the year 'round; entirely on the income generated by their four hundred dues-paying members' fees, and bills they incur at the club. One estimate we have says that the average annual member spends six thousand dollars a year.
'Six thousand dollars a year. One hundred and fifteen dollars a week.
At the minimum wage that's what a kid grosses working his way through college at a part-time job flipping burgers at McDonald's twenty-seven hours a week. For most of these people it buys at the most twenty-four weekend-rounds of golf. Six thousand dollars a year two hundred and fifty dollars a round. Joe Six-pack doesn't tee off at Grey Hills.
This is not a watering-hole for the common man. This a club for rich men, a closed society of very wealthy men. Yet there among their number we find recorded the names of Ambrose Merrion and Daniel Hilliard.
'How on earth did they get in there? What on earth are they doing there? Neither of these men, both of whom we would most likely describe as liberal populists, was born into a wealthy family. Neither one of them since the age of twenty-one has ever held any job other than the ones they've had on the public payroll. Yet if we allow for inflation and say the average annual cost of Grey Hills membership for these past twenty-two years was half of what we understand it is today, Mister Merrion's largesse in Mister Hilliard's behalf would amount to sixty-six thousand dollars. That on top of the eight-thousand-plus initiation fee and dues would be about seventy-five thousand dollars. All of which Merrion got from Lane's treasure chest, money Lane helped steal from us.'
'Your Honor,' Cohen said, 'I must ask again to interrupt. Again we have Mister Bissell regaling us with stories that begin: 'Once upon a time.' We don't for one moment dispute the US Attorney's right to seek out crimes for prosecution if he thinks, as he seems to, there're too few in plain sight to keep his forces occupied. We don't quarrel with his privilege to go back in time far beyond the statute of limitations and rummage around as much as he likes, to see if he can then find something that will catapult him forward into the present tense, still clinging to a trailing string that he can pull on, like Orpheus to his Eurydice, to tow all of those old outrages forward under his cherished relation back. It seems like any case you managed to weave out of such flimsy stuff would be a pretty thin one, and a waste of the taxpayer's money, and unless you leave out ego, a personal desire for the limelight, it's mighty hard to see why he'd want to do it. But nevertheless, however poor his judgment seems to be, there's no arguing his right to spend his time this way if he wants to.
'Mister Merrion has now known since the last week in August; he didn't until then that Mister Bissell the week before had federal marshals serve a subpoena duces tecum on Mister Merrion's bank. It demanded the records of his checking and savings accounts much further back than the bank is able to go. They notifed him as they must and then of course turned over to the government everything they had. So, if my client ever had any notion of trying to claim he never paid any club dues, bills or fees in Mister Hilliard's behalf, as he did not, he now knows going in that the US Attorney can prove otherwise, and would certainly reward him for such impudence by indicting him for perjury.
'But even without that, why go through all of it? Why bother to have him before the grand jury? We'll stipulate he paid Mister Hilliard's initiation fee, annual dues, and a lot of miscellaneous other stuff at Grey Hills over
