Prager and, along with the outsize returns he reported year after year, helped make Tirol one of the fastest growing funds of the new century.
Besides the money, and the truckloads by which it arrived at Tirol’s Greenwich, Connecticut, doorstep, the articles discuss Prager’s many good works. There are lists of scholarship funds, endowed chairs, research laboratories, and hospital pavilions that bear his name, and pictures of Prager and the missus-tall, blond, disdainful-at an endless series of charity events. Black ties, white ties, polo shirts and sunglasses-the dress code varies, but never the smiles, which are tight and entitled. Smiles of any sort are in short supply in the next set of clippings-the ones from the trials.
There were two of them, the first just before the markets collapsed, the second just afterward, and despite the torch-and-pitchfork temper of those times, both ended in hung juries. The press attributed this to the complexity of the government’s case against Prager-the difficulty of making money-laundering and conspiracy charges stick, the arcane financial instruments involved-though some in the U.S. Attorney’s office grumbled darkly, and not for attribution, about jury tampering.
The feds were about to have a third go when their only witness, a former Tirol compliance officer named Munce, drove his Lexus off a dark road in Litchfield County, and through the frozen skin of the Housatonic River. His blood alcohol level was twice the legal limit, and there was ice on the roadway, but still the feds had both Munce and his car stripped down to their frames. The autopsies found nothing, though, and the most they could do to Prager were a dozen stiff fines for a dozen obscure record-keeping violations.
But the mere fact of his indictment, along with the implosion of the markets, had already dealt much worse punishment to Prager and his firm. Tirol was losing investors at a slow bleed before the first trial began, and like a broken hydrant afterward, and by the time the feds imposed their fines, the firm was down to a measly billion or so in assets under management, and a handful of clients in Florida, Latin America, and the Caribbean.
News coverage of Curtis Prager dropped off sharply four years back, after the fines-a mention in the Greenwich Time of the sale of his North Street estate, another in the New York Post of his divorce and exodus to the Cayman Islands. After which the press had bigger, more blatant frauds to cover, and the entries in the dossier switch from press clippings to what Carr recognized on first reading as intelligence reports.
“Where does Boyce get this stuff?” he’d asked Declan at the time.
Declan had shrugged and, typically, answered a different question. “He likes to keep an eye on the competition.” Carr stopped asking about what other lines of business Mr. Boyce was in, though he’s never stopped wondering.
About Curtis Prager’s business, the reports leave little doubt. With a labored dispassion typical to the genre, and with no mention of sources or methods, they describe how Prager, having relocated to the Caymans, closed down what was left of Tirol Capital and established Isla Privada Holdings, a firm whose ostensible business is the acquisition, consolidation, and management of small banks and trust companies in the United States, but whose actual purpose is to deliver financial services to organized criminals.
A comprehensive list of services too, according to the reports, especially for a relative newcomer to the field: bulk cash processing, foreign exchange, electronic funds transfer, access to a network of overseas correspondent banks, provision of fully documented shell corporations, asset management, even tax consultation-everything a crime syndicate might require to launder large sums of money, move them around the world, invest them, and bring them home clean.
The reports say that Prager is still building his business, and that his client base is still small-a Mexican drug cartel, a Colombian cocaine syndicate, a smuggling ring out of Panama, and a Salvadoran private army that expanded from death-squad work into regional arms supply. But he has grander things in mind, and his marketing efforts have recently spread beyond the Caribbean and Latin America to Central Europe and Asia. The list of Prager’s clients stopped Carr in his tracks the first time he read it. He peered across the table through the smoke from Declan’s Cohiba.
“We know some of these guys,” Carr said. “We hit them twice, they’re going to take it personally.”
“It’s not them we’re hitting, boyo, it’s their banker. Deposit insurance is his problem.”
“You’re thinking about a cash shipment?”
Declan shook his head. “Keep reading.”
The lightbulb went on two paragraphs down, in the midst of a dry discussion of the common back office used by the banks that Isla Privada owns. The centralized processing system gives Curtis Prager ready access to all of the accounts in all of the banks in Isla Privada’s portfolio, and-with the help of an obedient, well-paid, and meticulously incurious operations and accounting staff-makes it a simple matter to commingle licit and illicit cash and hide dubious funds transfers in a forest of legitimate ones.
Carr had looked up at Declan, who was grinning like a shot fox. “That back-office system of his is a fecking magic lamp,” Declan said. “The great Prager rubs away, wishing for some clean money, it spews a bit of smoke, and poof -out pops a wire transfer! Any given time, he can move a hundred million at least with that lamp, boyo. I say we do a bit of wishin’ of our own.”
“You say something?” Tina asks him. She’s lifted her glasses off her nose, and her gray eyes are motionless. Carr shakes his head. “You sure you’re okay?” she asks. “ ’Cause you look like a fucking ghost.”
“I’m fine,” Carr says. He flips past the profiles of Prager’s staff-his security chief, his tame accountants and auditors-and leafs through the technical section. Floor plans of Isla Privada’s offices on Grand Cayman and of Prager’s beachfront compound, the makes and models of alarm systems, registry listings for Prager’s sloop and his motor yacht, the tail number of his G650-Boyce’s people are good at this sort of thing, and it goes on for pages.
Carr squints at a column of figures and rubs his head. He turns to the last tab and scans the latest updates.
There are pictures of a party by a long swimming pool, at night-men in linen trousers, women in gauzy shifts, waiters in starched jackets, and in the background a line of luminous surf. Carr recognizes it as Prager’s Grand Cayman beachfront.
“These are from his party last week?” he asks. Tina doesn’t look up from her magazine, but nods. “You bought yourself one of the caterer’s people?”
“Rented,” she says.
“Another fund-raiser?”
Tina nods again. “For a local grade school.”
“Prager schedule the next one?”
“Just before Labor Day-right before he leaves on his prospecting trip.”
“Still off to Europe?”
“And Asia now. Lot of money to be washed out there. He’ll be gone about five weeks.”
“So, Labor Day-that’s about eleven weeks.”
“Ten,” Tina says, and turns another page of her magazine. Carr keeps studying the party photos.
“I don’t see Eddie Silva here.”
“Next picture,” Tina says.
It’s a photo of a fifty-something man, thick, with a salt-and-pepper buzz cut. It’s a daytime shot, and he’s coming out of a bar. His eyes are smeared and his face is like pitted pavement. “He’s off the wagon?” Carr asks.
Tina nods. “Again.”
“That’s what-the third time in five months?”
“That’s what I make it.”
“Hell of a thing for the head of security.”
“Nice for you though.”
There are more photos at the back of the folder, and the very last one stops Carr. It’s another shot of Curtis Prager, and like the first picture in the file it shows Prager climbing from a car, though this car is a Bentley, and the street, sunny and white, isn’t in New York, but in George Town, on Grand Cayman. Prager is wearing jeans and a guayabera. His hair is long, curling, bleached from the sun, and his mouth is open, as if he’s about to speak.
Carr flips to the front of the file and then to the back again. There can’t be five years between this photo and the first one, but in the interim Prager’s face has aged fifteen years at least. His skin is hide brown, seamed, and pulled too tight over the fine bones. The cords of his neck are like rigging, and his eyes are adrift in a sea of lines
