banned parking on upper Savile Row and the adjoining Boyle Street.
Perkins himself was quite content. He ate a hearty dinner of spaghetti and meat sauce, and tried to converse with the other two over-night prisoners in the lockup. That was not productive, since both had been arrested for drunk and disorderly conduct. The first was raving piss-drunk and the second passed out.
After thirty-six hours, Perkins was moved on order of the crown prosecutor to an old Victorian-era prison in North London called Pentonville. This was a much bigger and more imposing establishment, built in Victorian times as a model penal institution. Its entrance was a creamy white facade that might have belonged to a Georgian townhouse; inside were facilities for fitness, wellness and the modern range of therapies. A plaque outside the gate noted that inmates over the years had included such luminaries as Oscar Wilde and Boy George.
Perkins was nervous at first when they put him in the police transfer van, worrying that the CIA might be planning some form of secret extradition. But through the barred windows he saw that the van was not moving west, toward Heathrow, but north, past King’s Cross and St. Pancras stations and up Caledonia Road toward Islington.
The prison warden, a tall man with a long nose and fringe of white hair, greeted Perkins personally and issued him a set of gray coveralls. He was assigned a cell in A-wing, where new arrivals were housed. But after an hour, an order came that he should be segregated from other prisoners, so he was moved to an empty corridor of D-wing, which was reserved for “enhanced” prisoners who were thought to be nonviolent. They gave Perkins his own television set and a stack of back issues of a celebrity magazine called OK! that featured pictures of big- breasted actresses and members of the royal family.
Perkins’s lawyer from Washington, Vincent Tarullo, came to visit him the first afternoon he was at Pentonville. He was accompanied by the dough-faced British solicitor who had been negotiating with the prosecutors. They were given an interview room in the entrance wing, near the warden’s office. Tarullo was a big man who usually walked jauntily on the balls of his feet, but today his body was slumped. His eyes were rimmed with fatigue from his fruitless efforts on two sides of the Atlantic to secure his client’s release.
The attorneys were seated at a wooden table when the guards brought in Perkins, who was smiling and looking relaxed. Tarullo had an unlit cigar in his mouth, which one of the guards told him to put away.
“Hi, Vince,” said Perkins. “You look absolutely awful. That must be my fault. Sorry about that.”
“What are you so cheery about? You are in very deep shit, my friend.”
“I like it here. I get three meals a day and my own toilet and a nice bed. I haven’t slept so well in months, actually. You should try it.”
“Don’t get used to it. I am busting you out of here, whether you like it or not. I brought along Mr. Chumley, here, who will be filing motions and petitions.”
“Gormley,” said the solicitor. “My name is Gormley.”
‘I have a question, before we go any further,” said Perkins. “Did you find Anthony Cronin?”
Tarullo shook his head.
“Jesus, Vince! The last time we talked I told you to squeeze everyone you knew until you found the guy. He’s the one who got me into this. He’s the way out.”
Tarullo sighed. He shrugged; he took his cigar out of his breast pocket, put it in his mouth again and then laid it down on the table between himself and his client.
“There is no Anthony Cronin, at least nobody who matches your description. I turned the government upside down trying to find him. Called in every chit I had, with the agency and the bureau, too. I paid consulting fees to two former chiefs of the CIA station in New York. I even paid some dope to look at the membership roster of the Athenian Club. Sorry. No such person.”
“Of course there is. I talked to him, repeatedly. We signed papers. We set up joint accounts at FBS in Geneva. Anthony Cronin was my freaking business partner.”
“It’s a false name, brother. Sorry to break it to you, but they do that. Whoever he is, he’s gone with the wind.”
“Then have the agency find the person who was using that cover.”
“I tried that. They claim there was no such operation. No Cronin, nobody with that work name, no connection with Alphabet Capital. Nothing.”
“But that’s bullshit, Vince. These people are paid to lie.”
“Maybe so, but they’ve been lying to everyone in town, in that case, because nobody knows shit about any of this. I even went to the congressional committees-that’s how much I love you. I got one of my buddies on the House side who is the ranking member, a gentleman who owes me a favor, owes me his fucking seat, to be honest. He has all the clearances. He went up to the vault and asked to see all the covert-action findings and proprietary operations involving U.S. financial companies overseas. They did a special search for him, and he didn’t get diddly squat. It’s not there.”
Perkins pounded the table, causing the cigar to roll toward the edge, where Tarullo caught it.
“Those fuckers! They are squeezing me, Vince. I’m the fall guy. They’re closing out the operation they were running through my firm, and now they are taking me out, too. They’re finished with whatever they were doing. I’m expendable.”
“You got it. That’s their game. The question is, what do you want me and Chumley to do about it?”
“Go to trial. Win the case. Get me off.”
“Not so easy, big boy. The Brits have gathered enough evidence to nail you: fraudulent statements to the regulators; insider trading; numbered Swiss bank accounts not declared to the Inland Revenue. They have a lot of shit, my friend. And I have some bad news for you: Juries don’t like billionaires, even in England. They want to crucify them. You’d have trouble finding a respectable barrister who would argue the case in court.”
Perkins listened to this litany of misdeeds and then shook his head.
“It’s all crap. They used me as long as it suited them, and then they ratted me out to the Brits. This is a setup, first to last.”
“Look, Tom, do you want my professional opinion?”
“No.”
“This case is a loser. If you take it to trial, you’re going down. Now, Mr. Chumley here has been talking to the prosecutors, which I am not allowed to do. And I think you should listen to what he has to say.”
“Can he get me off?”
“Sort of. Hear him out.”
“Fine. And stop calling this man Chumley, for god’s sake. He already told you it’s Gormley.”
The British solicitor looked relieved.
“Thank you. What Mr. Tarullo said is quite accurate. I have been in discussion this morning with Mr. Crane of the Serious Fraud Office, who was accompanied by a rather aggressive gentleman from the Crown Prosecution Service. We discussed the possibility of your entering a guilty plea to reduced charges. That would avoid the risk of going before a jury, which as Mr. Tarullo said would carry risks, given the current public mood toward, um, finance.”
“What would I plead to? Assuming that I was willing to pretend I did anything wrong.”
“That is still under discussion. But I was given to believe this morning that a possible arrangement might involve pleading guilty to a low-level count of banking fraud and a similarly low-level count of revenue fraud.”
“What would the sentence be?”
“That would be at the discretion of the judge. The guidelines suggest there should always be some reduction in sentence for a guilty plea. But there might still be a brief prison sentence.”
“How long is ‘brief’?”
“For the simplest banking fraud conviction, the guidelines recommend twenty-six weeks. For revenue fraud, it is twelve weeks. So let us imagine something well under a year. It could be more or less, of course, or nothing at all.”
“Take it,” said Tarullo. “It’s your best shot.”
“Shut up. Now, suppose I don’t accept this plea deal and I get convicted, what would I be facing?”
“Goodness, hard to say, but it would be quite unpleasant. The judge would not be amused by your subornation of an employee of the Bank of England.”
“How much time?”
“For major banking fraud, the recommendation is five years, plus five more years for major revenue fraud,
