This time, Grisham is exposing the criminal racket that comprises of private law schools, educational loans, law firms that hire from those schools just enough to advertise, and general machinery of it all brought together to ensure profits for all at cost of ruining lives of the students who are easily enticed by rosy scenarios of a bright future after a law degree with jobs paying over a hundred thousand dollars to begin with, and only going higher.
Those jobs, the students aren't told, hire top graduates at the top schools, while the bunch at the centre of this story are struggling, with grades and student loans and attempts to find a job that would pay. Mark, Todd, Gordy, and Zola.
Mark has been slogging at a summer internship that promised a job, but no contract yet and no talk of a salary number.
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"Mark was the bartender, the lounge was not crowded, and after the fourth round of vodka and cranberry juice they talked loud enough for all to hear. Among many interesting things they had said, Mark had always remembered two: “The big D.C. law firms are hiring like crazy.” And, “Starting salaries are one-fifty a year.”
"Not long after that, he bumped into a college friend who was a first-year student at the Foggy Bottom Law School in D.C., and the guy gushed on about his plans to blitz through his studies, finish in two and a half years, and sign on with a big firm for a fat salary. The Feds were throwing loans at students, anybody could qualify, and, well sure, he would graduate with a mountain of debt but nothing he couldn’t wipe out in five years. To his friend, at least, it made perfect sense to “invest in himself” with the debt because it would guarantee all that future earning power."
"Mark took the bait and began studying for the Law School Admission Test. His score was an unimpressive 146, but this did not bother the admissions folks at the Foggy Bottom Law School. Nor did his rather thin undergraduate résumé with an anemic grade point average of 2.8. FBLS accepted him with open arms. His loan applications were quickly approved. Sixty-five thousand bucks were simply transferred from the Department of Education each year to Foggy Bottom. And now, with one semester to go, Mark was staring miserably at the reality of graduating with a combined total, undergrad and law school, principal and interest, of $266,000 in debt.
"Another problem was his job. As it happened, the market wasn’t quite as strong as rumored. Nor was it as vibrant as FBLS had advertised in its slick brochures and near-fraudulent website. Graduates from top-tier law schools were still finding work at enviable salaries. FBLS, though, was not quite in the top tier. Mark had managed to worm his way into a midsized law firm that specialized in “governmental relations,” which meant nothing more than lobbying. His starting salary had not been established, because the firm’s management committee would meet in early January to review profits from the previous year and supposedly jiggle the pay structure. In a few months, Mark would be expected to have an important talk with his “loan counselor” about restructuring his student debt and somehow repaying the entire mess. This counselor had already expressed concern that Mark did not know how much he would be earning. This concerned Mark too, especially when added to the fact that he didn’t trust a single person he’d met at the law firm. As much as he tried to fool himself, he knew deep in his gut that his position was not secure."
"To varying degrees, almost everyone Mark knew believed that (1) FBLS was a subpar law school that (2) made too many promises, and (3) charged too much money, and (4) encouraged too much debt while (5) admitting a lot of mediocre students who really had no business in law school, and (6) were either not properly prepared for the bar exam or (7) too dumb to pass it."
"And why would anyone name a school Foggy Bottom? As if the law school experience itself wasn’t dreary enough, some bright soul had, some twenty years earlier, tagged it with a name that conveyed even more cheerlessness. That guy, now dead, had sold the school to some Wall Street investors who owned a string of law schools that were reportedly producing handsome profits while cranking out little in the way of legal talent.
"How do you buy and sell law schools? It was still a mystery."
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"At major law firms, the summer programs were used to entice top students to the big life. Little work was expected. The interns were given ridiculously easy schedules, along with tickets to ball games and invitations to fine parties in the splendid backyards of the wealthy partners. Once seduced, they signed on, and upon graduation were soon thrown into the meat grinder of hundred-hour weeks.
"Not so at Ness Skelton. With only fifty lawyers, it was far from a top-ten firm. ... The firm’s expertise, if it had any, was maintaining relationships with Congress. Its summer intern program was designed more to exploit cheap labor than to attract top students. Mark had worked hard and suffered through the stultifying work. At the end of the summer, when he had received an offer that somewhat resembled a position upon passing the bar exam, he couldn’t decide if he should celebrate or cry. Nonetheless, he jumped at what was being offered—there was nothing else on the table—and proudly became one of the few FBLS students with a future. Throughout the fall, he had gently pressed his supervisor about the terms of his upcoming employment but got nowhere. There might be a merger in the works. There might be a split. There might be a lot of things, but an employment contract was not one of them.
"His supervisor was named Randall, a ten-year guy on the verge of making partner, and thus under a lot of pressure. A Ness Skelton associate who didn’t make partner after ten years was quietly shown the door. Randall was a George Washington law grad, which, in the city’s pecking order, was a step down from Georgetown but several notches above Foggy Bottom. The hierarchy was clear and rigid, and its worst perpetrators were the GW lawyers. They detested being looked down upon by the Georgetown gang; thus they were eager to look down with even more disdain on anyone from FBLS."
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"Like Mark, Todd Lucero was inspired to become a lawyer by booze-tinted conversations he’d overheard in a bar. For the past three years, he had been mixing drinks at the Old Red Cat, a pub-style watering hole favored by students from GW and Foggy Bottom."
"He and Mark Frazier had met the first day, during orientation, back when they were both starry-eyed and envisioning big law careers with fat salaries, back when they, along with 350 others, were horribly naive. He vowed to quit after his first year, but his father yelled at him. Because of his commitment to the bar, he had never found the time to knock on doors around D.C. and hustle for summer internships. He vowed to quit after his second year and cut off the flow of debt, but his loan counselor strongly advised against it. As long as he was in school he did not have to confront some brutal repayment schedule, so it made perfect sense to keep borrowing in order to graduate and find one of those lucrative jobs that, in theory, would eventually take care of the debts. Now, though, with only one semester to go, he knew only too well such jobs did not exist.
"If only he’d borrowed $195,000 from a bank and opened his bar. He could be printing money and enjoying life."
"Grades at Foggy Bottom were a joke. It was imperative that the school’s graduates finish with sparkling résumés, and to that end the professors passed out As and Bs like cheap candy. No one flunked out of FBLS. So, of course, this had created a culture of rather listless studying, which, of course, killed any chance of competitive learning."
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Gordy has escaped from his engagement without escaping the engagement, returned to school before New Year, is bipolar and is off his medicines, Todd informs Mark, after hearing it from Zola.
Zola comes from a background of illegal immigrants from Senegal, but was born in the country and is legal, has done well at school and is more in tune with the country than her Muslim father, and has better grades than the three guys.
"She lived on Twenty-Third Street in a building not quite as dilapidated as the Coop but similar in many respects. It was packed with students crammed into small, cheaply furnished flats. Early in her third year, she had met Gordon Tanner, a handsome, athletic blond boy who lived directly across the hall. One thing quickly led to another, and they began an ill-fated affair, one that soon led to conversations about living together, to save money of course. Gordon finally nixed the idea because Brenda, his pretty fiancée from home, loved the big city and visited often.
"Juggling two women proved too much for Gordy. He’d been engaged to Brenda for practically his entire life and now wanted desperately to avoid a marriage. Zola raised far different issues, and he had not convinced himself he was brave enough to run off with a black girl and never see his family and friends again. Add the strain of a soft or even nonexistent job market, suffocating debt, and the prospect of flunking the bar exam, and Gordy lost control."
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They corner him, and he tells about his research.
"“This is the Great Satan. Name’s Hinds Rackley, Wall Street lawyer turned investment crook, worth only four billion, which barely gets the poor guy on the Forbes list these days. A lesser billionaire, I guess, but nonetheless one with all the toys: Fifth Avenue mansion with a view of the park, big spread in the Hamptons, a yacht, couple of jets, trophy wife, the usual. Law school at Harvard, then a few years with a big firm. Couldn’t fit there so he hung out his own shingle with a few buddies, merged here and there, and now he owns or controls four law firms. As billionaires go, he’s rather shy and loves his privacy. Operates behind the veil of a lot of different companies. I’ve only tracked down a few but I’ve found enough.”
"“His main vehicle is Shiloh Square Financial, a private investment operation that also plays with leveraged buyouts and distressed debt and all the usual Wall Street games. Shiloh owns a chunk of Varanda Capital, how much we don’t know because their filings are bare-bones, everything about this guy is deceptive, and Varanda owns a chunk of Baytrium Group. As you might know, Baytrium owns, among many other companies, our dear Foggy Bottom Law School. Us and three others. What you don’t know is that Varanda also owns an outfit called Lacker Street Trust, out of Chicago, and Lacker Street owns four other for-profit law schools. That’s a total of eight.”"
"“Rackley began piecing together these schools about ten years ago, always, of course, hiding behind his many fronts. It’s not illegal to own a for-profit law school or college, but he wants to keep it under cover anyway. Guess he’s afraid someone will catch on to his dirty little scheme. I’ve caught him.”"
"“In 2006, the bright people in Congress decided that every Tom, Dick, and Harry should be able to vastly improve their lives by getting more education, so the bright people said, basically, that anyone, including the four of us, could borrow as much as needed to pursue professional degrees. Loans for everyone, easy money. Tuition, books, even living expenses, regardless of how much, and of course all backed by the good word of the federal government.”
"“What’s not well-known is that once Rackley owned the law schools, all eight of them, they began expanding rapidly. In 2005, Foggy Bottom had four hundred students. By the time we arrived in 2011, enrollment was at a thousand, where it remains today. Same for his other schools, all have roughly a thousand students. The schools bought buildings, hired every half-assed professor they could find, paid big bucks to administrators with passable credentials, and, of course, marketed themselves like crazy. And why? Well, what’s not well-known are the economics of for-profit law schools.”"
"“A bit of law school math. Take Foggy Bottom. They clip us for forty-five thousand a year in tuition, and everybody pays. There are no scholarships or grants, nothing real schools have to offer. That’s a gross of forty-five million. They pay the professors about a hundred grand a year, a far cry from the national average of two-twenty for good schools, but still a bonanza for some of the clowns who taught us. There is an endless supply of legal academics looking for work, so they’re lined up begging for the jobs because, of course, they just love being with us students. The school likes to brag about its low student-to-teacher ratio, ten to one, as if we’re all being taught by gifted pros in small, cozy classes, right? Remember first-semester torts? There were two hundred of us packed into Stuttering Steve’s classroom.”"
"Foggy Bottom has about 150 professors, its biggest expense, say $15 million a year.” He pointed to a jumble of figures they could barely read. “Then you have the administration on the top floor. Did you know that our incompetent dean makes $800,000 a year? Of course not. The dean at Harvard Law makes half a million a year, but then he’s not in charge of a diploma mill where someone is watching the bottom line. Our dean has a nice résumé, looks good on paper, speaks well whenever he speaks, and has proven rather adept at fronting this racket. Rackley pays all his deans well and expects them to sell the dream. Throw in another, say, $3 million for the other bloated salaries up there and it’s safe to say the administration costs $4 million a year. Let’s be generous and make it $5, so we’re at $20 in costs. Last year it cost $4 million to operate the place—the building, the staff, and, of course, the marketing. Almost $2 million of it was for propaganda to entice even more misguided souls to sign up, start borrowing, and pursue glorious careers in law. I know this because I have a friend who’s a pretty good hacker. He found some stuff, didn’t find some other stuff, and was impressed with the school’s security. He says they work hard at protecting their files.”"
"Great Satan nets $20 million a year off dear old Foggy Bottom. Multiply that times eight and the math will make you sick.”"
"A major flaw in this defective system is that no LSAT score is too low to be admitted. These dipshit law schools will take anybody who can borrow the federal money, and, as stated, anybody can borrow the federal money. ... Based on percentages, the chances of passing the bar exam with a 145 is about 50 percent. No one told us this when we applied because they care nothing about us; they just wanted our money. We were screwed the day we walked in.”"
"“We’re in this mess because we saw the opportunity to pursue a dream, one that we could not afford. None of us should be in law school and now we’re in over our heads. We don’t belong here, but we were scammed into believing we were cut out for lucrative careers. It’s all about marketing and the promise of jobs. Jobs, jobs, jobs, big jobs with nice salaries. The reality, though, is that they don’t exist. Last year the big firms on Wall Street were offering $175,000 to the top grads. About $160,000 here in D.C. We’ve heard about these jobs for years and somehow convinced ourselves that we might get one. Now we know the truth, and the truth is that there are some jobs in the $50,000 range, something like you, Mark, managed to get, though you still don’t know the salary. These are at smaller firms where the work is brutal and the future is bleak. The big firms are paying one-sixty plus. And there is nothing in between. Nothing. We’ve suffered through the interviews, knocked on doors, scoured the Internet, so we know how bad the market is.”"
"“Here’s the really nasty stuff, the part you know nothing about. Rackley owns a New York law firm called Quinn & Vyrdoliac; you might have heard of it. I had not. In the trade it’s referred to simply as Quinn. Offices in six cities, about four hundred lawyers, not a top one hundred firm. A small branch here in D.C. with thirty lawyers.” He pointed to a sheet of paper with the firm’s name in bold lettering. “Quinn works primarily in financial services, the gutter end. It handles a lot of foreclosures, repossessions, collections, defaults, bankruptcies, almost everything related to debts gone bad. Including student loans. Quinn pays well, at least initially.” He pointed to a colorful brochure, a trifold opened and pinned to the wall. “I saw this four years ago when I was considering Foggy Bottom. You probably saw it too. It features the smiling face of one Jared Molson, a grad who was supposedly happily employed at Quinn with a starting salary of $125,000. I remember thinking that, hey, if Foggy Bottom is turning out guys who get jobs like that, then sign me up. Well, I found Mr. Molson, had a long chat with him over drinks. He was offered a job at Quinn but didn’t sign a contract until after he passed the bar exam. He worked there for six years and quit, and he quit because his salary kept going down. He said that each year the management would study the bottom line and decide that cuts were necessary. His last year he earned just over a hundred and said screw it. He said he lived like a bum, whittled down his debt, and now he’s selling real estate and driving part-time for Uber. The firm’s a sweatshop and he says he got used by Foggy Bottom’s propaganda machine.”
"“And he’s not the only one, right?” Todd said.
"“Oh no. Molson was just one of many. Quinn has a fancy website and I read the bios of all four hundred lawyers. Thirty percent are from Rackley’s law schools. Thirty percent! So, my friends, Rackley hires them at enviable salaries, then uses their smiling faces and great success stories for his propaganda.”"
"“The guy in the middle here is Walter Baldwin, runs a Chicago law firm called Spann & Tatta, three hundred lawyers in seven cities, coast to coast. Same type of work, same fondness for graduates of lesser law schools.” He pointed to the third face under Rackley. “And rounding out the gang is Mr. Marvin Jockety, senior partner of a Brooklyn law firm called Ratliff & Cosgrove. Same setup, same business model.”"
"“Not to belabor what should be obvious, but Rackley has under his thumb four law firms with eleven hundred lawyers in twenty-seven offices. Between them, they hire enough of his graduates to give his law schools plenty to crow about, so that suckers like us rush in with piles of cash provided by Congress.”"
"“The rest of the story. Rackley, through another company, and this guy has more fronts than a low-rent strip mall, owns Sorvann, which is now the fourth-largest private student lender. If you can’t get enough cash from the government, then you go private, where, surprise, surprise, the interest rates are higher and the debt collectors make the Mafia look like Cub Scouts. Sorvann lends to undergrads as well and has about ninety million in its portfolio. It’s a growing company. Evidently, Rackley smells blood on the private side as well.”"
"“Passant is Piss Ant, third-largest student loan collecting racket in the country. It’s under contract to the Department of Education to ‘service,’ as they like to say, student debt. There’s over a trillion dollars out there, owed by fools like us. Passant is a bunch of terrorists, been sued a number of times for abusive debt collection practices. Rackley owns a chunk of it. The man is pure evil.”"
"“How can we expose Rackley? I’ve thought about sitting down with a reporter, someone who covers the legal beat for the Post or maybe the Journal. I’ve even thought about a class action lawsuit against the crook. Think of the thousands of young idiots like us who are on the same sinking ship and would love to take a shot at the guy once the truth is out.”"
They discuss a lawsuit, of which the only one in the country was in California, thrown out for lack of sufficient evidence. In the morning, Gordy has vanished with his car. Later they picked him up from the police station, managing enough money to get him and his car out, but he still refused to give information about his doctor, and wouldn't go see him.
Gordy escaped again, and when they went around looking, they discovered he'd jumped off the bridge into the river. They were devastated, and worse, had to face the family and relatives of Gordy and his fiancee too, everybody blaming them!
And that was repeated at the funeral, without naming them, in a eulogy, after Gordy's body was discovered and the family asked Mark and Todd to identify him since they were too busy!
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Mark and Todd proceeded to put their plan in action - they got documents in various names and moved to rooms above Rooster Bar, Todd getting his job changed to it and getting mark employed there as well. They hung around the courthouse watching procedures. No one seemed to ask any lawyer for his qualifications or license.
Zola was worried because ICE had mistakenly arrested citizens after their illegal migrant families had been caught, usually after they'd been deported.
The three began with hustling clients with DUI, speeding, at traffic court, and Zola tried to do so at hospital with personal injury but wasn't yet successful. Mark connected with a prosecutor, managed a speeding case, and as a result had his client's cousin referred to him, who'd lost a baby son two days after birth and was convinced he'd been neglected at delivery.
"After three weeks of practicing law with no authority to do so, they had learned a lot and were somewhat comfortable with their routines; Zola less so than the other two. The fear of getting caught was almost gone, though it would always nag at some level. Mark and Todd were regularly appearing in the criminal courts, same as a thousand other lawyers, and answering the same questions from bored judges. They made quick deals with prosecutors, not a single one of whom seemed the least bit curious about their credentials. They signed their bogus names on orders and other paperwork. They roamed the halls in search of clients, often bumping into other lawyers, all too busy to suspect anything. Despite their fast start, they soon learned that business was not that easy to hustle. On a good day they would rake in $1,000 or so in fees from new clients. On a bad day they would net nothing, which was not unusual."
"On the one hand, familiarity would give them credibility as they became everyday players in the assembly line. But on the other hand, the more lawyers, prosecutors, clerks, and judges they met, the larger the pool of people who might one day ask the wrong question. And what might that question be? A bored clerk might ask, “What’s your bar number again? The one I’m showing is not in the system.” There were 100,000 lawyers in the D.C. Bar Council, and each one had a number that had to be added to every order and pleading. Mark and Todd were using fictitious numbers, of course. However, the sheer number of lawyers provided excellent cover, and so far the clerks had shown no interest.
"Or a judge might ask, “When were you admitted to the bar, son, haven’t seen you around here?” But, so far, no judge had been even remotely curious.
"Or an assistant prosecutor might ask, “Delaware Law, huh? I have a friend who went there. Do you know so-and-so?” However, the assistant prosecutors were far too busy and important for such idle chatter, and Mark and Todd kept their conversations brief.
"Questions were never feared from the most important folks of all: their clients."
But Zola was noticed. She gave a card to someone with injury, but another lawyer called her, shouting at her for trying to poach his client. He had employed an ex-cop to bring him cases, and the ex-cop found out their Rooster Bar address and the fact that they weren't listed. Mark's ob-gyn medical consultant had news, on the other hand.
"“You got ’em by the balls, son. And they’re covering up like crazy. Here’s my report.” He handed over a two-page document, single spaced. “All the technical stuff is in there. I’ll save you the time by explaining it in layman’s terms. The mother, Asia Taper, was left unattended, for the most part, for a crucial period of time. It’s hard to tell how closely she was monitored because there are missing records, but, suffice to say, the FHR—fetal heart rate—decelerated, the uterus ruptured, and there was a significant delay in performing a cesarean section. Without the delay, the baby would have probably been fine. Instead, it sustained what is known as an ischemic insult, or profound brain injury, and as we know died two days later. Death was a good thing; otherwise the child would have lived ten years or so basically as a vegetable, unable to walk, talk, or feed itself. It all could have been prevented by proper monitoring and a quick cesarean. I would classify the negligence as gross, and as you well know, this should make the case easier to settle.”"
Mark and Todd proceeded to put their plan in action - they got documents in various names and moved to rooms above Rooster Bar, Todd getting his job changed to it and getting mark employed there as well. They hung around the courthouse watching procedures. No one seemed to ask any lawyer for his qualifications or license.
Zola was worried because ICE had mistakenly arrested citizens after their illegal migrant families had been caught, usually after they'd been deported.
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The three began with hustling clients with DUI, speeding, at traffic court, and Zola tried to do so at hospital with personal injury but wasn't yet successful. Mark connected with a prosecutor, managed a speeding case, and as a result had his client's cousin referred to him, who'd lost a baby son two days after birth and was convinced he'd been neglected at delivery.
"After three weeks of practicing law with no authority to do so, they had learned a lot and were somewhat comfortable with their routines; Zola less so than the other two. The fear of getting caught was almost gone, though it would always nag at some level. Mark and Todd were regularly appearing in the criminal courts, same as a thousand other lawyers, and answering the same questions from bored judges. They made quick deals with prosecutors, not a single one of whom seemed the least bit curious about their credentials. They signed their bogus names on orders and other paperwork. They roamed the halls in search of clients, often bumping into other lawyers, all too busy to suspect anything. Despite their fast start, they soon learned that business was not that easy to hustle. On a good day they would rake in $1,000 or so in fees from new clients. On a bad day they would net nothing, which was not unusual."
"On the one hand, familiarity would give them credibility as they became everyday players in the assembly line. But on the other hand, the more lawyers, prosecutors, clerks, and judges they met, the larger the pool of people who might one day ask the wrong question. And what might that question be? A bored clerk might ask, “What’s your bar number again? The one I’m showing is not in the system.” There were 100,000 lawyers in the D.C. Bar Council, and each one had a number that had to be added to every order and pleading. Mark and Todd were using fictitious numbers, of course. However, the sheer number of lawyers provided excellent cover, and so far the clerks had shown no interest.
"Or a judge might ask, “When were you admitted to the bar, son, haven’t seen you around here?” But, so far, no judge had been even remotely curious.
"Or an assistant prosecutor might ask, “Delaware Law, huh? I have a friend who went there. Do you know so-and-so?” However, the assistant prosecutors were far too busy and important for such idle chatter, and Mark and Todd kept their conversations brief.
"Questions were never feared from the most important folks of all: their clients."
But Zola was noticed. She gave a card to someone with injury, but another lawyer called her, shouting at her for trying to poach his client. He had employed an ex-cop to bring him cases, and the ex-cop found out their Rooster Bar address and the fact that they weren't listed. Mark's ob-gyn medical consultant had news, on the other hand.
"“You got ’em by the balls, son. And they’re covering up like crazy. Here’s my report.” He handed over a two-page document, single spaced. “All the technical stuff is in there. I’ll save you the time by explaining it in layman’s terms. The mother, Asia Taper, was left unattended, for the most part, for a crucial period of time. It’s hard to tell how closely she was monitored because there are missing records, but, suffice to say, the FHR—fetal heart rate—decelerated, the uterus ruptured, and there was a significant delay in performing a cesarean section. Without the delay, the baby would have probably been fine. Instead, it sustained what is known as an ischemic insult, or profound brain injury, and as we know died two days later. Death was a good thing; otherwise the child would have lived ten years or so basically as a vegetable, unable to walk, talk, or feed itself. It all could have been prevented by proper monitoring and a quick cesarean. I would classify the negligence as gross, and as you well know, this should make the case easier to settle.”"
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"On Monday, March 3, federal agents raided the corporate headquarters of Swift Bank in downtown Philadelphia. The press was tipped off and there was plenty of footage of a small army of men with “FBI” emblazoned on their parkas hauling boxes and computers to waiting trucks. The company issued a statement saying all was well, it was cooperating and all that, while its stock price plummeted.
"A business commentator on cable recapped the bank’s troubles. Two congressional investigations were underway, along with the FBI’s. U.S. Attorneys in three states were preening for the cameras and promising to get to the bottom of things. At least five class action suits were on the books and the lawyers were in a frenzy. More litigation was a certainty. Swift’s CEO had just resigned—to spend more time with his family—and took with him about $100 million in stock options, loot that would undoubtedly make all that family time more enjoyable. The CFO was negotiating his exit package. Hundreds of former employees were surfacing, blowing whistles, and suing for wrongful terminations. Old lawsuits against Swift were reexamined and revealed that the bank’s bad behavior had been ongoing for at least a decade. Customers were howling and closing accounts. Consumer watchdogs were issuing statements condemning “the most fraudulent banking practices in U.S. history.”
"Nine percent of Swift’s stock was owned by an investment firm in L.A. As its largest stockholder, it had nothing to say. The UPL partners monitored Swift’s mess on a daily basis and printed every word they could find about the bank. So far, Hinds Rackley had managed to escape attention."
The medical malpractice case that the three were hoping to cash in on went bad, because the clients had waited almost two years, and the three rookies hadn't noticed the date of expiry was close, so hadn't filed legal paperwork before it expired. What really went bad, even more than the lawyer hired by the mother of the baby finding out, was that Ramon hired another hustlers for a DUI and told him, and it seemed now imminent that he'd file a malpractice suit against them, which would expose their having practiced without a license, a felony. This was already known to the cute public prosecutor whom mark and Todd had both been intimate with - she and her roommate had a contest.
The three discussed it.
"“Think about this. When Cromley sues us for legal malpractice, the named defendants will be Todd Lane, Mark Upshaw, and Zola Parker. Three people who do not exist. How can he discover our true identities?”
" Zola said, “And we’re assuming cute little Hadley does not know our real names either, right?”
"“Of course not,” Mark said.
"“And Mossberg?”
"“He has no clue.”
"“So, we have to either hide or run,” she said."
Meanwhile, they dealt with their respective student loan representatives tracking them down, and decided to join the class action now countrywide against Swift Bank. They chose the firm in Miami because it was faster and sharper, and made up some clients by changing names from white pages slightly with a letter here and there, but were told that the bigger firm wasn't interested in joining unless they had a thousand clients at least.
While they proceeded with that, the street lawyer had filed suit, and the lawyer of Ramon's ex-wife had complained to the bar, albeit only on phone since he didn't want to get involved. So cops and court process servers came to Rooster Bar and the owner, fed up, fired them, but they were still renting the place. Next cop came asking the owner was tokd their real names by the owner and given the key to upstairs where their apartments and office were.
Zola meanwhile went to Senegal, funded and equipped generously by the two, although they were surprised she'd saved money.
"On Monday, March 3, federal agents raided the corporate headquarters of Swift Bank in downtown Philadelphia. The press was tipped off and there was plenty of footage of a small army of men with “FBI” emblazoned on their parkas hauling boxes and computers to waiting trucks. The company issued a statement saying all was well, it was cooperating and all that, while its stock price plummeted.
"A business commentator on cable recapped the bank’s troubles. Two congressional investigations were underway, along with the FBI’s. U.S. Attorneys in three states were preening for the cameras and promising to get to the bottom of things. At least five class action suits were on the books and the lawyers were in a frenzy. More litigation was a certainty. Swift’s CEO had just resigned—to spend more time with his family—and took with him about $100 million in stock options, loot that would undoubtedly make all that family time more enjoyable. The CFO was negotiating his exit package. Hundreds of former employees were surfacing, blowing whistles, and suing for wrongful terminations. Old lawsuits against Swift were reexamined and revealed that the bank’s bad behavior had been ongoing for at least a decade. Customers were howling and closing accounts. Consumer watchdogs were issuing statements condemning “the most fraudulent banking practices in U.S. history.”
"Nine percent of Swift’s stock was owned by an investment firm in L.A. As its largest stockholder, it had nothing to say. The UPL partners monitored Swift’s mess on a daily basis and printed every word they could find about the bank. So far, Hinds Rackley had managed to escape attention."
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The medical malpractice case that the three were hoping to cash in on went bad, because the clients had waited almost two years, and the three rookies hadn't noticed the date of expiry was close, so hadn't filed legal paperwork before it expired. What really went bad, even more than the lawyer hired by the mother of the baby finding out, was that Ramon hired another hustlers for a DUI and told him, and it seemed now imminent that he'd file a malpractice suit against them, which would expose their having practiced without a license, a felony. This was already known to the cute public prosecutor whom mark and Todd had both been intimate with - she and her roommate had a contest.
The three discussed it.
"“Think about this. When Cromley sues us for legal malpractice, the named defendants will be Todd Lane, Mark Upshaw, and Zola Parker. Three people who do not exist. How can he discover our true identities?”
" Zola said, “And we’re assuming cute little Hadley does not know our real names either, right?”
"“Of course not,” Mark said.
"“And Mossberg?”
"“He has no clue.”
"“So, we have to either hide or run,” she said."
Meanwhile, they dealt with their respective student loan representatives tracking them down, and decided to join the class action now countrywide against Swift Bank. They chose the firm in Miami because it was faster and sharper, and made up some clients by changing names from white pages slightly with a letter here and there, but were told that the bigger firm wasn't interested in joining unless they had a thousand clients at least.
While they proceeded with that, the street lawyer had filed suit, and the lawyer of Ramon's ex-wife had complained to the bar, albeit only on phone since he didn't want to get involved. So cops and court process servers came to Rooster Bar and the owner, fed up, fired them, but they were still renting the place. Next cop came asking the owner was tokd their real names by the owner and given the key to upstairs where their apartments and office were.
Zola meanwhile went to Senegal, funded and equipped generously by the two, although they were surprised she'd saved money.
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Mark and Todd were picked up from home one night, booked, and let go in the morning with instructions to not leave the area. They left promptly and set up a new firm, thus time in Brooklyn, in their own names. They'd mailed cheques for refunds to every client they'd not finished work for, before leaving.
They'd picked Brooklyn for a reason, which was the contact Rackley, the law school scam owner who Gordy had researched about and told them. They contacted his lawyers, and were asked to meet him in the offices of the lawyers. They confronted Rackley with the facts and charts by Gordy, and weren't cowed down by him or his lawyer, getting Rackley to finally agree to announce settlement of Swift Bank suit.
Zola's brother was taken by police in Dakar along with her money, and her father coukdnt be contacted after he'd been taken on arrival. Her lawyer was told the police wanted several thousand dollars for each, else they'd arrest Zola and her mother too. Mark and Todd decided they had to send the money she needed to stay out of jail in Senegal. They meanwhile had to appear personally in court in D.C. before a judge. When they did, the judge did not agree with the prosecution about keeping them and they were let go, asked to appear for the next date. But they had no intention of going to jail, and managed to escape via Barbados and London to Dakar where they met Zola.
Zola bought them Senegalese citizenship, with three new identities for the three, and they bought a bar in St. Louis, and renovated and renamed it Rooster Bar.
Mark and Todd were picked up from home one night, booked, and let go in the morning with instructions to not leave the area. They left promptly and set up a new firm, thus time in Brooklyn, in their own names. They'd mailed cheques for refunds to every client they'd not finished work for, before leaving.
They'd picked Brooklyn for a reason, which was the contact Rackley, the law school scam owner who Gordy had researched about and told them. They contacted his lawyers, and were asked to meet him in the offices of the lawyers. They confronted Rackley with the facts and charts by Gordy, and weren't cowed down by him or his lawyer, getting Rackley to finally agree to announce settlement of Swift Bank suit.
Zola's brother was taken by police in Dakar along with her money, and her father coukdnt be contacted after he'd been taken on arrival. Her lawyer was told the police wanted several thousand dollars for each, else they'd arrest Zola and her mother too. Mark and Todd decided they had to send the money she needed to stay out of jail in Senegal. They meanwhile had to appear personally in court in D.C. before a judge. When they did, the judge did not agree with the prosecution about keeping them and they were let go, asked to appear for the next date. But they had no intention of going to jail, and managed to escape via Barbados and London to Dakar where they met Zola.
Zola bought them Senegalese citizenship, with three new identities for the three, and they bought a bar in St. Louis, and renovated and renamed it Rooster Bar.
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February 18, 2020 - March 7, 2020.
ISBN 978 1 473 61692 9
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