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magazine article. One of the letters was on French Samuelson stationery; the other one, and the memo, were on the letterhead of a firm called Merchant’s Worldwide Bank. I leafed through the fax a couple of times, but I didn’t get it. Mike and Pierro watched me.
    “This needs some explaining,” Mike said. “Have you read about Merchant’s, John? It got a lot of press a few years ago, and there’s a story on it every so often because the case is still going on.” The name was familiar, but I couldn’t place it and I told him so. “Maybe you know it by another name,” he said. “ ‘Money Washing Bank.’ ”
    “The money-laundering thing.” I said. Mike nodded.
    “I’ll give you the Reader’s Digest version; the details are in the file.” He pushed the filing box over to me and began.
    “Merchant’s Worldwide Bank was the largest of several dozen institutions owned by a Luxembourg holding company called the Merchants Group. And, according to federal prosecutors, it was the largest criminally controlled financial services firm that anyone’s ever heard of. It had a lot of legitimate customers and did a lot of legitimate business, but that was basically window dressing. MWB’s real business was servicing a clientele that ran the gamut from bad to worse: drug dealers, arms merchants, dictators, terrorists—bad, bad guys.
    “Money laundering was their leading service, and they were top-of-the-line providers. This wasn’t retail smurfing—no mom-and-pop operation passing a few million a day on the street. This was a wholesale business. They maintained hundreds of corporate shells—anyplace in the world you might need one—ready and waiting to funnel cash by the tens of millions, even the hundreds of millions, daily. These were entities with structures so twisted you’d need an army of accountants just to draw the org charts. And they controlled real companies too—legitimate businesses with offices and employees and products and everything. They’d buy into them, usually secretly, and turn them into cash conduits. Behind it all, to move the money around for them, they had a massive network of correspondent banks that included some of the biggest firms in the world.” Mike leaned back in his chair, his hands clasped behind his head.
    “It was unique in terms of scale and scope, a beautiful thing, in its own way,” Mike continued, a hint of admiration in his voice. “But it started coming apart just over three years ago, when the number two guy at a regional bank called Southern States Trust tried to buy drugs from a DEA agent in San Diego. They got him dead to rights, video and all, so he did a lot of talking. One of the things he talked about was who really owned Southern States. A hungry assistant U.S. attorney in San Diego started pulling, and it all started to unravel. He documented a chain of secret ownership for Southern States through over a dozen proxies, in six different countries, leading back finally to MWB. The roof really caved in a short while after, when the head guy at MWB, a Pakistani named Zahed, was a no-show for a meeting with the U.K. authorities. Two weeks later he turned up in Kuwait, dead.
    “That’s the condensed version. I didn’t even get to the investigation of the thing, which is a soap opera in itself. The number of agencies involved in this country alone is staggering. Add in the players from all the other countries MWB operated in, and you get a zoo. It’s all in the file.” I was quiet for a moment, letting the story sink in, recalling some of what I had read about MWB over the last couple of years.
    “Mike, you know I always like the business, but this kind of forensic accounting thing is really not my line,” I said. “There are firms that specialize in this.” I knew he understood; this was for Pierro’s benefit. But Mike went on.
    “MWB is the background, John, but this case isn’t money laundering. Take a closer look at the fax.”
    I picked up the