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serious tax avoiders. Poof. A century of Swiss bank secrecy went up in smoke, just like that. Justice had been hammering away for more names ever since.
    Apparently not everyone who worked for the U.S. government was a dumbass. Yet Abe Cushman had gone unnoticed by law enforcement. Those Ponzi schemes sure are hard to sniff out, especially the ones that last for only two decades and involve a measly $60 billion.
    Hmmm.
    “As part of this settlement,” the chief executive continued, “we have agreed to release the names of four thousand additional clients over the coming year.”
    “Four thousand?” my team leader whispered. “This is good news?”
    I leaned closer. “Actually, the good news is that the bank is offering a free box of Depend to each of our clients.”
    My boss snorted with laughter, a reflex. The chief executive stopped, clearly annoyed. His steely-blue-eyed glare silenced the room—and it nearly sent me running for my own box of adult diapers.
    Klaus leaned forward, his palms resting on the polished wood tabletop as he spoke. “I want to underscore that the only names on this list are clients of our cross-border business. This settlement agreement respects the fact that the cross-border business of BOS consists only of wealth management services offered to American residents outside the United States, that it operates entirely out of Switzerland, and that it is completely separate from the BOS/America wealth management business. In other words, this settlement affects less than one percent of the bank’s total invested assets. To put an even finer point on it, the settlement does not affect our U.S.-based private wealth management clients.”
    Yet , I wanted to say.
    “Which brings me to even more important news,” said Klaus, “and to the real purpose of this meeting. With the DOJ settlement behind us, it’s time to look forward. Ladies and gentlemen, I am pleased to introduce the new head of private wealth management for BOS/America, a man who truly needs no introduction, Joe Barber.”
    My supervisor and I exchanged glances. His expression matched my unspoken sentiment: Joe Barber? You must be joking.
    Advisors and their clients had been walking away from BOS since the fifty-billion-dollar write-down of subprime losses. The recent threat of a criminal indictment over bank secrecy had pushed the total loss of assets for the year to over 200 billion Swiss francs. BOS was on the fast track to number two—not in the world, but in Switzerland . The much-anticipated announcement of a new head of private wealth for the United States was supposed to restore faith and calm everyone’s concerns. The chosen one, however, had earned his stripes at Saxton Silvers.
    Barber entered the room, the picture of Wall Street confidence as a photographer captured him and the chief executive smiling and shaking hands.
    It was Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, and Saxton Silvers—in that order—on the list of Wall Street investment banks that had gone the way of T. rex and the dodo bird, swept away by the financial tsunami of subprime lending and mortgage-backed securities. Barber had sown the seeds of disaster at Saxton Silvers before accepting a presidential appointment as deputy secretary of the Treasury, the department’s number two post. Government service required him to liquidate his holdings, which meant that he had cashed out at the height of the market. He took $28 million out of Wall Street, and a year later he orchestrated a government bailout that pumped billions of taxpayer dollars back into the disaster that he and others like him had created. It still wasn’t clear what indictments might come out of the Saxton Silvers collapse. But there he stood, handpicked by the top executive in the world of bank secrecy: Joe Barber, our new leader, the power-drunk pilot who had put Wall Street on autopilot, headed straight for the side of a mountain, only to watch the crash from Treasury’s ivory tower.
    “Gee,