Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less Read Free Page B

legal documents were signed in New York on October 14,
1930.
    Roger left speedily for Newport, Rhode
Island, to commence his Officers’ Training Course in the U. S. Navy. Harvey
left for Grand Central Station to catch the train for Boston. His days as a
messenger boy on the New York Stock Exchange were over. He was twenty-one years
of age and the president of his own company.
    Sharpley & Son’s seventeen staff in
Boston did not know what was about to hit them. When Harvey arrived on Monday
morning at six o’clock his first move was to take over Mr. Bodie’s office,
relegating him to a storeroom at the back of the building. John Bodie
eventually arrived, as he always did, at nine-thirty, and called the police,
thinking his office had been broken into–they left with red faces when Harvey
produced the legal documents.
    Bodie, in unbelieving fury, called the
company lawyers, who had also drawn up the will for Henry Sharpley, to see if
they could remove this cancer that had appeared from nowhere. When the
documents signed by Harvey and Roger Sharpley had been carefully checked, Bodie
left within the hour and never returned. Harvey was on his way. A respectable
company, established for nearly a hundred years, was to be his vehicle for
future dubious transactions.
    What looked like disaster to most, Harvey
could always manage to turn into a triumph. The American people were still
suffering from Prohibition, and although Harvey could export furs, he could not
import whisky. This had been one of the reasons for the fall in the company
profits over the past few years. But Harvey found that with a little bribery,
involving the mayor of Boston, the chief of police and the customs officials on
the Canadian border, plus a payment to the Mafia to ensure his products reached
the restaurants and speakeasies, somehow the whisky imports went up rather than
down. Sharpley & Son lost its more respectable and
long-serving staff, and replaced them with the animals that suited Harvey
Metcalfe’s particular jungle.
    From 1930 to 1933, despite the Depression,
people continued to drink, and Harvey went from strength to strength, but when
Prohibition was finally lifted by President Roosevelt after overwhelming public
demand, the excitement went with it, and Harvey allowed the company to continue
to deal with whisky and furs while he branched into new fields. In 1933
Sharpley & Son celebrated a hundred years in business. In three years
Harvey had lost ninety-seven years of goodwill and still managed to double the
profit. One of his new interests was the export of arms. Harvey was never too
fussy about the final destination of his equipment; in fact, he was only too
happy to supply both sides.
    When Britain declared war on Germany in
September 1939, America was horrified. Harvey rubbed his hands and two years
later, in December 1941, when America joined the Allies after Pearl Harbor, he
never stopped rubbing them. He must have been one of the few people who was not delighted by the 1945 Agreement signed in Potsdam by
Truman, Churchill and Stalin, which signalled the end of the Second World War.
However, the peace coincided with Roger Sharpley’s fortieth birthday, and as
Harvey had amassed several million dollars and was becoming bored, he decided
it was time to part with Sharpley & Son. He had in fifteen years built the
profits up from $30,000 in 1930 to $910,000 in 1945. He sold the company for
$7,100,000, paying $100,000 to the widow of Captain Roger Sharpley of the U. S.
Navy, and kept $7,000,000 for himself.
    Harvey celebrated his thirty-sixth birthday
by buying at a cost of $4 million a small, ailing bank in Boston called The
Lincoln Trust. At the time it had an income of approximately $500,000 a year, a
prestigious building in the centre of Boston and an unblemished reputation.
Harvey enjoyed being the president of a bank, but it did nothing for his
honesty. Every strange deal in the Boston area seemed to go through The Lincoln
Trust, and