Gold was up 2 percent the morning Benjamin Raab’s life
began to fall apart.
He was leaning back at his desk, looking down on
Forty-seventh Street, in the lavish comfort of his
office high above the Avenue of the Americas, the phone
crooked in his neck.
“I’m waiting, Raj….”
Raab had a spot gold contract he was holding for two
thousand pounds. Over a million dollars. The Indians
were his biggest customers, one of the largest exporters
of jewelry in the world. Two percent. Raab checked the
Quotron screen. That was thirty thousand dollars. Before
lunch.
“Raj, c’mon,” Raab prodded. “My daughter’s getting
married this afternoon. I’d like to make it if I can….”
“Katie’s getting married?” The Indian seemed to be hurt.
“Ben, you never said-”
“It’s just an expression, Raj. If Kate was getting
married, you’d be there. But, Raj, c’mon … we’re
talking gold here-not pastrami. It doesn’t go bad.”
This was what Raab did. He moved gold. He’d owned his
own trading company near New York’s diamond district for
twenty years. Years ago he had started out buying
inventory from the mom-and-pop jewelers who were going
out of business. Now he supplied gold to half the
dealers on the Street. As well as to some of the largest
exporters of jewelry across the globe.
Everyone in the trade knew him. He could hardly grab a
turkey club at the Gotham Deli down the street without
one of the pushy, heavyset Hasids squeezing next to him
in the booth with the news of some dazzling new stone
they were peddling. (Though they always chided that as a
Sephardi he wasn’t even one of their own.) Or one of the
young Puerto Rican runners who delivered the contracts,
thanking him for the flowers he’d sent to their wedding.
Or the Chinese, looking to hedge some dollars against a
currency play. Or the Australians, tantalizing him with
uncut blocks of industrial-quality stones.
I’ve been lucky, Raab always said. He had a wife who
adored him, three beautiful children who made him proud.
His house in Larchmont (a whole lot more than just a
house) that overlooked the Long Island Sound, and the
Ferrari 585, which Raab once raced at Lime Rock and had
its own special place in the five-car garage. Not to
mention the box at Yankee Stadium and the Knicks
tickets, on the floor of the Garden, just behind the
bench.
Betsy, his assistant for over twenty years, stepped in
carrying a chef’s salad on a plate along with a cloth
napkin, Raab’s best defense against his proclivity for
leaving grease stains on his Hermès ties. She rolled her
eyes. “Raji, still …?”
Benjamin shrugged, drawing her eye to his notepad where
he had already written down the outcome: $648.50. He
knew that his buyer was going to take it. Raj always
did. They’d been doing this little dance for years. But
did he always have to play out the drama so long?
“Okay, my friend.” The Indian buyer sighed at last in
surrender. “We consider it a deal.”
“Whew, Raj.” Raab exhaled in mock relief. “The Financial
Times is outside waiting on the exclusive.”
The Indian laughed, too, and they closed out the deal:
$648.50, just as he’d written down.
Betsy smiled-“He says that every time, doesn’t
he?”-trading the handwritten contract for two glossy
travel brochures that she placed next to his plate.
Raab tucked the napkin into the collar of his Thomas
Pink striped shirt. “Fifteen years.”
All one had to do was step into Raab’s crowded office
and it was impossible not to notice the walls and
credenzas crammed with pictures of Sharon, his wife, and
his children-Kate, the oldest, who had graduated from
Brown; Emily, who was sixteen, and nationally ranked at
squash; and Justin, two years younger-and all the
fabulous family trips they’d taken over the years.
The villa in Tuscany. Kenya on safari. Skiing at
Courchevel in the French Alps. Ben in his driver’s suit
with Richard Petty at the Porsche rally school.
And that’s what he was doing over lunch, mapping out
their next big trip-the best one yet. Machu Picchu. The
Andes. Then on a fantastic walking tour of Patagonia.
Their twenty-fifth anniversary was coming up. Patagonia
had always been one of Sharon’s dreams.
“My next life”-Betsy grinned as she shut the office
door-“I’m making sure I come back as one of your kids.”
“Next life,” Raab called after her, “I am, too.”
Suddenly a loud crash came from the outer office. At
first Raab thought it was an explosion or a break-in. He
thought about triggering the alarm. Sharp, unfamiliar
voices were barking commands.
Betsy rushed back in, a look of panic on her face. A
step behind, two men in suits and navy windbreakers
pushed through the door.
“Benjamin Raab?”
“Yes …” He stood up and faced the tall, balding man
who had addressed him, who seemed to be in charge. “You
can’t just barge in here like this. What the hell’s
going on …?”
“What’s going on, Mr. Raab”-the man tossed a folded
document onto the desk-“is that we have a warrant from a
federal judge for your arrest.”
“Arrest …?” Suddenly people in FBI jackets were
everywhere. His staff was being rounded up and told to
vacate. “What the hell for?”
“For money laundering, aiding and abetting a criminal
enterprise, conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government,”
the agent read off. “How’s that, Mr. Raab? The contents
of this office are being impounded as material evidence
in this case.”
“What?”
Before he could utter another word, the second agent, a
young Hispanic, spun Raab around, forcing his arms
roughly behind him, and slapped a set of handcuffs on
his wrists, his whole office looking on.
“This is crazy!” Raab twisted, trying to look the agent
in the face.
“Sure it is,” the Hispanic agent chortled. He lifted the
travel brochures out of Raab’s hands. “Too bad.” He
winked, tossing them back onto the desk. “Seemed like
one helluva trip.”
Chapter Two
“Check these babies out,” Kate Raab muttered, peering
into the high-powered Siemens microscope.
Tina O’Hearn, her lab partner, leaned over the scope.
“Whoa!”
In the gleaming luminescence of the high-resolution
lens, two brightly magnified cells sharpened into view.
One was the lymphocyte, the defective white blood cell
with a ring of hairy particles protruding from its
membrane. The other cell was thinner, squiggle-shaped,
and had a large white dot in the center.
“That’s the Alpha-boy,” Kate said, slowly adjusting the
magnification. “We call them Tristan and Isolde.
Packer’s name for them.” She picked up a tiny metal
probe off the counter. “Now check this out….”
As Kate prodded, Tristan nudged its way toward the
denser lymphocyte. The defective cell resisted, but the
squiggle cell kept coming back, as if searching out a
weakness in the lymphocyte’s membrane. As if attacking.
“Seems more like Nick and Jessica,” Tina giggled, bent
over the lens.
“Watch.”
As if on cue, the squiggle cell seemed to probe the
hairy borders of the white blood cell, until in front of
their eyes the attacking membrane seemed to penetrate
the border of its prey and they merged into a single,
larger cell with a white dot in the center.
Tina looked up. “Ouch!”
“Love hurts, huh? That’s a progenitive stem-cell line,”
Kate explained, looking up from the scope. “The white
one’s a lymphoblast-what Packer calls the-killer
leukocyte.’ It’s the pathogenic agent of leukemia. Next
week, we see what happens in a plasma solution similar
to the bloodstream. I get to record the results.”
“You do this all day?” Tina scrunched up her face.
Kate chuckled. Welcome to life in the petri dish. “All
year.”
For the past eight months, Kate had been working as a
lab researcher for Dr. Grant Packer, up at Albert
Einstein Medical College in the Bronx, whose work in
cytogenetic leukemia was starting to make noise in
medical circles. She’d won a fellowship out of Brown,
where she and Tina had been lab partners her senior
year.
Kate was always smart-just not “geeky” smart, she always
maintained. She was twenty-three. She liked to have
fun-hit the new restaurants, go to clubs. Since she’d
been twelve, she could beat most guys down the hill on a
snowboard. She had a boyfriend, Greg, who was a
second-year resident at NYU Medical School. She just
spent the majority of her day leaning over a microscope,
recording data or transcribing it onto digital files,
but she and Greg always joked-when they actually saw
each other-that one lab rat in their relationship was
enough. Still, Kate loved the work. Packer was starting
to turn some heads, and Kate had to admit it was the
coolest option she’d had for a while.
Besides, her real claim to distinction, she figured, was
no doubt being the only person she knew who could recite
Cleary’s Ten Stages of Cellular Development and had a
tattoo of a double helix on her butt.
“Leukoscopophy,” Kate explained. “Pretty cool the first
time you see it. Try watching it a thousand times. Now
check out what happens.”
They leaned back over the double scope. There was only
one cell left-larger, squiggle-shaped Tristan. The
defective lymphoblast had virtually disappeared.
Tina whistled, impressed. “If that happens in a living
model, there’s got to be a Nobel Prize in this.”
“In ten years, maybe. Personally, I was just hoping for
a graduate dissertation.” Kate grinned.
At that moment her cell phone started to vibrate. She
thought it might be Greg, who loved to e-mail her funny
photos from rounds, but when she checked out the screen,
she shook her head and flipped the phone back into her
lab coat.
“If it’s not one thing it’s a mother …” she sighed.
Kate led Tina into the library, with about a thousand
recorded iterations of the stem-cell line on digital
film. “My life’s work!” She introduced her to Max,
Packer’s baby, the cytogenetic scope worth over $2
million, which separated chromosomes in the cells and
made the whole thing possible. “You’ll feel like you’re
dating it before the month is through.”
Tina looked it over with a shrug of mock approval. “I’ve
done worse.”
That was when Kate’s cell phone sounded again. She
flipped it out. Her mom again. This time there was a
text message coming in.
Kate, something’s happened. Call home quick!
Kate stared. She’d never gotten a message like that
before. She didn’t like the sound of those words. Her
mind flashed through the possibilities-and all of them
were bad.
“Tina, sorry, but I gotta call home.”
“No sweat. I’ll just start the small talk rolling with
Max.”
With a jitter of nerves, Kate punched in the speed dial
of her parents’ home in Larchmont. Her mom picked up on
the first ring. Kate could hear the alarm in her voice.
“Kate, it’s your father….”
Something bad had happened. A tremor of dread flashed
through her. Her dad had never been sick. He was in
perfect shape. He could probably take Em at squash on a
good day.
“What’s happened, Mom? Is he okay?”
“I don’t know…. His secretary just called in. Your
father’s been arrested, Kate. He’s been arrested by the
FBI!”
Chapter Three
They took the cuffs off Raab inside FBI headquarters at
Foley Square in Lower Manhattan, leading him into a
stark, narrow room with a wooden table and metal chairs
and a couple of dog-eared Wanted posters tacked to a
bulletin board on the wall.
He sat there staring up at a small mirror that he knew
was the two-way kind, like on some police drama on TV.
He knew what he had to tell them. He’d rehearsed it over
and over. That this was all some kind of crazy mistake.
He was just a businessman. He’d never done anything
wrong in his entire life.
After about twenty minutes, the door opened. Raab stood
up. The same two agents who had arrested him stepped in,
trailed by a thin young man in a gray suit and short,
close-cropped hair, who placed a briefcase on the table.
“I’m Special Agent in Charge Booth,” announced the tall,
balding agent. “You’ve already met Special Agent Ruiz.
This is Mr. Nardozzi. He’s a U.S. Attorney with the
Justice Department who’s familiar with your case.”
“My case …?” Raab forced a hesitant smile, eyeing
their thick files a little warily, not believing he was
hearing that word.
“What we’re going to do is ask you a few questions, Mr.
Raab,” the Hispanic agent, Ruiz, began. “Please sit back
down. I can assure you this will go a lot easier if we
can count on your full cooperation and you simply answer
truthfully and succinctly to the best of your
knowledge.”
“Of course.” Raab nodded, sitting back down.
“And we’re going to be taping this, if that’s okay?”
Ruiz said, placing a standard cassette recorder on the
table, not even waiting for his response. “It’s for your
own protection, too. At any time, if you like, you can
request that a lawyer be present.”
“I don’t need a lawyer.” Raab shook his head. “I have
nothing to hide.”
“That’s good, Mr. Raab.” Ruiz winked back affably.
“These things have a way of always going best when
people have nothing to hide.”
The agent removed a stack of papers from the file and
ordered them in a certain way on the table. “You’ve
heard of a Paz Export Enterprises, Mr. Raab?” he started
in, turning the first page.
“Of course,” Raab confirmed. “They’re one of my biggest
accounts.”
“And just what is it you do for them?” the FBI agent
asked him.
“I purchase gold. On the open market. They’re in the
novelty gift business or something. I ship it to an
intermediary on their behalf.”
“Argot Manufacturing?” Ruiz interjected, turning over a
page from his notes.
“Yes, Argot. Look, if that’s what this is about-”
“And Argot does what with all this gold you purchase?”
Ruiz cut him off one more time.
“I don’t know. They’re manufacturers. They turn it into
gold plate, or whatever Paz requests.”
“Novelty items,” Ruiz said, cynically, looking up from
his notes.
Raab stared back. “What they do with it is their
business. I just buy the gold for them.”
“And how long have you been supplying gold to Argot on
Paz’s behalf?” Agent in Charge Booth took up the
questioning.
“I’m not sure. I’d have to check. Maybe six, eight years …”
“Six to eight years.” The agents glanced at each other.
“And in all that time, Mr. Raab, you have no idea what
products they make once they receive your gold?”
It had the feel of a rhetorical question. But they
seemed to be waiting for an answer. “They make a lot of
things.” Raab shrugged. “For different customers.
Jewelry. Gold-plated stuff, desk ornaments, paperweights …”
“They consume quite a lot of gold,” Booth said, running
his eye down a column of numbers, “for a bunch of desk
ornaments and paperweights, wouldn’t you say? Last year
over thirty-one hundred pounds. At roughly six hundred
forty dollars an ounce, that’s over thirty-one million
dollars, Mr. Raab.”
The number took Raab by surprise. He felt a bead of
sweat run down his temple. He wet his lips. “I told you,
I’m in the transaction business. They give me a
contract. All I do is supply the gold. Look, maybe if
you tell me what this is about …”
Booth stared back, as if bemused, with a cynical smile,
but a smile, it appeared to Raab, that had facts behind
it. Ruiz opened his folder and removed some new sheets.
Photographs. Black-and-white, eight-by-tens. The shots
were all of mundane items. Bookends, paperweights, and
some basic tools: hammers, screwdrivers, hoes.
“You recognize any of these items, Mr. Raab?”
For the first time, Raab felt his heart start to
accelerate. He warily shook his head. “No.”
“You receive payments from Argot, don’t you, Mr. Raab?”
Ruiz took him by surprise. “Kickbacks …”
“Commissions,” Raab corrected him, irritated at his
tone.
“In addition to your commissions.” Ruiz kept his eyes on
him. He slid another sheet across the table.
“Commissions in the commodities market run, what? One
and a half, two percent? Yours go as high as six, eight
percent, Mr. Raab, isn’t that right?”
Ruiz kept his gaze fixed on him. Raab’s throat suddenly
went dry. He became aware he was fiddling with the gold
Cartier cuff links Sharon had given him for his fiftieth
birthday, and he stopped abruptly. His glance flicked
back and forth among the three agents, trying to gauge
what was in their minds.
“Like you said, they use a lot of gold,” he answered.
“But what they do with it is their business. I just
supply the gold.”
(Continues…)
Excerpted from The Blue Zone
by Andrew Gross
Copyright © 2007 by Andrew Gross.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
William Morrow
Copyright © 2007
Andrew Gross
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-06-114340-3
