4: Paragraph 17 I'd applied for admission to the Delaware bar and taken the bar exam the end of July, and Rod Ward was my preceptor, so I was frequently discussing with him and with Dave Garrett both Hutton's situation and my own, especially the ethical aspects.
4: Paragraph 18 By the end of September, Hutton Trust was operating with a siege mentality: Hutton Group was interviewing people to replace Abbes and Hitchcock as CEO and president, and several of us vp's, especially Ron Hatton and I, were maneuvering to move up in the shuffle. On 8 October I took a business trip to the Alexandria VA brokerage office, and while I was gone there was a flap about a friend of Hatton's applying for the job of CEO — Abbes had found out Hatton had told his friend, an officer at a bank in, I think, Pennsylvania, about the opening, and Hutton in New York had interviewed him. It was really funny, but the BOM in Alexandria had filled me in on what was happening at Hutton in New York and why, and that wasn't funny: He and many other BOMs around the country had demanded that Fomon replace Abbes and Hitchcock because Hutton Trust wasn't delivering its statements, and the pension trust customers, who were already nervous because of the check-kiting, were starting to bail out of Hutton in droves.
4: Paragraph 19 Abbes and Hitchcock were upset and taking it out on us, and for the first time it wasn't much fun to work at Hutton Trust. As a lawyer I had a particular problem: The ethics rules prohibited my lying to a court, I was Hutton Trust's lawyer, and I knew it had lied to Judge Oberdorfer about Hutton & Co.'s involvement in managing the Orphans' Trust. I decided the ethics rules required me to tell Judge Oberdorfer the truth, but they didn't require me to lose my job if I could help it. (I'd been looking for another job for months, but I never got any offer.)
4: Paragraph 20 First I telephoned the judge's chambers and talked to his clerk; I said I had a copy of a document that bore on how the trust was being managed, and I wanted to send it to the judge, but I needed to know he wouldn't say who gave it to him. The clerk, who was probably right out of law school because he had the arrogance and inflated sense of self-importance you often find in new clerks but seldom in the judges themselves, told me anything they received would be made public, and so would the circumstances under which they received it. So much for the direct approach, but in a way that simplified matters for me, because it meant I didn't have to worry about keeping the commissioner's report confidential, because as soon as the judge got it, he was going to make it public anyhow.
4: Paragraph 21 After several more days of thought, I decided the only kind of person I could trust to carry the report to the judge and not say who gave it to him was a journalist, so I called the 'Washington Post' and talked to a reporter there. After several conversations, in which I did not give my name or any information he could trace me by, some days later I agreed to send him a copy of the report, and he promised to take it directly to Oberdorfer; I believed he would, because any good reporter would naturally take it to the judge first and see what happened — that would make for a better story.
4: Paragraph 22 So I mailed, anonymously, a copy of the bank examiners' report to the reporter and waited to see what would happen, and two things did: First, Hutton bought off the 'Washington Post'! After the 'Post' took the report to the judge and got him worked up, a reporter called Hutton for comment before publishing the story; for about two days Hutton Group's highest officials spent a lot of time on the phone with the 'Post''s owner, and then the 'Post' killed the story. That scared the hell out of me, because I hadn't thought anyone had that much clout, but when the VP's brother-in-law is one of your senior officers, I guess everyone in D.C. listens when you talk.
4: Paragraph 23 The second thing that happened was that on 31 October Oberdorfer issued a notice scheduling a conference for the next week to discuss, among other things, why he hadn't heard about the bank commissioner's report until the reporter showed it to him. The upshot was not only that Hutton lost the European orphans' trust that was coming in, but Work and Hutton were removed as co-trustee and trustee of the one we already had; it was consolidated with the European one all right, but in the hands of the trustees that already had that one.
4: Paragraph 24 Abbes always believed I was the one who leaked the commissioner's report to the 'Post', but he couldn't prove it, and I never admitted it to him. Not that I was ashamed of what I'd done — quite the contrary, as I'd done what the ethics rules required me to do and the corporate bylaws authorized me, as a vp, to do — but once the 'Post' knuckled under to Hutton, I knew the undercurrents were too strong for me to keep rocking that particular boat.
4: Paragraph 25 By December Hutton Group had decided to send someone down to Hutton Trust to whip things into shape, and they chose Ken Simon; he had us hire every accountant and accounting clerk the temp agencies in Wilmington could provide, and then we got some from Philly, too, and we started digging out from under the mountain of overdue statements.
4: Paragraph 26 At Hutton Trust's board of directors meeting on 4 December, I got a nasty surprise: As corporate secretary, I was there taking the minutes, and because of how much trouble we were in, Fomon attended the meeting. At one point he asked how our efforts with "the Congressman" were coming, and Ellis answered that we had Carper "under control," that Phipps was telling him what laws we wanted passed, and it was okay to release the campaign contribution Carper was supposed to get for his help.