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For Ethan. But which one?
 PROLOGUE

Analog

One morning in the spring of 1985, a white man in his midthirties,

stocky in build, boarded a flight from California to Atlanta with a
passport taped to the bottom of his left foot. The passport, hidden
inside a deck shoe, bore his real name. His paper ticket had an alias.
He had paid for everything in cash, pulling bills from a thick wad in
his pocket. He had recently shaved off his beard.
It had been days since the man last slept, so once seated, after
he smoked a cigarette, he took his chance. He leaned back and
closed his eyes, then began to snore so loudly that when he woke
up on the other side of the country, his fellow passengers burst into
applause.
From the Atlanta airport, the man took a taxi to a used car lot,
where he offered $750 for an old pickup truck, and when the dealer
asked to see his driver’s license in order to fill out some paperwork,
he growled at him: “Do you want the fucking money or not?” Soon
he was steering the truck north and east into the hills of North
Carolina, to a rental house in the woods at the end of a dirt road.
His family hadn’t seen him for a long time—months, maybe a
year—and his two girls had never seen him without a beard. The
older one, Desiree, who was six, watched the truck pull up and
watched her mom greet the stranger with a kiss. “Who is it?” she
whispered.
 He lived in the Bahamas, on an island called Great Harbour Cay,
but he’d been on a job in Central America, he later explained, when
he’d had to go dark. Two people he was working with had suddenly
gone missing—“Just poof, disappeared,” he said in his baritone—and
he feared he would be next. He fled, making his way to Mexico
before sneaking across the border to San Diego, where he hid out
and spent his days in Balboa Park, taking art lessons and teaching
himself how to oil-paint.
Desiree would one day see holes in her dad’s stories. The part
about San Diego, though, about his picking up some technical skill
more or less overnight—that rang true. He had that kind of mind.
When he finally ventured out of the rental house, a day or two after
arriving in South Carolina, he took her and her little sister, Carly,
three years younger, to a hobby shop in a nearby town. He bought
an easel, canvas, paint, and brushes, and they returned to the
woods. Then he began painting their portraits, memorializing what
he had while he still could. In hers, Desiree is depicted sitting on her
father’s lap in the cockpit of his airplane, shadow on one side of her
face, light on the other, smiling up at him with the hint of a question
in her eyes.
After two weeks of hiding out at the house, he seemed to decide
on something. The whole family piled into the pickup; a person
doesn’t raise suspicions when he’s traveling with kids. They began
driving south to Florida with a cardboard sign in the back window:
LOST PLATES. Police pulled them over in three states, and he talked
his way out of trouble each time.
They reached Fort Lauderdale after a dozen hours on the road.
He dropped his family off at a friend’s house and continued alone to
a pay phone, where he called a famous attorney he had grown close
to in the Bahamas, F. Lee Bailey. He asked Bailey to contact the Drug
Enforcement Administration. He wanted to cut a deal. He had access
to something valuable, and he knew, even then, years before he
built his first supercomputer, years before he became America’s dark
lord of data, that it was worth more than gold or coke or pot. He
had information.
 Author’s Interlude

What He Had on Me, and Why I Care

An introduction is in order. My name is McKenzie Funk, and my

LexID is 000874529875. How those two things relate to the man we
just met will soon become clear.
My LexID was assigned to me by a private company sometime in
2001. Think of the number as a barcode tracking a package: me
(though yours is also tracking you). Think of it as an atomic nucleus
that anchors a growing cloud of electrons. Or think of it as a hairball
in my drain, trapping the waste I once assumed had washed away
forever. It’s hard to come up with the right metaphor. Maybe it’s best
just to think of it as a shadow Social Security number, one of the
many issued not by the government but by data brokers like
LexisNexis—and used behind closed doors to determine who you are
and what you’re worth and what opportunities you’ll be given in life.
I know that my LexID was born in a computer room in South
Florida, as many still are, and that without my consent it began
quietly stalking me then and there. Its first data point on me would
have been my name; its second, my parents’ address in Oregon.
From my birth certificate or my driver’s license or my teenage fishing
license—and from the fact that the three confirmed one another—it
got my sex and my date of birth. At the time, it would have been
able to collect the address of the college I attended, Swarthmore,
which was small and expensive, and it would have found my first
full-time employer, the National Geographic Society, quickly amassing
more than enough data to let someone—back then, a human
someone—infer that I was white and from a background of relative
privilege.
When I opened my first credit card, it got that; when I rented an
apartment in New York City, it got that; when I bought a cheap car
and drove across the country, it got that; when I signed up for a
travel-booking site using my email address, it got that; whenever I
shipped a package via UPS, it got that; whenever I donated to a
political candidate, it got that; and when I secured a mortgage and
bought my first house in Seattle, it got that.
Two decades after its creation, my LexID and its equivalents in
the marketing world have indexed tens of thousands of data points
on me. They reveal that I stay up late and that I like to bicycle and
that my grandparents are all dead and that I’ve underperformed my
earning potential and that I’m not very active on social media and
that I now have a wife and two sons, who will soon also have
LexIDs.
My LexID lets algorithms map in milliseconds a network of people
I’ve met, lived near, or interacted with online or off, and it shows the
trajectory of my life—up, down, and sideways. It impacts what kind
of care I get from my doctor. It affects how much I pay for car
insurance. It helps determine what kind of credit cards I have. It and
its counterparts influence what ads I see and how long I wait on
hold when I call a customer service line. They allow computers
inside police departments, intelligence agencies, hospitals, banks,
insurance companies, political parties, and marketing firms to
understand personal behavior and, increasingly, as artificial
intelligence and machine learning expand into every corner of
society, to predict and exploit it.
LexIDs are far from the only numbers tracking us. Persistent
identifiers—PIDs, in digital parlance—are everywhere. The data
broker Acxiom has amassed personal information around its AbiliTec
ID (sixteen digits); the “answer company” Thomson Reuters, around
its Entity ID (fifteen digits); the database giant Oracle, around its
BlueKai UUID (fourteen characters); the ad tech company The Trade
Desk around its Unified ID 2.0, or UID2 (44 or 64 characters); and
the identity clearinghouse Neustar—now part of the credit agency
TransUnion—around its Fabrick ID (44–255 characters). Facebook
assigned Facebook User IDs, which eventually grew to fifteen or
more digits, to nearly three billion of us—and even, for a time,
tracked people who had never signed up for an account. Before the
2016 presidential election, the Republican National Committee
developed its thirty-two-character RNC ID and the controversial data
firm Cambridge Analytica its seven-digit Voter_id, which helped them
merge Americans’ offline and online selves, combining voter records
and Acxiom AbiliTec IDs and misappropriated Facebook User IDs for
the last-minute advertising blitz in Michigan and Wisconsin that may
(or may not) have secured Donald Trump the presidency.
When COVID-19 later washed over America on Trump’s watch,
LexIDs and other PIDs were used to identify and monitor the
afflicted, helping communities accelerate contact tracing, helping AI
systems predict hot spots, helping hospitals and health systems
determine who was most likely to die if infected. When the murder
of George Floyd sent citizens marching in the streets, such tracking
numbers were rumored to help government cameras recognize faces
in the crowds while federal drones and surveillance planes circled in
the skies above, sucking up the fifteen-digit IMSI numbers of
protestors’ cell phones. When, during the Biden administration two
years later, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, women
across the country were warned to delete their period-tracking apps,
lest the MAIDs (mobile advertising IDs) in their phones—thirty-two
hexadecimal characters, no uppercase, in the case of Google’s AAID
(Android Advertising ID) and thirty-two hexadecimal characters, no
lowercase, in the case of Apple’s IDFA (Identifier for Advertisers)—
give away too much.
These identifiers we’ve all been assigned represent a new and
exponentially growing kind of power. It’s called “data fusion” or
“identity resolution”: the power to know everything about someone
without actually knowing them at all; the power to automatically
distinguish me from McKenzie Funk, the thirty-six-year-old former 4-
H champion in Nebraska (LexID: XXXXXXXX9429), and from
McKenzie Funk, the twenty-three-year-old former Taco Bell employee
in Ohio (LexID: XXXXXXXX2145); and the growing power held by
governments and corporations to flag or target or include or exclude
each of us accordingly. If data is the new oil, as the cliché goes,
then data fusion is the process of refining it—the machine humming
quietly in the background of our modern lives.
At first, I didn’t understand how different this machine is for me
than it is for many other people. But the fidelity with which it
captured the contours of my mostly comfortable life isn’t the point—
the machine has surely been good to me—and it isn’t why I care. I
set out to investigate not privacy, but power. The point is that
virtually everyone in our supposed land of opportunity has a LexID.
Yours knows if you have unpaid medical bills. It knows if your
brother is or was in prison. It knows if you’ve ever lived in what one
corporate brochure terms an “insane asylum.” It knows if you’ve ever
lived in a trailer park—and counts that against you. It’s keeping
score.

I found out about my LexID in 2015. At the time, Americans were

still digesting Edward Snowden’s revelations about domestic
surveillance by the National Security Agency, and the term “big data”
was already well in vogue. I was just back from reporting trips to
China and Russia, now wondering if technologies I’d used abroad to
protect my privacy or a source’s anonymity—encrypted messaging,
Tor, VPNs—were just as relevant here. A magazine editor called with
a potential assignment, about a campaign against child trafficking in
Central America, and when I researched it, I read that the group
leading the effort had partnered with a “data mining software
company” in Florida. I didn’t end up taking the assignment, but at
some point I looked up the company. I found myself reading about a
man named Hank Asher, the so-called “father of data fusion”—and
the person ultimately responsible for the LexID.
Asher’s first data startup, Database Technologies, had helped
strip so many Black people from Florida’s 2000 voter rolls that
George W. Bush became president. His next company, Seisint,
worked with the Bush White House to build a controversial, post-
9/11 surveillance program, the MATRIX, which formally died in 2005
—and informally lived on, in a fashion, inside the CIA and other
federal and state agencies. As I dug deeper, I learned that large
divisions of information giants LexisNexis, Thomson Reuters, and
TransUnion still ran on technology Asher and his companies had built
—and consequently so did police departments and government
agencies and much of corporate America, those information
companies’ clients. His creations are built into nearly 80 percent of
the companies in the Fortune 500, seven of the world’s ten biggest
banks, and nearly 100 percent of America’s eighteen thousand law
enforcement agencies. But I had never heard of Asher, nor had
anyone I knew.
Asher had recently died, a sudden passing in 2013 at age sixty-
one. I found a page of tributes to him in The Palm Beach Post.
Friends described his charm, his daring, his generosity, his volatility,
his drinking, his sleeplessness, his middle-of-the-night phone calls,
his thousand-yard stares, his maddening disdain for social norms,
and his superhuman, almost computerlike ability to take in
information and discern patterns. He was also unstable, sometimes
violent, not right in the head. You never knew what he’d do next, so
you couldn’t turn away.
One acquaintance called it “the Hank Show.” I liked the term. It
suggested that someone had built their own reality, then sucked the
rest of us in.
At his memorial, his longtime lawyer, one of his many lawyers,
called him an unsung legal genius. A doctor from the Mayo Clinic—
where Asher was a major donor—explained how he’d helped dream
up novel strategies against cancer. America’s Most Wanted host John
Walsh, his good friend, described how Asher had flown harrowing
rescue missions to Haiti after the 2010 earthquake and had for years
given free software and tens of millions of dollars to the National
Center for Missing and Exploited Children. His younger daughter
recalled the first word he ever taught her: “bullshit.” Colleagues
remembered Asher’s usual business attire: shorts, deck shoes, pink
shirt, beard, aviator sunglasses. An early employee recalled the gruff
charisma and hint of something deeper behind Asher’s first words to
him in an elevator in Pompano Beach, Florida, in the 1990s: “Who
the fuck are you?”
I guess I couldn’t stop asking the same question. When I started
reaching out to Asher’s family and colleagues, I was struck by how
loved and hated he was—there was little middle ground—and by the
strange fuzziness in some of their descriptions. He was a black box.
They could tell me what he did but often not why. Many alluded to
mental illness, to the idea that genius and madness go hand in
hand. But I hoped there was something in the man who built so
many of the machines running our new world, something in his
madness, that could help explain what increasingly ails all of us.
It took me a while to see that the person being described to me
had echoes of the artificial intelligence programs I’d also been
reading about: machine-learning algorithms that were inscrutable for
the same reasons they were so powerful, because they scanned
volumes of data too massive for human minds to take in, because
they trained themselves to see the patterns normal people couldn’t
see. (They—and Asher—also made basic errors of judgment no
ordinary person would make.) One computer scientist who helped
build the MATRIX told me his former boss could look at a mass of
numbers on a whiteboard and see immediately what others couldn’t,
picking out patterns in seconds. Machine learning hadn’t really been
part of the MATRIX, the executive said, not back then. “That was still
Hank. Hank was the algorithm.”
 Colleagues could more easily describe the technology they and
Asher created than they could describe the man himself. Starting in
the 1980s, they designed military-grade supercomputers that could
string together dozens of consumer PCs in “massively parallel”
systems capable of splitting big jobs into tiny pieces, a processor for
every data point, a virtual eyeball on every pixel. “It’s kind of like
teaching a thousand chickens to pull a wagon,” Asher once
explained. In the early 1990s, he taught his computers to ingest and
aggregate what were then untapped resources: everyday citizens’
driving records, property records, voting records, court records,
fishing licenses, utility bills, and more. In 2001, as the internet
busted and boomed and individuals began producing exponentially
more electronic data, he and his engineers coalesced these bits of
information plus traditional public records around a single,
unshakable entity, the future LexID (or, as it was first known, the
Accurint Data Link, or ADL). That same year, days after jetliners
slammed into the Twin Towers on 9/11, he retooled an existing
algorithm and sent his computers terrorist hunting. Asher’s identity
machines have been spinning ever since, amassing more and more
data even as they’ve spawned endless imitators. By the time I went
looking for them, they were everywhere, looking right back.

Everyone old enough to remember 9/11 has a story about it. Mine is
that I was living in New York City and working at a magazine, my
first real job—but was on a backpacking trip that week, trying to get
off the grid in a wilderness area in southern Colorado. I must have
been hiking when the planes hit. My group spent a day, maybe two
—it’s hard to remember—camped in a meadow next to a creek
surrounded by fourteen-thousand-foot peaks, and only later did we
realize that we’d stopped seeing any contrails in the sky above. We
met a woman, a fellow backpacker, who asked us if we’d heard a
rumor about a terrorist attack, and some in our group thought she
was delusional, and some thought she wasn’t. There was a
thunderstorm, and we stood in the rain outside our tents debating
what to do about the rumor, and the next day we met three men—
lawyers—who had a cell phone and had managed to place a call
from the top of one of the fourteeners.
It wasn’t a rumor. We ran out of the mountains. My flight into
New York’s JFK Airport was one of the first allowed to land after
reopening, and in my fragmented memory, our approach path took
us alongside Manhattan and the site of the Twin Towers, and I
looked out the window and saw them gone, saw the dust still
suspended in the air.
A friend and I biked that night to Manhattan’s Union Square,
where there were candles and shrines for the dead, walls plastered
with photocopied images of the missing, relatives with wide eyes.
We rode across a police line and into lower Manhattan, pedaling in
silence and dust on empty, darkened streets before riding home to
Brooklyn. During the attacks, my roommate had sat on the roof of
our apartment building with my good camera, watching flames and
falling people through its telephoto lens. We never developed the
film. By the time I was back in civilization, videos of the jets hitting
the towers were no longer looping over and over again on TV news,
so I never watched any of them. But it seemed everyone I knew in
New York—and everyone everywhere else—had, and that they better
understood why we collectively decided to give up the liberties we
did. Perhaps that’s an admission of bias. For years it felt to me as if
the rest of the nation had experienced 9/11, had been changed by
it, had tacitly agreed to being changed—but that all I could see was
the ugly aftermath.
Hank Asher’s 9/11 story was different. At the Seisint building in
Boca Raton that morning, dozens of employees filled his oversize
office, and together they watched the second jet slam into the South
Tower, then watched the tower collapse. People screamed. Some
broke down. Asher stood up and ordered them to call federal
agencies and state and local police departments—everyone they
knew in government—and offer free access to their flagship
investigative database, Accurint. Within days, Asher was spending
hundreds of thousands of dollars of his own money to build a secure
room for law enforcement inside Seisint’s building, equipping it with
desks, tables, lamps, whiteboards, computers, phone lines, and fax
machines, and quickly it filled with agents from the FBI, Secret
Service, U.S. Marshals Service, Customs, and Florida Department of
Law Enforcement (FDLE).
Two days after the attacks, Asher was at home at his mansion
with his employee and confidant Bill Shrewsbury, a retired Florida
drug investigator. They were drinking martinis. “I can find these
motherfuckers,” Asher announced. He rushed over to his bedroom,
where he kept a computer with a fifty-inch monitor, and began
modifying a marketing algorithm Seisint had first developed in order
to identify high-net-worth individuals. Change some parameters—
age, credit history, presumed religion—and the same programming
logic seemed to work for other purposes. Now it would flag any
United States resident whose combined data revealed what Asher
called the “high terrorist factor” or “terrorism quotient.” He stayed up
all night refining his code. By morning, he was done—and he had
identified one of the hijackers before their names were publicly
known. In later iterations, he identified four more.
This was the beginning of the MATRIX. It was arguably the
beginning of something else, too: our new era of analytics. Your risk,
scored. Your data as prediction, not just description. While marketers
had long rated prospects, and while Fair, Isaac and Company credit
scores—FICO scores—were half a century old, rarely had actuarial
science jumped the fence to predict other aspects of a citizen’s
character. Rarely had the process been so automated, so frictionless.
Now, Asher sold federal agencies on the promise that his systems
could predict an individual’s propensity for terrorism, and soon he
convinced cops and state lawmakers the same systems could predict
criminality—an early example of the controversial practice known as
predictive policing.
 Many critiques of our increasingly algorithmic world have focused
on where AI fails. I agree with these critiques. One boils down to
simple math: some sample sizes are so small (of terror attacks, for
instance) that algorithms can hardly reliably predict what they
purport to predict. Another boils down to psychology: As anyone
who’s ever become lost by blindly following Google Maps can attest,
people tend to perilously ignore common sense and trust the
machine. A third boils down to checks and balances: algorithms are
often proprietary black boxes, closed to outside scrutiny. A fourth
critique points out that algorithms, far from being objective, often
just encode and scale up human biases: if a predictive policing
system learns that most of a city’s arrests have historically been in a
certain majority-Black neighborhood, the computer may decide to
deploy more officers to that neighborhood, perpetuating a racist
pattern of arrests and violence. Garbage in, garbage out.
But the story of Hank Asher and his creations also raises a
different question: What happens when this stuff actually works? Is
that better or worse? In our brave new reality, insurers and hospitals
can assign you a health score that takes into account your LexID-
derived socioeconomic status: the poorer and more isolated you are,
the riskier it is, in the midst of a pandemic, to give you a ventilator
that could instead go to another patient. In our new reality, U.S.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers can lean on Asher’s
data-fusion technologies to fine-tune their targeting and more
efficiently arrest immigrants at work or right outside their home. In
our new reality, police surveillance cameras can recognize your
license plate or face and instantaneously pull up a full dossier on
you. History is marching in one direction, because society and
capitalism keep pushing it that way. So it seems inevitable that the
science and machinery of AI, the current focus of billions of dollars
of investment from the biggest corporations on the planet, will
improve.
A world in which computers accurately collect and remember and
thereby make decisions based on every little thing you’ve ever done
is a world in which your past is ever more determinant of your
future. It’s a world tailored to who you’ve been and not who you
plan to be, one that perpetuates the lopsided structures we have,
not those we want. It’s a world in which lenders and insurers charge
you more if you’re poor or Black and less if you’re rich or white, and
one in which advertisers and political campaigners know exactly how
to press your buttons by serving ads meant just for you. It’s a more
perfect feedback loop, a lifelong echo chamber, a life-size version of
the Facebook News Feed, and insofar as it cripples social mobility
because you’re stuck in your own pattern, it could further hasten the
end of the American dream. See yourself through Asher’s inventions,
and you see that what may be scariest is not when the machines are
wrong about you—but when they’re right.
 ACT I
WHITE NOISE (1951–2000)
 CHAPTER 1

MR. JOHN ADAMS

F. Lee Bailey had made his name as an attorney in the 1960s and
’70s defending the fugitive Dr. Sam Sheppard, “Boston Strangler”
Albert DeSalvo, and the newspaper heiress Patty Hearst—but had
made his money, much of it, in the ’80s, defending accused drug
smugglers. One client was Lynden Pindling, the prime minister of the
Bahamas. Not by chance, Bailey had taken a business interest in the
Bahamas’s Great Harbour Cay, seven miles of land a hundred and
fifty miles east of Miami that seemed prime for a casino
development, if only he could get Pindling’s permission. The lawyer,
then fifty-one years old, spent weekends at his townhouse at the
island’s marina, minutes down the road from the far grander
beachside home owned by the younger friend who suddenly wanted
his help with the DEA.
The lawyer knew the younger man well. He was a pilot, like
Bailey. He was a heavy drinker, like Bailey. He was a womanizer, like
Bailey. He was intense, hyperactively intelligent; once he got an idea
in his head, it was hard for him to stop talking. He had a $250,000
plane, a sleek, twin-engine Aerostar, which he once used to save a
local woman’s life with an emergency medevac flight to Nassau in
the middle of a storm.
He was celebrated on the island for that, and for the barrel rolls
he liked to do as he made his approach to its airport. Crowds
gathered at the nearby beach bar when they heard he was coming
in, some because they wanted to witness the inevitable crash, others
just to watch him kiss the tops of the waves with his wingtips.
After moving from Florida to Great Harbour Cay in 1982, the man
had shown up one evening at Bailey’s door to introduce himself.
Soon after, he jumped into helping Bailey rebuild the island’s fire
department and water-treatment plant. But as much time as they
spent together, it was tough for Bailey to know what motivated him
beyond a need for constant stimulus and the loyalty he seemed to
show his friends. What was clear was that he liked—perhaps needed
—to be at the center of things. Among Great Harbour Cay’s few
hundred residents, he was the rare person with real relationships
with both the mostly Black locals and the mostly white homeowners.
When gun-toting Colombians and Cubans began taking daily
advantage of the island’s paved, forty-two-hundred-foot airstrip and
its proximity by boat to Florida for their drug runs, he got to know
the newcomers, too. While there were rumors that he had a coke
habit and rumors that he had once been in the drug business
himself, Bailey hadn’t known for sure until receiving his phone call.
After Bailey hung up, he called Peter Gruden, the DEA’s special
agent in charge for Florida and the Caribbean, the epicenter of the
drug wars. “I need you to talk to a guy,” he said. Gruden said he
would.
Lawyer and client drove down from Fort Lauderdale to Miami the
next day, taking Bailey’s jeep in case only the lawyer would be
coming back. The younger man chain-smoked and looked nervously
out the window. Bailey had never seen him scared. He told Bailey he
wouldn’t be able to pay any legal fees until he sold his beachside
house, and Bailey said that was fine.
In Miami, they sat down across from Gruden in a conference
room near the DEA building next to what is now Trump National
Doral golf resort. What happened inside the room was off the
record. Perhaps Bailey told Gruden, as he later told others, that the
man before him had lately been working covertly for the U.S.
government—something to do with the CIA, something to do with
the Contras, the right-wing rebels the Reagan administration had
covertly supported in Nicaragua throughout a bloody 1980s civil war.
But as Bailey remembered it in interviews before his 2021 death, he
stuck that day to the immediate facts at hand: Great Harbour Cay
and adjacent Cistern Cay now served as a way station for as many
as ten illegal drug shipments a week, and the DEA had been wholly
unable to stanch the flow. Violence was on the rise: a resident
murdered offshore, a body buried in the sand, an intentional fire set
to Bailey’s boat and townhouse to warn him and other developers
from getting in the way of the drug trade. It was out of control. But
the man could help.
Bailey’s client was a homeowner, too, the lawyer explained, and
one who was popular with the locals. He knew and remembered
everyone and everything that happened in the Berry Islands. He
could map networks, help reveal patterns. He could deliver the tail
numbers of the planes coming in, the vessel numbers of the boats
going out, the names of the people loading and unloading and
piloting them.
“All I want is for him to know that he’s not facing the specter of
any charges,” Bailey told Gruden, “and that he’s working in
cooperation with the government from this point on.” Gruden
considered the pitch, and soon, for Bailey’s client, a great weight
began to lift. Gruden explained that the DEA itself didn’t have
anything pending on him—the agents after him were with the
Florida Department of Law Enforcement—and assured the man that
if they all worked together, they could all get what they wanted.
They shook hands.
Before the man left to meet with one of Gruden’s subordinates, a
field agent who would be his new handler, he made a request: He
didn’t want his real identity to leave the room. He didn’t want his
past to keep following him. They agreed on an alias he had used at
least once before: Adams. He would be Mr. John Adams.
The DEA was the first law enforcement agency in the United States,
federal or local, to rely on a centralized electronic database—already
a data pioneer when Mr. John Adams came to it. Its far-flung agents
may have dialed in from separate green screens in separate field
offices, but when investigating drug suspects, they all scoured the
same master index. The Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs Information
System, as it was known, or NADDIS, was housed in a mainframe in
El Paso, Texas. It held five million records, and it fattened by the day
with hundreds more names, phone numbers, plate numbers, vessel
numbers, and tail numbers—loose scraps of information that were
meaningless on their own but powerful in combination. Suspects
entered into the system were assigned seven-digit tracking numbers,
known as NADDIS numbers, and whether arrested or not, whether
convicted or not, they were in the system for life. When Adams
began feeding information to the DEA, he delivered it to people, but
ultimately he was feeding a new breed of machine.
For most of human history, you either knew someone or you
didn’t. You either knew the details of their life or you didn’t. And if
you knew them—how they lived, where they lived, whom they loved
—they typically knew much the same about you. There was
symmetry. Relationships were mostly one-to-one, and natural limits
—geography, time, memory—constrained how many people you
could know and how quickly you could come to know them. It was
trivial, in such a world, to simply declare yourself John Adams. How
would strangers discover otherwise? But the databasing of America,
NADDIS being an early example, was beginning to change all that.
The age of information would become the age of mass
incarceration not just because of what you could now know but
because of how quickly you could now come to know it. In 1980,
there were half a million people in America’s jails and prisons. Two
decades later, in 2000, there would be four times as many: two
million people. Higher crime rates and longer sentences were behind
much of the spike. But “tough on crime” laws ushered in under
Ronald Reagan in the 1980s would have been toothless without new
technologies. Computerized records and growing data stores would
help us keep feeding the prisons we kept building.
Adams became an informant in the new era, but he had been
busted in the old era. It had taken the FDLE special agent who led
the investigation four years—and a lucky break—to put all the pieces
together and make a first arrest. “You needed to know two things”
to catch drug runners in those days, the agent says: “Who and
when. But usually we only knew one of those things.” The case
began in 1980 at a remote ranch in Central Florida’s Okeechobee
County that had an absentee owner and a grass airstrip kept
regularly mowed. Small planes flew in and out, too often and too
many to escape neighbors’ notice. From property records—only
accessible via a phone call or face-to-face visit with a county clerk—
the agent got the ranch owner’s name. With a warrant, he could
have used the name to request phone records from Southern Bell,
waited three weeks or a month, and learned which numbers the
owner had called and which numbers had called him. Then he could
have checked agency records to see if any of the numbers belonged
to known or suspected smugglers. But a hunch about a busy airstrip
couldn’t get you a warrant.
So the agent and his partners from the local sheriff’s department
took to hiding for fruitless hours amid the palmettos and scrub oak
on the other side of the property line, waiting and watching and
swatting away mosquitoes. They set up a surveillance camera in the
woods and wrapped it in pine bark for camouflage, and every three
to four seconds it automatically snapped a photo. It captured tail
numbers and license plate numbers but never anything illegal: when
a plane landed, it taxied immediately into one of the airstrip’s three
hangars—one north, one south, one in the middle—and whatever
happened next happened behind closed doors. Soon the hangar
doors opened and the plane flew off again. It took time to develop
the camera’s film and more time—weeks, months—to run down tail
numbers and plate numbers, if they could be run down at all. “We
were always six months behind,” the agent says.
 In the end, it took a crash-landing by one of the crew’s junior
pilots—police found him on the tarmac in Tennessee with a load of
cocaine—before the agent had a tangible who and when. Now he
had enough for a warrant. Facing jail time, the young pilot began to
talk, explaining to the agent who was who in the smuggling
network. There were well over a dozen people in the gang. One of
them, a pilot who went by Adams, had a signature move after he
took off from the ranch’s airstrip: a barrel roll. The agent tracked
down the man’s real name from phone records.

In late May of 1985, after his meeting with the DEA, Adams returned
to Great Harbour Cay. He ignored the parts of the island known to
casual visitors—the beach homes and marina and overgrown ruins of
a failed golf resort Jack Nicklaus once frequented—and spent his
days on the other side of a narrow causeway, in the part of the
island where most of the Bahamians lived. Here in the settlement of
Bullock’s Harbour, in a restaurant-nightclub called the Graveyard that
hosted a reliable mix of locals and foreign smugglers, he tried to
infiltrate one of the biggest groups. But his friendship with Bailey
raised suspicions. The smugglers accepted the drinks he bought
them but never talked about what they were doing on the island,
never really let him in. Adams quickly tried something else.
In between Bullock’s Harbour and Cistern Cay was a mile-wide
bay flanked by a maze of mangroves and estuaries—known locally
as “creeks”—where boats or bales of pot could be hidden with ease.
Whether smugglers landed their planes at Great Harbour or on the
smaller airstrip at Cistern or simply tossed their loads out open cargo
doors, the staging for high-speed boat runs onward to Florida
typically took place out on the water. On a windless night, you could
stand outside the Graveyard and hear the hum of a Panther
helicopter or the buzz of a DC-3 as they came and went, then the
roar of powerboat engines firing up before fading into the darkness.
 For his new plan, Adams focused his attention on the owners of
two cliffside homes on Cistern that had the perfect vantage point
from which to observe the action. The owners, American former
smugglers like him, had come here not so much to operate as to
hide out. They, too, had legal problems. Adams cornered one of their
associates one night at the bar, and soon he had a meeting on
Cistern, where he sold the crew on the idea that if they helped him
and the DEA, he and the DEA could help them. Adams said nothing
about his own legal peril. But he wasn’t working for the agency for
money. His game was much the same, just one level up: if he could
prove his utility as a middleman, his own troubles would go away.
In August, Adams checked into a Miami hotel ahead of his
recruits’ face-to-face introduction to the DEA. Adams and one of the
men stayed up all night in his room, hand-drawing a half-dozen
detailed charts on posterboard, summarizing the group’s collective
expertise. One chart was a map of all the various routes Colombian
drug pilots took through the Caribbean to reach Florida or the
Bahamas. Another, labeled “Contacts,” was a spreadsheet: In the left
column, a list of the local smugglers they knew in the Berry Islands.
In the next column, their locations. Then, in the next, drug deals
these contacts had pulled off in the past. Then the drug deals they
were currently planning. The proposals they’d made to Adams’s crew
to get in on the action. Their affiliations with other smuggling
groups. Any payoffs they’d made to local authorities. The equipment
—boats, planes, and so on—they used in their operations. The last
column in the spreadsheet was labeled “Remarks”: the name of
someone one of the “contacts” had murdered, for instance, or the
phrase “biggest in the Berries.”
The information in the charts, and its careful organization, greatly
impressed Adams’s handlers. They signed off on his recruits. Soon
he was formally running an off-the-books team of five retired
smugglers. The DEA called them the Cistern Five.
There were no phone networks on Cistern and Great Harbour
Cays in 1985, still few mobile phones to speak of anywhere in the
world. To sneak intel to the DEA, the men flew back and forth from
the mainland, and they built their own high-frequency radio
network: an HF transmitter in Chicago, a transmitter in Tampa, a
transmitter in Fort Lauderdale, a transmitter in a hidden drawer in a
North Carolina laundry room that Desiree, using the call sign Honey
Bunny, sometimes pulled out to try to talk to her dad. “Hotel Charlie,
come in,” she called. “Come in, Hotel Charlie.”
On Cistern Cay, the team had not only a radio but a night-vision
scope and a newly purchased radar system, nicknamed Randy, that
they set up on a rooftop to detect incoming planes. With Adams
mostly in Florida and others manning Cistern, they spent late nights
by their HF radios, speaking in code Adams helped them devise,
swapping out numbers for letters when reporting a plane and using
the phrase “black stones” when they wanted to jump to a new
channel. Adams had talked the other men into buying all the
equipment with their own money—he was broke—and into buying
the fuel that kept their planes aloft.
Some in the crew had buried gold coins, South African
Krugerrands, in various secret stashes around the island: smugglers’
savings accounts. Now they had to dig them up to pay for
everything. That summer the Cistern Five helped the DEA track a
half-dozen cocaine planes and freighters full of marijuana and seize
a five-hundred-kilo load of coke from the Cistern airstrip. The team,
or at least Adams, seemed to prove worthy.
Adams spoke on the record about the operation only once, in
court in Chicago in 1987 at the trial of one of the other men. He
testified for the defense, agreeing to appear only after the judge, at
Bailey’s behest, sealed the courtroom from the public and the press
for alleged security reasons—the first closed hearing in the history of
Chicago’s U.S. District Court. Even then, he used his alias.
“Mr. Witness, did I subpoena you up here?” asked the defense
attorney.
“No,” Adams answered.
“What did I tell you if you didn’t appear?”
 “You would subpoena me under my own name.”
“Under what name? You don’t want to tell me, do you?”
“No.”
Though he deflected questions about his past, Adams talked
freely about the operation, his unsophisticated appearance—shaggy
beard, shaggy hair, open shirt, deck shoes—belied by the precision
of his answers. He walked the court through complex spreadsheets
he’d created to map the islands’ drug routes and human networks,
then helped the defense attorney calculate the street value of five
hundred kilos of cocaine: “If you figure it at a hundred dollars a
gram, and there are a thousand grams in a kilogram, that would be
a hundred thousand dollars times five hundred. Fifty million.” He
explained how sometimes the group changed radio channels for
security reasons, and sometimes because of physics. “With HF
equipment what you are doing is bouncing off the ionosphere and
back to your receiving station,” he said, “and at nighttime, for
instance, the ionosphere gets closer to the surface of the earth, so
you use a lower frequency, which has a longer wavelength.”
He told the court he had been entrusted with DEA frequencies to
call the agency’s intelligence center in El Paso—where NADDIS was
housed—and with analysts’ direct work and home phone numbers in
case the radios failed. On the ground in Florida, he briefed DEA and
sometimes FDLE agents in person. He had made sure he was the
focal point for all communications, indispensable. All the data
coming in had to be synthesized, all the individual team members’
efforts coordinated, or it would just be noise.
“It would be pretty confusing if five of us were talking with five
people from the DEA,” he explained. “That would give us twenty-five
different ways of cross-conversation.” Asked to describe his role with
the Cistern Five, he answered “player-coach” and then, more
precisely, “information center.”
Before Adams testified in Chicago, he and his DEA handler had
driven to Okeechobee County to meet with the FDLE special agent
who’d spent years investigating his crew. They got along. Compared
to what the agent had on the others, he had very little on Adams:
proof of a single planeload of cocaine, for which Adams had
apparently been just the pilot, not the ringleader. The truth of
Adams’s smuggling career—which had him cutting his own deals as
he flew between Colombia, Belize, or the Caribbean and the
American South or West—remained shrouded. The state seemed
willing to let him walk. After the Chicago hearing, his drug days
would be behind him. It should have been a turning point for Mr.
John Adams, and in one sense it was.
The defense attorney slipped up first. “Do you know,” he asked a
different witness that morning, “if Mr. Asher … excuse me, Mr.
Adams … I move to strike that, your honor. That was a mistake on
my part.”
Two days later, it was the prosecutor’s turn. “Mr. Asher didn’t tell
you to call?” he asked a witness. He said “Asher” four more times
before the judge paused the hearing, then: “I’m sorry. I think I used
the wrong name. Adams. Mr. Adams.”
That week, when the Chicago Tribune published a story about
the Cistern Five, the possibility that the man could wholly erase the
past was gone. There, printed in black and white, was his real name:
Hank Asher.
The Cistern Five all moved on after Chicago. One, after a short
time in prison, became a real estate developer. Another worked in
construction. A third achieved multiple world skydiving records
before dying in an accident.
Back in South Florida, the specter of prison time now behind him,
Asher, wearing a panama hat and unbuttoned shirt, marched one
afternoon into the drab offices of the CPT Corporation, a technology
company down the street from his new rental house near Hollywood
Beach, and talked his way past the receptionist. “Can you sell me a
computer?” he asked the surprised men in the back office. Selling
individual computers wasn’t their business, but they decided they
could do it in his case. One of the men agreed to teach him how to
use it.
Soon the thirty-five-year-old Asher was learning to write his own
code. His time inside the DEA had revealed to him a new kind of
power, perhaps even a pathway to redemption—and that’s what he
wanted. Maybe he thought computing would change him. The
opposite happened.
 CHAPTER 2

DESCENT

Hank Asher grew up on an alfalfa farm in Valparaiso, Indiana, a

Jewish kid in a Christian town known otherwise for the hybrid strain
of popping corn developed here by Orville Redenbacher. His parents
were Chicagoans who had married six months before his 1951 birth.
They moved to the farm, originally purchased as a vacation property,
soon after, to raise the baby. Asher’s father, Harry, continued
commuting to his dental practice in the city, two hours away. Asher’s
mother, Lucille, or Lu, a nurse, stopped working. She had nearly died
during labor. She spent the first months of his life recovering. He
spent his first months alone in a crib.
In public, the Ashers, who quickly welcomed two more sons and
a daughter, lived a gilded life. They had a stately farmhouse, a
country club membership, and a longtime friendship with Chicago’s
mayor for life, Richard J. Daley—a patient of Harry’s. Their lively
New Year’s Day “revival” parties were chronicled in the local society
pages. When Hank was eight, his parents spent three hours
socializing with Queen Elizabeth of England and her husband, Prince
Philip, at a ball Mayor Daley threw to celebrate the opening of the
St. Lawrence Seaway. When Hank was fourteen, he and his little
brother Chuck, a year younger, attended a luncheon Daley held to
welcome the astronauts of Gemini IV back to Earth from America’s
first space walk. The boys got to pepper them with questions.
In private, their life was far less ideal. Asher’s father drank
himself into a rage many nights, a pattern that only grew worse in
1958, when years of exposure to X-rays saw him lose a finger to
cancer. Next, doctors removed his entire left arm and shoulder. Harry
was right-handed and stubborn, and he was back at his practice
within six weeks, a one-armed dentist seeing patients from 7 a.m. to
sundown, assistants flanking him on both sides. Had it been the
other way around, he told people, “I’m the kind of guy who would
have learned to use the left one.” He was also the kind to keep his
anger pent up until he got home, when he unleashed it on his eldest
son, who didn’t seem to be measuring up.
Asher’s brother Chuck would become student council president at
Valparaiso High School. His little sister, Sari, was homecoming
princess. But Hank, who spent his afternoons hunting squirrels in the
woods near the farm with his .223 rifle, his evenings watching a new
show called Star Trek, found the classroom oppressive. “My mother
used to tell me that there’s this place where kids that did bad in
school could go in Alaska and they had to become timber men,” he
later told an interviewer. “Sitting in school, I would think of ways to
cut timber.” He dropped out of Valparaiso High on the third day.
He applied for work at a local factory and scored so high on its
basic employment test that his new bosses asked him to take the
more difficult draftsman’s test. He taught himself trigonometry in a
week and aced that test, too. He drew circuits for the company for a
year, made some money, spent it, and in 1968 returned to school
long enough to learn French and to appear in the yearbook
alongside his brother, the student council president. For their
portraits, both boys wore suits, Chuck grinning while Hank, his tie
loose and head cocked, scowled.
Asher would allude to Harry’s abuse for the rest of his life,
omitting details, but half a century later friend after friend would
apologetically compare the personality of Hank Asher, lifelong
Democrat, to that of another son of a domineering father, another
arriviste in Florida who sucked up all the air in a room: Donald
Trump. Profane but charming, mesmerizing in his barely concealed
rage, Asher developed a cavernous need for adulation, an obsession
with winning, a constant fear of betrayal. He was profoundly loyal to
some but suspicious of many, and consciously or unconsciously, he
was forever looking for leverage over you.
There was one story Asher did tell about his dad. When Asher
was a teenager, Harry came walking up the stairs, drunk, and
grabbed his son by the shirt and spit in his face. Asher clenched his
fist and took a swing. He hit his dad so hard that he knocked him
out cold. When the rest of the family rushed over, Asher blocked
their path, standing for a moment over Harry’s crumpled form. “It
was probably the first time he ever felt safe,” his daughter Desiree
says. It was probably the first time he felt in control.

In the summer of 1969, the eighteen-year-old Asher took a job as a

painter for Bethlehem Steel, where he spent his days hanging from
radio towers, bridges, and cranes. “We were up 450 feet hand-
brushing 40 gallons a day of paint, walking on 3-inch beams,” he
told the journalist Robert O’Harrow Jr., author of the 2005 privacy
book No Place to Hide. Asher was paid Bethlehem’s highest wage,
$6.50 an hour—“rolling in dough”—and he ran his own business
painting houses on the side.
He worked all the time and enjoyed spending his own money. He
bought a green MG convertible. He had a steady girlfriend, Barbara
Wieggel, whom he’d met in his French class. “By the time I’m
twenty-five,” he confided to her, “I’m going to be a millionaire.”
Wieggel’s family moved to Fort Lauderdale that summer, and
Asher, his beard becoming bushy and his hair long, allowed himself a
break to go to the Woodstock music festival in New York, where he
stayed up all night in the crowd of more than four hundred thousand
people, dancing in the rain and mud to performances by Creedence
Clearwater Revival, Janis Joplin, and Sly and the Family Stone. When
he returned to Valparaiso, it was just in time for a September
snowstorm. A painter couldn’t work in the snow. Always
superstitious, he took it as a sign. It was time to move.
 Asher didn’t know much about Florida, but now Wieggel was
down there, and he knew that it was warmer than Indiana. He
loaded his dog, a Saint Bernard named Chicago, in the MG and
drove twenty hours south. Approaching Fort Lauderdale, he rolled
past new neighborhoods carved out of the Everglades, past concrete
towers blooming along the wealthy and wind-battered Gold Coast.
Florida was booming. It was a good place to seek a fortune.
He landed work as a housepainter within days of his arrival. He
founded his own company within a year. To hasten jobs, he bought a
van and removed its side panels and built a platform on the roof.
One crew of painters stood up top, another below, and Asher drove
the van in circles around each house as the crew splashed on a first
coat, then a second. “I’ve got this new painter working for me,” one
developer told his family. “The kid is a genius!” Then Asher crashed
the van, refused to pay for the damage to the property, and was
fired. He was already moving on anyway: he’d set his sights on the
more lucrative business of painting condo buildings.
Asher Painting took over South Florida’s condo market the way
Silicon Valley tech companies would later monopolize whole sectors
of the national economy. He blitzscaled to victory, hiring hundreds of
painters and finishing jobs so quickly no one else could catch up. His
crews attacked each condo building with overwhelming force,
swarming it like so many insects, each man painting his patch while
the man next to him painted his own. Get enough people and know
just where to put them and how to coordinate their actions, and you
could dominate.
To woo condo boards, which oversaw painting contracts, Asher
bought a twenty-six-foot GMC motorhome and installed a chauffeur
in a suit at the wheel, a secretary with a typewriter in the back, and
drove board members around town on tours. He stood up front in a
collared shirt, smiling proudly as he pointed out his growing list of
clients, including the beachside Galt Ocean Mile Hotel, a Fort
Lauderdale landmark. He played up his Jewish heritage, which many
board members shared. If asked for a bid, he had it ready in an
hour: the secretary typed it up in the building’s parking lot. Rivals
took weeks.
Key to Asher’s success as a salesman, and perhaps to his own
relentless drive, was his ability to convince himself—and everyone
around him—that whatever he was doing was the most important
thing in the world. One early advertisement for his painting company
was a holiday card that featured twelve long-haired employees
sitting at a table, a bearded Asher at its head, all with white sheets
draped over their chests. “It took the Lord six days to build the
world,” the copy read. “On the seventh day he gave us the job of
painting it.”
By 1975, Asher had a car phone and a high-tech digital watch, a
$500 Casio, and the biggest painting company in Florida. The
twenty-four-year-old was profiled in the Fort Lauderdale Sun-
Sentinel—“From a panel-and-glass home on a lush green half-acre in
Wilton Manors, Asher directs a condominium painting business
apparently unmatched anywhere”—and back home in Indiana, in
Valparaiso’s local Vidette-Messenger.
He and Barbara Wieggel had broken up. “I became a born-again
Christian,” she explains, “and he didn’t want anything to do with that
or me anymore.” (Forty years later, she would be shocked to learn
she was in his will.) But his pledge to her had come true: he was a
millionaire.

As a boss, Asher led by intimidation. But for those who stuck with
him, becoming part of what some called his “tribe,” there was more
to it than that.
Frank Irwin, a Massachusetts native who’d come to Florida to
party and maybe track down his estranged father, first met Asher at
the company’s Fort Lauderdale shop, a low-slung brick warehouse
next to the train tracks. “Who the fuck’s that guy?” he heard Asher
say to a foreman after his first week on the job. The foreman had
brought Irwin on after a chance encounter at the beach, where to
win a bet Irwin had free-climbed a seventeen-story hotel they were
painting. “I didn’t give you approval to hire him.”
Asher marched across the room and got up in Irwin’s face. Then
a smile crept in, and he reached out to shake Irwin’s hand. Irwin
was in.
Six months later, Asher—who was usually too busy with his
supervisors and sales teams to say more than a gruff hello to
anyone else—stopped Irwin again. “You’ve been here six months,”
he said, “and you’ve only had two weeks where you worked every
day. Why?” Irwin explained he was in Florida to have fun with his
friends. He had enough money for that. He didn’t need more. “How
about this?” Asher proposed. “Make it five days a week for the next
six months, and I’ll make you a foreman.”
Raised with two brothers by a single mom who worked at a
sweatshop in Pittsfield, in the Berkshire Mountains, Irwin had two
crooked front teeth, one of them chipped in half. Before dropping
out of high school, he’d been voted “Most Likely to End Up in Jail” by
his classmates—though he’d also had the fourth-highest SAT score in
the country that year. Until now, no one had ever believed in him.
“Hank made me feel like I was part of something,” he says. “I
started doing what was necessary to be a man.”
Irwin began showing up five days a week. His swing stage—the
hanging platform painters use on the outside of buildings—seemed
to always make it to the top of condo towers before any of the
others. After six months, Asher made good on his promise. Irwin,
then twenty-three, began supervising men ten or fifteen years his
senior.
“Hey, Frank, you’ve got to go get your teeth fixed,” Asher told
Irwin one day. Irwin said he didn’t have the money. Asher handed
him his own dentist’s business card. “Have him give me a call when
you go in,” he told Irwin. He paid for the whole thing. Irwin, in turn,
would stick with Asher for years, following him from one business to
the next.
 Asher’s tribe members would come to include dozens of people
he took a chance on—a waiter he thought would be good at sales, a
teenage clerk at a bait-and-tackle shop who demonstrated quick
mental math while selling him fishing gear—and dozens more to
whom he showed unexpected generosity. He would spontaneously
pay an employee’s medical bills or pay for a spouse’s funeral or for
someone’s talented kid to go to college. If a person could get
beyond Asher’s tantrums and bluster and see the twinkle in his eye—
some could, some couldn’t—there was clarity in adopting his manic
work ethic and goals, frequent awe at how quickly his mind worked,
and a feeling of belonging. “It drew people to him,” Irwin says. “He
brought a lot of people up.” It was him and them against the world.
To outsiders, Asher’s competitive streak could seem out of
control. One night while out on the town, he ran into the owner of
another painting company. They exchanged insults until the man,
decades older, threw his drink in Asher’s face. Asher knocked him
flat with a punch and ended up in handcuffs. He found a lawyer, the
first of many, and got off.
But it could be fun, and strange, on the inside. Some people
flocked to Asher for the same reason they flocked to “Fort
Liquordale.” He was where the action was. An early employee
describes Asher yelling, “Catch!” only to see a full-size watermelon
hurtling at him. It hit the corner of a couch and exploded, spraying
seeds and juice all over the room, and Asher dissolved into laughter.
A friend describes traveling with Asher to visit his parents in
Valparaiso, only to be recruited to throw the family’s chickens onto
the roof outside his mom’s bedroom in the middle of the night:
Asher’s idea of a funny prank.
At Shooter’s, a “pull up your boat and party, wet T-shirt contest
kind of place” on the Intracoastal Waterway that separates Fort
Lauderdale’s barrier islands from the mainland, Irwin saw exactly
how little money itself meant to Asher. Winning, his way, was what
mattered to him. A condo building across the waterway had just
chosen a rival’s bid over his, and Asher went to its board and
announced, “I’ll paint the building for half of whatever you signed
that contract for.” The board agreed to rip up the contract, but Irwin,
by now a lead supervisor, tried to convince Asher he couldn’t afford
to do the job for half-price. “I can afford it,” Asher retorted, “and
there’s no way in hell I’m going to sit at my bar and watch someone
else paint that building.”

One of Asher’s few real friends as he grew his business was a thick-
bearded sea captain named Rick Kirvan, a New Englander who ran a
forty-eight-foot fishing boat up and down the Atlantic Coast on
behalf of the paint distributor MAB. Asher had become MAB Paint’s
biggest client. “If he wants to go on the boat,” Kirvan’s boss told
him, “just take him.” So Kirvan took Asher fishing and drinking in the
Bahamas. He introduced Asher to the Berry Islands, the sparsely
populated chain that’s home to Great Harbour and Cistern Cays, and
Asher liked the islands so much that Kirvan took him again and
again. The young millionaire already knew that people—clients,
employees, strangers—wanted things from you when you were rich,
but he could sense that the captain wasn’t one of them. They
became close, Kirvan says, because “I didn’t give a shit if he bought
any more paint.”
Kirvan knew Asher’s reputation in Fort Lauderdale for being
“aggressive, very aggressive,” but he was different out on the water.
It calmed him. The men usually fished for bottom-feeders, which
were abundant, and only sometimes for more elusive marlin. “He
didn’t like to catch nothing,” Kirvan explains. They drank cocktails on
the boat and then back at the closest marina and then late into the
night at some beachside bar. Then they slept it off and repeated.
Kirvan noticed that Asher had a way of drifting off midsentence as
they bobbed along in the Atlantic, staring right through him as he
worked through some idea. “You’d be sitting there talking to him,”
Kirvan says, “just talking about anything, and all of a sudden he’d go
silent. You’d know he was in another world.”
 Decades later, Asher would be diagnosed with a range of mental
and mood disorders, including cyclothymia—a condition that causes
emotions to swing high and low—and histrionic personality disorder,
which is characterized by extreme attention seeking and an abiding
need for approval. He would struggle with anxiety and severe
depression and would suffer at least one psychotic break. But if
mental illness was already taking hold of him in his twenties, Asher
kept it buried under work and drink and an occasional snort of the
cocaine that was now increasingly easy to get in Florida.
One afternoon in 1977, Kirvan and Asher docked at Fort
Lauderdale’s Pier Sixty-Six Hotel, an iconic tower on the Intracoastal
not far from the beach. They ordered drinks by the back pool, where
Judith Wheelon, tall and poised and twenty-six years old, was the
server. Asher asked her out.
On their first date, Asher and Wheelon went to a bar that had
the “ring game” that is popular in the Bahamas: the ring hangs from
a string, and you try to swing it onto a hook. “I bet you a hundred
dollars I can get it on the first try,” Asher said to a man standing
there. The man took the bet, Asher got it on the first try, and the
man refused to pay. Asher beat him up.
Wheelon agreed to a second date despite that. Two years later
she gave birth to their daughter Desiree, and three years after that
to a second daughter, Caroline, or Carly. In between, they would live
together and break up and get back together and split again. They
considered getting married, and once Asher even got down on one
knee and proposed to her, but they didn’t follow through. “I loved
him but couldn’t handle him twenty- four hours a day,” Wheelon
says. “He was so hot and cold. Nobody could.”
Kirvan and Asher were in Fort Lauderdale once, talking about
going fishing, when Kirvan suggested that they fly over to the
Berries, where MAB’s boat was moored. “I don’t fly,” Asher told him.
“I don’t like flying.” But Kirvan convinced him to go to the airport.
“I said, ‘Hank, get in the fucking plane,’” Kirvan recalls. “It was a
white-knuckle special. He went and sat in the very back seat of this
seven-seater, holding on to both sides, just panicked. He said
nothing, just held on. Same thing on the way back.”
Soon after the trip, Asher told Kirvan he’d started taking flying
lessons. Now he would be at the controls.

By 1980, Asher had a lucrative side business selling waterproof roof

coatings to the same buildings his company painted, and he had a
team of supervisors and foremen, including Irwin, whom he trusted
to keep things running. He had free time. He now owned a small
plane of his own, a twin-engine Piper Seneca, and flew it often to
the Berry Islands, where he kept a fishing boat, the Sweet Miss Sari,
named after his little sister. He and Judith and Desiree lived for long
stretches there on a houseboat called What It Is that he kept
moored in one of the back bays.
That spring, a fellow pilot Asher sometimes partied with in the
Berries offered him a spot to park his plane in a big corporate
hangar at Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport. The pilot shared the
hangar with a group of business associates. The men all flew
Aerostars, the fastest twin-piston planes on the planet. Two of them,
a gaunt, garrulous thirty-nine-year-old named Ed Goldberg and a
younger, slicker man with an athletic build who has agreed to be
identified by the initials J.T., were official Aerostar dealers. They sold
and serviced the planes, along with radar-resistant Bellancas, right
there at the hangar.
The men had other legitimate business interests, too, including
Contemporary Computer Group, a programming company Goldberg
owned that developed payroll software. It kept its offices in the
terminal building by the hangar. Goldberg’s “mini,” a large computer
that took up much of a specially air-conditioned room, was housed
behind sliding glass doors next to a receptionist, visible to all who
entered. Asher was fascinated by it. “That was my front,” Goldberg
says, “but we actually made money with it.”
 South Florida in the early 1980s was a cocaine economy. The
drug trade, for all its violence, was becoming the region’s industrial
mainstay—bigger than tourism, bigger than real estate. South
Florida’s principal morgue overflowed with so many excess bodies
that officials would soon have to store them in a rented refrigerator
truck—but its Federal Reserve bank overflowed with excess cash; its
businesses, with laundered money.
The men in Goldberg and J.T.’s group were a smuggling gang,
though no one directly told Asher so. The only reason they let him
share the hangar was that they were laying low: on a recent run
from Colombia, J.T. had been chased by Customs planes and an
army helicopter and forced to ditch one of the Aerostars on the
tarmac at the Boca Raton Airport, and now the FDLE was trying to
find the pilot.
Asher and J.T. were around the same age. They became friends
despite marked differences. “Brutus from Popeye: That’s Hank,” J.T.
says. “Uncouth, a drunkard. Gobs of confidence. Didn’t have a filter.
You would not want to take Hank to a nice restaurant.” But the burly
painter and the watchful smuggler had in common an ability to
recognize talent. What J.T. admired about Asher was his ceaseless
drive. “He had a good work ethic,” he says. “And he was a master
manipulator—that was his strong suit.”
J.T., grounded from flying until the FDLE investigation cooled,
spent much of 1980 in the passenger seat of Asher’s Jaguar XJ6. He
joined Asher at meetings with condo owners and property managers
up and down the coast, and at restaurants and bars on the way
home. Asher had a habit of “unbridled spending,” J.T. noticed. At
times, Asher was unable to make payroll, and J.T. became his lender,
loaning him ten thousand here, twenty thousand there, usually
getting it quickly back. “I didn’t take collateral,” J.T. says, “and that’s
very uncommon for me.” Eventually, Asher had $60,000 outstanding.
One morning, J.T. climbed into the Jaguar and Asher, always a
dangerously fast driver, raced them through the streets of Fort
Lauderdale until they reached the local IBM sales office. “We didn’t
know what a computer could do for the painting business,” J.T. says,
“but Hank was interested.” Asher’s painting business was now
mature, wringed of its inefficiencies—perhaps even, to a person like
him, rote. Asher bounded inside, impatient as ever, and found a
cluster of men in dark suits and white shirts. They met him with
surprised stares. “I need a computer,” he said.
IBM’s flagship product that year was the 3031 Processor
Complex, a room-size mainframe that sold for as much as $1.5
million and leased for $25,000 a month. The salesmen dealt with
blue-chip clients like banks and insurance companies, with people
who dressed like they did, not people who showed up off the street.
(IBM’s PC, then secretly under development in nearby Boca Raton,
wouldn’t launch for another year.) One of the salesmen asked Asher
how much revenue his painting business did, then told him it wasn’t
enough, and the IBM men waited for him to leave. “Such disrespect,”
J.T. recalls.
Being told he wasn’t worthy was Asher’s least favorite thing. But
he had other opportunities. Soon after the IBM visit, Asher decided
to buy a used Aerostar from J.T. and Goldberg. The group took it as
a sign that he understood very well what their real business was—
and wanted in.

Back at the office, Asher had started dating one of the secretaries.
Marci Tickle was twenty years old when she was hired in 1980, alert
to the world, and blond like the other women in the front office. She
could type so fast—a hundred words a minute—that she’d had
multiple job offers, including one from Broward County, which her
parents had urged her to take. The fleet of company-issued Jaguars
in the parking lot of the Asher Waterproof Coatings, Roofing, and
Painting Corporation had convinced her that it offered something
more.
Early on, Tickle heard a tremendous crashing sound and rushed
back to the garage, where she saw Asher slamming one of the
Jaguars back and forth into the walls, paint cans flying everywhere.
“Every time you buy a Jag you have to buy six mechanics to go with
it,” he muttered. But she learned that his tantrums were tempered
by shows of generosity. In April, on National Secretaries Day, he
asked her and the other secretary to meet him at the café at
Lauderdale Executive so he could buy them lunch. When they
arrived, he was waiting with his Seneca. They were soon soaring
over the Intracoastal and the row of condo towers along the beach
and then the Atlantic Ocean and Great Bahama Bank, above water
so clear that she could see the undulations of the sand and
limestone on the seabed.
They landed at Great Harbour Cay, and locals came up and
hugged Asher like family. He bought the secretaries lunch, conch
fritters at a bar by the water.
Asher and Tickle were soon eating out together out almost
nightly, frequenting Casa Vecchia on the Intracoastal and Boca
Raton’s La Vieille Maison, a restaurant in a majestic 1930s home
where the eternally underdressed Asher had to dine in a loaner
jacket while Tickle, because she was a woman, got a menu without
any prices.
One night at the oceanside Royce Resort Hotel, Tickle admitted
she didn’t really understand the rules of American football, so Asher
borrowed a sheet of paper and painstakingly drew her a full-page
diagram: tackle, tight end, split end, QB, defensive backs, line of
scrimmage, and so on. “Offsides=5 yards defensive penalty,” he
wrote. “Face mask=5 or 15. Encroachment=too many men on field.”
He could be smothering sometimes—“definitely a control freak,” she
says—but gestures like this were how he showed affection.
“I’m going to treat you so good that you’ll never, ever find
anyone you like as much as me,” he told her. She knew he had a
daughter and knew he was still seeing other women, including
Judith Wheelon—“I’m magnanimous, not monogamous,” he would
declare—and it ate at her, but she stuck with him.
 Shortly after buying the Aerostar, Asher flew Tickle to Belize for
the weekend on what seemed like a whim. J.T. and his girlfriend
came along, and they cleared customs in Belize City before hopping
over to a tiny, pancake-flat, rarely visited island near the barrier reef,
Caye Chapel. It had a simple hotel, a handful of empty beach
homes, and, of particular interest to Asher—the real reason he
wanted to show it to J.T. after finding it on a previous trip—a thirty-
six-hundred-foot marlstone runway, so solid and grippy it could have
been asphalt.
The island’s hotel had a few dozen rooms arranged around a
central dining area and bar. If you wanted dinner, you went in
beforehand and said, “We’d like lobster for four tonight,” so the staff
had time to catch it.
There was another guest, a hippie who sat at one of the tables
near the bar holding a walkie-talkie. “He looks like a player,” J.T.
said. “He’s about our age. And I’m curious, just because I’m curious,
so I go look at the sign-in sheet.” The name on the sheet was Dirk
Stokes.
It seemed like a fake name, and it was. Dirk Stokes was just
what they were looking for. He would turn out to be an American
fugitive who grew his own sinsemilla in the hills near the
Guatemalan border—and who knew all the right people in the
fledgling Belizean government.
“Hank’s the perfect person to start up a conversation with
someone,” J.T. says. Asher went over to him, and the two talked and
talked, and Tickle, still imagining this was a vacation, noticed but
didn’t think much about it.

Asher’s first drug run was a load of pot from Belize’s Orange Walk
District, lucrative enough to wipe his $60,000 debt clean. There was
a dense fog the predawn morning he was meant to take off, and the
Aerostar was packed dangerously full and the airstrip was
dangerously short. Worried they would be seen as the day broke, he
and J.T. wheeled the plane to the adjacent highway, and Asher used
it as his runway, lifting off before a rumbling convoy of sugar trucks
could block his path. He flew north over the Yucatan Peninsula and
low over the Gulf of Mexico to an airstrip in rural Oklahoma, helped
a waiting crew unload, and returned to Belize the same day,
exuberant, hugging J.T. and kissing him on the cheek. He was
hooked.
The real game in Belize wasn’t pot, however. What mattered was
the new country’s strategic location in between the cocaine growers
in South America and the users in the United States. The airstrip
Asher found on Caye Chapel would help J.T.’s smuggling gang solve
one of the bottlenecks inherent in flying coke in from Colombia: try
to do it nonstop in a small plane, and you’re likely to run out of fuel
before you get anywhere north of Central Florida. Carry more fuel,
and you can’t carry a full payload of drugs. Get a bigger plane, and
you need bigger runways.
As the gang tried to rebuild its smuggling operation, Caye Chapel
became its refueling station. “What Hank would do,” J.T. says, “is go
down in the Aerostar, fuel up at Belize City, and go out to the cay,
where we would defuel the Aerostar and transfer it to my plane—his
Aerostar was our flying fuel tank.” Soon Asher and J.T. were also
hiding drums of fuel procured by their new friend Dirk behind a two-
room bungalow on Caye Chapel they purchased with J.T.’s money,
with Asher providing cover by vacationing on the island with
Wheelon and a two-year-old Desiree—just a family man on a family
trip.
Tickle sometimes stayed at the Caye Chapel bungalow, too, and
as Asher spent more and more time away from his painting
company, she joined him on various trips throughout the Caribbean.
Strange things began to happen: a crash-landing in Nassau, a crash-
landing in Belize City, a pair of military jets out her window one day
as they entered U.S. airspace, which Asher easily ditched because he
knew to fly low and slow.
Another random document with
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 But it was one of the disabilities of the fulfillment of his vow, that he
could not leave England until many things had been done, and when
he spoke his tone was apologetic.
“My hands are tied for a while. I have no choice, Mildred, or I
would not hesitate to go at once. If you wish, the yacht shall be got
ready and you can take your sister with you for company until I can
join you.”
“You are very good, but I don’t think that I am very keen on going.
After all it would have been rather dull—just you and I,” she
answered coldly.
Lady Ethel took the baby back to the nurse and a few moments
later Drake excused himself with the plea that he would finish his
unpacking.
“Why have you brought that man to live with us?” Lady Mildred
asked when she was alone with her husband.
“I like him,” Gaunt answered emphatically.
“Yes. But that is not an answer to my question.”
“Have you any objection? If so, I can very quickly alter the
arrangement.”
“No. I don’t wish that. You have the right to ask any friend you wish
to your house.”
“If you dislike the idea, I will——”
“No—no. You misunderstand me,” she interrupted him hastily. “I
was only thinking that it was a little strange that you should make a
clergyman a member of our family. I have never noticed that you
were religiously inclined,” she wound up drily.
“Mildred, dear, will you be patient with me? It is my intention to
make a great change in my life, and I want your help and sympathy.”
A look of surprise swept over her face.
“Surely you haven’t lost all your money, or anything dreadful of
that kind?” she cried.
 “No. But even if I had, you would be quite safe. Your settlement
was a quarter of a million, and that can never be touched,” he
answered grimly.
“May I ask the reason of the change you propose?”
“First of all, I shall give up business in the City. As soon as
possible I shall retire from all the companies in which I am interested,
and shall invest my capital in gilt edged securities that are easily
realized. But a great deal of this capital I intend to use, and it is
probable that in a few months’ time I shall be only a moderately
wealthy man.”
Lady Mildred had listened with eager attention, and was evidently
very puzzled by the announcement.
“It is certain that you can do as you like with your money. As you
say, I and the child are provided for by the settlement,” she remarked
frigidly.
Gaunt was silent and there was a hesitating look in his eyes for he
was wondering if it were possible to tell his wife of the vow that he
had made; but it was certain that she would not understand, and so
the idea was quickly abandoned.
“Mildred, I had hoped that we were going to be better friends,” he
said impulsively.
“Is that possible, John? I think we are a model couple for I cannot
remember that we have ever quarrelled,” she answered nervously.
“I wish that you cared for me sufficiently—to quarrel. I sometimes
wonder if you suspect how much I love you. A few days ago—when
you were so ill—I imagined that, that you loved me even as I love
you.”
“My dear, I am afraid that you are growing sentimental. Really,
John, you are full of surprises. Of course I love you.”
Their eyes met, and his were filled with so great a passion that she
grew afraid and rose quickly.
 “I am very tired, and the doctor said that I must not overdo it. I
think I will retire,” she said hastily.
Gaunt proffered his arm and together they walked in silence to her
room, at the door of which she dismissed him with a smile. He went
to the library, and sat down to think over what had taken place. It
was certain that Lady Mildred had been hurt by his refusal to set off
on the yacht at once, and he cursed the necessity of refusal, but
there was no alternative if he was to keep faith.
These last few days had revealed to him some of the difficulties
that lay before him, and for the moment he was dismayed, but it was
typical of the man that there was not even a temptation to turn aside
from the course that he had mapped out.
His reverie was interrupted by the entrance of Drake and Lady
Ethel, both of whom were in the best of spirits, for they were chatting
together gaily and it seemed to Gaunt that the man whom he now
called his father confessor was enjoying himself thoroughly.
“Mr. Drake, I will play you a hundred up,” said Lady Ethel.
“I can’t play billiards,” Drake replied ruefully.
“Then it’s time you learned and I will teach you.”
“I shall be delighted,” he answered.
Gaunt looked after him, and then called out.
“Drake, I want to have a long chat after dinner, so please don’t
make any promise to amuse this young lady,” he said drily.
A slight flush came to Drake’s face as he answered quietly.
“I shall be at your service, Mr. Gaunt.”
And Lady Ethel threw him a glance that was full of mischief.
 CHAPTER IX

T HE footman brought the coffee which he placed on a table

between the chairs on which Gaunt and Drake were seated and
then withdrew silently. Neither of them spoke but their faces bore an
expression of great gravity, for they realized that they were about to
discuss a question of vast importance, and that this discussion was
likely to be a momentous one.
“I suppose it is the Congo?” Drake at last ventured to say.
“Yes—compared with that, all my other sins are light. To fulfill my
promise I must try to remedy the state of affairs that I helped to bring
into existence,” Gaunt said quietly.
“I know a good deal of its history, but I wish that you would tell me
something from the inside. I want to be able to understand from your
point of view,” Drake answered.
“It’s a gruesome subject, but I will do as you ask. It is only within
the last few years that Europe has begun to grasp a little of the truth
—of the infamies, of the murderings and torturings that have been
committed in the name of civilization. I must go back to the
commencement, and I will admit that when the late King of the
Belgians entered into the agreement with Stanley to represent him in
making treaties with the natives, he had no intention of exploiting the
country in the way he did. King Leopold gained the consent of
Europe and the United States to forming the Congo Free State with
the plea that he wished to develop the country for the good of its
inhabitants. In fact he termed himself a philanthropist and promised
that the natives should be his first consideration. And so in 1884 the
Congo Free State was formed under the benign auspices of the
Great Powers of the world—England and America being especially
interested. For some years—until 1891—these promises were more
or less faithfully carried out, and the country was developed, the
natives being paid for the work they did. But the Belgians are not
born colonizers, and the financial position became desperate. King
Leopold had sunk fifty thousand pounds of his own money, and in
those days he was not a rich man. I suppose it is unnecessary for
me to refer to the late King’s private life, to his licentiousness, to his
extravagance, to his——”
“Quite so,” Drake broke in hurriedly. “De mortuis nil——”
“That maxim may apply in ordinary cases, but to one with the
crimes that lay on the soul of King Leopold——”
Gaunt broke off with a shrug of the shoulders, and lapsed into
silence. His eyes were moody and Drake thought he could detect
something of shame in their expression.
“An Englishman—the late Colonel North—invested a large sum in
one of the companies formed to exploit the rubber trade and that
was my first connection with the Congo. I went out there determined
to amass wealth, and I arrived just about the time that King Leopold
was beginning to discover that he owned a little gold mine. Hitherto
the natives had been paid for the rubber which they collected, but it
occurred to his Majesty that such a payment was unnecessary.
Accordingly he appropriated the land, the produce of the soil, and
the labor of the people—in spite of the promises to the great powers
of Europe. It was but natural that the natives would not submit to
such robbery without a struggle, and so the Congo raised a vast
army of natives to carry out this policy.”
Drake was deeply interested, and his eyes were fixed eagerly on
Gaunt.
“I will only tell you what I saw with my own eyes,” the latter
continued. “I was sent to the Mongalla district. I arrived at the house
of the chief of the post and I noticed a little crowd gathered in front of
it. A woman was strung up to a post, and a huge native was flogging
her with a weapon they called the chicotte—a whip of rhinoceros
hide that cuts deeply into the flesh. A white man was counting
monotonously and he had reached the number one hundred and
ninety. He stopped when he saw me, but the native continued to
strike. ‘What is the matter?’ I cried. The officer looked at me in
surprise. ‘She is the wife of a chief who won’t bring in his rubber,’ he
replied. I looked at the woman, and she was dead.”
 Drake shuddered, and his face had grown very white.
“Didn’t you interfere?” he asked hoarsely.
“What could I do? I was out there to make money, and use soon
accustomed me to such sights. I won’t go into details, but will merely
say that human life and suffering were held as naught. The orders
were that so much rubber must be sent down the river, and the only
way to get the natives to collect it was by the fear of death and
torture.”
“Had you a direct hand in this business?” Drake asked in a low
voice.
“No—but I profited by the method in which the rubber was
obtained. I don’t want to harrow your feelings, but I tell you that every
pound of rubber that has come from the Congo has been and is
being produced by the wholesale murdering and torturing of the
natives,” Gaunt said solemnly.
“You use the present tense. Surely now that the Congo has been
taken over by Belgium, things are better?”
“Not one whit—and they never will be better so long as a Belgian
remains in power.”
“But the new King. He is of good repute, and——”
“The new King will not have the slightest power to alter the
conditions. Years of rapine and murder have reduced the Congo to
such a state that the present methods must continue. The alternative
is bankruptcy,” Gaunt answered.
There was horror on Drake’s face, and his lips were pressed into a
straight line.
“When the Belgian government took over the Congo,” Gaunt
continued, “they gave a pledge that the condition of the natives
should be improved immediately. I have means of obtaining
information of what is really taking place, and I saw that they have no
intention of relinquishing their methods of obtaining rubber by murder
and torture. But they have promised to open the Congo to the trade
of the world in three stages. That is, they have divided the country
into three portions. The first is to be opened out in a few months, but
I may say that that portion is one that has already been devastated
by murder and the land has been depleted of its one valuable
product—namely, rubber. A year later a second portion is to be
thrown open—by that time it will be in the same state as the first.”
“It is dastardly,” Drake broke in angrily.
“No date has been given as to the opening out of the third portion
—and for a good reason—the country is practically untouched, and
they propose first to exhaust it by their usual methods. When the
country has been drained dry—when the Belgians have earned their
millions, then, and not till then, will they admit the foreigner.”
“Do you mean to say seriously that now—at this moment, the
Belgians are collecting rubber in the same way as they did in the
past?” Drake asked in a whisper.
Gaunt nodded his head.
“Yes. They think it is a simple matter to fool Europe as they have
done in the past. There are companies with a capital of a few
thousands that pay an annual dividend of a quarter of a million
pounds. You can readily understand how it is done. Their labor costs
them nothing, and every native has to work six days out of the seven
to bring in his allotted weight of rubber. If he fails he is flogged to
death and his family is imprisoned. Thousands of women have been
flogged and starved, because their men have not been able to bring
in the required quantity of rubber.”
“And this is the twentieth century—it seems incredible!”
“But the state of things has been proved by innumerable
trustworthy witnesses. It is strange to me that the British people have
not been fired by the hearing of such atrocities. I suppose the Congo
is too remote a country,” Gaunt said reflectively.
Drake had risen and began to pace rapidly to and fro. His brow
was puckered into a frown and it was evident that he was deeply
moved.
 “I don’t think that we have ever really realized it. These poor
innocent natives, butchered in cold blood, and all for the sake of
gold. And they are white people as ourselves who reap the profit
from this slavery.”
“Their condition is worse than slavery,” Gaunt said quietly.
“Can nothing be done? Are we quite helpless?” Drake cried
passionately.
There was no reply and there was something akin to contempt in
the look that he gave Gaunt.
“You are a rich man, and you say that your wealth was founded on
this base traffic. You are in the confidence of these monsters who
are wringing gold by murder and torture—can you think of no
remedy?” he cried vehemently.
“It is a difficult question. Europe is too busy with its own affairs to
concern itself. Righteous England has only been able to talk and
threaten and has been afraid of deeds. Belgium has taken
advantage of this, and has calmly gone its own way, secure in the
knowledge that we should confine ourselves to words.”
“But there must be some way of helping these poor people,” Drake
said desperately.
“If you can suggest anything I shall be glad to listen to you. I
appreciate that it is my duty to do all that lies in my power. I place
myself in your hands, Drake——”
“It is an awful responsibility. But I will find a way. This talk with you
has brought the grim reality before my eyes. I shall know no rest until
we attempt something to help. At this moment innocent people are
being done to death. It is infamous.”
“There is no alternative while the present people have power.
Unless they force the natives to work rubber will cease to come in.
The people are broken and the land devastated to such an extent
that it will take generations to recover. If the Congo is to be governed
equitably, it will be necessary to sink millions in the country instead
of draining them out. No, Drake, the position is hopeless so long as
the Belgians rule the Congo.”
“I will not believe it. There must be some remedy for such a heart-
breaking state of affairs. No punishment would be too great for the
men who have perpetrated this crime.”
Gaunt did not speak but concentrated all his attention on the fresh
cigar he had taken from the box.
“Are you with me heart and soul? Would you make any sacrifice to
help this downtrodden people?” Drake asked, and now he spoke
quietly and calmly.
“I repeat that I am in your hands,” Gaunt replied.
“God will help me to find a way.”
The words were spoken confidently and the two men stared at one
another steadily.
 CHAPTER X

A FORTNIGHT passed and Gaunt made no further effort to arrive

at an understanding with his wife. They met but seldom, and
always in the presence of Edward Drake or Lady Ethel, so that he
came to the conclusion that Lady Mildred was desirous of avoiding
any intimate conversation with him, and in this supposition he was
right.
As a matter of fact Lady Mildred was unsettled in mind, and did not
quite know what she herself wished. It must be remembered that
love had never touched her heart, and she much preferred to keep
her feelings well in hand, for she imagined that to care for a man
deeply would cause her more discomfort than pleasure.
Lady Mildred was physically strong and she had completely
recovered her health; in fact motherhood had added to her beauty,
for it had given a gentler expression to her face and had banished a
great deal of the coldness that had been there. A drive in the park
had brought a fresh color to her cheeks so that when she reëntered
the house, her sister looked at her with undisguised admiration.
“Mildred, I am only just beginning to realize how very beautiful you
are,” Lady Ethel remarked. “I am not surprised that your husband
adores you so openly.”
Lady Mildred made no reply but took off her coat and turned away
her face so that her sister should not see the flush that had come to
her cheeks.
“Will you ring for tea?” she said quietly.
Lady Ethel laughed slightly as she touched the button of the bell,
and there was still a smile on her face when she took a seat by the
side of her sister.
“I think you are a very lucky woman and ought to be very happy—
but I don’t think you are, Mildred,” she remarked frankly.
“Are you not just a little impertinent?” Lady Mildred said coldly.
 “No. Only curious, which is the prerogative of youth. I quite like this
husband of yours, although when I first saw him at the wedding, I
thought him rather hateful, and wondered how you could marry him.”
“You forget that John is a rich man,” Lady Mildred said bitterly.
“No. I don’t forget, for I am quite sure that you would never have
married for money alone. I have been watching you two rather
closely of late and sometimes I think you care for him much more
than you will allow any one to see.”
As she spoke she looked steadily at her sister, and was pleased to
see that her words were not without effect, for Lady Mildred was very
angry.
“You talk like a sentimental schoolgirl. You imagine love to be the
most important thing in the world.”
“So it is, my dear, and you’ll find it out some day. Let me give you
a little sisterly advice. John is by no means an ordinary man, and I
warn you that he may be driven too far. Perhaps you won’t know his
real worth until you lose him. As I said before, I have been keeping
my eyes open and it is very evident that your husband is in trouble of
some kind. I wonder you don’t speak to him frankly and offer to
share it. You would be received with open arms,” Lady Ethel said
with unwonted seriousness.
“If John has worries, I am ready to help him to the best of my
ability.”
“Why don’t you tell him so?”
“It is not my place to ask for his confidence. You really are going
too far, Ethel. I think I will rest till dinner time,” she said wearily.
But when she reached her room Lady Mildred made no attempt to
sleep, for she was strangely disturbed; instinct told her that there
was a good deal of truth in what Lady Ethel had said.
Did she love her husband? The question could not be answered
readily, although she realized that her feelings towards him were
very different to what they were at the time of their marriage.
 Before she began to dress for dinner, a visit was paid to the
nursery and she took the baby in her arms and pressed it closely to
her breast. Its eyes were open and it struck her very forcibly that the
child was more like her husband than herself, and she was
conscious of a twinge of jealousy, but the feeling quickly passed and
again she remembered John Gaunt’s never varying kindness. Did
she love him?
Her lips reverently touched the baby and she turned away with a
sigh. As she slowly dressed, a determination was born—a
determination to give her husband a chance, and to allow him to
approach more closely to her.
During dinner Gaunt was very quiet but as soon as the meal was
over he rose from the table.
“Mr. Drake and I have an engagement—if you will excuse us,” he
announced quietly.
“Is it important? I rather wanted to talk to you,” Lady Mildred
answered with unwonted tenderness.
“I am sorry. It is a meeting about the Congo, and——”
“Will you take me with you?” Lady Ethel broke in eagerly.
“Do you wish to listen to a recital of horrors?” he asked brusquely.
“I should like to go. I am interested in the Congo,” she answered.
“I, too, would like to go,” Lady Mildred said, and the two men were
surprised at the announcement.
“I think you would be wiser to stay at home,” Drake said nervously.
“I wish to go,” Lady Mildred rejoined coldly.
Gaunt shrugged his shoulders and made no further objection, but
he was very silent during the drive to the hall, where the meeting
was to take place. They entered a building that was packed from
gallery to floor and on the platform were many well-known faces. The
Archbishop of Canterbury was the chairman and he was supported
by the heads of the free churches, while notabilities from every
branch of life were present to add weight to the protest against the
crime of the Congo.
Eloquent words were spoken—words that deeply stirred the hearts
of the vast crowd as they listened to the description of the sufferings
of a people who were powerless to help themselves. Then a
manifesto was read which had been issued and signed by every
well-known divine in the country.
“Twenty-five years ago we sanctioned the formation of the so-
called ‘Congo Free State,’ on the ground of its being a ‘humane and
benevolent enterprise.’ We invoked the divine blessing upon an
undertaking which was intended to work to the benefit of the
inhabitants of the country. To speak of those hopes as falsified is to
use too mild a term. The basin of the Congo is to-day the scene of
as cruel a tyranny as exists on earth.”
Lady Mildred listened with the deepest interest. Like the great
mass of the British people she had read something of the state of
affairs, but no lasting impression had been left on her mind. But the
eloquent words to which she listened brought the whole cruel
tragedy vividly before her mind.
John Gaunt had founded his fortune on “red rubber,” and John
Gaunt was her husband.
Her eyes happened to rest on his face and she saw that he was
very pale—what were his thoughts of this scathing indictment of a
nation? She dared not think.
“Where are you going, John?” she whispered hoarsely.
A speaker had just sat down, and Gaunt was making his way
rapidly to the platform which he quietly mounted and turned to face
the audience.
“I am John Gaunt and I wish to speak,” he said in a clear ringing
voice.
A murmur arose, and the chairman whispered to those near him.
What could this millionaire wish to say to them? This man whose
gold had the taint of blood.
 Lady Mildred’s breath came quickly and the time seemed
interminable as she waited for her husband to continue his speech.
Edward Drake watched the scene with a feeling of intense
excitement, for he had no idea what Gaunt was about to say. It was
but a few hours ago that the subject of their presence had been
discussed. The meeting had attracted a good deal of attention and it
chanced that during the afternoon, Drake was reading an article in
the Times when Gaunt entered the library.
“Mr. Gaunt, I think that the time has come for action,” Drake cried
eagerly. “Have you read this leader about the Congo?”
“I have just glanced at it. Isn’t there a meeting of some sort to-
night?” was the careless answer.
“Yes, and I think you ought to be present. A fortnight has passed
and we have done nothing,” Drake replied energetically.
“What do you suggest?”
“This meeting is intended as a weighty protest against the inaction
of the English government. The speakers are eminent men and there
can be no question about their disinterestedness. If such a man as
yourself raised a voice, the effect would be increased a
thousandfold.”
“You mean because of my connection with the Congo?” Gaunt
asked thoughtfully.
“Yes. The public more or less connect you with the Congo Free
State, and if you were to relate your experience, it would have an
enormous influence for good. During these years while a war has
been raged against this iniquitous rule the burden has rested on the
shoulders of one man—the secretary of the Congo Republic
Convention. He has pluckily fought a battle with public apathy, but
little can be done without funds. You have said that you are prepared
to spend your wealth in righting the wrongs which you have
committed. In what better way can you do so than by joining hands
with those who are strenuously endeavoring to obtain justice for the
natives of the Congo?” Drake said earnestly.
 “There is something in what you say, but have you thought how
such an action would affect me personally? My Belgian friends will
say I have ‘ratted,’ while if I tell the brutal truth my English friends will
call me a blackguard, and refuse to associate with me. You must
remember that the Belgians have always denied that any atrocities
have been committed.”
“The statement by you will remove every doubt,” Drake cried
impetuously.
“It is rather a large order to ask me to do this. I think you know that
if I do undertake it, I shall not mince matters,” Gaunt said quietly.
“So much the better. Under the circumstances I do not think that
you have the right to consider yourself personally. You have led me
to believe that you are honest in your determination to fulfil your vow.
If this is true, you cannot hesitate for a moment.”
“I quite understand your point of view, but I must own that I had not
anticipated any such public action as you suggest.”
“Do you honestly wish to help the natives of the Congo?” Drake
cried vehemently.
“I haven’t considered them—I am only thinking of myself,” Gaunt
answered drily. “Perhaps you will be quiet for a few minutes.”
Drake watched him eagerly, and when the minutes passed he
grew despondent for he recognized that he had set a difficult task,
and one that would require courage of a high order to carry out.
“Surely I was not mistaken in this man,” he told himself hopefully.
Gaunt rose and crossed over to a cabinet from which he took a
cigar. Still he did not speak and the silence continued for some time.
“You are not going to draw back?” Drake cried in desperation.
“No. I will accompany you to the meeting.”
“Thank God! And you will bear witness to——”
“I will make no promise,” Gaunt interrupted him quietly.
 Drake possessed tact and he recognized that it was not the
moment to apply pressure. If a decision had been arrived at, nothing
he could now say would change it, and he must possess his soul in
patience.
The fact that Lady Mildred and her sister were to accompany them
disturbed him greatly, for it was but natural to think that their
presence might cause Gaunt to modify any statement that he
intended to make.
But Drake did not yet fully understand the character of John
Gaunt.
 CHAPTER XI

D URING the last two weeks Gaunt had been working hard in the
City and had made arrangements for relinquishing his active life.
Tempting propositions had been brought to him but they had been
firmly refused, and the general impression was that he had made
sufficient money to satisfy even his requirements and was about to
retire.
There was no attempt to disguise from himself that the chief
matter with which he must deal was the Congo, and he brought all
his intellect to bear on the problem before him. But the difficulties
seemed well-nigh insurmountable.
Now that he knew his position, it was characteristic that he would
not discuss the matter with Drake until he could see daylight. The
suggestion that he should speak at the meeting was distasteful in the
extreme, but finally he decided that refusal was impossible.
When he faced the thousands of tense faces he was calm and
collected.
“Have I your Grace’s permission to speak?” he asked of the
Archbishop.
The latter rose and cleared his throat.
“My lords, ladies and gentlemen. Most of you know the name of
John Gaunt, and I feel sure that you will be interested in one who
must have unique knowledge of the subject we are discussing,” he
said, and resumed his seat.
“I thank your Grace, and promise that I will detain you for but a few
moments. I have listened attentively to all that you have said and I
tell you that the condition of affairs in the Congo has not been
exaggerated. I do not intend to shock you with horrors, but with my
own eyes I have seen men, women and even children murdered in
cold blood, maimed and tortured.”
 He paused, for a hoarse murmur had arisen so that it was a few
minutes before he could continue.
“I admit that I myself have made money through labor which has
been procured by these means. My wealth is founded on the ‘red
rubber’ which has come from the Congo. I tell you this so that you
shall know I am quite honest in what I am about to say, for I shall
speak against my own pecuniary interests. You have been
discussing the effects of the annexation of the Congo by the Belgian
government, and some of you have expressed the hope that matters
may be improved thereby.”
He paused, and the silence was intense.
“Your hopes are doomed to disappointment. There can be no
improvement in the conditions, for any improvement would
necessitate the abandonment of the slavery which exists. I said
slavery—but it is hardly the right word, for in modern history slavery
has not meant work forced by the fear of death or torture. Wherever
the late King held active sway, there the country was laid waste by
the sword, and rubber was produced not with any idea of the future
but solely for immediate gold. The abandonment of the present
system can only be accomplished by the abandonment of the Congo
by the Belgians. That they will not do unless compelled by superior
force. Their present budget anticipates a profit of nearly a million
pounds. If the land and produce of the soil be returned to the rightful
owners—the natives—then, instead of a profit, there would
necessarily be a heavy deficit. When the Congo budget provides for
a deficit and not a huge profit, then and not till then will you know
that the natives are about to receive fair treatment. That will occur
only when the country has been drained dry. If you hear that a
portion of the country has been opened to the foreigner, you will
know that that portion is worthless, for the population will either have
been killed or have fled from the fear of death, and the produce will
have been exhausted.”
This statement made a profound impression, and all anxiously
waited for Gaunt to continue.
 “You are seeking the amelioration of the natives. To accomplish
this you must remove the present officials. There must be no half
measures and I am convinced that no amount of talk will have the
slightest effect. Actions and not words are required, and it is for you
to see that England does more than talk. A single gunboat at the
mouth of the river would affect a change, while diplomatic
representations will be swept aside as has been done in the past.
Surely England is strong enough to act alone—or is it fear of
Germany that ties her hands? If this be the case, it is not the spirit
that won our empire, and as a race we are doomed. Let there be no
more hesitation, let each of you use his influence and bring pressure
to bear upon our government.”
“We have already done everything in our power,” a bishop
interrupted vehemently.
“Then I fear that the reform of the Congo is impossible. But let us
make an effort. I am a rich man—rich, largely through the Congo—
but, if money is necessary, I am prepared to spend every penny
piece of it on this work. More than that, I now publicly announce that
from this moment I am the enemy of the governors of the Congo.
Any ability that I possess shall be used to affect reform.”
There was a murmur which developed into loud cheers, and there
was a look of defiance in Gaunt’s eyes as he listened.
“My lords, I feel that I owe you some personal explanation. You
must have viewed my appearance here with mingled feelings, for I
am aware that I am looked upon as one of the strongest supporters
of the present régime. You all know the name of Edward Drake, who
has done such good work in the East End of London, and I refer you
to him should you have any doubt as to the honesty of my intentions.
It is owing to his influence that I am here to-night.”
Gaunt paused for a moment and the Archbishop rose to his feet.
“I am sure that we have listened to Mr. Gaunt’s statement with
profound interest. From one point alone what he has said is
invaluable. His evidence will remove every shadow of doubt as to the
atrocities that have been and are taking place in the Congo. I must
own frankly that I looked always upon him as one of our bitterest
enemies. I have been ashamed to think that an Englishman could
have profited by cruelty and torture. Surely God must have brought
him here to-night. We must all admire the courage with which he has
spoken. It was no light thing to face us and frankly admit the sins of
the past, and I honor him for what he has done. He has taken the
only course open to a Christian, for he has promised to do his utmost
to right the wrongs in which he has been a participator. Before Mr.
Gaunt resumes his seat, I should like to ask him one question.
Naturally he is in touch with the rulers of the Congo—would it not be
possible for him to use his influence with them, to bring pressure to
bear upon them that they should govern the natives equitably?”
The Archbishop resumed his seat and Gaunt continued:
“No personal influence or pressure would effect any change.
There is only one effective weapon—force. The position of England
has caused a good deal of cynical amusement in the Congo. The
British government would only move if so great a feeling were
aroused in this country that they dared not do otherwise. Much has
been done in recent years by meetings and writings in the press; but
the Congo is so far away that the truth has never been driven home.
The question of Tariff Reform or Free Trade can rouse fierce
passions, for the principle touches our pocket; but that thousands of
human beings should suffer torture—that is a thing to read and be
harrowed about—but a cup-tie is of much more immediate
importance. Perhaps I am unjust to my fellow countrymen, for at
times they have been aroused to white fury by the story of
oppression and murder. Witness the Armenian atrocities. But then
there was a great man with a silver tongue who could move a nation
by his words. And the only chance for the people of the Congo is that
such a man should rise again and tear from us our complacency.
Make the British people understand that they have been cleverly
swindled. The late King played the confidence trick upon America
and the great powers of Europe. He deliberately hoodwinked them
with his tongue in his cheek. But King Leopold was a master ‘crook.’
He was a born diplomat of the most unscrupulous type; and to his
dying day he was a match for every foreign secretary that crossed