“Just myself, the security company, and, of course, your father had his key.”
Wilson nodded as he followed Anne into the office. He could almost feel his father’s presence in the room. The wall of glass overlooking the Charles River, the elaborate Italian renaissance ceiling, the exposed columns of stone, the collection of unusual books and curious artifacts from around the world, it all reflected his father’s eclectic tastes.
At the far end of the sizeable office was his father’s workstation, which covered an entire wall. A variety of electronic devices and gadgetry were spread across the builtin black walnut desk. Two fax machines, a paper shredder, three computer screens, two printers, a scanner, three flat-screen TVs, stereo equipment, and four telephones. There were also a number of family pictures from their travels around the world, which brought a new wave of emotions. Wilson looked away to stay focused. A few feet in front of the workstation was a gray stone conference table, oblong and irregular in shape, surrounded by seven black leather wing chairs.
Emotions returned as Wilson remembered a time, eight months earlier, when he’d come to talk about his career at Kresge & Company. Secretly, Wilson had wanted his father to say, Why don’t you come to work for me? Even though he probably never would have accepted, he still wanted the invitation. But his father had never asked. He remembered wondering whether his father was waiting for him to make the overture, asking outright: I’d like to join you at Fielder & Company. Now, he wished he had. Maybe both of them had been too proud or too fearful of rejection. Or was my father simply trying to protect me? Mental images of his father in the hospital brought him back to the present, as Anne opened the twelve file cabinets on each side of his father’s workstation.
“How long do you need me to stay?” Anne asked.
“You can go home when you like, Anne. I’ll be here for a few hours. I’ve got my father’s keys, so I can lock up,” Wilson said, taking the keys from his pocket. “Do I have everything I need?”
She examined the keys closely before showing him which ones were file keys, office keys, and building keys. Then, she held up an oddly shaped gold key. “This one opens the vault in the clothes closet,” she said, pointing to the bookshelves at the other end of the office, past the matching French sofas and large wrought iron and glass coffee table in the sitting area. “You also need to key in the password HWF1952. I haven’t given Mr. Emerson or anyone else access to the vault.”
They both walked toward the wall of bookshelves. Wilson opened the shelf-faced door leading to a private bath, shower-steam room, and large walk-in closet. His father’s wardrobe filled the racks and drawers of the closet. Over the years, he’d occasionally borrowed his father’s clothes, having worn the same-sized pants and jackets since he’d turned twenty.
“It’s on your right, behind the suit coats. Only your father had this key,” Anne said before handing the keys back to Wilson. Then she excused herself.
After inserting the key and entering the password, he opened the concealed vault. Inside he found a solitary folder containing a computer disk and a paper printout of all the corporations, general and limited partnerships, limited liability companies, investment trusts, stocks, bonds, and other money instruments in which his father held partial or controlling interests. He’d seen a similar list in Daniel’s office. Many of the entities had Nevada and Wyoming addresses, others had Nevis and Cayman Island addresses, and still others had Swiss addresses. His father had obviously gone to great lengths to protect his privacy and conceal his assets. Under Nevada and Wyoming state law, only one name and signature was required to register a business entity, making it easy to keep owners and officers anonymous. Wilson could appreciate the appeal of Nevada and Wyoming, the most secretive states in the union. And Nevis, a tiny island country in the Caribbean, had even more favorable and flexible offshore banking laws than the Cayman Islands or Switzerland.
According to the latest update of the files a month earlier, his father owned or controlled one hundred and ninety-eight different entities or instruments, each of which held ownership positions in a wide variety of publicly and privately held corporations. After reexamining the long list of additional investments, Wilson breathed a sigh of relief, having found no indication that his father owned shares in Zollinger’s Dutton Industries, Zebra Technology, or any of the companies identified in Daniel Redd’s fifty-two files.
However, there was more in the concealed vault—an old book,
Capitalism’s Flaw
by William Tate Boyles, and a stack of loose papers and press clippings. He opened the cloth-covered book. It was a publisher’s bound proof. The pages were worn with age and brown at the edges. There was an inscription from his great-grandfather to his grandfather in blotchy blue ink, faded but still legible.
Dear Son, December 25, 1935
I tried to dissuade William from writing this book because it has placed his life in grave danger. Nonetheless, it is a vitally important work and you should be aware of its contents. It explains the real forces behind this nation’s debilitating depression. Lord Montagu Norman of the Bank of England is one of the vilest practitioners of the evil gift in our times. But he is only one of a corrupt society. Benjamin Strong of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, Hjalmar Schacht of the German Reichsbank, and the entire House of Morgan are also nefarious practitioners. Whether the Hoover Administration and Lord John Maynard Keynes were active participants or mindless facilitators is, at present, uncertain.
These are indeed desperate times, not merely because of the human suffering brought on by our economic woes, but also because of the mystification and manipulation wrought by hidden tyrants in high places. They are the authors of our needless woes and suffering, but now is not the time to expose them. We have neither the resources nor the mandate. The best we can do is protect ourselves and those around us from the corruption.
I hope you can enjoy some peace during the holidays.
Merry Christmas,
Father
After pondering the inscription, Wilson read the book’s introduction. It was a compelling summary of how a handful of men brought about the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression of the 1930s, simply because they wanted to slow middle-class wealth creation in America and shift economic power back to Europe. According to the book, the flaw in capitalism was that it allowed elite private corporations with captive customers and government protection—such as the Federal Reserve, international banks, stock exchanges, and insurance companies—to preserve their power and wealth at the expense of the masses. Capitalism’s first movers had used their early success to structure the system to their advantage and entrench their control.
Wilson reflected on the many conversations with his father about corrupt authority and exploitation. They were conversations that had fueled his deep-seated distrust of authority. He quickly scanned the rest of the book, but he was preoccupied with reflections on what sort of men his great-grandfather and grandfather had been.
He turned his attention to the stack of loose papers. The press clipping on top of the stack was a
New York Times
article about the death of Congressman Louis T. McFadden in 1936. Wilson sat down on the floor and began to read. Congressman McFadden was a Republican from Pennsylvania. He served as chairman of the Banking and Currency Committee of the United States House of Representatives from 1920 to 1931. According to hand-written notes on some of the press clippings and documents, McFadden had also been a close personal friend and associate of Wilson’s great-grandfather, Harry Wilson Fielder.
On May 23, 1933, Congressman McFadden brought formal charges against the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, the Comptroller of the Currency, and the Secretary of the United States Treasury for numerous criminal acts, including, but not limited to, conspiracy, fraud, unlawful conversion, and treason. From the floor of the House of Representatives, Congressman McFadden accused international bankers of orchestrating the stock market crash of 1929 and creating the nation’s Great Depression. He called the bankers a “dark crew of financial pirates who would cut a man’s throat to get a dollar out of his pocket… They prey upon the people of these United States.”
Congressman McFadden and Wilson’s great-grandfather had worked together with author William Tate Boyles to expose the hidden tyranny of the Federal Reserve and international bankers who controlled the world’s credit and money supply, until lives were threatened. Boyles’ New York publisher was threatened with the death of his family if he printed
Capitalism’s Flaw
and McFadden barely escaped an assassination attempt near the Capitol Building. Wilson’s great-grandfather argued vehemently against further attempts to expose the corruption and severely reprimanded McFadden for his increasingly anti-Semitic views. Boyles agreed, but McFadden disregarded the warnings and continued fighting until his untimely death in 1936.
Wilson scanned the news clippings from
The New York Times
,
The Wall Street Journal
, and other major newspapers about Congressman McFadden’s speeches between 1932 and 1934. Congressman McFadden accused the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve Banks of being “the most corrupt institutions in the world.” He claimed they had impoverished and ruined the people of the United States and almost bankrupted the government. On the floor of the House of Representatives in 1933, Congressman McFadden called the Federal Reserve and its power-over-money supply the greatest conspiracy of modern times. Wilson was captivated by the speech:
Some people think that the Federal Reserve Banks are United States Government institutions. They are private monopolies that prey upon the people of these United States for the benefit of themselves and their foreign customers; foreign and domestic speculators and swindlers; and rich and predatory moneylenders… These twelve private credit monopolies were deceitfully and disloyally foisted upon this country by the bankers who came here from Europe, and repaid us our hospitality by undermining our American institutions. Those bankers took money out of this country to finance Japan in a war against Russia. They created a reign of terror in Russia with our money, in order to help that war along. They instigated the separate peace between Germany and Russia, and thus drove a wedge between the allies… In 1912, the National Monetary Association, under the chairmanship of the late Senator Nelson W. Aldrich, made a report and presented a vicious bill called the National Reserve Association Bill. This bill is usually spoken of as the Aldrich Bill. Senator Aldrich did not write the Aldrich Bill. He was the tool, if not the accomplice, of the European bankers who for nearly twenty years had been scheming to set up a central bank in this country and who in 1912 had spent and were continuing to spend vast sums of money to accomplish their purpose… We were opposed to the Aldrich plan for a central bank. The men who rule the Democratic Party then promised the people that if they were returned to power there would be no central bank established here while they held the reigns of government. Thirteen months later that promise was broken and the Wilson administration, under the tutelage of those sinister Wall Street figures who stood behind Colonel House, established here in our free country the worm-eaten monarchical institution of the “King’s Bank” to control us from the top downward, and from the cradle to the grave. It fastened down upon the country the very tyranny from which the framers of the Constitution sought to save us… These men and those who replaced them are still in power and control every aspect of your life. They will not give up a slave just because the slave no longer wishes to be a slave.
After Wilson had finished reading McFadden’s other speeches, he found more firsthand accounts and press reports on the assassination attempts against the congressman. In early 1934, two ambush shots were fired at the congressman as he was getting out of a taxi near the Capitol Building. A few months later he became violently ill after dining at a political banquet in Washington D.C. and would have died if not for his friend and physician who was on site to administer an emergency stomach pump. Finally, on October 3, 1936 at age sixty, McFadden died of sudden heart failure after an usual bout with intestinal flu. His associates were convinced he’d been poisoned, but investigations into his death were squelched. Wilson’s great-grandfather and William Boyles continued to distance themselves even further from their earlier quest. They vowed to live within the system without being destroyed or corrupted by it, until 1952, when both Boyles and his great-grandfather died.
What Wilson read next from an obscure collection of copied journal pages grabbed him by the throat like a hangman’s noose. He literally could not breathe. Just as he was beginning to lose consciousness, he gasped for air. With his heart racing, he read the words again:
Harry Wilson Fielder was killed on November 11, 1952, one week after Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected president, in a hit-and-run accident outside his Back Bay office. William Tate Boyles was poisoned two days later and died of a heart attack after being rushed to the hospital. Both men were murdered in order to keep them quiet.
Wilson’s body was still shaking as he read the words again in utter disbelief. He now knew why his father had never told him the truth about his great-grandfather’s death. It would have magnified his natural rebellion a hundredfold. He never would have made it to age thirty-one. Now I might not see thirty-two.
As Wilson regained his composure, his shock turning to sadness, he continued to read everything he could find on his great-grandfather. According to a set of journal pages written by Harry’s son, Wilson’s grandfather, both Harry Wilson Fielder and William Tate Boyles had long feared for their lives. As they grew older, they had been secretly preparing to simultaneously publish their memoirs as witnesses to a hidden tyranny. Extensive notes from Harry’s son confirmed that they had indeed been murdered. Investigations into their deaths were taken over by federal authorities and then shelved. Wilson’s grandfather never pursued the matter out of fear for his family and in heed to his father’s warning.