CHAPTER SIX
The door of the limousine was opening even as it was still rolling to a stop in front of the Dellstone office building in midtown Manhattan.
Stuart, the founder of the iconic watersports brand and chairman of its’ board, hopped out hastily and hurried across the sidewalk before his bodyguard, who was tasked with opening the door for the boss, could unbuckle his seatbelt.
By the time the bodyguard hopped out of the front passenger seat, Stuart was already at the building’s entrance.
When Stuart entered the lobby of his massive office complex, three of his top executives, including his Chief Executive Officer Mel Weiss, were waiting for him.
“Is it final?” Stuart asked urgently without breaking his stride.
“Not yet,” Mel replied, as he and the other executives kept pace with their boss. “He still one vote shy to take him over the top.”
When Stuart heard that there was still hope, he began running toward his private elevator with a speed that none in his entourage could match, but they tried to keep pace anyway.
The few employees still in the downstairs lobby at that time of night were amazed to see their top leaders running so dramatically.
Especially Mr. Jacobs himself! What was going on?
They were pulling out their phones to call their contacts in upper management. What was happening?!
But when the executives hopped onto the elevator and the doors slammed shut, Stuart wanted to know the exact same thing. He looked at his CEO and longtime friend and was unable to shield his shock. “How on earth could this have happened, Mel?”
“They started making offers months ago, Boss, but Alan stayed in the background. He wanted the stakeholders to believe it was just rogue board members behind it. That way, it wouldn’t get back to you.
But today, Alan got involved. His mother turned over her twenty-four percent to him, and she was able to bring along another nine percent.
And then Alan gave the holdouts offers they couldn’t refuse.
But conditional on every one of them accepting before he ended the phone call.
They had to sell their stakes to him right away.
But he didn’t make those phone calls until after we both had left the building earlier today.
By the time I made it home, just before midnight, it was already in progress.
And I mean they were already going down to the wire.
He was only four votes short by then, and two were committing as soon as I got the word that a takeover was taking place.
I didn’t even immediately know who the last two holdouts were.
We had to scramble to find out who the last two were so that we could get to them with a counteroffer.
But we were working behind the eight-ball.
We had to phone nearly every stakeholder just to find out who the remaining two were, and we’re still in the process of doing so.
Alan timed this to the second, Stuart. He knew what he was doing. ”
“But how did it happen?” Stuart was still in that land of disbelief. “I had every possible safeguard in place. I had every single scenario imaginable fleshed out.”
“And Alan, as your CFO, knew every single scenario. He’s a punk, but he’s a brilliant punk. And he made sure to knock every one of those safeguards down before he proceeded. He planned this shit to the last man!”
But Stuart was shaking his head. “A hostile takeover right under my nose, by my very own son, and nobody saw it coming? Nobody? I’ll be damned if I’ll accept that!” He pounded his fist into the elevator wall. “I’ll be damned if that will ever be acceptable to me!”
The three executives looked at each other. They knew their asses were cooked right along with Stuart’s control of the company. They were loyal to Stuart and would remain loyal to Stuart and Alan knew it. This was a dark day for them too.
But Stuart wasn’t thinking about himself, let alone any of them, as the elevator doors opened on the top floor. He took off running again.
By the time he made into his boardroom at the southeastern end of the top floor, Alan Jacobs, the new majority stakeholder of the Dellstone Watersports Corporation, was uncorking a bottle of champagne.
Cheers and congratulatory laughter were heard in the room.
Until Stuart walked in. Then everything went silent.
He stood there staring at his son as everybody in that room, including his son, were staring at him.
He was not his usual dapper self. It was obvious that he had thrown on a dress shirt, untucked, and a pair of pants that were available to grab.
He also had on an overcoat that opened and hung off of him so loosely that it seemed as if he had lost a ton of weight since he got that call from Mel less than half an hour ago.
It was the first time in memory that anyone in that room had ever seen the boss in anything other than one of his patented designer suits.
The full gravity of what they’d all just participated in, this sneaky, underhanded, disloyal takeover, hit them like a ton of bricks when they saw him.
Because in all the hoopla of their taking over one of the largest corporations in America, they had failed to remember just who they were dealing with.
This man came from a rough background. He wasn’t born with any silver spoon in his mouth.
Before he became rich and powerful, he was a man of the streets.
He wasn’t a violent man by nature, but they all had been around him long enough to know that he could become a bruiser if you crossed him.
And they all knew it was wrong. Their faces showed that they knew it.
Stuart Jacobs built that corporation from the ground up and not one person in that room was there during those days of struggle.
His son wasn’t even born yet! But now this twenty-six-year-old was Stuart’s boss?
Alan was the largest stakeholder? It was a robbery in plain sight.
It was a victimless crime that was murderous in its scope.
When Stuart saw his son standing there with that bottle of champagne in his hands, he had to stand still just to reclaim his own center of gravity.
Because inwardly he was beyond enraged. He looked around at the men in that room.
Men who would have been some lower-level executive stuck in some corner office somewhere had he not invested in their talents and given them a stake in his company.
They were his people. They were supposed to have his back. And now this?
But then his attention returned to his son. His only son. A son he loved. A son who failed business school and would have been a failure all around had Stuart not invested in him too. It was a stunning development. Stuart still could hardly believe it.
He began walking slowly to the head of the conference table where his son stood. He couldn’t take his eyes off of him. He used to change this boy’s diapers and now he was his boss?
Like hell.
Like hell.
It was so disconcerting that as soon as Stuart got up to him, and saw up close that smug look on his face as if his victory wasn’t by conniving and deceit, he lost it. And all he saw was red.
Stuart took his fist and punched his son so hard that Alan fell straight on his ass, but with the ferociousness of that hit causing his body to not just fall, but to slide across the floor in uncontrollable momentum.
But no way was Stuart done. Before anybody could even reach him, Stuart had hurried to his son, got down on his knees straddling him, and began beating the shit out of him.
He was back in that trailer park in Larkin when he was a teenager.
He was that thug again. Nobody was going to ever crap on Stuart Jacobs and not expect severe retribution.
It took Mel and the two other executives that had entered the boardroom with Stuart to rush over and try to pull him off of his son.
But the members of the board that had participated in the coup, Alan’s supporters, remained where they were.
They didn’t lift a finger to help him. Because now they understood the full scope of their crime.
They now knew that the crime they had perpetrated against a man whose only sin was to help them throughout their lives was so treacherous that it was tantamount to treason.
When Mel managed to get Stuart off of his son, Stuart stood up and began kicking him like he was a dog.
Alan was screaming like the punk he was as his father was still kicking his ass.
It took a lot of combined strength, but Mel and the other two executives were finally able to pull the boss to the other side of the table and away from Alan.
But all three of them were floored too. How in the world, they wondered, could their colleagues in that room think it was a better idea to follow a punk like Alan over a whole man’s man like Stuart? They couldn’t believe it.
But it was only when they put distance between Stuart and Alan did Alan’s men hurry to his rescue and got him off the floor.
Alan came up enraged. “Get him out of here at once!” his son screamed out. “Get him out of here and get him out of here right now!”
But nobody was that bold. Stuart Jacobs left a room when Stuart Jacobs was ready to leave a room.
Because they all knew the real truth: Alan, by virtue of having the most shares in the company at that given time, might have the power right now.
But Stuart still had the money. Wrestling control of his company was not going to take a dime of that massive fortune away from Stuart.
And that was why nobody obeyed Alan’s order. Nobody moved a muscle.
Stuart continued to stare at his son. It wasn’t just a betrayal, but it was a heartbreaking sight to see. That was his son. That was his flesh and blood. All he ever did was love him and support him and help him. How could he do that to him?
Alan was nearly bent over in pain. And his face was swelling and bleeding. But he still was that arrogant bastard he always was. “I can have you arrested for brutalizing me like this!” he yelled out to his father.
Which, where Stuart came from, was a punk move to even speak such a thing. Nobody called the cops on a rival. They handled it themselves. But Alan didn’t come from where Stuart came from. Thanks to Stuart, his son was born in a lap of luxury. And his ass was as soft as his satin sheets.
“If you don’t want to be arrested,” his soft son continued saying, “you get out of this building and you get out of here instantaneously. This is mine now. I own this. This is my company now,” he had the nerve to say.
When he said it, Stuart was amazed. “Your company? It’s your company now?
” Stuart jerked away from Mel and pointed at his son.
“I built this motherfucker with my blood, sweat, and tears!” he yelled at his son.
“You didn’t have shit to do with any of this!
Your ass wasn’t even born when I was hustling twenty-three hours a day to make this work, but this is your company now?
I built this! I built this!” he yelled so loud that everybody in that room took a metaphorical step backwards. They could feel his pain.
Then Stuart calmed back down before he said his final words.
“If you think for one gotdamn second that I’m going to let you take this company away from me because you’ve got a couple more votes than I have, you’re a bigger fool than I thought.
I’ll be back,” he said as he looked around at every man in that room, and then at his son again. “You can bank on it.”
Then Stuart walked out of that boardroom alone.
Had it been anyone else making such a declaration, it would have fallen on death ears.
It would have been like telling a corpse that he was dead.
It really didn’t matter in the end. The takeover was final.
Alan had secured the last vote that would give him a fifty-one percent stake in Dellstone.
Just hours ago, Stuart had that fifty-one percent stake.
Now Stuart had forty-nine percent. The roles had reversed. His son was now the boss.
Had it been anybody else proclaiming how they would be back after such a resounding defeat, it would have sounded preposterous. But Stuart wasn’t anybody else. And every man in that room knew it.
Alan pulled out his Versace handkerchief from his Tom Ford skinny suit and began dabbing his bloody nose.
He looked at Mel and the other two executives.
“You can tell my father that he may remain on the board if he prefer. His shares accord him that privilege. Although I’m sure his pride won’t let him.
But in any event, you let him know this: I am now the chairman of the board of directors of Dellstone. Me, and me alone.”
Mel, who’d known Alan since he was a kid, couldn’t believe how out of touch the young man truly was. “You think your father gives a damn about a chairmanship? He’s going to stump you through the earth, and that’s what you’re worried about? A chairmanship?”
Mel shook his head in disgust and then left that boardroom. The other two executives that had arrived with Stuart and Mel left too.
But Alan remained defiant. “He’ll stump me? He’s delusional! He’ll pay for what he just did to me,” Alan added, as if his father’s understandable anger was the real affront. “His arrogant ass will pay for everything he’s ever done to me. Mark my words. Mark my words, you hear me?” he yelled again.
But it was just words as far as everybody under the sound of his voice were concerned. They knew that by taking over his father’s company had already not only marked his words, but marked him, in his father’s eyes.
Because they knew Stuart Jacobs well enough to know that the day of reckoning was coming.
And because he was a reclusive, behind-the-scenes kind of man, nothing was going to happen for maybe months on end.
And then bam! Like a thief in the night he was going to strike.
And Alan was going to be blindsided just like he’d just blindsided his father.