Chapter 11 ‘Forty-Three Years Ago’
Forty-Three Years Ago
The best advice Nicholas’s father ever gave him was this: Never let fear make your decisions.
Of course, his father offered this advice shortly before Nicholas’s seventh birthday, as justification for his own decision to head off for a new life with a girlfriend out in California, while opting to leave Nicholas and his little brother and their mother behind in Texas.
Despite that (and, also, because of it) the advice stuck.
And it was the first thing Nicholas thought of when he agreed to meet Frank.
Because, if Nicholas was being honest, fear was why he said yes.
He was thirty-one years old with a family to support and crushing law school and college debt.
The kind of debt that didn’t get paid off from a civil servant job.
And he feared what would happen if he said no to a crime boss.
Would he be killed for that? Did these kinds of people kill for things like that?
Would it all lead to Nicholas inadvertently abandoning his family, just like his father had?
Nicholas had organized his life to do the opposite of his father.
And still we can do tricks in our minds, can’t we? Especially when the impossible seeps in. Which is exactly what Nicholas did. He convinced himself that it wasn’t fear guiding him. In fact, he convinced himself it was closer to the opposite.
It was the promise of freedom.
Meredith was working full-time as a guidance counselor and leaving the kids with her mother, which she hated. But they needed Meredith’s salary unless Nicholas left the Austin public defender’s office.
He was making a difference there, wasn’t that the point?
But now there were other points. Meredith and their children.
The main points. Nicholas would do whatever was needed for them.
He interviewed for a partner track position at a tony criminal law firm.
It would mean a move to Houston, where the criminal law firm had their headquarters.
Meredith would be able to stay home with the kids, but she would be far from Austin and her parents.
It was a trade they were gearing up to make, if Meredith decided she wanted it.
She couldn’t seem to decide. She was trading the guilt of not taking care of her young kids with abandoning her unwell father.
This was where they were, perched at that inflection point, with two realities that weren’t quite working for them. Being presented with a third reality. Because of Harris Gray.
Harris Gray was a young man who had been caught selling prescription pills at a fraternity party on UT-Austin’s campus, and whose case had been assigned to Nicholas. It was an open-and-shut case for the state. Harris was caught with the drugs in hand.
But Nicholas had managed to get it dismissed.
This was why he loved his job. He loved helping people who needed it.
Who needed it more than a young kid like Harris, who grew up with nothing and got out over his skis to correct that?
Nicholas thought that Harris would take his second chance and do things differently.
That was until Nicholas learned that Harris worked for the organization.
Every criminal lawyer in the United States was familiar with the organization and the family at its helm. It wasn’t a crime syndicate the way folks traditionally thought of crime syndicates: narcotics and prostitution, loan sharking. Extortion. Murder.
Frank Campano Pointe II did things differently from the generations before him.
He and his leadership team operated the organization out of South Florida, focused on more sophisticated revenue streams like international online gaming and brokerage fraud.
Most notably, they bulked up their OxyContin business long before their competitors saw the opening there.
That was where Harris Gray came in. Harris Gray—whose open-and-shut case Nicholas had managed to make less open-and-shut.
This is what led to a phone call from Frank himself.
And a job offer from Frank. A job offer that would allow Nicholas to spend most of his time still taking on pro bono cases and helping out at the public defenders and staying in Austin.
A job offer that would have Nicholas consulting on a high level with Frank’s legal team when future criminal matters arose.
A job offer that he wanted to discuss more in person. No strings, Frank had said.
Did Nicholas believe there were no strings?
Not exactly, no. The very nature of agreeing to the meeting already involved strings.
But if Nicholas had declined the invitation, that would be a different kind of string.
The string connecting Nicholas to the organization was already in place as soon as Frank saw how good Nicholas was at his job—and as soon as Frank decided he wanted more of him.
Because Frank was used to getting exactly what Frank wanted.
Never let fear make your decisions.
What about when fear and freedom started to feel like the same thing?
Frank flew Nicholas and Meredith to Miami on a private plane. It was going to be a three-day vacation, care of Frank, the only obligation was one face-to-face meeting.
It was the only time that Meredith had ever left her kids, except when her grandmother died. Meredith had flown to Italy, to her grandparents’ small farm in Tuscany to bury her. Then she flew straight home. Less than three days.
Nicholas expected Meredith to pull out of the trip at the last moment. All the way to the airport it felt like it could go either way. She kept biting on her thumbnails, the way she did when she was thinking or nervous or both.
But something shifted in his wife when they drove through the airport gates, straight up to the tarmac, the private plane waiting for them. Even Nicholas was a little wooed. He had been on planes before but never on a private plane. Never on a plane just for him.
“Is this safe?” Meredith asked.
But she was already getting out of the car. She was already heading for the stairs and up to the private cabin and the glass of champagne waiting for her.
It was like watching a switch go on: She was enjoying herself, for the first time in a long time. And Nicholas loved seeing it.
At the airport in Miami, a black car was waiting. It drove Nicholas and Meredith to their oceanfront hotel to freshen up and then to the exit for Frank’s compound on Fisher Island.
Fisher Island was a gated community that put most gated communities to shame. You needed to board a security-guarded ferry to even get to it. And you needed an invitation to even get on that ferry.
When the ferry arrived on the island, they were greeted by additional security who took them by golf cart down the palm tree–landscaped roads (lush residences, tropical plants, and windblown foliage) until they got to the far end of the island—where Frank’s stunning house sat perched overlooking the Atlantic Ocean and Biscayne Bay.
It was the largest house on the island, but somehow the most welcoming with its blue shutters and flowers on the windowsills, a large oak door.
Frank and his wife, Jenny, and their children were waiting for them in the sunroom with cocktails being stirred and bowls of olives and oven-warm rosemary nuts. And, of course, those ocean views.
Frank was only a few years older than Nicholas, but he could have been a decade older. He was dressed in a pressed button-down shirt and khakis, relaxed loafers.
Jenny was in a white sundress, no shoes. And very pregnant. Pregnant for the fourth time. Twins this go-round, she said.
Their kids were bouncing around the sunroom and the backyard just beyond it, like a photograph of a happy family. There was an adorable blond and curly-haired daughter named Quinn, and her two younger brothers, Teddy and Dominic.
Jenny reached for Meredith, took her by the shoulders. “You’re not going to believe this, but I grew up not too far from you and your husband here,” she said.
“Really?” Meredith said, unable to hide her surprise.
“Your maiden name is Smith, yes?”
“Yes.”
“My maiden name is Delaney,” she said. Then she turned to Nicholas.
“Your brother Sam was a grade behind me, I think. Or two grades maybe? I can’t remember…
but I recognized your name straightaway.
And I knew you from the football team. Everyone knew you from the football team. What are the odds, right?”
A Texas city of eighty thousand people, a high school of fewer than five hundred. Nicholas and Meredith and Jenny among the few who managed to find their way out. To find their way to somewhere better. To, somehow, find their way to each other.
What were the odds? Not high, Nicholas knew. And yet, the older he was getting, the more it felt to him like further proof. We end up where we start.
So even if it didn’t all feel destined, it certainly did make Jenny seem knowable, familiar. It made Frank seem that way by association. Frank who was on the ground with his kids, tending to them in a way that was disarming to Nicholas—breaking apart LEGOs and zipping up a doll’s dress.
This was the head of a crime empire? He seemed like a smitten family man.
Of course, though, you could be both.
The kids ran into the family room to watch Superman II on the VHS.
And Jenny took Meredith’s arm, locked it in her own, steering her out toward two Adirondack chairs on the far end of the backyard, to sip on white wine, to talk about friends they used to have in common.
To start down the road they naturally seemed like they both wanted to be walking down.
And Nicholas was alone with Frank. Frank who’d been down on the floor playing with his kids.
In a moment, Frank would tell Nicholas to have a seat on one side of the sunroom table, Frank handing him a cocktail and sitting down across from him. In a moment, Frank would lean back in that chair and start the conversation he’d asked Nicholas to fly fifteen hundred miles to have in person.
Nicholas was ready for this. He expected Frank to lay out the case for why he should do this: Everyone deserved a fair defense; criminal defense lawyers represented criminals; Nicholas taking a few cases a year for the organization would mean he could keep doing the meaningful work he loved, for people who needed someone like him to care; the organization had in-house counsel, so this was more of a consulting role, which would allow Nicholas to stay near his home and take care of his family, and family (they could both agree, couldn’t they?) was everything to them.
But Frank didn’t do any of that. He merely slid a folder across the table and waited for Nicholas to open it. Inside the folder was a list of every client the tony firm in Houston represented—the firm that had offered Nicholas a job.
Nicholas scanned the client list, the cases: corporations destroying the environment, hedge funders stealing retirement funds, sociopathic sons of billionaires.
Rapists and murderers and extortionists.
All the awful people that Nicholas would be expected to save, simply because they had the money to be saved.
The people he’d have to fight for 120 hours a week. Until it killed him.
Nicholas looked up from the folder. It took a lot to surprise him and he was focused on not showing it, on not giving that away.
Which might be why it didn’t occur to Nicholas, until later that night, in his oceanfront hotel room, that he had no idea how Frank knew about the job offer in the first place.
But they were a step before all of that anyway. They were at the step where everything changed.
Frank stood up. And he put out his hand.
And Nicholas—he took it.