Follow the Money

II


A few years ago, American Lawyer magazine named Max Stanton to its forty under forty list. Meaning he was seen as one of the top forty lawyers in the country under the age of forty. Needless to say, it’s a hard list to get on.

Stanton had long been the rising star of the Kohlberg & Crowley litigation department. And K&C was one of the most prestigious and powerful law firms not just in Los Angeles, but in the entire world. Still in his early forties, his career appeared to have limitless potential. And at K&C, he would have every means at his disposal to make good on that promise. K&C was a law firm that rendered advice on the largest and most complicated business deals and lawsuits in existence. It was a place where the partners, like Stanton, made millions of dollars a year, a law firm where only the brightest legal minds in the world could even hope to get an interview, let alone a job. Once upon a time, I had gotten both.

We got in the elevator and Jendrek winked at me. “I’ll bet it feels good to be home again.”

“Reception’s on seventy-two,” I said.

“Ooh, the top floor,” he said, as he pushed the button, then added, “swanky.”

“You don’t let up, do you?”

Jendrek leaned against the back of the elevator as we rode up. His eyes grew distant. He was running through our meeting at the Vargas house in his head. Finally, he asked, “What do you think the deal is between the son and the wife?”

“What do you mean?”

“What was it she said? ‘My husband wasn’t perfect, but he didn’t deserve this.’ Don’t you think that’s a strange comment?”

“I thought the whole place was strange,” I said, thinking of Brianna’s tan skin and the smell of lotion in the warm sun. “That girl on the deck, Brianna? I guess she lives there, but she’s not a relative. She said something weird. She said that Don Vargas wouldn’t let her move in until she turned eighteen.”

Jendrek laughed as the doors opened. He spoke in a loud whisper as he stepped out into the lobby. “Well, you gotta be of age to be in porn.”

The words stunned me for a moment as I thought of her sitting on the deck in the lounge chair. It hadn’t occurred to me that she was part of Don Vargas’s business. I felt both repulsion and fascination come over me and the elevator nearly closed with me still inside. I jumped out and caught up with Jendrek at the desk.

The receptionist told us Stanton would be with us in a minute and Jendrek and I strolled over to the floor to ceiling windows. The view west was unobstructed. The Hollywood Hills, with the famous sign and the white dome of the observatory in the foreground, stretched off to the ocean, disappearing into a distant blue haze. The grid of Los Angeles crisscrossed through mid-Wilshire, Beverly Hills, Westwood, and on into Santa Monica, which sat in the distance like a handful of white pebbles next to the glimmering Pacific.

Then a man spoke from behind us. “Mark?”

We turned to see Max Stanton smiling at us. He was tan and fit. Six feet tall and perfectly groomed. Handsome, but not too handsome. And dressed in a casual shirt and slacks that must have cost a grand if they cost a dime.

Jendrek shook his hand. “Thanks for seeing us, Max.”

“No trouble at all.” Then he turned to me. “You must be Mr. Olson.”

“Good to meet you.” I smiled and shook his hand. He wore an Omega watch that could easily be mistaken for a Seiko by someone who didn’t know what they were looking at. I noticed because it was the same watch I wore. The same watch I’d bought for myself the summer I worked there. I now wore it as a talisman to remind me why I’d left the rarefied air of K&C so far behind. “Nice watch,” I said.

He smiled and said, “Yours too.” Max Stanton wasn’t the kind of guy who needed to impress people, because he was impressive. It was just a simple fact. The fact that he came across as a decent guy only made him more impressive.

We followed him back to his corner office and sat in the leather chairs in front of his desk. Stanton eased into his own chair and laced his fingers behind his head. “So, Mr. Olson,” he began, making small talk. “I’m sorry we didn’t have a chance to work together when you were here.”

I was caught off guard by the comment. I smiled and shrugged and said, “Yeah, well, I was pretty busy that summer.”

Stanton laughed at the understatement and said, “So I’ve heard. Well, Jim Carver still speaks highly of you, if it’s any consolation. And at any rate, I’m glad the Vargases will have someone like you working on this for them. Ed Vargas called me in the middle of the night last night and asked me to take the case, but, as I’m sure you can understand, a firm like ours doesn’t make a habit of suing the city. Too many conflicts of interest.” He grinned.

Jendrek said, “I understand. We’re happy to take work away from you guys any way we can.”

Everybody chuckled at that, and then Stanton leaned forward against his desk, resting his weight on his elbows, hunching toward us, signaling that chitchat time was over. “I gotta tell you, I was absolutely shocked last night when I got that call. I’m still reeling from it. It’s unbelievable.”

“Everyone out at the house is still in shock as well,” Jendrek replied. “It’s understandable, of course. Ed Vargas seems convinced that the police don’t have a leg to stand on. I tried to talk to him about the difficulty of these kinds of suits, but I’m not sure he understood what I was saying.”

Stanton said, “Well, Ed’s a smart guy. He’ll understand once his mind gets focused, but frankly, I’m not sure Ed’s the one you need to be dealing with.”

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Ed wrote me a retainer check from some company called Good Times, Limited. Since a wrongful death suit belongs to the next of kin, I assume it’s the wife I should be dealing with. But she was completely out of it. Is she just going to let Ed run the show?”

Stanton cleared his throat and scowled, thinking it over, probably contemplating what he could and couldn’t say. Then he leaned back and shook his head. “Not likely. Ed and Tiffany Vargas don’t have—” Stanton floated us the grin again, “—how should I put this? Let’s just say they don’t have a normal mother-son relationship.”

Jendrek laughed and said, “I picked up on that. Hell, they look about the same age.”

“I actually think the son is older than the mother.” Stanton rubbed his chin and said, “Let me give you a little background. Don Vargas first came to me about twelve or thirteen years ago. I was a brand new partner and I’d gotten a reputation doing First Amendment work for a group of adult bookstore owners down in Long Beach. They were challenging some rezoning. The city was trying to put them out of business. Normally we don’t do cases fighting with cities, but it was Long Beach and it was a sexy free speech thing, so I took it and we won.”

Stanton crossed his legs and took his time telling the story. “This was sometime in the mid-90s, 1995, ‘96, something like that. Anyway, Vargas came in not long after that case and told me he was trying to put together this project selling pornography over the Internet. I know it’s hard to imagine these days, but remember back then most people had never heard of the Internet. I didn’t know anything about Vargas, and the porn industry isn’t something a firm like this likes to do business with, but I was fascinated by the idea. I mean, from a free speech standpoint, there are all kinds of issues with selling pornography over the Internet. It was cutting edge stuff at the time.

“All I knew about Vargas back then was that he’d made his start back in the 70s. You know, making actual porno movies on film. But the guy was a real visionary. He saw the potential for home video technology to completely change the industry and he was one of the first guys to really start doing video. He made a ton of dough in the early 80s and then kind of limped along from there once business leveled off. Then, when the Internet thing came, he was right at the forefront of that as well.

“But what’s important for you two to understand, is that a lot of the Internet stuff was driven by Ed Vargas. He was all into video games and shit like that. Computer stuff, right? He was a sophomore or something at UCLA and he’s the one who turned his dad onto the Internet thing. Don Vargas took one look at that, saw what its potential was, and he started pouring money into it. Vargas was one of the first guys, hell, maybe the first guy, to do things like put cameras in a sorority and broadcast it over the Internet.

“When I first met him, he had a warehouse out in the Valley that he was building these little sets in. You know, a shower room, a gym room, a bedroom, a hot tub room, and he was going to put women in them and have Internet peep shows. That’s what he first came to talk to me about. It was really brilliant. He was way ahead of his time. It was years before the technology really caught up with his ideas and made it possible for him to do everything he really wanted to do.”

Stanton laughed and rolled his chair over to a file drawer along the wall. He opened it up and flipped through some files as he spoke. “The funny thing is, you’d never have guessed the guy was an innovator by looking at him.” He pulled a booklet from a file, got up, and handed it to me. It was a press release from a pornography conference in Las Vegas.

“There’s a picture of him on page three,” Stanton said as he sat down again. “I mean, he was a sleazy looking guy. Gold chains, big rings, the whole deal.”

I opened the booklet and saw a Rodney Dangerfield looking guy grinning out from the page. The caption below the picture read: Don Vargas, a thirty-year veteran of the Adult Entertainment Industry, says, “Everyone loves to f*ck, but only a lucky few make money at it.” I smiled and handed it to Jendrek.

Stanton said, “Ridiculous right? But that was how he was. And let me tell you, he made a lot of money. He has about twenty companies doing everything from making movies, to making sex toys, to running an Internet empire. It’s brilliant. He cross-sells everything. It’s unbelievable really.”

Jendrek said, “So all these businesses, who’s going to run them now? If he was the brilliant guy behind everything, is there a successor? A board of directors?”

Stanton shook his head. “No. See, that’s the problem. Vargas was a wheeler-dealer kind of guy. He had his hand in everything and ran it all fast and loose. No boards of directors, no shareholder meetings, none of that shit. He owned and controlled everything. It was all Vargas all the time. It was a very mom and pop, homegrown kind of thing. No formalities. No strategic plans. Nothing like that. Hell, Vargas didn’t even have a will.”

I said, “You’re kidding me? What’s this guy’s estate worth?”

“It’s hard to say. Vargas might have been worth a hundred million.”

“Dollars?” Jendrek almost gasped.

Stanton nodded very seriously. “Yeah. I don’t know the exact number, but what I do know is that California is a community property state, which means whatever it’s worth, it all goes to his wife.”

“So Ed Vargas is out in the cold?” Jendrek chuckled at the cruelty of it.

“Well, I don’t know about that. I mean, someone’s got to run these companies and Ed is the logical choice. But with Tiffany owning everything, Ed’s just another employee. They’ve never gotten along before, I doubt this is going to improve their relationship.”

Jendrek and I glanced at each other. I was thinking about Ed Vargas’s comment about what had been done to him and it suddenly made a lot more sense. I could see Jendrek was thinking the same thing.

Stanton cleared his throat again. “This is made even touchier by the fact that Ed has really been the one running the Internet companies. And lately, he’d been pressuring his dad to go ahead and transfer ownership of those companies to him. Don was ready to do it. We were drafting the documents this week. Don’s plan was to transfer ownership to his son before the end of the year.”

Stanton let his words hang in the air for a few long seconds. Jendrek leaned forward and set the press release on the edge of Stanton’s desk and said, “So Vargas the younger has lost out on a sizeable chunk of dough?”

Stanton said, “That’s an understatement. With the explosion of the web, the Internet business has grown exponentially over the last ten years. Everything else has been flat, or has actually declined in value. The Internet business is now far and away the largest revenue generator in the Vargas empire. Tiffany Vargas could always go ahead and complete the transfer to Ed, but something tells me she won’t.”

Jendrek asked, “Was Ed aware that his father was going to transfer ownership?”

“Oh yeah, definitely. He’d been pressuring his dad to do it for a long time. They were both in here just last week looking over some documents.”

“So Tiffany Vargas is the beneficiary of the cop’s stupidity.”

“I’d say that’s about right.” Stanton smiled.

On the way out we stood around in the lobby waiting for the elevator. I could tell Jendrek was thinking things through when a soft ding signaled that our ride was there. We stepped into the elevator and I could see his eyes focus on the bright colored painting hanging on the opposite side of the elevator bank.

“Is that a real Picasso?” he asked, as the doors closed.

I said, “Of course. Only the best around here.”