Boomerang_ Travels in the New Third World - Michael D. Lewis [54]
It came immediately. Right after the executives took their places at the dais, a shareholder stood up, uninvited, to ask a question. Gleeson, AIB’s chairman, barked, “Sit down!”
“He thought he was a dictator!” says Keogh, who had heard enough. He rose to his feet and shouted, “I’ve listened to enough of your crap! You’re a fucking bastard!” And then he began firing.
“He thought he had been shot,” he says now with a little smile, “because the first egg hit the microphone and went Pow!” It splattered onto the shoulder pad of Gleeson’s suit. The second egg missed the CEO but nailed the AIB sign behind him.
Then the security guards were on him. “I was told I would be arrested and charged, but I never was,” he says. Of course he wasn’t: this was, at bottom, a family dispute. The guards wanted to escort him out, but he actually left the place on his own and climbed aboard the next bus home. “The incident happened at ten past ten in the morning,” he says. “I was home by ten to eleven. At ten past eleven the phone rang. And I was on the radio for an hour.” Then, but briefly, all was madness. “The press descended on the house and they wouldn’t get out,” he says. It didn’t really matter; he wasn’t sticking around. He’d done exactly what he’d planned to do and saw no need to make a further fuss. He flew out of Dublin Airport at six the next morning for a long-planned Mediterranean cruise.
* On July 10, 2011, after a phone-hacking scandal, News of the World was closed.
† Lenihan died in June 2011, seven months after this interview.
IV
THE SECRET LIVES OF GERMANS
By the time I arrived in Hamburg, in the summer of 2011, the fate of the financial universe seemed to turn on which way the German people jumped. Moody’s was set to downgrade the Portuguese government’s debt to junk bond status, and Standard & Poor’s had hinted darkly that Italy might be next. Ireland was about to be downgraded to junk status, too, and there was a very real possibility that the newly elected local Spanish governments might seize the moment to announce that the former local Spanish governments had miscalculated, and owed foreigners a lot more money than they previously imagined. Then there was Greece. Of the 126 countries with rated debt, Greece now ranked 126th: the Greeks were officially regarded as the least likely people on the planet to repay their debts. As the Germans were not only the biggest creditor of the various deadbeat European nations but their only serious hope for future funding, it was left to the Germans to act as moral arbiter, to decide which financial behaviors would be tolerated and which would not. As a senior official at the Bundesbank put it to me, “If we say no, it’s no. Nothing happens without Germany. This is where the losses come to live.” Just a year ago, when German public figures called Greeks cheaters, or German magazines ran headlines like WHY DON'T YOU SELL YOUR ISLANDS, YOU BANKRUPT GREEKS?, ordinary Greeks took it as an outrageous insult. In June of 2011 the Greek government started selling islands, or at any rate created a fire-sale list of thousands of properties—golf courses, beaches, airports, farmlands, roads—that they hoped to auction in order to help repay their debts. It’s safe to say that the idea of doing this had not come from the Greeks.
To no one but a German is Hamburg an obvious place to spend a vacation, but it happened to be a German holiday, and Hamburg was overrun by German tourists. When I asked the hotel concierge what there was to see in his city, he had to think for a few seconds before he said, “Most people just go to the Reeperbahn.” The Reeperbahn is Hamburg’s red-light