Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [111]
According to one account, the spy firm conducted surveillance on DiCaprio in Cape Town, South Africa, where he was filming the movie Blood Diamond in the spring of 2006. According to another story told by insiders, the spies tried to get photos of DiCaprio with other women during a trip to the Caribbean. The ultimate prize would be a photograph of DiCaprio in the arms of anybody other than Bar Refaeli, which could be leaked to the media or mailed to Bar. Presumably, if she was confronted with evidence of DiCaprio’s treachery, Bar would be more easily lured into the waiting arms of the financier.
It is important to note that one spy in a position to know denied the existence of the project. In any event, the project, if it existed at all, seems to have fizzled, and DiCaprio and Refaeli continued dating until their reported breakup in the spring of 2009. For as much as two years longer, though, the financier continued to send e-mails to Bar Refaeli, although her mother says she gave up replying to them. “She’s very loyal,” Tzipi Refaeli says. Tzipi says that Bar never received suspicious photographs or other evidence against DiCaprio, and was never aware that the spy team was interested in him. But Tzipi doesn’t doubt the story, either.
“I am not objective,” Tzipi says; but “she is beautiful. She is really a very good girl. She’s pretty, nice, intelligent, young, Jewish, Israeli, and successful. It’s very easy to be in love with her.”
CHAPTER TEN
They’re All Kind of Crazy
A collection of random facts—even random secrets—isn’t worth much unless you can put it together so as to understand what the data tell you about the real world. Beckett Brown faced that problem with the reams of data coming in from its surveillance of Mars, Inc. How do you know what’s important, and what’s not? Which information is going to move markets, or affect the competitive picture?
One company that specializes in the analysis side of the private intelligence business is Verbatim Advisory Group, based in Boston. Verbatim’s squadron of analysts gather information and weave it together to produce what the government calls “actionable intelligence.” The firm’s theory is that investigators need enough data points confirming a thesis before they’ll recommend any action. It’s not enough to have one source telling you something. You want to hear it over and over again from people in the know before you act on it.
In September 2006, four different steel buyers around the world got calls from Verbatim’s analysts. The analysts were fishing for specifics: What’s the Arcelor Mittal steel company up to now? What kind of capacity does it have? And what about pricing? That fall, Arcelor Mittal, a London-based company with roots in India, faced uncomfortably high steel prices—and Verbatim’s analysts wondered what Arcelor would do about this.
But the steel buyers already knew the answer. They did business with Arcelor every day. The word was that it was on the verge of scaling back its output to drive up prices—a move that Wall Street would welcome and that would boost the company’s stock price. Verbatim passed the intelligence on to a hedge fund client in late September. As it turned out, this was just a few days before Arcelor announced that it would idle two blast furnaces: one in Cleveland and the other in East Chicago, Indiana. As a result of this news, trading volume was nearly triple that of the previous day and the stock closed $1 per share higher, at $35.54. Anyone on Wall Street who knew about the move in advance could have raked in a tidy profit.
Verbatim, founded in 2001, gathers data on companies for more than twenty hedge fund clients by interviewing