Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [36]
Arriving on the executive floor, Lipset stepped out of the elevator and told the switchboard operator to step aside for one of his detectives, who would handle all inbound calls for the rest of the day. Lipset’s team went through the floor office by office, stopping at the key executives’ locations with court documents ordering them to be fired. Each one was replaced by an executive handpicked by Creative Capital who began the tedious process of figuring out where the garment company’s money had been going.
Lipset and his remaining team burst into Maris’s suite last, confronting the surprised entrepreneur at his desk.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Paul Maris,” Lipset intoned, “I’m here to serve papers on you.”
“Oh, you’re trying to scare me. OK, go ahead. I’ve got the best law firm in San Francisco, so just try it.”
“Mr. Maris,” Lipset replied, “I’m serving these documents on you in addition to a complaint allowing Creative Capital to take over this company. These papers specifically restrain you from removing any company property. You are not allowed to take your company car when you leave. You are not allowed to take business papers from this office. You are not allowed to take printouts from the computer room. You are not allowed to take plans from the designing room. You are not allowed to take any samples, and furthermore, according to paragraph 16 of this order, you are restrained from discussing this matter with any employees until this case is heard in court.”14
After some back-and-forth bickering about what he was allowed to take from his office, Maris left—without throwing a punch.
In the aftermath, Creative Capital kept Lipset on the case—trying to find out if Maris was violating the court order by meeting with company employees or was still in possession of any company property. Lipset sent a woman operative to tail Maris, and she followed him to the Stanford Court Hotel on San Francisco’s posh Nob Hill. With cable cars clattering up the hill nearby, the operative began taking clandestine pictures of Maris and the people he was meeting with. But Maris and the others spotted her, closed in, and grabbed her wrists. They snatched her camera and pulled out the film, ruining the surveillance images.
Shortly after that unpleasant episode, Lipset got another surprise: Maris was suing him for $5 million.
Planning to fight back, Lipset demanded that Creative Capital tell him everything it knew about Maris. The CEO of Creative Capital told Lipset that he’d had Maris checked out by a prestigious investigative firm, Proudfoot Reports, which was based on the East Coast and was headed up by a former FBI agent. Proudfoot reported that Maris was on the up-and-up. He went to a filing cabinet and turned over a copy of the investigative report on Maris.
Lipset scanned the report by the Proudfoot team, and felt that something was wrong. The document listed Maris’s army career but didn’t identify the unit he’d served with. It included a list of stocks that he held, but they were all in privately held companies, with no addresses listed. It said Proudfoot had checked with the schools Maris had listed on his résumé, and the information checked out. But the document didn’t list the name of the registrar Proudfoot’s investigators had spoken to, which Lipset knew his own operatives would include as a matter of accuracy.
Lipset realized that Maris was not who he said he was. He insisted that Creative Capital hire him to figure out who Maris really was.
Creative Capital’s CEO scoffed at the idea. His investigators at Proudfoot were top-notch. Why would he want to hire Lipset to redo their work? Lipset was probably just trying to generate more fees. The conversation ended badly, with Lipset and his client shouting at each other. The stressful operation