Swimming to Catalina (Stone Barrington 4)

“How did he take that?”

“Not well. I explained that I had never done a television commercial and that I never would. I’ve carefully built a persona as an actor, and I didn’t want to squander that. He said that persona was the very reason he wanted me. After all, I was connected to the bank as a customer, I had done business with it, I was on its board; it made sense for me to be a public spokesman. I refused again, and I told him I was giving him thirty days’ notice, and then I would resign from the board. He had that time to put the best face on it, and I promised him I would not make my reasons public.”

“Did he put further pressure on you?”

“Not immediately. But the following week, David Sturmack came to me and said that someone was willing to pay handsomely for my Centurion stock—double what it’s worth, I reckon. I told David that I couldn’t even consider that until I’d talked to Lou Regenstein about it.”

“What did he say to that?”

“He urged me not to reveal to Lou that I’d been approached, and especially not that he was the one who’d done the approaching. There was something very hard about it, almost threatening.”

“What did you do?”

“As soon as he left my office I called Lou and told him what had transpired. Lou was very angry about it, and I promised him I wouldn’t sell the stock. I had Betty put my shares in a new safe deposit box the same day.”

“You felt that threatened?”

“It’s hard to explain, but yes.”

“Is Centurion a very profitable studio?”

“Not wildly so, but year in and year out, it does well. The studio has always operated without much debt, but the last year or two there had been a couple of expensive failures, and Lou started to borrow from Safe Harbor, with the board’s approval. I’m on the board.”

“Why were they so anxious to get the studio, if it’s not all that profitable?”

“The real estate.”

“What real estate?”

“The land the studio sits on. That was Lou’s theory, anyway. All the stockholders and everyone on the board knew that the land was as valuable as the business itself The back lot had been sold off years ago, for a few million dollars, which was stupid. It would be worth twenty times as much now. The studio sits on the biggest piece of land remaining in Los Angeles that is still held by a single owner—more than four hundred acres. If you tried to put together that much well-located, contiguous land in L.A. by assembling it from different owners, it could cost hundreds of millions of dollars, maybe as much as a billion.”

“Why doesn’t the studio sell it, move to the sticks, and build a new studio?”

“The costs of doing that, of building from scratch, would be nearly as much as would be gained by selling the land. Anyway, all the stockholders are deeply involved in the movie business; all of them—producers, dire

ctors, studio executives—know that what we have is unique and can never be re-created. They’re all wealthy people, so they don’t need a lot of money from the sale. There’s a traditional practice, but not a hard rule, that if someone wants to sell his stock, the studio will buy it back, with the price determined by a previously agreed formula. The same if someone dies—the studio will buy back the stock from the heirs. There’s no real market for small parcels of stock outside the studio family, so it worked for everyone. Whoever was behind this wanted to gain control by assembling a block of shareholders, ignoring the buy-back tradition, then buying out everyone else.”

“I see. But then the new owners would be in the same position as the old owners, wouldn’t they? They’d have a big asset that makes money and that would cost as much to move as to stay. They wouldn’t just close down the studio, raze it, and sell the land, would they?”

“Lou thinks there’s more to it. He thinks they’re using Century City as their example.”

“The big group of office buildings?”

“Yes. Century City was built on what used to be the back lot of Twentieth Century—Fox; they sold out to developers. Lou thinks the prospective owners—let’s call them Sturmack and Ippolito, since they already own a substantial minority of the shares—don’t want to sell the land; he thinks they want to do the development themselves, and with Safe Harbor and other money behind them they could do it. It would be worth billions in the end.”

“One bank could finance all that?”

“No. But there’s something else I haven’t told you.”

“Go ahead.”

“A couple of years ago, Oney sent me to a man named Barone, who runs some sort of financial services company. Barone asked me if I’d like to make a substantial investment for an absolutely amazing return, tax-free.”

“Uh-oh.”

“Yes, but I didn’t see it at the time. I gave him half a million dollars, and every month a man delivered cash payment to me. I’d give the money to Barone and he would send it abroad, for a fee, where it would be invested in a company name.”

“He’d launder the money?”