Anyway, this particular building—namely, 500 Fifth Avenue-was an especially fine place to keep a law office. In fact, that was something that had instilled great confidence in me when I'd first met Nick and Greg four years ago, confirming a gut feeling I'd had that these two young lawyers were quickly on the rise.

You see, at the time, the law firm of De Feis O'Connell & Rose wasn't one of New York's marquis names. Rather, they were up-and-comers, two sharp young lawyers who'd made a name for themselves at the U.S. Attorney's Office (prosecuting crooks like me) and who'd only recently made the leap into private practice, where they could earn some realbucks (defending crooks like me).

The firm's third partner, Charlie Rose, had died tragically of a malignant brain tumor. But the gold-plated sign on the office's walnut front door still bore his name, and there were numerous pictures of him on the walls of the reception area, the conference room, and the walls of both Nick's and Greg's offices. It was a sentimental touch not lost on me. In my mind, the message was clear: Nick and Greg were extremely loyal guys, the very sort of guys to whom I could entrust my freedom.

“Why don't you take a seat?” said a soothing Magnum, extending his mile-long arm toward my armchair. “You need to calm down a bit, buddy.”

“I am calm,” I muttered. “I'm real fucking calm. What the hell do I have to be nervous about, anyway? The fact that I'm facing three hundred years?” I shrugged and took my seat. “That's not so bad in the general scheme of things, is it?”

“You're not facing three hundred years,” replied Magnum, in the tone a psychiatrist would normally use to coax a suicidal jumper off the edge of a bridge. “At worst, you're facing thirty years… or maybe thirty-five.” Then he paused, pursing his lips like an undertaker. “Althoughthere's an excellent chance the government's gonna try to supersede you.”

I recoiled in my seat. “Supersede me? What are you talking about?” Of course, I knew exactly what the fuck he was talking about. After all, I had been under criminal investigation for the better part of my adult life, so I was an expert in these matters. Still, I thought that somehow, if I made supersede mesound like an entirely outlandish concept, it would make it that much less likely to happen.

“Let me clarify things,” said the Yale-man. “Right now you're being charged with securities fraud and money laundering, but only on four stocks. Chances are they'll try to add on other charges—or supersede you,as the term goes. Don't be surprised if they try to indict you on the rest of the companies you took public. There were thirty-five in all, right?”

“More or less,” I said casually, entirely numb at this point to the sort of bad news that would make the average man pee in his pants. Besides, what was the difference between thirty years and thirty-five? They were both life sentences, weren't they? The Duchess would be long gone, and my children would be completely grown up—married, most likely, with children of their own.

And what would be myfate? Well, I would end up one of those toothless old men, the sort of worthless wino who embarrasses his children and grandchildren when he shows up at their doorstep on holidays. I would be like that old jailbird Mr. Gower, the druggist from It's a Wonderful Life.He had once been a well-respected man in his community, until he poisoned an innocent child after receiving a telegram that his son had died in World War I. Last time I'd watched the movie, Mr. Gower had just been sprayed in the face with a bottle of seltzer and then kicked out of a bar on his ass.

I took a deep breath. Christ—I had to rein in all these stray thoughts! Even in good times my mind had a habit of running away from me. I said, “So tell me what my options are here. I mean, the thought of doing thirty years in jail doesn't exactly thrill me.”

“Wellllllll,”said Magnum, “the way I see it—and feel free to chime in here, Nick—you have three options. The first is to fight this thing to the end, to go all the way to trial and win an acquittal.” He nodded his head once, letting the word acquittalhang in the air. “And if we dowin, then that'll be that. This will all be behind you, once and for all.”

“No double jeopardy,” I added, feeling both proud and disturbed at my expertise in criminal law.

“Exactly,” offered the Yale-man. “You can't be tried twice for the same crime. It'll be a case people talk about for years. Something that'll make Greg and I big wheels around town.”Then he paused and smiled sadly. “But I strongly advise you against that course. I think it would be a big mistake to take this thing to trial. And I say this as your friend, Jordan, not as your attorney.”

Now Magnum took over: “Understand, buddy, as a law firm we make much more money advising you to go to trial—probably ten times as much in a case like this. A trial as complicated as this would drag on forever—more than a year, probably—and the cost would be astronomical: ten million plus.”

Now the Yale-man chimed in: “But if we dogo to trial and you end up losing, it's going to be a total disaster. A disaster of biblical proportions. You'll get thirty years plus, Jordan, and—”

Magnum, overlapping: “—and you won't do your time in a federal prison camp, playing golf and tennis. You'll be in a federal penitentiary, with murderers and rapists.” He shook his head gravely. “It'll be hell on earth.”

I nodded in understanding, keenly aware how the feds housed their criminals. It was according to time: the more time you faced, the higher your security risk. Anything under ten years, with no violence in your background, and you qualified for a minimum-security prison. (Club Fed, so to speak.) But if your sentence was greater than ten years, they locked you in a place where a jar of Vaseline was more valuable than a truckload of weapons-grade plutonium.

Greg plowed on: “Now, as your friend, I would be veryupset knowing you were locked in a place like that, especially when there were other options open to you—better options, I would say.”

And Magnum kept right on talking, but I tuned out. I was already aware that going to trial wasn't an option. I knew that contrary to what most people thought, the sentences meted out for financial crimes were far worse than those for violent crimes. It was all in the amount: If investor losses exceeded a million dollars, the sentences were severe. And if investor losses topped a hundred million—as in my case—sentences were off the charts.

And there was more, starting with the fact was that I was guilty as sin. It was something Nick knew, Greg knew, and I knew too. For their part, Nick and Greg had represented me since the beginning— since the summer of 1994, when I'd made the fatal mistake of smuggling millions of dollars to Switzerland.

I had been under intense regulatory pressure at the time, starting with the SEC, which had become obsessed with my brokerage firm, Stratton Oakmont. I had started the place back in the fall of 1988, quickly discovering a wildly lucrative niche in the securities markets selling five-dollar stocks to the richest one percent of Americans. And just like that,Stratton became one of the largest brokerage firms in America.

In retrospect, things could have turned out much differently. Just as easily, I could have gone down the path of the straight and narrow—building a brokerage firm to rival Lehman Brothers or Merrill Lynch. As fate would have it, one of my first mentors, a true genius named Al Abrams, had a rather aggressive take on what constituted a violation of the federal securities laws. And Al was a careful man, the sort of man who kept ten-year-old pens in his drawer so when he backdated documents the ink would hold up to an FBI gas chromatograph. Al spent the better part of his day anticipating the moves of nosy securities regulators and covering his tracks accordingly.