R.V. Roush
�You lost that on the Bengals� game last week, loser,� Dan Wissel prodded.
�Funny, Dickhead, funny. Damn Bengals,� Jeff �Tank� Johnson fumed. He�d dropped another $85 on them. But the whole point of following football was dressing in comfy sweats, cracking a few beers and testing the couch springs. It wasn�t an image the SEC applauded, but the agency didn�t run his life.
�The municipals he�s selling don�t toe it with tax free securities laws. They�re financing unrealistic building expansions and the city�s plowing the profits back into Cantrell�s stock offerings. It�s damn smelly.�
�Your socks, Tank. Check your socks,� Dan groaned.
�Go ta hell, Dan.�
�Why, if your socks smell bad, you don�t mix them with water in machine?� Gezarina Piethaesco asked. Gezarina had defected from Romania eight years ago. Bad smells had been the least of her complaints. After breaking her leg falling off the balancing beam, she�d never been as graceful. She knew she was a has-been when the government moved her family twice in the same year and told them they had to ration their heating like every other Romanian.
�He was joking, Geza. And not very well, I might add,� Tank said, feeling a little bad that the language in the office gave the Romanian ex-gymnast a negative impression of Americans.
�He was making only small joke, then,� Gezarina said. �I am happy to keep learning new language.�
�Left nuts and dickheads aren�t the sort of things you should be learning. No woman should hear that kind of talk.�
Tank could spot a fraud. He saw small potato thefts and knew people got braver with each success. Small-timers eventually went for the big money. He knew the SEC couldn�t be everywhere. They couldn�t expect to catch every paper alteration and forgery, be privy to every private meeting, be present during every crooked transaction between a swindling broker and a trusting customer.
�Dayton�s gaining quite a reputation as the insider trading capital of the world,� Tim Hitchcock said with a sarcastic lilt in his voice.
�Sarcasm ain�t a good discussion opener, Tim,� Tank retorted, unable to come up with the phrase he wanted, which was, �conducive to discussion.�
�We�re so busy tracking merger and bankruptcy notices,� Tank complained, �that we miss the shit the individuals are pulling. I think we oughta check this guy out.�
�I don�t ignore the small stuff,� Hitchcock said and then continued with a self-serving promo, �Just because I slid my suggestion to measure a company�s market risk as 1.2 times their minimum capital at the last vote doesn�t mean I�m only out for big fish. I�m not saying small scale is unimportant, just that big scale is more important.�
�Scale this,� Tank said, flipping Tim the bird.
�Not many investors feel confident enough to report their brokers,� Tank ground his teeth. �That�s how they get away with it. They know we can�t enforce the rules when we�re sixty miles away. Small investors take their bad medicine without a whimper to us, and we sit around here on our asses kidding ourselves that everything�s okay.�
�Is bad when you cannot take yourself onto the road with a hunch only. I think I know how you feel,� Gezarina said. She slowly lifted her compact head from the computer screen to look at Tank. The ends of her short cut black hair were stiff against her heavy cheeks.
He knew he didn�t have a case against Suersak. All he had was a gut feeling. He couldn�t justify it. How did you convince others based on a tightness that you�d always relied on and which proved right about 75% of the time?
Tank hated venting his frustrations verbally. He�d never been good at it. He kept stumbling for words that danced on the boundaries of his working vocabulary. And what else did he have on Suersak? He really shouldn�t have given Tim the finger. That was a rough physical edge Tank had never been able to sand off from his days as an all Big 8 linebacker.
Tank had joined the SEC in 1979 when the NFL draft passed up on him. He�d personally been responsible for the red lettering of twenty three brokers over the past eleven years who�d cheated their clients. He didn�t get a lot of recognition for it, and he knew that brokerage managers fired red lettered brokers. When they were fired, bad brokers either falsified their records to get their crooked toes into the door of another brokerage or became independent financial advisors or money managers, and needed only to hang a sign to start business. Those were the easiest to track, but the hardest to nail since they could sever their ties at the drop of a subpoena.
�Don�t you think I�ll be missed around here?�
�You will be missed like my cousins miss that troublemaker Nicolae Ceausescu. I am making a joke. It is a joke that also isn�t very funny.�
� 2004 R.V. Roush