The Corruption of Neil Bush

It was a small, private affair in the summer of 1985, attended by a few of Denver's new rich. Dinner hadn't yet been served and the guests stood in small groups, clutching glasses and cocktail napkins. An expensive-looking man excused himself from one of the groups, approached Neil Bush and introduced himself as Michael Wise, chairman of Silverado Banking.

The words spoke volumes. Yes, Neil knew of him, partly through the investors in his oil firm, Ken Good and Bill Walters, two of Denver's wealthiest and most extravagant real-estate developers. But he also knew of Silverado. It was the savings and loan that was beating Denver's economy--which was just beginning to slide--and making millions doing it.

Wise must have been impressed with the young man, because he phoned Neil a couple of weeks later to discuss a possible place for him on Silverado's board of directors. Wise observed that there were a lot of older people on the board, people who had been around for a while. He thought it was important for Silverado to acquire new blood. It wasn't a savings-and-loan expert they were looking for, he said. A bright young man who had an inside track on Denver's oil industry might do wonders for Silverado. Wise asked Neil to think it over and set a breakfast date with him to discuss it further.

True to his promise, Neil considered Wise's proposal. How could he go wrong? He was flattered by the offer. It fit perfectly in his career plan: He would make his fortune in oil, get rooted in the community, gain influence by being associated with the biggest and best businesses in town, then make a move on politics. The blueprint had been laid out neatly by his father, George Bush, and Neil followed it with slavish devotion. After a breakfast meeting with Wise at a neighborhood pancake house, Neil Bush shook Michael Wise's hand and sealed his fate as the poster boy of one of the worst financial crises in the nation's history.

•

When Neil and Sharon Bush arrived in Denver in 1980, the family name seemed to sit well with people, and soon they were invited to the right parties and asked to join the right organizations. Neil "didn't have a business reputation, he had a name," said Marvin Buckels, executive vice-president of Denver's Bank Western Federal Savings. "He and his wife both photographed well at cocktails."

Former Colorado Attorney General Duane Woodard tells a story about a ritzy black-tie affair he attended. Neil and Sharon and most of Denver's dignitaries and important business people were there. As the evening closed, Neil shook hands with the people around him, smiled and joked, obviously enjoying the status his name brought him. But as the guests filed out, he groped in his pockets and, chagrined, found nothing. "Hey, Duane," he said, "could I borrow a couple of bucks from you for parking? I don't seem to have any cash."

Soon Neil would begin uttering a variation of those words to start his oil business. Practically from the time he settled in Denver, the thought had been in the back of his mind. In 1980, Denver blazed with oil money. A lot of people were getting rich. Not Neil. He was making 30 grand working for Amoco Production as a lease negotiator.

Neil made his split with Amoco in late 1982. Soon he would form JNB Exploration with two of his co-workers--James Judd, a geologist with a Ph.D., and Evans Nash, Jr., a geophysicist. "Neil knew people because of his name," Nash said in 1990. "He's the one who made it happen for us."

Neil insisted it wasn't his name that opened people's wallets. Indeed, he claimed to take steps to avoid such things with what he called his "Smith Smell Test": Would a Neil Smith get the same treatment as Neil Bush? If, under the test, Neil Bush got a better deal, "I would automatically reject it," he declared. But his actions didn't seem to support his words. While out looking for JNB investors, he once left a message with a wealthy Denver oilman's secretary. "Tell him Neil Bush called," he reportedly said. "You know, the Vice-President's son."

Late in 1982, the Vice-President's son placed a call to Bill Walters Companies. Neil had met Walters at a business lunch some months before and knew that he wanted to invest in oil. When the multimillionaire real-estate developer got on the phone, Neil explained his plan. The company would need a $150,000 investment from Walters in exchange for a 6.25 percent share in the profits. Neil would put in $100 of his own money for a 33 percent share. He quickly explained that if their calculations were correct, the JNB plan virtually guaranteed that Walters would get a quick return on his money.

Neil finished his pitch. There was silence on the other end. He resisted the temptation to break it. "Make an appointment with my secretary," Walters finally said. "I'd like to hear what you have to say."

A week later, Neil and his two partners sat in the richly appointed reception area of Walters' office. Of Denver's real-estate lords, Walters was the king. Sporting a perpetual suntan and a $6500 Rolex watch, he was known as "the Donald Trump of Denver," which at the time was a compliment. Neil fidgeted in his chair. It had been 15 minutes since he and his partners had given Walters' secretary their names. Finally, the suntan strolled from his office, flashing straight, white teeth and extending a big, fleshy palm. The court advisors appeared and whisked the entourage into a conference room. For a half hour, Walters sat silently, leaning back in his chair, finger tips together, as Judd and Nash shuffled documents, proposals, maps and diagrams. The advisors scribbled notes.

Neil sat with his hands folded. His partners finished and Walters leaned forward. "With all this you've given me, I ought to go out and do it myself and not even fool with you guys." He flashed his teeth. An overly loud laugh burst from Neil. "Thanks for coming by." When they left, Walters nodded to one of his advisors. "Prepare the standard forms."

With a promise of $150,000 from Walters and another $150,000 from a Denver oil company, JNB officially opened for business on January 6, 1983. Neil set up his new office with a bust of his father on the credenza behind him and his grandfather's name plate on the desk in front of him. Now he was a Bush. Now he was like Dad. And, thanks to Walters, he was making $66,000 a year, a tidy little raise from his salary at Amoco.

Still, a $300,000 stake wasn't going to keep JNB alive for very long. So it was a bit of fortune for Neil when, in the summer of 1983, he received an elaborately engraved invitation to attend the opening of the Good estate at 16 Lynn Road. Built for $10,000,000, Ken Good's new house was the largest in Colorado. It had 15 bathrooms, six kitchens, a wine cellar, guest suites with private offices and exercise facilities that included a sensory-deprivation tank, a 150-gallon saline flotation tub and marble-walled locker rooms.

Good, like Walters, had built his empire on the other-people's-money method of real-estate development. In the tradition of big-time developers of the age, he designed elaborate deals that created wealth that hadn't been there before--with a little help from obliging savings and loans such as Silverado. For example, Good and several partners traded two parcels of vacant land three times in six months, with the value increasing each time, until they finally sold them to Silverado for a $3,200,000 profit.

Neil probably didn't know or care about the sources of Good's wealth when he and Sharon, tuxedoed and ball-gowned, politely elbowed their way among Denver's elite, who were clogging a cavernous white hallway in the developer's hilltop mansion. At the buffet table, adorned with swans carved in ice, Neil was standing in front of the poached salmon and the steamed lobster when Walters approached him and introduced Ken Good.

The man who stood grinning before Neil was bald on top with a wreath of black hair that descended along his cheeks into a massive coffee-colored beard. (Its length constantly changed, Good explaining that he trimmed his beard in accordance with his prosperity; when he felt rich, he let it grow, and when the cards didn't fall to his liking, he cut it close.)

Good must have been delighted to make Neil's acquaintance. He made it a point to foster relationships both within circles of power and on the periphery, and he had a long track record of exploiting those relationships. Good became a friend of Jack Kinstlinger, head of Colorado's Highway Department. Kinstlinger oversaw (with Federal approval) a highway-department purchase of Good's land for a reported $2,000,000 more than it was worth.

Whether or not Good was attempting to expand his political base with Neil Bush, he took the young man under his wing. The two talked during the night, and Neil told him of his plans to make it big. Good told Neil he wanted to expand his holdings into oil exploration, and it seemed as though they could help each other out. Weeks later, Good arranged to acquire 25 percent of JNB and put $10,000 into the partnership. "It was nothing more than a way to make a valid contract," said Neil's partner Nash. "It was just so he could get ownership in the company and start getting us the capital we needed." With his ownership interest in place, Good went to Cherry Creek National Bank, which Walters owned, and acquired two lines of credit eventually worth a total of $1,750,000 for JNB. It was the start of a beautiful relationship.

By 1984, JNB had struck oil three times, but after ecstatic celebrations, the wells proved too small to be profitable and were abandoned. Still, JNB provided a comfortable existence for Neil. Or, rather, Ken Good did. Good entreated Neil to make use of his magnificent estate. He wanted Neil and his partners to join him each morning in workouts. "He got us all involved," Nash said. "He liked to see us there working out, enjoying his place." Neil took to running laps around the grounds in good weather, breathing in the pine-scented air and listening to horses neigh in nearby pastures.

JNB meetings were also held at the Good estate. The partners gathered once every couple of weeks to go over the partnership's progress in a grand conference room that streamed with sunlight. Good usually arrived in workout clothes, sometimes carrying his tennis racket.

It was after one of those meetings, when the others had left, that Good asked Neil if he'd like to make a little (continued on page 156) Neil Bush (continued from page 100) money. Good explained that he knew of a commodities pool that was sure to rise in price over the coming weeks. A $100,000 investment could double or even triple. Neil protested. He didn't have that kind of money. Good told him he was missing the point. He would lend Neil the money. If they did well, Good would take back the $100,000 and give Neil the difference. If they lost, he wouldn't have to pay him back at all.

Neil accepted the offer. How could he lose? As he explained later, "It was an incredibly sweet deal."

Apparently, it had never dawned on Neil that the very sweetness of the deal might have been reason enough to turn it down. He later defended himself, saying, "It was the wild West in those days, and Ken Good was one of the high riders. He was worth tens of millions of dollars, and he enjoyed having people he worked with participate in ventures with him.... I know it sounds a little fishy, but I have heard this happened before."

Indeed, it had. Good made a point of it. "Frankly, this had been a modus operandi of mine for many years," he said. "[It] was a means of attracting and keeping loyal business associates." Good handed out similar loans--anywhere from $10,000 to $350,000--to employees and friends. He once gave a head bookkeeper a new Corvette as a reward for loyal service. "Believe me, I never had any trouble asking my secretary or my bookkeeper to work late when they could expect this kind of sharing in whatever success I might have."

A few days after making his offer, Good called Neil to report on their commodities deal. He had invested the $100,000 for Neil, plus a little of his own pocket change, just for fun. After an encouraging rise, however, the market went sour and the investment was wiped out. As agreed, Neil never repaid the loan. It wasn't until six years later, after the saga had been reported, that Neil decided to include the $100,000 on his 1990 tax return.

By 1985, it was clear that JNB wasn't going to make money. Oil prices had crashed, and many exploration firms had foundered. That didn't make things any easier for JNB, but the truth of the matter was that oil prices hardly entered the equation. They had marginal success with their first three drillings, but in five years of sinking 26 wells, JNB never found a drop of salable oil.

The partners' early effort in Wyoming's Powder River Basin, which became a veritable Shangri-la for other oil prospectors, had failed. So they hunted around other parts of the West. They sank holes in Colorado, Wyoming and South Dakota and found nothing. They considered looking in Honduras and China but finally pinned their hopes on Ohio. An official with the state's Oil and Gas Department wrote in a 1989 memo about JNB's efforts, "The head of the Ohio Oil and Gas Department says he doesn't know why anyone would want to dig in that region."

Nash was worried about the growing relationship between Good and Bush. "Neil wasn't the kind of guy to do something conniving. But somehow, I don't think he was so naïve that he would get into something without knowing its ramifications," he said. "I had some concerns that weren't major but were enough for me to want to get out. I felt that Neil was fairly young and that he had made some decisions he wouldn't have made if he had been a little more experienced." So, early in 1985, Nash sold his share of the company to Neil and departed.

•

Neil Bush joined Silverado at a watershed in the thrift's operation. Until 1985, it had done just what the Reagan Administration wanted thrifts to do: grow and diversify Granted, Silverado had done it faster and more recklessly than most other institutions, but it wasn't entirely out of sync with the spirit of deregulation.

Michael Wise sent loan officers into the field to lend money wherever possible. They regularly called on other financial institutions, mortgage companies and mortgage brokers to ask that they send borrowers to Silverado. "We sent our paperwork to anyone who would take it," a former lending officer said. "If somebody got turned down at Brand X, we'd give him our forms." The loan portfolio grew exponentially, rocketing from $216,000,000 in 1982 to 1.8 billion dollars in 1986. Silverado reported enormous profits, because new accounting rules--designed to make savings and loans look more profitable--allowed it to book loan fees all at once. (Before deregulation, thrifts were required to spread the fees, and profits, over the life of the loan.) The change essentially wiped out incentives to make good loans. All that mattered was to make loans, period--good or bad. Silverado focused on the latter, and in breath-taking volume.

Inevitably, problem loans began to mount. That didn't present a great deal of trouble to Silverado before 1985. The local economy was booming, and management could afford to chuck bad loans into a closet, like old newspapers. For every loan that went bad, it simply made ten new ones, using the fees to make up for losses.

But in 1985, the world changed. Oil prices bombed and real-estate values fell through the floor. New loans didn't come in fast enough to make up for the rapidly expanding quantity of bad ones. By the end of the year, foreclosures had increased tenfold from 1984 and loans that were about to go bad had quadrupled. And yet Silverado management proudly presented a $12,000,000 profit to its accounting firm, Ernst & Whinney, for verification. When the auditors began rummaging through the financial statements, they discovered Silverado's closetful of worthless paper. They demanded that Silverado recognize $40,000,000 in loan losses and insisted it report a $20,000,000 loss for the year. For Silverado's management, there was only one possible response: Hire a new accounting firm. The replacement was the Denver office of Coopers & Lybrand, which was feeling some intense competitive pressure of its own. They allowed Silverado to claim the $15,000,000 in profit. It was later asserted, at hearings before the House Banking committee, that the replacement firm "had little experience in auditing savings-and-loan institutions, a fact clearly demonstrated by their work."

The three years from 1985 until Silverado failed in December 1988 were to be the thrift's most shameful ones. At almost any time, the managers or the board of directors probably could have saved the thrift by owning up to their mistakes and returning to safer investments. Instead, management devised shell games to hide Silverado's pitifully poor capital level and sank money into ever riskier investment deals, many involving Bill Walters and Ken Good.

This process had already begun when, in August 1985, Neil Bush met with Michael Wise and his vice-chairmen, Richard Vandapool and Robert Lewis, in Silverado's board room. Neil (continued on page 165) Neil Bush (continued from page 156) officially joined the board with the caveat that he wouldn't vote on any of Silverado's dealings with Good or Walters. Neil claims he never made the agreement, but in a letter to preferred shareholders dated July 15, 1985, Wise wrote, "In reviewing Neil's business relationships, we have learned his business interests include associations with Bill L. Walters and Kenneth M. Good. For his part, Neil has agreed to abstain from any board considerations regarding Silverado's relations with Mr. Walters or Mr. Good, and Neil has further agreed he will not participate in any board actions relating to preferred stock or preferred stockholders."

If there was an agreement, Neil didn't stick to it for very long. At his first board meeting, he voted to approve stock dividends to preferred stockholders who included Good and Walters.

In any case, Neil was overwhelmed with the "privilege and honor" of his appointment. When he arrived for board meetings, he sometimes ambled among the desks in Silverado's nerve center, the 14th floor, working the room like a politician. In the board room, on the hushed 15th floor, he earnestly plied himself to his job. He made it a point to raise questions at the meetings despite the fact that--as he later admitted--he would "never claim to have fully understood everything that took place" at Silverado.

The entire board seemed ready to acknowledge that its collective wisdom was inferior to that of Silverado's management. "I don't think anybody on that board of directors had a sophisticated knowledge of those transactions," former outside director Florian Barth said in a 1989 interview. "The real-estate transactions looked pretty good when you wrote them up. They certainly could have been unorthodox, but unorthodoxy doesn't mean it's wrong."

Of course, supervision of oddball deals isn't all there is to being a director of a big financial institution. The job comes with certain perks, and Neil was quick to take advantage of them. In August 1986, for instance, he replaced his $289,875 mortgage from World Savings and Loan with a $300,000 loan from Silverado, which gave him a two-percent-age-point break on the interest rate.

Perhaps more important, Silverado threw great parties. Soon after Neil joined the board, the thrift paid $30,000 for a massive charity gala to benefit a child-abuse concern called Hope for the Children. "This thing was really something," recalled a guest who sat at Neil's table. "All the celebrities were there. It was like Hollywood had come to Denver. I wondered whether Neil knew he was being used as window dressing at Silverado. People talked about it behind his back. But he seemed to enjoy himself, so I didn't worry about it."

In 1985, Silverado became desperately short of capital, so Bob Lewis, the bank's financial genius, found a way to replenish the coffers without actually adding any money. Accounting changes in the Eighties allowed thrifts to include in their capital reserves certain investments, including stock. Lewis' first brain child was to issue Silverado stock and, instead of trying to entice buyers, simply lend money to people who would turn around and buy stock with some of the loan. In reality, Silverado wouldn't have any more capital than when it initiated the deal, but it would look as though it did on the books.

Lewis' second plan worked in much the same way. Silverado had to get rid of a lot of bad loans, which were piling up at an astonishing rate. So he hit on the idea of dumping all the loans into one billion-dollar pile, cutting it up into pieces and selling bundles of bad paper like shares in a company. Who would buy such an investment? Bill Walters, for one. He needed someone to lend him money and to take bad property off his hands. Silverado was happy to do both. Shortly after Neil joined the board, Walters became what the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation called a "favored borrower." The thrift handed him huge sums of money not available to other borrowers, and in most cases, it shouldered the risk. When a deal went bad (which all Walters' schemes eventually did), Silverado lost money, not Walters.

By the end of 1985, Neil owed $1,975,000 to Walters' Cherry Creek National Bank for JNB expenses, plus another $20,000 line of personal credit. That didn't prevent him from voting to give Walters a total of $35,000,000 if he would use $7,000,000 of the proceeds to buy Silverado stock. About $4,000,000 of the stock sales went directly to Wise and Silverado's majority shareholder, W. James Metz, as loans to pay off personal debts. Silverado also took a piece of literally hot property--it was contaminated by a nearby toxic dump--off Walters' hands. For his role in the deal, Lewis got a $117,000 bonus.

In all, there were a dozen Walters transactions. During Neil's tenure, Silverado lent Walters $106,000,000; he defaulted on every loan. He bought so much Silverado stock in the deals that at one point, he technically controlled the institution. (Walters later said it was a mistake.) He also unloaded $95,000,000 of his real estate on the thrift.

All of the loans violated pages of banking laws, regulators later said. They exceeded Federal lending limits, unjustly enriched Silverado officers and broke a half dozen of Silverado's internal lending policies. Neil had voted to approve several of them.

In June 1986, Ken Good tested Neil's judgment. He told him he wanted to buy 80 percent of JNB and fold the company into his new, Florida-based Gulfstream Land & Development Corp. Under the new arrangement, Good planned to pump $5,000,000 into JNB on top of the $1,750,000 he'd already invested. He would invest $500,000 at once, and enough later to pay off loans JNB owed to Walters' Cherry Creek National Bank. Already, Neil relied on Good's contributions to "maintain our overhead and maintain operation and activities," he said in 1990. In other words, without Good, he would have been out of a job. Neil agreed to sell JNB to his keeper.

At Silverado's June board meeting, the directors were handed a form: Acknowledgment--Conflicts of Interest and Code of Conduct. It asked directors to write down any relationship that might "create or appear to create" a conflict with their activities as directors. Walters and Good were two of Silverado's biggest borrowers. Neil owed Cherry Creek National Bank for JNB expenses. He owed virtual fealty to Good for keeping the lights on at JNB. And yet, when confronted with the form asking him to list any possible conflicts of interest, Neil put his pen to paper and wrote a single word: "None."

In November 1986, Neil sent a letter to Michael Wise, asking Silverado to extend a $900,000 line of credit to Good International, Inc. The credit line was meant to help Good show the government of Argentina that the developer had enough financial wherewithal to do business in its country, Neil said in the letter. He never mentioned--to Wise, to executives who assembled the deal or to the board--that the company was formed expressly to fund the plan to take JNB's exploration efforts into Argentina. Silverado's board approved the line of credit, despite the fact that Good couldn't put up any collateral. "If I would have had that information ... I might not have even prepared the memo," said the Silverado executive who recommended that the credit line be extended.

At a board meeting later that month, Wise informed the directors that Good was threatening to default on a $31,000,000 loan, taken out to buy a chunk of prairie south of Denver. Good didn't want Silverado to foreclose, so he was ready to deal. He agreed to pay $3,000,000 up front if Silverado would release him from $15,000,000 in collateral and personal guarantees. Neil said nothing about Good's plan to ship money into JNB, money that might have gone toward the loan. When the matter was decided in December, Neil sat silently as his fellow directors approved the deal. Good's collateral was released, and he defaulted.

Perhaps as a gesture of appreciation, Good awarded Neil a $45,000 pay raise and a $22,000 bonus, bringing his total 1987 income from JNB to $142,000.

Neil never fathomed that his dealings even remotely resembled conflicts of interest and that he was placing his own gain before the safety of the institution he had sworn to protect. When he went before Federal investigators in September 1990, Neil perched defiantly on the witness stand in a Federal courtroom in Denver, where he slammed his fist and stomped his feet in indignation over what he called "unfair" and "outrageous" questioning from Government attorneys trying to prove conflicts of interest at Silverado. He fumed at the suggestion that he competed with Silverado for Good's money. "That's a stretch," he said. "I mean, that's a real--I see where you're going, but the answer to--I can only very vaguely come to the same conclusion that you have."

It had taken four hours of tedious questioning to extract from Neil what everyone else in the courtroom perceived as simple logic: that he stood to gain from Good's line of credit; that Walters held him by the ears with $2,000,000 in debt; that he might be out of a job--and a six-figure salary--if Good couldn't wriggle out of his financial obligations to Silverado.

Late in the hearing, a Government attorney asked, "Did you ever consider whether or not you were competing [with Silverado] for funds that Mr. Good controlled or had access to?"

Neil held up his head and set his jaw. "Absolutely not."

When regulators finally unearthed Silverado's labyrinthine self-funding devices, they discovered it had been near insolvency since the end of 1986. At the time, however, it appeared to be a gleaming tower of prosperity, buoyed by its deals with Walters and others. The $15,000,000 profit Silverado's managers had invented for the year (which regulators later determined should have been a $15,000,000 loss) was so bounteous that they decided to take huge bonuses. Wise, Lewis and Vandapool split $2,700,000 for the year. Wise's salary alone was higher that year than those of the 16 highest-paid executives at Denver's two largest bank holding companies. As a director and a member of Silverado's compensation committee, Neil had approved the bonuses.

Silverado finally collapsed on December 9, 1988. Regulators massed outside like combat troops before storming the building. Michael Wise was nowhere to be found. His desk and some file drawers had been cleared out.

Neil had been the first rat off the ship, resigning in August, glibly saying that he didn't want to add even a hint of conflict of interest--those words again--to his father's Presidential campaign.

•

When news reports began to unravel Neil Bush's role in the scandal, he virtually became the savings-and-loan crisis, its living flesh. His name and face were splashed across the front pages of every newspaper in the land. Outraged depositors picketed his house, screaming, "Give it back, Neil!"

It was baffling, in a way. His transgressions certainly were no more heinous than those of other shady thrift operators. Yet there was something about him that reached into the guts of the nation and squeezed. The reason became evident one sweltering July day in Denver when Neil stepped up to the podium at one of his many press conferences and renounced the "self-serving" Government regulators who he claimed were out to smear his name. A half dozen TV cameras and 50 or so members of the pencil press jammed the lobby of the downtown building where he kept his office.

Young Bush adjusted his tie, swept his suit jacket back as he put his hands in his pockets and struck a rakish pose before the microphones. He was angry, and he wanted the world to know it. He denounced the media, denounced the regulators, denounced everything but his own actions. A reporter asked him to concede that there was at least the appearance of a conflict. "I'll say it again," Neil snapped back, halting on each word for emphasis. His reproving glare swept the room. "There. Was. No. Conflict. Of. Interest." As though that explained it all.

In a way, of course, it did. There, standing before the nation, shaking his finger in indignation, was the very ethos of the savings-and-loan crisis. He cut through all the daisy chains and the deregulation and the accounting rules to the quick of it. The infuriating thing wasn't that he had committed the acts. It was that he believed he was right. Even in the face of irrefutable evidence that everyone but he seemed to understand, he seemed to believe it was his birthright to profit at the nation's expense.

•

After Neil resigned from Silverado, he filmed the last of a series of TV commentaries he'd been doing on the local CBS affiliate. Solemnly, he bid his viewers goodbye, saying he was leaving TV to concentrate on his family and his oil business, which was, at that time, dormant. Ever hopeful, he was preparing to begin another oil venture, Apex Energy. He would get $125,000 in funding from a wealthy man in his new neighborhood, near the Glenmoor Country Club. A spokesman for the neighbor, a cable-TV executive, said Neil got the loan because the two "are good friends, obviously."

On television, Neil spoke earnestly into the camera, thanking his father and his nation for giving him the opportunity to make something of himself. "America is a great country," he said. "Saying farewell, this is Neil Bush."

"For every loan that went bad, Silverado made ten new ones, using the fees to make up for losses."

"'I wondered if Neil knew he was being used as window dressing. People talked about it behind his back.'"