Target Manhattan

Valkenburg (Cont’d)

Did the Federal Reserve Bank respond with alacrity to your approach?

I don’t know if you could say that.

What could you say?

They got stricken with a damn near terminal case of bureaucracy over there. They always do if there’s anything that smells like a crisis.

And?

I got put on hold.

And then?

In the first place they couldn’t seem to find anybody that was willing to admit he was authorized to talk to anyone about anything. It was about ten after twelve when I made the call, and they’re all civil servants down there. Ergo they were all out to lunch.

And in the second place?

Well, look, in a nutshell what it came down to was this: The federal government gives money away all the time, but they do it after there’s been a Congressional appropriation and a policy authorization from some Cabinet agency, right? Now here we’re talking about five million dollars in cash, and the Fed is the only place in town that happens to stock that particular model, and what it boiled down to was that they didn’t have signatures in quintuplicate authorizing the release of said item.

What did you do about it?

Me? I’m a vice-president of a private bank. I don’t swing much weight at the Fed. I knew one guy down there, I play handball with him, he’s a deputy administrator in the disposal office. But he was out to lunch. The rest of them heard my story, suddenly they no spick English. At first they wouldn’t even tell me where my friend was having lunch. Finally I got the name of the restaurant and put through a call. He came on the line and listened to my yarn and then he just breathed hard for a few minutes. I didn’t want to interrupt that. Then he said he’d run straight back to his office and call me back from there.

What time was it then?

It must have been after twelve thirty by the time I got him at the restaurant, and it was maybe ten minutes to one when he called me back from the Fed.

But there was no progress?

Not right away, no. It was still the bugaboo of authorization. Everybody was out to lunch and everybody at the head office in Washington was out to lunch too.

You must have been a little angry by then.

I didn’t have any doubt at all that this guy was perfectly willing to spray bombs all over the city if we didn’t come up with the money.

Why were you convinced of that?

Because I figured if I were crazy enough to pull a stunt like that, I sure as hell wouldn’t be bluffing.

You mentioned that your friend at the Federal Reserve Bank was a deputy administrator in the disposal office. Can you tell me what that means?

It’s where they destroy old money.

You mean worn-out dollar bills, that sort of thing?

Yes. You’ve probably seen bank tellers separating out the badly worn bills and putting them in separate bundles in their cash drawers. At the end of the day those bills are gathered up by each bank and set aside for collection by the Federal Reserve. The Fed takes the responsibility of disposing of them. They collect the used bills from the banks, and they either issue credits for them or they exchange them for brand-new bills, depending on the individual bank’s cashflow situation at the moment. There’s a lot of red tape, of course. It wouldn’t be a federal office without that. They have to make a record of the serial number of every bill before they destroy it. Then they have all sorts of checks and balances-people watching people watching people-to make sure nobody rips off a wad of old twenties on the way to the incinerator. It’s a complicated operation. But it does mean there’s a lot of money in the vaults at the disposal office-that’s the incinerator office. The new bills, ready for dispersal to the banks, are kept in vaults adjacent to the disposal vaults. So between the two sets of vaults you have the heaviest concentration of small-denomination banknotes in the city.

Don’t some of the big banks have large supplies of cash? Your bank, for example, the Merchants Trust, doesn’t it have dozens of branches around the city? Wouldn’t there be a large aggregate of cash among them?

Sure. But it’s scattered all over. We’ve got forty-six branch offices in the five boroughs of New York. Every branch office has a vault and x number of tellers’ cages. Do you have any idea how long it would take to round up all that money and get it delivered to one central point? Christ, the guy had given us a deadline-we had less than three hours to come up with the money. More like two hours at that point. We were sitting on a goddamn time bomb-literally.