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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
"What we do has been well honed over the years. People can get incendiary and you try to keep a lid on that. You do it in the first ten minutes you walk in the door. Take my lead. If there are decisions to be made, I'll make them. When the door opens, the cop will say, 'This is Mr. Harley Lewin, he's here to serve some papers.' I will explain, in the tone of voice that you're listening to right now, that this is very serious, that they can make it hard or they can make it easy, and the easy way is to show us where we need to go. We'll look anyway, but that gives them some sense of control. You're rummaging through their home, and people in their own homes get very protective, very emotional.
"When you do the search, everything is left as you find it. Nothing is disturbed, nothing is dumped. I have a camera with me, and before anybody moves we take a picture of the place, and we take a picture of the place when we leave. We request, firmly, that they don't make phone calls unless they're calling an attorney. We don't raise our voices. Everybody's addressed 'Mr.' and 'sir' and 'Thank you.' Asians respect authority and get real quiet on you, so you can feel full of power if you're not careful. The room will become crowded with bodies and that usually suffices to keep the peace. There are occasions when people will start to freak out. In that case, you call me and I'll take them aside and calm them down. If we play good guy, bad guy you'll see me get a little nutty. If there's any joking to be done, it will be done for a purpose. The last thing is: Do not let the cop go. There have been times in the past where everybody waits till the cop leaves and then the thing goes bang. Right, Ter?"
"Yes, sir," Terry said.
"Things have a way of deteriorating. Somebody might come home and change the emotional balance. Know who's there. Know everybody in the place and always know where they are. If there are kids, where are the kids? Because parents beget trouble. They want to protect the house and the kitchen's full of weapons. Every now and then, Caspar Milquetoast will turn into Superman. It's a bad thing when it happens. I've had a guy pull the master switch in a warehouse in New Jersey and kill everything, pitch black. One of the uniforms finds the switch, turns it back on, and there's a guy with a hammer in one hand and a wrench in the other. Turns out he'd done some hard time. So those are the rules of the game."
Harley Lewin had flown into Atlanta at dawn. It was a hot, hot morning. He wore cotton and clogs. The name of the game that day was Hermes handbags. He had reason to believe that the man whose house he was going to raid imported counterfeit bags from China and sold them on the Internet; he had been hired by Hermes to stop him. Harley is a lawyer who protects trademarks. He works for Greenberg Traurig. When a company has a counterfeiting problem, he tracks down the bad guys and sues them.
Harley was going to raid the house with two of his private investigators, Terry and Matt, and two lawyers, Gail and Jim. They would rendezvous with the cop on the way. Harley had had the raidee's bank accounts frozen so that he wouldn't be able to hide his money when he realized what was going on. Jim and Harley drove to meet the cop.
"We did a gig here in Atlanta once, in the stadium," Harley said, reminiscing. Harley started out as a lawyer for an agency that booked rock bands. "I was working the box office. Now it's all charge cards, but back then it was five-dollar bills, ten-dollar bills. We're staying at a cheap motel nearby and I have a hundred grand in cash I'm gonna bring back to New York. All I wanna do is get the hell out of town. I don't like leaving that kind of money in a safe so I sleep on it. I get to New York, I count the money, I'm ten grand light. Now, twenty-five years ago? Ten grand's a lot of money. I call the motel and I say, 'I gotta trust you, I need you to go check under my mattress and see if there's ten thousand dollars wrapped in rubber bands.' And he gets back on the phone and says, 'Mr. Lewin, you're lucky I'm an honest man.' "
Harley looked out the window.
"We used to do terrible things when I was in the rock-and-roll business," he said. "I helped Rod Stewart take an entire Holiday Inn room out of the hotel in the middle of the night and move it to the pool. We made the bed and put the TV there--the whole room. I got real friendly with ZZ Top. I did their tours with them for years and years. I wonder what happened to all those guys."
"They got older," Jim said.
The cop was waiting in the parking lot of a Citgo station near the raid site. He was brawny, bald, and tanned and had a thick blond mustache. He stood with his hands on his hips. He stared at Harley. Harley looked up at his sunglasses. Getting the cop on board was part of the process. Every raid, same thing: the cop was always suspicious of a situation where he was supposed to follow the lead of a civilian, and he never understood what he was supposed to be doing--there was a crime involved, but he wasn't there to arrest the criminal, and somehow a lawyer had obtained a warrant to break into somebody's house and take his stuff. (That cops were confused wasn't surprising. When Harley was starting out, it was difficult even to persuade a judge that filing for a search-and-seizure order ex parte--without giving the bad guys any notice--was justified in a civil case, as it was in a criminal case, but then the 1984 Trademark Counterfeiting Law was passed, codifying it. The idea was that without the element of surprise a counterfeiter would be likely to destroy evidence and hide funds that might be drawn upon for damages.) The fact was, Harley would love his bad guys to get arrested, but usually, when he explained the situation, the cop figured it wasn't worth his while, because the case would go nowhere. No matter how dastardly a ring of...
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