In The Matter Of The Loan Agreement 3rd Party And Power Of Attorney 3rd Party: Fill & Download for Free

What are the key takeaways from the SEC ICO guidance issued on April 3rd 2019?On the surface the SEC’s response to Turnkey Jet’s letter to the SEC of April 2nd 2019, drafted by J.P. Curry Esq. is highly problematic for it implies that a consent decree type agreement is necessary for the issuance of a token initial offering.This is phrased in terms of “the SEC will not recommend enforcement action…” which de-facto grants the SEC powers it does not have under current legislation. This grants the SEC implicit power to approve or better “recommend non enforcement” of undisclosed or non-existent legislative initiatives.This is very similar to the Open Internet Order protocols of 2010, that were initiated by the Federal Communications Commission without legislative authority, and eventually taken down in court subsequent to a multiyear legal challenge. That also means that unless you got Verizon grade legal funds, you have no business innovating in the token space or with blockchain.Explicitly it means nothing.The SEC’s April 3rd letter, in response to Turnkey Jet’s consent letter, as drafted by J.A. Ingram says nothing about its legal authority to intervene in the issuance of its “non enforcement” letter.It is purposefully unforceful since the authority is absent.It’s more of a “consent agree” extorted against the threat of administrative harassment. A serious enough threat, but they are not packing any ammo in the stated opinion.No Action, Interpretive and/or Exemptive Letter of April 3, 2019The SEC April 3rd 2019 “Public Statement”, “Statement on “Framework for ‘Investment Contract’ Analysis of Digital Assets” drafted by B. Hinman Director of Division of Corporate Finance, and by V. Szczepanik, Seniour Advisor for Digital Assets and Innovation, is on the other hand a little clearer as to their authority.Statement on “Framework for ‘Investment Contract’ Analysis of Digital Assets”Clearly stated: “…it may fall within the definition of a security under the US federal securities laws…” Which laws they do not say, for clearly the Securities Law of 1933 did not contemplate the notion of digital goods.Whatever “framework” they offer, would come under the guise of a white paper: Framework for “Investment Contract” Analysis of Digital AssetsThis is based entirely on the Supreme’s Courts Howey Definition from 1946.Regardless of precedent claimed, they are at least being honest about the precedent set:“This framework represents Staff views and is not a rule, regulation, or statement of the Commission. The Commission has neither approved nor disapproved its content. This framework, like other Staff guidance, is not binding on the Divisions or the Commission. It does not constitute legal advice, for which you should consult with your own attorney. It does not modify or replace any existing applicable laws, regulations, or rules. Market participants are encouraged to review all the materials published on FinHub.”End of statement.Explicitly it means nothing but implicitly it gives them power to curtail innovation.Sczczepanik goes further than this. Her statement at SXSW 2019 was that “We would much rather have people come in and ask us before they do something, than do it and ask for forgiveness later…”Forgiveness for what? Either the law specifically bans an activity, or its permissible a priori. If it’s not banned, or legislatively regulated, one is not required to ask permission to conduct business of any conceivable kind. This is an administrative state regulatory capture of the first order, absent any legislative authority.What is critical here is the pseudo consent decree they agreed to as negotiated by Curry Esq. Here is the link for the offending piece: https://www.sec.gov/divisions/corpfin/cf-noaction/2019/turnkey-jet-040219-2a1-incoming.pdfThis agreement is offensive on many levels. First and foremost on the simple basis that for two and a half millennia of roman jurisprudence, and seven hundred years of English common law thereupon based, the operating principle has been that “everything is permitted unless specifically banned or regulated.”Napoleon’s Code Civil des Francais of 1803, and Bismarck’s Prussian Code of 1873 states that “Everything is forbidden unless specifically allowed by law, regulated by the competent ministry, and permits granted and paid for”.The US would have to ditch the Constitution and the Bill of Rights for such a legal monstrosity to prevail. I think I would know if that had occurred.The short of it is that a digital coin offering is a figment of my imagination, and absent legislation, I am free to do with it as I please. That also extends to the sale, purchase or trade of imaginary pet rocks. I could also theoretically make a market for pet rocks, if it also pleased me.But lets look at the specifics of the Curry “negotiated pseudo consent agreement” that prompted the “no action” letter on the part of the SEC.Token is restricted to (p1): “Token sales cannot be used for platform development”. That means that they cannot be financed via coin issuance, ie a bet on the future value of the coin offering. That restricts financing, specifically to private funds only and bank loans, not VC backed public market accessed risk capital financing. It states “funds will be secured privately”. That means funds invested in technology development and deployment are not subject to leverage or the distribution of risk among different investments.Tokens must be “immediately useful” which means that that all tokens must be in use, or withdrawn. That’s a pseudo escrow account, not a token.Tokens might have a restriction on use limited to “charter flights”. They cannot be used for commercial air travel. That is a severe and restrictive definition of market that does not exist in law. The market is defined geographically for any given service or product (regionally, nationally or globally), for the purposes of anti trust. As written, it's a restraint of trade in the market for business travel, movements of goods, and air travel generally. The SEC has no authority to determine market. Only the Justice Department subject to the Sherman Act specifically and the Anti-Trust generally can make such a determination, if they can prove it in a Court of Law. It’s an administrative grab of somebody else’s turf, that bypasses judicial review.“Repurchases can only be made at a discount”. This is highly problematic because it does not allow the purchaser to get out of the purchase of a service he no longer finds useful. It also perverts the settlement process since the vendor has to negotiate his compensation, after he got nominally paid for services rendered at a given price.This also irrationally prices token supply negatively. The very definition of a property right presupposes the ability to resell the good. If that is gone, its no longer a property right. If its no longer property, then what exactly is it? A travel license subject to SEC review?If it's a pseudo coin (though not legal tender), the money supply is not within the purview of the SEC. The monopoly on the money supply was granted to the Federal Reserve Banking Corporation in 1913. It's a private corporation. If somebody is walking on their legislatively chartered monopoly, its their business, not the SEC’s. A cease and desist letter approved by a Judge is the only requirement if its a coin alternative.If it is not a storage of value, then one should be able to control the “not a coin” token supply, i.e. the volume of tokens in circulation. Absent that, there are either too many coins or too few to transact business.Since tokens must be purchased in advance, and held in escrow 1:1 against future use, there must be a guarantee that use can be made at market rates. If you restrict the ability to buy and sell them, you are at the mercy of the restricted pool of suppliers. Suppliers leaving because they are not happy with their inability to make a market for the token, or who are unhappy with the discount to redeem cash for services rendered, further curtail one’s ability to negotiate a market rate for the services.The inability to use the tokens for anything else other than “charter flights” means the tokens are perfectly illiquid. An illiquid coin with a market purposefully and legislatively restricted to a narrow sub market of the vertical, is sub optimal to the point of no longer being a transactional tool or pseudo coin. Its a captive prepayment mechanism that precludes a services discount against volume or future schedule capture.More critically, the tokens cannot be used as forward financial instruments, because they are not financial instruments. If they are not, it bewilders the mind as to why the SEC is involved in private contractual negotiations.They can only be used “for the immediate purchase of a charter flight”. That means it's a purchase against today’s availability, not tomorrow availability. If they cannot be used to hedge the future price of fuel, availability of equipment, landing rights, or parking slots, gates or personnel, they are not financial instruments. In which case, what has the SEC got to do with my ability to reserve a charter jet for next year’s Davos trip…? (Hehehehehe…).All business is based on one’s ability to efficiently price tomorrow’s needs, both goods and services. This is a pure restraint of trade on the part of a Securities Regulator. The SEC has no business deciding the future allocation of scarce resources by whatever means they are transacted.The non transferability of tokens across other digital domains, results is a mis allocation of technology invested funds. It precludes technology re-use.Domain restrictions are of course possible under Anti Trust, but that is not the legislative authority of the SEC. Regardless, you cannot restrict the applicability of a new technology. Even patent is very clear about this. It's a process, and a process necessarily is restricted to a specific industry. Using the same concept or idea as part of another industry’s process is perfectly permissible under patent law. Overly broad patents are rejected on this very basis. It is the purpose of patent law to restrict it to market process so that it can be re-used in other markets.While the patent is purposefully kept narrow, there is nothing that says that you cannot acquire the knowhow to apply it in another domain. There are no restrictions in law that disallow further investigation and application to other industries. A process patent for a separate domain is what is required, subject of course to a new filing with the PTO.It would seem that this agreement also trumps the PTO’s exclusive on the issuance of patents, and determining their reach.The pseudo consent decree also states unequivocally that the purpose is to reduce transactional fees like wire transfers, and other banking fees. If that were true, why would the agreement require 1:1 dollar deposit into a federally insured bank? Funds are released against escrow. Are escrow services cheaper than a check or a TT Wire transfer?If the tokens can only be exchanged for escrow amounts at a discount to face value, is that not more expensive than a normal banking transaction? If funds must be withdrawn from TokenJet’s bank escrow account, does it not follow that the funds must be wired out within business hours?That makes a mockery of the transactional efficiency and cost arguments being made by TokenJet. Its pure nonsense.P.2 goes further in defining who the customer is by using a novel conception of supplier and customer, that has nothing to do with goods, services or digital transactions: “Brokers and carriers are business entities and cannot be customers…” That of course precludes my ability to buy services from five vendors, assemble my own bill of materials, and sell it on. That is what a brokerage function is. I buy the plane’s time slot, the fuel, the pilot’s time, the cabin crew, the takeoff and landing slots, the ability to file the flight plan and leverage that against my ability to find a customer for that virtual product at any present or future time. A broker in the aviation industry is in fact purchasing goods from multiple other suppliers and brokers and provided he or she has a valid State issued Reseller’s License, he can buy, trade or barter for those goods without having to pay a sales tax on it either.It seems the concept of resell is alien to the folks at the SEC.If a token cannot facilitate the assembly of services rendered, its neither a coin or a service. What remains is the pseudo consent agreement which is nothing more than a restraint of trade. If the flight is not across State lines, it's a restraint of State Rights. If it’s between States, it's a restraint of interstate commerce. The SEC has no business and no authority regulating this.Further, “When a token enters circulation TKJ may freely trade or exchange tokens between wallets”. This is not an accounting function, and there is scant little to audit, especially where triangulation is not permitted by the tax authorities, or a value added tax against services rendered is required. There is no method by which a tax authority can collect what its due if the transaction is settled in one jurisdiction for services rendered in another jurisdiction. The agreement precludes venue for revenue purposes.That of course means that bank escrow capital is not subject to taxation. Yet, its pretty obvious that the decision here is to be made by the Department of Revenue not the SEC.“Platform will eliminate chargebacks” which is fine except that consumer law allows the chargeback in the event that goods or services provided do not meet the contractual stipulation. It is not the SEC’s job to re-write consumer protection rights.“TKJet will be responsible for verifying the validity of the ledger”. Except its not an accounting ledger, so no Generally Accepted Accounting Standards exist. Is the SEC now in the business of setting digital accounting standards also? Regardless the whole point of a block-chain, private or not, is to allow the parties to the transactions to verify transparently all entries in the ledger, and by virtue of distributed verification protocols, guarantee its veracity. In a two participant blockchain, either party can verify that present transactions cannot overwrite previous transactions. If you are required to verify the validity of the ledger, does that give you the right to reverse entries or make journal entries ex post facto? It's a contradiction in terms.On page 3 of the pseudo consent agreement they take this further:”The respective token balances and related activities of each member will not be public…” Then its not a block-chain, distributed or not.Worse yet there is nothing in the block-chain that would allow users to discover the appropriate price points in the market. It does not afford pricing discovery. As such its not a public market for services or products, but a private contractual domain where the information asymmetry is owned and leveraged by the stock holders only. If its not a public market where pricing discovery and trade is allowed, its not a public market, and as such its not subject to SEC review in any form. This agreement is an SEC attempt to regulate private contracts between willing participants. The State has no authority to regulate perfectly legal contracts between business and individuals, never mind the SEC.“TKJ will allow any and all brokers to be members because of anti trust legal concerns…” A monopoly position or absence thereof, is not for the “offender” to prove or disporove. It’s for the Justice Department to make a case, and for them to prosecute said claimed violations in Court subject to defendant’s legal recourse. Again, the SEC has no business regulating monopolies or even considering market impact of business trade agreements.P.4: “TKJ is obligated to release token escrow funds to broker or carrier…” In which case it's a pre-paid business service, subject to normal contractual practice. Absent is the ability to negotiate discount against volume purchase or pre-payment. It's a pure restraint of trade and a restraint of the ability to privately contract services in whatever manner one pleases.It also implies that contract structure, is subject to banking regulation generally, and by securities regulators specifically. That implies that the financial regulator is the only party that can arbitrate digital contract terms, and their disposition in the event of a contract dispute. It takes the Sovereign Court out of the contract enforcement business, and hands it over the SEC.This also introduces another problem. Failure to fully comply with the stated digital contract terms, does not entitle the defrauded party from not paying for partial services rendered, or returning goods not to contract terms. This agreement entitles the receiving party to claim that even a partial failure to meet agreed to terms, entitles them to withdraw total payment. Its either or, and the purchasing party has full power to decline payment on the simple basis that a comma is out of place. That is worse than a traditional letter of credit that requires thirty days to clear, where the slightest clerical error guarantees extensive delays and negotiations.We are back to a 1970’s financial instrument transmitted via Telex bank to bank.On page 4 it further insists the blockchain would be “…no different than currently employed business jet card programs”. But discounts are not permitted against settlement. Does that mean that only the SEC can regulate airline miles rebate programs? Or are those illegal now too? Is the SEC making the Justice Department’s case on their behalf, that airline miles and hotel rebates are a private bribe to the detriment of the corporation paying for said services? Legitimate case to be made, but its not the SEC’s case to make.On page 5, the logic further stretches incredulity. “Only consumers will be able to purchase tokens…” That of course means that a private contractor in the airline industry will not be able to settle all the transactions necessary to organize a flight, and sell their logistical skills to the highest bidder. Perhaps the SEC is unaware that all product is a BOM. And I am certain that they probably do not even know what that means, which is why they should not interfere with normal contractually agreed business transactions.In an industry where costs and revenue are calculated on the basis of time travelled, the agreement states “The tokens will not reprensent a TKJ obligation to supply a specified number of flight hours…” Airplanes like ships do not have mile odometers, they have time odometers, as in “how many hours are on that engine…?” Again, this is what happens when securities lawyers improvise themselves as business consultants with no vertical experience or training.“In compliance with banking Know Your Customer rules” … “any transfer of funds above US$10,000 must be reported” which I assume, means that the TKJ service provider is now a banking agent with legal reporting requirements. That implies that if my trip to Davos costs more than 10k, the SEC needs to know about it, or the travel agent, sorry the block-chain owner is subject to money laundering violations of law.The agreement specifies that only a customer can purchase the token. Then it goes to specify that the actual person flying is the customer. Does that not imply that a corporation cannot purchase said tokens with no idea who will eventually fly in the jet? The agreement strictly enforces the notion that the consumer is the flyer, not the corporation purchasing the service. This of course ignores that the beneficiaries are on the flight manifest, not on the contracted service. One answers to the contract the other to the TSA. And yet the consent decree enforces “all users must submit to CFR1540.107”And with that the SEC is doing Department of Homeland Security enforcement.Yes, the SEC consent agreement specifically states that “TKJ will follow the Patriot Act… and report any purchases above $10k”. Are there travel restrictions under law? Is freedom of movement no longer law? A flight plan and passenger manifest is mandatory. What does the SEC have to do with the purchase or brokerage of corporate jet travel restricted singularly to purchase by the actual flyer only…?!Page 8 further restricts the purchase, in so far as it “cannot be made in the expectation of profit”. Fine, but if I pre-book my trip to Davos a year in advance, will I not get a substantial price reduction versus buying it the day Davos Week opens? Does that mean that the expectation of future savings is a profit center and should be regulated like buying a pork future six months out on the Chicago Board of Trade?Buying when goods are not scarce, or reserving future production when its useful to you, is what profit is entirely predicated on. Will the individual flying have to prove to the SEC that he did not intend to profit from the early reservation of the jet when clearly buying passage same day would have been more expensive…?!The agreement is completely absurd. Future contracting for services, flight hours in the appropriately contracted private jet, has absolutely nothing to do with the Howey Test devised by the Supreme Court for an entirely different matter.A financial instrument is a property right. There are no property rights being transacted here. The property rights are transferred to TKJ subject to bank escrow and are not refundable. There are no financial instruments to track because the token gives you none.Under current law a reservation of passage on an aircraft is not a legal right, never mind a property right.When you purchase the token you simply surrender all your contractual rights to travel, to the SEC. The agreement presumes all services rendered are subject to banking and security controls. And since the profit motive is banned, it follows that the only beneficiary to the transaction is the capital holder as regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission.If I was a shareholder in the Federal Reserve Bank I would tell the SEC they need to take better aim when pissing in the night pot.And that’s my story and I am sticking to it.Thanks for the ask always a pleasure!

The simple reality is that access is the most abused commodity known to the process of commerce. When I was 21 I met a hairdresser that had recently lost the lease over his salon at an extremely coveted location at 57th Street & 7th Ave on the 2nd floor. he was about 32; and had been in the space for over 5 years. A roughly 41 y/o customer of his that was the former land acquisitions vice president for Arlen Realty Group, shared a ridiculously large office at 888 Seventh Ave & 58th Street (on the 43rd floor)—-with his dad; and a personal secretary (at the time).The father & son’s prior firm (Arlen) had built 888 7th Ave. So in the tradition of true moguls and captains of industry they treated themselves official opulent office space professional accommodations. A special bank of private elevators was required to get above the 40th Floor—-where Arlen bigshots were cloistered. Each floor of 888 7th is between 40,000 sf to 30,000 sf of usable space. Close to 95% of the 43rd floor’s surface was comprised of Venice style stone; accentuated by high ceilinged moonlit effect lighting for the 200 foot walk from the elevator to the receptionist station under a 30 ft by 15 ft fancy tapestry rug.Their setup was right out of a movie. They’d just “lost” $ 2B of public investors money as the nation’s largest real estate investment trust which specialized in property development. The hairdresser had got me the job interview with the son who, along with his serious industrial powerhouse dad were downsizing—-to more affordable office space. I estimated that their floor’s rent was worth around $ 1M a year, for the 3 of it’s occupants. Obviously the purpose for such an impressive office arrangement was to encourage larger transaction seekers & affluent clients to feel that they were among peers.They’d leased that floor & the one underneath it for around $ 2.50 per square foot for an aprox. 20 year term. The actual fair market value of the space was around $ 40 psf to $ 50 psf. So basically they’d buried several million dollars of hidden value in the cheap lease to themselves—-as the builders of the well located property. During that particular window of time their lease was worth as much as the equity in the whole building [due to the way that their then massive bankruptcy re-organization plan was structured].I was brought in as a fancy intern to work on their post $ 2B portfolio bankruptcy. I had no idea that I was so well prepared, or remotely capable to address such lofty financial matters—-given my own extravagant abuses of all the types of access that I’d been born into. I’d known hundreds of big executives across dozens of industrial segments and sectors. It most cases I had no clue that I was interacting with anyone of their commercial, or professional prowess.Often people change positions and enterprises change their roles in the industrial paradigm resulting in awkward scoring (or ranking of who’s where in the barometer of importance). Prior to the internet operation of fuck you walls required more tact. The head of Arlen for instance was managing partner of the 1.2M sf downtown office building complex that became my primary office (known world wide as 17 Battery Place). I worked on re-financing that property for $ 75M; and re-casting it’s debt a couple of times in an amazing short interval.It’s managing owner periodically visited our offices and made a point never to speak to me. We road the elevator together a few times and it was in my opinion protocol that he not acknowledge me. I didn’t feel that it was professionally convenient for me to be personable toward him—-under the circumstance (either). From my vantage point the guy’d just orchestrated the disappearance of $ 2B. He was in the process of being fined $ 105M for robbing a bank in Virginia that he’d gotten control over. Part of his eventual plea agreement was that he consented never to own, or manage bank assets again.I knew him to be an attorney that’d never practiced law—-partly because his father’d given him an apartment building upon his graduating from law school. My internship put me in direct routine communications with over 30 of the Forbes Fortune 400 annual wealthiest people in the U.S.. Arlen’s re-organization assignment gave me 4 offices throughout Manhattan’s commercial districts, while I was in college.So in my opinion big executives were generally far more approachable than your question hints at. I frequently had all kinds of trouble speaking to every level of professional, or personal contact(s) for that matter. Today an 80+ ex-business partner which I’ve enjoyed almost 40 years of unfrettered access to refuses to answer my phone calls. He’s been a mega shot throughout our window of acquaintanceship. But the guy’s gay; and I’m not. His idea of bridging the difference included unifying our families’ through me marrying one of his ugly daughters.As I look back on that premise at my present age of 60 and taking all of the financial & health considerations into account I’m very confident that it would’ve been in my best interest to marry all 3 of his ugly daughters. He gave each of his ugly daughters homes that today are worth about $ 1M. Quite a number of people that i have difficulty reaching call him on a scheduled basis. He and a prior business partner of his loaned that constituency over $ 12B in mostly 3rd mortgages (over an aprox. 13 year interval).A significant part of my routine work involves re-structuring debt portfolios of my ex-partner’s involvements. In terms of accessing senior executives it’s prudent to bare some startling practical factors in mind. Typically when an industry undergoes change the values of many associated components dramatically change. So the person, or cluster of individuals that you believe are adequately positioned to enact your agenda may in fact be shopping their own resumes around to get of a sinking ship that looks like its as strong as the rock of Gibraltar to the untrained eye.For clarity purposes a bigshot in my jargon has influence over a minimum of 12 to 100 other bigshots. A mega shot clearly exerts actual physical and financial control over 1,000+ prominent bigshots. I joked with my former business partner 15 years ago, when he gave his 3 daughters their homes the properties were worth $ 300K each.He mentioned that it was a good point for me consider marrying his eldest daughter—-if I wanted to make a sound investment (while we were sharing a lunch to save money). I commented that he was unquestionably correct; and in fact that it’d occured to me that a prudent means of acquiring the much coveted $ 1M of real estate with no down payment would entail my marrying all three of daughters. He laughed & offered that he was packaging a few extra incentives along with the eldest daughter—-to sweeten the deal. She died in prison, without his even mentioning it to me—-to give you a glimpse of the logistics at issue.He quasi-adopted a 43 y/o female politician to replace that eldest daughter. She was made one of the most powerful black women in the world—-as an aspect of his mega shot/kingmaker accelerated personal development program. She happened to be cute (and stacked); with some rather eloquent speaking skills. In fact she was realistically far easier to’ve gotten elected to the U.S. presidency than Obama. They parted ways in highly publicized fashion when she learned that he was actually gay; and not amenable to her concept of his serving as her financial backer. She thought they were somewhat romantically aligned; and with her being nearly half his age she assumed that there was always a sex card to play [to get over those rough patches when you’re moving up the political and corporate ladders].One of the means of access I used when I was on Wall Street in commercial real estate was saved envelopes from important senders. I re-sent my own communications in those high priority envelopes to people that i felt were intentionally snubbing my various efforts to move matters forward. I did that so often that really fancy consulting partnership invitation was offered to me by one of my college instructors. He said that he gave the recent former chief civil engineer of NJ my name—-to see if I was appropriate for the kind of consulting work that the 2 of them were envisioning getting into. My former instructor was a very accomplished zoning lawyer (and WW II bigtime hero—-a la saving of the free world and democracy, as we enjoy it).He told me that the civil engineer inquired amongst his NYC contacts about me and was told use of the recycled envelopes to get to a trustee for a major charitable portfolio. Ironically, that candidate transaction was for a terrible office space tenant aptly called Wildcat Services—-that wanted to consolidate the daily servicing of over 500 ex-convicts and former drug addicts, along with hard to employ women in 40,000 square feet of a really unique warehouse building on the west side of Manhattan. That transaction’s shopping was done under the aegis of Wildcat’s senior office manager. I spent 2 years looking for space to consolidate their 5 branch offices which focused on training of their clients for jobs in the construction trades.Technically no landlord was thrilled to have that type of tenancy in their portfolios. Yet they were already in the buildings of 5 different landlords—-some of whom have even donated the space (to get that program to the $ 5M a year in fiscal budget level). It had a rather impressive board of directors and a brilliant/eventually wealthy micro-biologist as it’s chairwoman. She married a poet that died and left her $ 14M—-which speaks back to my earlier point (lol).The trustee for the real estate portfolio was never willing to allow me to lease Wildcat the space in his building. But he gave me such an award winning professional reference that my former instructor & the civil engineer made me their senior partner in our consulting practice. I was 22. They were in their 60’s and had had particularly distinguished careers. Obama’s early activities as president co-hosted a ceremony organized by the people of France to give my professor and the few remaining surviving U.S. military that’d fought in WW II awards of valor.My professor got the highest of those commendations because he’d also written an extraordinarily compelling book on his experiences clandestinely entering Normandy a full year prior to D-Day (with 100,000 naval persons) to put all of the necessary logistics in place for the success of the 2M person subsequent mass assault. Had I known what a bigshot and highly official world hero he was I would’ve been far more practical with the many types of access that he provided me.The president of the American Express charge card division was 7 blocks from my office. My boss insisted that i not do any commercial business with American Express due to their being his largest tenant and client (world wide). Ken Chenault was a lawyer that’d only gotten to American Express as the charge card’s division ceo a couple of years before I came to Wall Street. I was allowed to train on American Express’s lease negotiations. So I was completely oblivious to even the possibility that a black ceo existed in their culture.I was in almost weekly meetings with teams of American Express negotiators and representative. I was the only black in the room. I didn’t dawn on me that these people were a few levels below Ken—who’d gotten the assignment from Sandy Weil to be the fall guy for Sandy’s plan to close down the money loosing charge card operations—-with the perfect scapegoat. Ken outsmarted Sandy’s plan by partnering American Express with what would eventually comprise over 72 retail & manufacturing brands (that would render the card too valuable to the merchant communities for Sandy to shutter the product to hide the hundreds of millions of dollars that he’d stolen from the overall large group of financial companies which are somewhat referred to as the Shearson companies).As big as all those high flyers were American Express was behind on it’s rent and utilities globally at that point. They engineered a complex scheme to induce Paul and David Riechman to consolidate huge portions of American Express in about $ 8B of proposed newly constructed buildings at Canary Wharf 20 miles outside of London; and the World Financial Center across the street from the World Trade Center. This was taking place while I’d been trying to regularly get pricing information on various space throughout the Reichman’s Olympia & York portfolio around Manhattan. Paul & David were asserting that they were worth $ 60B; and essentially if I had to ask the price of their office space the clients that I intended to bring them couldn’t afford to be in their portfolio.They were right. The problem, however, was that Paul & David also couldn’t afford to be owners of their portfolio. When they finally got audited it was learned that their combined net worth was aprox. negative $ 10B. Alot of their financial pickle was tied to American Express being broke too; and unable to move into Canary Wharf on the schedule that O & Y’d promised it’s countless financiers. The World Financial Center experienced a variation of that same scenario on a milder level. AmExp took about half as much of WFC complex for it’s own offices and purchased equity in the complex—-to soften the embarrassment for the countless parties involved.I wasn’t surprised to learn of O & Y’s debacle because my original Arlen post bankruptcy asset re-structuring required me to review holdings of E J Korvettes, Regal Mens Shoes & Bulova watch company—-all of whom i’d worked for just prior to accepting the Arlen collapse fostered gig. At 21 i was moreorless off-loading the assets of my immediate prior employers’ NYC presence. When i started my 4 week employment with E J Korvettes department store chain they physically paid me a week’s salary to watch a company staff orientation movie extolling their size and affluence, along with the vastness of their parent (Arlen).Regal Mens’ Shoes’ management even pretended to be surprised when i turned down management opportunities in their company. All of those same executives were aware that Brown Shoe Group had already bought control of Regal when i was invited to pursue career security on that sinking ship. I didn’t give Bulova the time to present a feasible lie about why I should view them as a stable income source to me. I left them to join Regal who hired me to work at a store 7 blocks from my college. The Regal job paid me twice as much to boot.Knowing who you really know can be a more prudent means of optimizing your access to senior executives. In less than 18 months of my leaving Korvettes for Bulova and leaving Bulova for Regal; i was reviewing listings of their locations that were being offered to other users (because the firms had ceased operations in NYC).