Page 105 of The Oligarch's Daughter

“Yeah, he wants me to look into it. You know anything about them?”

Ethan glanced sideways, then at Paul. “I do. Because actuallywelooked into FanStars, some years back.”

“And?”

“We, you know . . . we passed on it.”

“When was this?” asked Paul.

“I don’t know, five or six years ago.”

“Before online gambling was legal.”

“In the U.S. anyway. Good ol’ puritan America. We did an exhaustive study of the gambling space. Looked really hard at a couple of deals.”

“But you passed on them?”

“Yeah.”

“Any particular reason why?”

He shrugged. “Legal exposure, probably. But I wasn’t point on the deal.”

“Thanks.”

Paul shook his head. Maybe it wasn’t so weird that Frost wanted to go back to this online gambling site after so many changes in the marketplace.

But Paul was obviously far more concerned about Frost’s announcement at the meeting, how they were investigating the network break-in. If they discovered it was him, he was fucked.

He took out his burner phone and texted Addison.

68

Paul was living in a state of anxiety, afraid that at any moment Mr. Frost or Berzin was going to take him aside and interrogate him. So he decided he was going to do some serious due diligence on FanStars. Maybe he’d turn up something like he did on Cavalier, when he was at Aquinnah. Busy work like that would take his mind off the constant nervousness.

The first thing he did was read the twenty-eight-page PowerPoint deck on the company that Frost had shared with him, taking notes in a new document. The research was mostly fluff. It talked about the technology FanStars used, who its potential customers were, why AGF was going after this particular firm. That sort of thing. Then he turned to Bloomberg to see who the investors in FanStars were. It was a private company, so there wasn’t much information available. He combed through the other databases on his desktop—FactSet, Capital IQ, TechCrunch—gathering whatever miscellaneous information he could. Paul had researched hundreds if not thousands of companies and had a pretty good idea what he was looking for: the people who ran the firm. It’s always the people at a company who cause the problems. As the saying goes, you’re betting on the jockeys, not the horses. So he collected the names on the management team and then started digging into them—looking at their LinkedIn profiles, what sports they’d played in college, if any. He looked at Dun and Bradstreet to see whether these people were creditworthy or not, whether they paid their taxes, what the approximate size of FanStars was.

FanStars was legally based in Cyprus. This didn’t surprise him. Gambling companies liked to be based in countries like Malta or Cyprus, where there weren’t too many rules and where nobody asked questions.

Everything seemed to check out okay—no big surprises, no reason to stay away from making a deal with FanStars—until he logged into one of the websites where employees (and ex-employees) anonymously reviewed their own companies. He looked at FanStars’s employee reviews. Most of the reviews said benign, bland things like “Great company” or “Good company to work for and flexible benefits” or “Great working environment.” Then, one caught his attention, an anonymous post from seven years ago:

“OK company but . . . my girlfriend temped there, and they offered her a full-time job, but she heard rumors. Too many stories about too much weirdness going around.”

Rumors . . . weirdness going around . . .

That could mean anything. Or nothing.

He decided to dig some more. He wanted to be thorough with his due diligence. Do another Cavalier. See what he could find. That meant he needed to look at whatever was in the files from five or six years ago, when AGF last looked at the company. See why they ultimately decided against doing a deal with FanStars.

Paul emerged from his office and said to his admin, Margo, “I need to find some files from five or six or seven years ago. Where should I look?”

“Five years ago or more? That stuff’s stored offsite,” she said. “The SEC makes us keep them going back seven years.”

“What’s offsite?”

“Upstate.”

“How far upstate?”

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