I drink coffee with a team of lawyers who haven’t seen the light of day in weeks and sift through thousands of pages of emails with a highlighter. Most of the material is banal talk about steakhouse lunches and corporate retreats. Every few pages, I notice the obscene dollar amounts of Enron’s transactions. Villains get paid in numbers with extra zeros.

  On the day of the Enron hearings, I go watch the fireworks at the Hart Building. A homeless man stands at the front of a long line stretching down Constitution Avenue. I watch a sharky-looking guy in a jet-black suit hand the homeless man a ten-dollar bill and slide into his place. Lobbyists have probably been pulling this trick since the Grant administration. I flash my staff ID and follow the lobbyist past security and into the Senate hearing room, where I stand against the back wall.

  Levin strides up to the dais in a baggy suit, the last of his hair combed over a sun-spotted scalp. In 2013, BuzzFeed News will publish a list of the “23 Most Important Comb-overs of Congress.” Levin will come in second place. A man of the people. He’s the hardest-working member of his staff. I watch, rapt, as he rakes Herbert Winokur Jr., Enron’s Finance Committee chair, over the coals about a half-billion-dollar loan.

  “Now, when you met with my staff, did you also tell my staff you did not have much recollection of that transaction?” Levin asks, peering down his glasses, pushed far down the bridge of his nose.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Now that you have refreshed your recollections. Enron was borrowing a half a billion dollars from Citibank, but it did not show up on the balance sheet of Enron as debt but rather as preferred shares, which looked more like equity than debt. It was a loan disguised as equity in order to avoid showing debt on the books.”

  “Sir, I believe it was accounted for as a consolidated subsidiary with a—”

  Levin cuts him off. “Was it shown as a loan?”

  “It was shown as—the entity was consolidated and the $500 million of Citibank was a minority interest.”

  “But was it shown as a loan?”

  Levin’s got him dead to rights. I watch Winokur break. “No, sir.”

  An exchange worthy of a headline. I spot a gaggle of reporters taking notes at the side of the chamber. As in a debate, they’ve got their evidence. Now they’ll print it in tomorrow’s paper. And some college debater will use the article as evidence in a round where the topic is “fiscal regulation.” It’s codified into the record. The truth, as far as anyone is concerned.

  I’m fascinated by this bloodbath, particularly by the criminals on the witness stand. Who helps them? Who prepped them for this massacre? Whoever it was, they aren’t good enough at their job. Where’s the consistent messaging? Why weren’t they expecting these questions? Why aren’t they repeating the same five lines over and over and over? Why are they just giving easy sound bites to the senator and the media?

  I realize I’m probably the only person in the world who has this reaction to the Enron scandal.

  * * *

  I lean out into K Street, hailing a cab. It’s the first week of summer. School is out. I’ve been barhopping with Hill staffers. A yellow cab pulls up, and I attempt to hop over a Jersey barrier. My foot catches the edge. I spin as I fall to the curb.

  I can’t walk. I crawl into the cab’s backseat and tell the driver to take me to the nearest trauma center. When we arrive at George Washington University’s ER, nurses put me in a wheelchair. Three hours later, a tech looks at my X-ray, says, “Oh shit,” and starts to run out of the room. I grab his arm. Make him show me the image. The ball of my hip is floating, completely separated from my femur.

  I wake up sucking oxygen from a tube. My mother is sitting in a chair next to the bed. My mother lives on the other side of the country, so I figure something is probably wrong. I don’t remember anything after looking at the X-ray.

  I’m on crutches for a month. Then I graduate to a cane. For the rest of my life, I’ll walk with a slight limp. And the three titanium screws in my hip will ache when the temperature dips below forty degrees. A few months later, I skydive out of an airplane for the first time. At a checkup, I inform my surgeon that he must have done some good work. He is not pleased.

  * * *

  My parents fly in for Georgetown’s graduation ceremony. They seem relieved that I made it to the finish line. Levin writes yet another letter, and I’m accepted into the London School of Economics. I live in a flat in Notting Hill, attending lectures on trade wars with the kids of prime ministers and international diplomats.

  One day, I’m walking on campus when I pass a balding young man with hard eyes flanked by massive bodyguards. I’ve heard about Saif Gaddafi. The students whisper that he’s a dictator’s son. I’ve heard we share a weed dealer.

  In a few years, he’ll be one of my clients. Long after I’ve been on his family’s payroll, the world will find out that Saif allegedly bought his PhD in philosophy from LSE with millions of pounds in bribes. Howard Davies, the distinguished institution’s director, whose signature is on my diploma, will resign, disgraced.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  * * *

  I walk through the doors of Venture, which feels like the smallest public relations shop in DC. I’ve been back in town for a few weeks, applying for any job that will keep me close to the action on the Hill. I’ve missed this city. Missed working on projects that I’d read about in the newspapers the next day. Missed the happy hours spent trading gossip about senators and feeling like a master of the universe.

  Venture’s office isn’t much more than a few desks scattered in the basement of a lobbying firm. A young woman shakes my hand and tells me to sit down. She scans my résumé, catching an item that makes her pause.

  “Mr. Elwood,” she says, smiling. “I see you’ve worked on the Hill.”

  * * *

  I’m riding in a black SUV heading down First Street toward CNN Studios. Beside me sits Jon Powers, an army officer fresh off a tour in Iraq, and Michael Tucker, a filmmaker. “When you get on set, remember to emphasize that young audiences need to watch this film,” I coach them. “Putting an R-rating on it is limiting the exact people who should see what war is like firsthand. The kids who might enlist.”

  Powers nods, mouthing my words to himself. I walk him through his talking points one more time as the SUV pulls up to the tan-and-glass building housing CNN’s DC bureau.

  “If this film gets rated R, it hurts the youth of America,” I repeat when we step into the lobby and receive our security badges.

  Powers is a subject of the documentary Gunner Palace, directed by Tucker, about soldiers living in Saddam Hussein’s son Uday’s pleasure palace during the second Iraq War. Venture has been tasked with keeping a PG-13 rating on a film in which the word fuck is uttered more than forty-two times. MPAA rules state if the word fuck is said in a movie more than once, the film receives an automatic R. And an R means fewer ticket sales.

  It’s my first PR campaign. My strategy has been to flood the zone. Make as much noise as we could. I’ve called television bookers and producers from a landline in Venture’s basement office. “The Iraq War is a killing field right now,” I spitballed. “Teenagers being recruited by the army need to see this film.”

  “I don’t have time for this,” beleaguered bookers said before hanging up.

  “This isn’t my beat,” I heard again and again. “Take me off your list.”

  I’m twenty-four years old—my “save the children” pitch was born out of instinct. I didn’t train in a press shop on the Hill. Venture has two other employees and pays me $35,000 a year, but my gut told me I was on to something. After a barrage of calls, I got through to a segment producer at CNN. In passing, I mentioned that Powers was from Buffalo, New York.

  “Lucky break,” the producer said. “Wolf Blitzer is from Buffalo. We’ll help your guy out.”

  The CNN set is smaller than I imagined. The studio looks like a toy replica of what you see on-screen. The idea that this tiny room is responsible for so much influence seems incongruous, like ants carrying an apple. A line producer walks Powers from the green room to his mark. We have four minutes of camera time. Powers is calm. He has faced down RPG fire in Baghdad; he can handle a few questions from a cable news anchor.

  I watch the segment on the TV in the green room, imagining the audience watching at home. Powers and Tucker stick to our script, repeating my talking points about the film educating America’s youth about the harsh realities of war.

  As the anchor nods like a concerned parent, I watch as Powers’s words—my words—become legitimate in real time because he’s saying them on cable news. In an instant, ideas I thought up in a windowless office appear to become reality, certified by CNN itself. The audience doesn’t see me building the machine that creates this illusion. They don’t even know I exist. If a PR person appears on TV, it usually means we’ve fucked up.

  As CNN broadcasts my message to millions of Americans, I realize my job isn’t to manipulate public opinion. My job is to get gatekeepers like CNN to do it for me. Once you have ink, your story becomes real. A conversation starts that didn’t exist moments before, a conversation nobody would think to have if you hadn’t started it. The public begins to accept something you created out of nothing.

  And I have something reporters will always need: access to inside information. Information is the only commodity I control, but in this world it’s valuable currency. The media demand constant fuel. I can feed information to reporters and toggle how much they see. I feel as if I’ve put on a pair of night-vision goggles that reveal the hidden machines powering the world. I begin to see levers I can pull. The adrenaline that spikes feels stronger than any line of cocaine.

  * * *

  The press pick up our message and run with it. We secure a sympathetic review by A. O. Scott in the New York Times. “The raw inconclusiveness of ‘Gunner Palace’ is the truest measure of its authenticity as an artifact of our time and of its value for future attempts to understand what the United States is doing in Iraq,” he writes. Fox News’s Sean Hannity and Alan Colmes bring on Powers for a five-minute segment. MSNBC also does a segment with Powers and the director. My first time out, I secure a cable news “hat trick.”

  A few weeks later, I attend the premiere of Gunner Palace. Sen. Ted Kennedy shows face on the red carpet. The house lights go down, and the screen lights up: “This film is rated PG-13.”

  I’ve just sunk a body.

  Let me explain. I sank my first body when I was twelve. My father was the minister of an East Coast church, an easy walk to the ocean. Our house stood behind the church, and our front yard was the parish graveyard. Heavy metal bands tried to rent the property for record release parties. Aging, failing septic systems upstream yielded fecal counts in the hundreds of thousands in the creek running through the graveyard. A river of shit.

  When a parishioner expired, I would get to spend time with my father, and I would be compensated for my time. Fifty dollars per body. All I had to do was hold the cross and look sad for an hour. Workers brought in earth-moving machines to dig the grave. When the casket was in place, we stacked flower pots between the hole and the bereaved.

  During one burial, my father and I stood behind the flower pots. I could see down into the hole. “Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…” my father began. Then, over the mourners’ bellowing, crying, and sniffling, I heard clods of earth falling and … splashing. Brown liquid was pooling up from the dark earth. I gave my father an elbow and nodded toward the bottom of the grave.

  He picked up his pace. “I will fear no evil.”

  I watched shit-colored water swirl around the coffin. The coffin broke free from the dirt, floating, rising. I elbowed my father again.

  “Steady the casket,” he whispered.

  Angling the cross just so, I was able to place one foot on terra firma and the other on today’s Jane Doe.

  “For thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.”

  By the closing prayer, my shoe was soaked through.

  “Handle this. I’ll be back soon,” my father told me and then led the mourners to the parish hall. They were none the wiser. I worried that the coffin was going to float up and out of the hole. I was twelve, so I also worried that the body inside would come back to life. I jumped on the coffin, trying to submerge it. I slipped on its slick surface and fell into the grave.

  It was the first time I helped create a false narrative. Cover up the truth when the wheels have fallen completely off the wagon. Remain calm and sink the body. The body is the truth. With Gunner Palace, the truth was that we wanted a PG-13 rating to sell more tickets. So, you sink the body. You make the public believe you want to keep vulnerable teenagers safe from the Iraq War. And with this body, I’ve made much more than fifty bucks.

  I need to create this illusion again. All around me, I see power and more power. I’m low in DC’s pecking order. Even Moynihan’s aide Eric has more pull than me. But for the first time in my life, I’ve discovered a trick that makes people clap. A trick that I’m apparently good at. I need to master it. I need to see how far it can take me.

  CHAPTER 2

  Everyone Deserves Representation

  I’m sweating through my best suit at the Garden Terrace at the Four Seasons in Georgetown. My table sits below a trellis of manicured ivy. Peter Brown is due to arrive in five minutes.

  Earlier this afternoon, I got a call from a woman who said she was Peter Brown’s assistant. “Can you meet Mr. Brown for a drink this afternoon?” she asked. “He’s thinking about hiring you.”

  I agreed. Then I googled “Peter Brown.”

  Brown rose from running the record department at a store in Liverpool to managing the Beatles and sitting on the board of Apple Corps. He is mentioned by name in a Beatles song. He helps Robert De Niro promote the Tribeca Film Festival and takes Barbara Walters as his date to events. In the early 1980s, Brown moved to the PR game and now heads up Brown Lloyd James, a boutique firm based in New York.

  Brown strides into the Garden Terrace wearing a tailored blue suit accented with a pink silk tie. His silver hair matches his cuff links. When we shake hands, he feels frail but somehow in charge of even this small physical interaction—which is incredibly disarming. A waiter materializes, asking, “Campari and soda, Mr. Brown?” I order a glass of Malbec. Our drinks arrive nearly instantaneously.

  “So,” I say, “tell me about the firm.”

  “Imagine Brown Lloyd James as a relationship brokerage,” Brown says in an elegant English accent. “We solve ornate problems for extraordinary clients. Used to do it ages ago for John.”

  It takes me a moment to realize he’s referring to John Lennon.

  “John once called me in a pinch. He needed to get married immediately without the media hounding the ceremony. I found the one place on the bloody globe that fit the ticket. He and Yoko tied the knot in Gibraltar.”

  Coming out of a less remarkable man’s mouth, this story would sound like shameless name-dropping. But Brown speaks softly, nonchalantly. He can afford to: Lennon canonized him in “The Ballad of John and Yoko”: “Peter Brown called to say ‘You can make it okay,’” Lennon sang. “‘You can get married in Gibraltar, near Spain.’” A Beatle singing about your cocktail stories is better than being knighted. And Brown will later almost be knighted. The Crown will appoint him a Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

  “My uncle Phil is a big Beatles fan,” I say. “I’m named after him.”

  “John and Yoko bought an apartment in the building next to mine because they liked my view of Central Park. Yoko still lives there. Mick Jagger once sublet my apartment. When the term was up, he wouldn’t give it back. We got into quite a dustup over it.”

  “Happens.”

  “We need someone in New York,” Brown says. “To run a couple of accounts.”

  “What sort of accounts?”

  “BLJ represents exotic clients. Countries. High-net-worth individuals.”

  Brown doesn’t get specific, and I’m too impressed to pry. He isn’t selling his firm. Rather, a new life that his demeanor telegraphs I’d be lucky to accept. I’m in the market for a new life. After Venture, I was hired away by the PR mega firm Burson-Marsteller. My biggest client was the U.S. Tuna Foundation, which tried to get pregnant women to eat, you guessed it, more tuna. We paid off academics to argue that a certain form of molecular mercury was too large to cross the blood–brain barrier. The National Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies Coalition maintained that women of childbearing age should eat at least twelve ounces of seafood per week. We were caught by none other than the New York Times: “Industry Money Fans Debate on Fish,” read the headline that exposed the whole nasty affair.

  “Everyone deserves representation,” Brown opines. “And anything is possible with the right amount of money.”

  “I have some references you can call.”

  Brown takes a slow sip of his Campari and soda. “What do I care what someone else thinks?”

  * * *

  “You need to sign this,” Peter Brown’s assistant tells me, sliding a form across the desk.

  U.S. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE

  REGISTRATION STATEMENT PURSUANT TO THE FOREIGN AGENTS REGISTRATION ACT OF 1938

  List every foreign principal to whom you will render services:

  Hassan Tatanaki, Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya

  I don’t recognize the name “Tatanaki,” but I sign the form without a second thought. I walk back out into the Brown Lloyd James offices. A dozen PR pros pace around gray laminate cubicles, firing pitches into phone lines. I hear conversations in Chinese and Arabic. I can’t wait to get my hands dirty.