CHAPTER 2
December 2004
As Adam stared down Cyrus Moody and his team of over-priced, stuffed-shirt lawyers, he wondered if any of them would end up doing something crazy on New Year’s Eve. He couldn’t really picture it. He could only see them at the country club, sipping champagne and telling bad jokes.
One of the only good things about the practice of law was getting paid to tell guys like Cy Moody to fuck themselves. Adam’s client, Chuck Sager, had made the mistake of trusting Moody and making him a business partner, which was okay until the day when Moody decided it was time for his ne’er-do-well nephew to get a real job. Moody orchestrated a coup at Sager’s company, where Moody was the now the controlling shareholder. To add insult to injury, when Moody found out that Sager wouldn’t go quietly, he released the hounds — well, about 12 of the 140 lawyers who worked at Moody & Moody. Moody’s minions filed a 75-page lawsuit against Chuck Sager, accusing him of fraud and breach of contract
Adam and Chuck Sager had been summoned to Moody & Moody for a settlement conference, but once Adam walked into the room, he knew it was an ambush. On one side of the mammoth mahogany conference room table sat Cy Moody’s army of underlings. Adam and Sager were dwarfed by the dozen attorneys and almost twice as many huge, black three-ring binders filled with accusations and “evidence.”
When Moody nodded, one of the attorneys began the inquisition. “What’s contained in these binders is indisputable proof that Mr. Sager was engaged in racketeering,” one of Moody’s suck-ups rattled off.
Less than a minute into the diatribe, Adam, who was leaning all the way back in one of the firm’s comfortable conference room chairs, sprung forward and asked, “Are you trying to intimidate us? Racketeering? So a dispute about pushing a guy out of a company he founded is now the same as a mob case? Has this ridiculous tactic actually worked before?”
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