Finally. 6 Years. No transfers requested. You turned down a director role in 2022. I did.
Why? My daughter was in second grade and the role required travel 3 weeks a month. Elliot said, "That's the whole reason. There isn't a more interesting one." Something moved across her face, brief and unreadable, and then she crossed to the desk, opened a drawer, and took out a document folder that was thick enough to have weight. She held it a moment before she put it in his hands, and he understood that this was the actual decision, and that everything before it had been her deciding whether to make it.
"Read that," she said. "Then tell me what you see." He sat down on the arm of the chair, which was not polite, and which she did not appear to notice, and he opened it. What he found was a summary schedule of vendor payments, three years of them, compiled with the kind of clean formatting that suggested that somebody had wanted it to be presentable rather than complete. The vendor was a firm called Northstar Advisory Group. The engagement was described as Strategic Logistics Consulting.
The total across 11 separate payments came to $14,200,000. Every single authorization carried Marin Callaway's electronic signature, $14 million. Elliot said, "I have never approved a payment to that company." She said, "I have never heard of that company until yesterday afternoon at 4:00. I did not know it existed. Who gave you this?" Conrad Waywright.
She said, "The name without inflection, which took effort. He came to my office. He was very kind about it. He said he had been sitting on it for weeks trying to find a way to make it go away and that he had failed and that he was sorry. He offered me two options.
I resigned voluntarily for health reasons with a statement the board would help me write or the board refers the file to federal investigators and issues a release stating that the chief executive misappropriated company funds. He gave you a deadline. The special session convenes in 11 days. Elliot turned a page. And you haven't taken this to your own council.
No. Or to the bureau. No, Miss Callaway. I'm not hiring you, she said. I want to be extremely clear about that because if I hire you, you become my instrument and everything you find becomes tainted.