The employees of 467 LLC were all lawyers and accountants at first, since the company produced no goods or services, only collected profits and grew. Brian Louis Summers was its president and only stockholder. He was allowed to do nothing except receive a salary, which 467 paid directly to his bank, and which he spent through his credit cards, automatically paid by his bank. On the one occasion when he’d wanted anything more expensive than things people usually bought with credit cards, it had been a car. One of the lawyers paid for it with a cashier’s check, then picked up the vehicle, registered it, drove it to Brian Summers’s house, and parked it in the garage.

Paul Duquesne had been born in Philadelphia and raised at his great-great-great-grandparents’ country estate on the Main Line west of the city center, which was no longer in the country, and in the city mansion on Rittenhouse Square. Even when he was a small child, his time spent in each place did not coincide with the time spent by his mother. She was an Englishwoman who saw him as shaming evidence that she was not as young and untouched as she wished to appear. It was an offense that only got worse as both grew older. His father, the formidable businessman Mark Duquesne, was the one in charge of the extended family’s holdings, and this left him little time for either of them.

Paul went to college in Boston and then spent years building his own business in New York. He developed a service that helped people who wanted to avoid paying taxes move money offshore. He had twenty-eight employees who handled every aspect of the issue, from filling out tax forms to physically transporting money or other physical assets to other countries and putting them in secret accounts. Paul attributed his success partly to this business model, which prevented amateur mistakes by never involving the amateurs, his clients, in the process. He depended entirely on word of mouth for new clients, so theoretically nobody would learn about it who wasn’t known and vouched for by people in his own social stratum. He miscalculated drastically, and it was only six years before one of the people who heard about the service was an Exeter and Harvard man married to a U.S. attorney.