I pick up the phone and do another search for Katherine Smith, thousands of links popping up on Google for such a common name. Some that seem like they could be leading to the right Katherine but don’t: an art history professor who graduated from University of Texas at Austin; a chef born and bred on Lake Austin; an actress, who looks quite a bit like the Kate I saw in the photos at the bar. I click on the link to the actress and pull up a photograph of her in a gown.

And it comes to me in a flash: what I am trying to remember, what struck me at The Never Dry.

There was that newspaper clipping I noticed when I first arrived at the bar.

The clip included a photograph of Kate dressed in a gown. Kate in a gown, Charlie dressed in a tuxedo, the older couple bookending them. Meredith Smith. Nicholas Bell. The headline read: NICHOLAS BELL RECEIVES THE TEXAS STAR AWARD. His name was also beneath the clipping.

Nicholas Bell. Husband of Meredith Smith. She was in other photographs, but he wasn’t. Why was he in so few photographs except for that clipping? Why did his name sound familiar?

I plug in his name and then I know.

This is how the story started.

A young, handsome El Paso, Texas, Presidential Scholar was one of the first kids from his high school to attend college, let alone the University of Texas at Austin. Let alone law school.

He came from modest means, but money wasn’t his motivation for becoming a lawyer. Even after a childhood where he didn’t often know where his next meal was coming from, he turned down all sorts of job offers from firms in New York and San Francisco to become a public defender for the city of Austin. He was twenty-six years old. He was young, idealistic, and newly married to his high school sweetheart, a social worker, who had aspirations for beautiful babies, but none (at the time) for fancy houses.

His name was Nicholas but he quickly earned the nickname The Good Lawyer, handling the cases no one wanted, helping out defendants who wouldn’t have gotten a fair shake with someone who cared less.

It is unclear how Nicholas went from there to becoming the bad lawyer.

It is unclear how he became the most trusted adviser to one of the largest crime syndicates in North America.

The organization was based out of New York and South Florida, where their top leaders lived in places like Fisher Island and oceanfront South Beach. They played golf and wore Brioni suits and told their neighbors they worked in securities. This was how the new regime operated. Quietly. Efficiently. Brutally. Their lieutenants preserved their stronghold in several core businesses—extortion, loan-sharking, narcotics—while also moving into more sophisticated revenue streams, like international online gaming and brokerage fraud on Wall Street.