Page 596 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
Wall Street firms that were to be acting as “financial advisors.” Thus, about thirty men and women, most of whom (other than the RTC peo- ple) were very expensively attired, gathered in a conference room in southern California to discuss and prepare for the events that were planned to occur late on Friday afternoon and the disposition of assets that would follow those events.
At 4:00 p.m. on Friday, representatives of the RTC, accompanied by armed (!) personnel, were going to (and did) march into the executive offices of Home Fed, order all of the executives out of the building, secure the offices and all of the papers in this multibillion-dollar enter- prise, freeze all bank accounts, and inform all employees that, if they weren’t on the list to be fired, they were now working for the Resolution Trust Corporation, which intended to seize and dispose of all of Home Fed’s assets. This was standard operating procedure, which had already occurred at hundreds of smaller thrifts, but this intended operation was huge—and it was intended to be a closely guarded secret. Somehow, however, it seemed not to have struck the leadership that the influx of the people in the room, their staffs, and more than four hundred other individuals who had been brought into San Diego to aid in the seizure just might not go unnoticed. (There was an earthquake that shook San Diego that night, but its impact was nothing when compared with the effect of the Home Fed takedown.) And so the takedown occurred, and my focus now turned to the mechanics and forms of disposition that we would use in liquidating the assets of Home Federal Savings and Loan.
Within another week or so, I learned my first lesson in the impor- tance of pecking order and appearance in Washington. RTC’s general counsel, Jerry Jacobs; its head of asset disposition, Lamar Kelly; its head of resolutions, Bill Rolle; its head of litigation, Rick Aboussie; and I were in a conference room of the Department of Justice (note: DOJ’s room, not ours) because the Justice Department, acting by and through the head of its Criminal Division, had halted the entire San Diego operation and had taken the position that not one piece of paper could be removed from Home Fed until they had signed off on it. We, on the other hand, needed that paper (particularly original notes) and argued that there
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