Mr. Manners, who rarely checks his investment portfolio, woke up the “morning after,” head big, still adorned in various parts of his Brioni tux, and got to thinking: “This behavior has got to stop. I’ll start by calling my good friend Tersh Broderick (Cayman’s impresario of bodybuilding and physical fitness), take out a lifetime membership in one of his clubs, and, get into shape.
It was not the first time Mr. Manners had thought these thoughts.
Then, Mr. Manners, feeling a bit buoyed, had the epiphany that maybe it wasn’t only his physical corpus that needed a touch-up. How about his financial portfolio. He was always concerned about that Obama guy but, always being a long-termer, figured he’d check back into Wall Street after Obama left town in 2016.
Nevertheless, on this headachy Cayman morning, Mr. Manners decided to be “proactive” and have a look. And what he saw!
Oh, hold the pity. He was far from broke, but his net worth, under the smooth-talking President, had been reduced to mere middle-class billionaire status. Still, action was called for.
Now, for background, Mr. Manners is not a financial whiz (or, for that matter, any other kind of whiz; he always thought of his bean more as an adornment than an appendage for thinking). Thanks to Aunt Mart, who early on realized that her favored nephew might be a neuron or two shy in the synapse department, nevertheless thought he might still do fine in life if that burdensome matter of earning a living were deleted from his bucket list of life’s challenges.
To get to the point, Dear Aunt Mart left him a bundle (which he was whittling down, one would have thought, year after year – but as those who comprehend the miracle of compound interest would understand, this was not possible. As diligently as Mr. Manners was trying to empty his trust fund, compound interest was “filling ’er up” (as they say at Jose’s Esso station) – and then some. Ah, life is grand. As was Grand Cayman. For the record, Mr. Manners didn’t move here because the “natives” were the “most friendly people in the world.”
Indeed not. What attracted him were the palm trees, uncrowded beaches, an “understanding” tax regime, tight-lipped financial regulators, and, most important, an assortment of like-minded rich partying sots. Perfect.
But this portfolio burp was a bit of a call to action. He really couldn’t blame his troubles on his financial advisors who, for the most part, were fine chums who occupied their nocturnal sentry posts at, where else?, the Ritz-Carlton bar.
Mr. Manners, it turns out, was heavily invested in a wide assortment of Cayman craters – abandoned holes in the ground – Beach Bay, the Island Resort in East End, the Crown Jewel excavation, even the pocked roller-coaster road and surrounding environs at the Yacht Club. He even had a small piece of the Hyatt Regency that some CIREBA-credentialed blonde in August 2004 convinced him was “no lose.” Days later, Hurricane Ivan paid a visit.
These were small-change investments for Mr. Manners – a decimal point here or there but mainly flings, financial la-di-das. The real problem could be traced to his dalliance in two things (really quite the same thing): hedge funds and gambling.
On this particular morning, Mr. Manners discovered that neither had gone well in recent times. He needed a whole new investment portfolio. Diversification was the ticket. Even Warren Buffett said so.
This island life agreed with Mr. Manners. He shivered in any locale that ever registered 75 degrees or lower (what could be lower, the Antarctic? He abhorred ching-chings but preferred them to penguins). Mr. Manners also liked the easy-going life of the natives, especially the domino-playing politicians, and so, decided to invest in what he knew – mainly the Cayman Islands.
Against that background, Mr. Manners decided to buy the Brac.
He didn’t need investors, but he did need like-minded neighbors, so he decided to invite a few of his Ritz-Carlton cronies into the deal.
There was the issue, of course, of what to do with the Brackers who had developed a sentimental attachment to their homeland. This, he reasoned, was not a problem without a solution. In fact, two solutions: 1) moolah (and lots of it); he’d buy them out, or 2) for all Brackers, permanent residence with right to work. Why not? That’s what the government had offered him, and he was delighted to receive it (although, of course, he never executed the “right to work” option).
It was only a cursory examination of island-buying and country-creating that caused second thoughts. He recalled the strange story of “Prince Lazarus,” aka Howard Turney, whose name rang a familiar bell. Turney, who passed away in April 2012, was a well-known figure in Grand Cayman before getting into the Human Growth Hormone racket in Playa del Carmen, Mexico. Mr. Manners may have given him a dime or two.
Things got cooking, though, when Turney decided he liked tax havens so much that he decided to start his own – “The Principality of New Utopia” – constructed on concrete platforms 115 miles east of Grand Cayman. That’s when he traded in his moniker of “Howard Turney” for the more exotic “Prince Lazarus.”
His rallying cry was that he was going to “out-Cayman the Cayman Islands.”
Things started well, but didn’t end well, for the newly minted Prince. His downfall began when he decided to float a bond issue of $350 million but neglected to register the offering with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which was not amused.
Digging deeper, Mr. Manners learned that pompous organizations (such as the United Nations) do not take kindly to the establishment of micronations not likely to join the “club.”
All of which put Mr. Manners into somewhat of a funk. His Brac idea was no doubt brilliant, but he had little appetite for “mixing it up” with any U.S. bullies with three initials in their names. Well, SEC maybe, but IRS, no thanks.
And so, Mr. Manners went back to his barstool at The Ritz to mull things over, and it was there he met a most-congenial fellow who introduced himself as Brian Uzzell.
Uzzell gently chastised him that “a bright fellow like you shouldn’t be wasting your abilities, bounding about buying Bracs and who knows what else. A man of your talents should get into the media.”
“But how would I ever do that?” asked a befuddled Mr. Manners.
“Why don’t we have lunch,” suggested Mr. Uzzell. “Maybe we can work something out . . .”
