Then another.

Then a whole series of wire transfers to shell companies I had never heard of, and large withdrawals authorized by signatures that looked like my grandparents’ but carried subtle, wrong little irregularities, and millions of dollars that had flowed, quietly, out of the family trust and into my father’s struggling commercial real estate firm, paying off his corporate debts and buying private properties that no beneficiary had ever been told about.

I will not lay out the mechanics of how it had been structured, because a map of how to loot a family trust is not a thing that belongs on a page.

It is enough to say that what I was looking at was not a series of accounting errors.