He had done this before, I was certain, watching him.

He had stood in other rooms, in front of other frightened owners, and made this exact speech, and watched it work, because the machinery of law that is supposed to protect people can, in the hands of someone who understands it, be turned into the very thing that traps them.

That is the genius and the horror of white-collar crime: it hides violence inside legitimacy, wraps theft in the sober language of deeds and liens and collateral, so that the victim’s own respect for the law becomes the reason they do not fight.

Julian was betting that I would respect the paper too much to challenge it.