The Woman in the Basement
Four hundred and six people were employed by Vaughn Enterprises on the morning the board voted. Two hundred and eighty-one were laid off within six weeks as the credit lines closed.
Of those, the median time to reemployment was seven months. Forty-one were still unemployed at the eighteen-month mark. Nineteen lost health coverage during an active medical treatment.
The 401(k) plan was fine — that money was segregated and protected, and I want that in the record because it is the one piece of good news.
The deferred compensation was not. Vaughn had run an unfunded deferred-comp arrangement for its senior and mid-level staff, which meant those balances were a general unsecured claim in the insolvency, which meant they were gone.
Fifty-eight people. Aggregate: eleven million dollars.
Odalys Ferrante had four hundred and nine thousand dollars in it. She was fifty-one.