by Mark Ames and Alexander Zaitchik
Salon.com

On the morning
of Nov. 19, 1985, a wild-eyed and disheveled homeless woman entered
the reception room at the legendary Wall Street firm of Deak-Perera.
Carrying a backpack with an aluminum baseball bat sticking out of
the top, her face partially hidden by shocks of greasy, gray-streaked
hair falling out from under a wool cap, she demanded to speak with
the firmÂ’s 80-year-old founder and president, Nicholas Deak.

The 44-year-old
drifterÂ’s name was Lois Lang. She had arrived at Port Authority
that morning, the final stop on a month-long cross-country Greyhound
journey that began in Seattle. Deak-PereraÂ’s receptionist,
Frances Lauder, told the woman that Deak was out. Lang became agitated
and accused Lauder of lying. Trying to defuse the situation, the
receptionist led the unkempt woman down the hallway and showed her
Deak’s empty office. “I’ll be in touch,” Lang
said, and left for a coffee shop around the corner. From her seat
by a window, she kept close watch on 29 Broadway, an art deco skyscraper
diagonal from the Bowling Green Bull.

Deak-Perera
had been headquartered on the buildingÂ’s 20th and 21st floors
since the late 1960s. Nick Deak, known as “the
James Bond of money,” founded the company in 1947 with
the financial backing of the CIA. For more than three decades the
company had functioned as an unofficial arm of the intelligence
agency and was a key asset in the execution of U.S. Cold War foreign
policy. From humble beginnings as a spook front and flower import
business, the firm grew to become the largest currency and precious
metals firm in the Western Hemisphere, if not the world. But on
this day in November, the offices were half-empty and employees
few. Deak-Perera had been decimated the year before by a federal
investigation into its ties to organized crime syndicates from Buenos
Aires to Manila. DeakÂ’s former CIA associates did nothing to
interfere with the public takedown. Deak-Perera declared bankruptcy
in December 1984, setting off panicked and sometimes violent runs
on its offices in Latin America and Asia.

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the rest of the article

December
3, 2012

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