Free The Last Days by Joel C. Rosenberg Page B

work your sources, trust your gut and make a recommendation. It was another thing for your boss to place a half-billion-dollar bet on your advice. What if he was wrong? What if the stock sunk like a rock and his job with it? Bennett became a man obsessed. He made it his mission in life to know every detail he possibly could about AOL, Steve Case, and anyone and everyone connected in any way, shape, or form with the company.
    In the spring of 2000, AOL’s stock hit a high of $72 a share, giving the Joshua Fund a pretax profit of over 3 billion dollars. MacPherson wanted to bolt. Bennett said no. They were just getting started. Then the tech crash began. AOL stock plunged to $47 a share in just a few months. MacPherson was furious. He prepared to dump all of the Joshua Fund’s AOL holdings, but Bennett urged him to hang on for a little while longer. They were still $36 above their purchase price. AOL was still acquiring good companies at bargain prices. They’d just nabbed Map Quest. They were launching new divisions in Argentina and Mexico. ICQ had just hit 85 million members.
    Bennett was onto something hot. His sources were telling him Steve Case was plotting to take over media giant Time Warner. The news hadn’t yet broken publicly. But it would soon and the stock would skyrocket. MacPherson wasn’t so sure. Time Warner was a strong company, but the whole market was overpriced. The Fed was trying to burst the bubble, and the Joshua Fund couldn’t afford a massive loss. True, Bennett argued, but why not let the AOL–Time Warner merger news begin to leak and then see what happened? If the stock began to drop, they could dump it all. If it rose, they could hold on a bit longer, then cash out and take the whole company to the Bahamas, all expenses paid.
    MacPherson had to smile. He liked this kid’s moxie. Fine, he said, let it ride for a little while longer, but under no circumstances could they let the price drop under $40 a share. Deal? Deal, Bennett agreed. And the merger news leaked.
    By Christmas of 2000, AOL stock hit $74 a share. When it slipped to $72, Bennett and his team began selling off. When it was all over, the Joshua Fund had sold 50 million shares at an average of $70 each, scoring a pretax profit of just under 3 billion dollars. A pretty nifty chunk of change, MacPherson had to admit. And he had Jon Bennett to thank for it. And he did.
    MacPherson promoted Bennett to senior VP. He named Bennett chief investment strategist. He put him in charge of a staff of more than a hundred. And he asked him to begin helping him on an entirely new project—MacPherson’s bid to enter elective politics. Sure, he was a Republican and Bennett wasn’t. But so what? Bennett was a Kennedy Democrat—Jack, not Ted—and MacPherson could live with that. It was a match made in heaven.
    Quietly, under the radar, Bennett recruited a few friends to form Democrats for MacPherson—first for MacPherson’s gubernatorial campaigns, then again for the run for the White House. From the Iowa caucuses through the convention and right up to the inauguration, Bennett was there for MacPherson every step of the way. He did so enthusiastically, without pay, without expecting anything in return. He’d never asked to join the administration. He’d never wanted a fancy-sounding Washington title. Bennett didn’t care about politics. He wanted to make money—lots of it. And why shouldn’t he? He was good at it.
    The president had no doubt that Bennett would have been on the Forbes 400 list in the next five years. But events had conspired against him. Suddenly—inexplicably—everything was different. History was taking a turn for the worse. Jon Bennett’s destiny was being recast. MacPherson had asked him to give up everything to serve “at the pleasure of the president,” to figure out a way to nail down a deal between the Israelis and Palestinians, a deal