CHAPTER 10

Sister Bay, WI Friday, June 18, 2021

IT HAD BEEN YEARS SINCE ANYONE CALLED HER CLAIRE. NO ONE ELSE, in fact, referred to her today as anything other than Avery Mason. She wondered if it was really possible to erase a past and become someone else. Childhood memories rooted deeply in her subconscious told her that it was not. No matter how many years passed, some part of her would always be Claire Montgomery. The part of her that was tethered to Connie Clarkson had no other identity.

Born Claire Avery Montgomery, she had not legally changed her name to Avery Mason, but had used the moniker in the byline of her first article for the LA Times when she was twenty-eight years old. It stuck. Not coincidentally, it was the same year her father was indicted for one of the largest Ponzi schemes in American history. The name change was a strategic move made after she graduated law school and tried to escape her family’s legacy. Being the daughter of Garth Montgomery had ended her legal career before it started. No one would trust the daughter of one of America’s greatest thieves to honestly pursue criminals, so she hadn’t tried. With a useless law degree and a family lineage she was trying to expunge, she fled New York and landed in Southern California. She fell back on her undergraduate degree in journalism to secure a job as a beat writer for the Los Angeles Times. It paid little and was a far cry from the life she had left behind. Once the daughter of a billionaire and the recipient of a trust fund meant to provide a lifetime of financial independence, she landed in LA and for the first time in her life needed to fend for herself.

Soon after starting at the Times, she stumbled across the story of the missing Florida toddler. The story was picked up nationally, and her investigation gained the attention of Mack Carter. She, as Avery Mason, was asked to appear as a guest on American Events to tell the story, which led to a three-part special. The final two-hour episode included the dramatic footage of Avery, followed by American Events cameras, accompanying the police when they made their disturbing discovery in a shed behind the grandmother’s home. Mack Carter had been so impressed with Avery’s investigative instincts that he asked her back on the show several times that year. She was just twenty-nine years old at the time. The frequent guest spots led to a more permanent role as a regular contributor. Her ratings proved the young journalist popular. After two years as a contributor, she was asked to join the show permanently as co-host. When Mack Carter died she found herself in the unlikely position as the new face of one of America’s longest running newsmagazine shows. On the surface, Avery Mason was a young, successful journalist with her entire career in front of her. Inside, she was a nervous wreck that the attention would shine a spotlight on her past and link her to Garth Montgomery—her father, the Thief of Manhattan.

Throughout the 1990s and 2000s the Montgomery family had been a symbol of the American Dream—a hardworking family who had reached the upper echelons of society through grit and determination. Garth Montgomery founded Montgomery Investment Services in 1986, a New York–based hedge fund that offered security brokerage and investment advisory services to banks, financial institutions, and high net worth individuals. After three decades of managing the portfolios of some of the country’s wealthiest people, advising some of the world’s largest corporations, overseeing retirement funds for America’s biggest unions, and controlling the endowments of influential universities, the firm had $50 billion in assets under management. It looked like a well-managed global fund making millions for its clients. In reality, it was a massive Ponzi scheme that paid long-term investors outrageous returns generated from new investors’ deposits. A house of cards waiting to fall, it finally did, and in stunning fashion.

Forensic accountants determined that more than $30 billion had been fraudulently obtained and squandered on Garth Montgomery’s jet-setting lifestyle. The rest of the company’s “assets” were make believe—the books were so cooked they nearly incinerated when the feds finally got their hands on them. The federal indictments came the summer after Claire Montgomery graduated law school, and she still held vivid memories of federal agents crashing through the front door of her family’s Manhattan penthouse, pulling her father from bed in his pajamas, and walking him in handcuffs to the waiting squad car parked in front of the building. The perp walk had been seen the world over. Photos of it were splashed on the front page of every newspaper, and video footage led every news program. Type the name Garth Montgomery into any search engine and the first image that popped up was her father, pajama-clad with hands cuffed behind his back and a score of federal agents leading him from the building.

Despite that she had been warned of the details, she was still shocked by the enormity of the situation when the specifics of House of Cards—the FBI’s name for the operation that brought down Montgomery Investment Services—became public. It was like watching a horror movie that starred her father as the villain. If the allegations were true, and she knew they were, it meant that her father had defrauded thousands of people out of their life savings, many blue-collar workers out of their retirements, and universities out of decades of endowment contributions. The allegations meant the Montgomery family was a mirage, both morally and materially. Everything they owned was contaminated by greed and deceit—the penthouse, the Hamptons mansion, the Aspen villa, the beachfront condo on St. Barts, the cars, the jet, her trust fund. Even the Claire-Voyance, her majestic sailboat that had sunk the previous summer, had come from ill-gotten money. But it wasn’t just the things that were an illusion, it was the lie that they were ever a happy family.

Perhaps worse than the financial fraud was the personal deceit that came to light in the wake of her father’s conviction. Garth Montgomery’s mistress was discovered. A forty-year-old woman her father had been sleeping with for more than a decade, her entire lifestyle had been financed by Garth Montgomery and the money he stole. The affair dated back to Avery’s teenage years, and all at once the late nights her father constantly worked and the frequent business trips made sense. Even the idea that Avery and her brother had been shipped off to Wisconsin each summer had felt tainted by deceit. The revelation of her father’s dual life had cut deeper than knowing her whole life had been a fantasy. The discovery wrecked her mother—a complete deconstruction of the life she believed she had built with the man she loved. A heart attack claimed Annette Montgomery when she was just sixty-two years old, a mere eight months after federal agents hauled her husband from bed in the early dawn hours. Despite an autopsy revealing chronic and undetected coronary artery disease, Avery couldn’t get past the idea that her father’s betrayal had been the real cause of death. It was this festering thought that continued to fuel the disgust she felt toward her father. Though her mother’s passing had been another tragedy to bear, there was some sense of peace knowing her mother would not have to endure the stigma that came with being the wife of one of the most hated men in America.

Anguish and anger eventually gave way to clarity. The life Claire Montgomery had lived for twenty-eight years was over. Survival would come only from reinventing herself. So she did, and Avery Mason was born.