Here’s the summary of the indictment from the U.S. Attorney’s office in San Jose.

Theranos Founder and Former Chief Operating Officer Charged In Alleged Wire Fraud Schemes

For part 1, see my previous post.

Apparently Elizabeth Holmes has a certain charisma. The book quotes several people as remarking how striking her blue eyes and unusually low her voice were. She can be charming when she wants to be, apparently. So there are many who may be inclined to take her side. Don’t be one of them. She may have Svengali-like drawing power, but so did David Koresh and Jim Jones. Don’t drink the Kool-aid.

Holmes and Balwani have been indicted on wire fraud and other charges by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in San Jose. I know from first-hand experience how difficult it is to get that office to prosecute a white collar case. Jurors have difficulty understanding such cases. Having a loss value of millions is only a starting point. You also need absolutely overwhelming proof of guilt of a federal crime before they’ll even take it to a grand jury. I’ve testified before a federal grand jury myself many times. Indictment is usually not a tough hurdle since you only need a two-thirds majority and all the evidence comes from the prosecution, but I also know that some jurors are simply hostile to the government in general or the FBI in particular. Others ask wacky, irrelevant questions and yet others simply aren’t smart or educated enough to understand the evidence or legal instructions. At trial, though, it only takes one juror to hang a jury. One thing the grand jury doesn’t rely on, though, is reporting from newspapers or magazines. Everything is verified through FBI investigations, interviews, records searches, and so forth.  So if these two were indicted, the substance of the case is there. That doesn’t mean they will be found guilty at a trial or even should be found guilty. That will depend on the trial evidence and the legal instructions from the judge. I also have great confidence in the regulatory agencies that have shut down Theranos. Those people are dedicated to public health and take their responsibilities seriously. If they found the lab procedures and equipment bad enough to shut the place down, it was a danger to public health. For all these reasons and more, I believe the book reports accurately.

I found it interesting that this case really has no political slant to it. Holmes herself was chummy with the Clintons and Obamas, and was a big supporter of Hillary Clinton in 2016, yet her board of directors was packed with conservative Republicans including George Shultz and Henry Kissinger. Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch was the single largest investor. She was able to bamboozle leaders of both parties. Most disturbing to me personally, though, were the dirty tactics employed by David Boies, the so-called super lawyer. His intimidation tactics and harassment were very instrumental in silencing many employees or others. He should at the least be disbarred and, I hope, indicted himself. He, too, was a director with a very large equity stake in the company. They were all lusting after that billionaire title. For shame.

Everyone should read this fantastic book. Before I go farther I should point out that this is no ordinary review and my particular knowledge and experience make it necessary to tell you something of myself. I’m a retired FBI agent and attorney in Silicon Valley. I used to work on high-tech cases much like the one in the book. I also litigated in both local and federal courts and served as a judge (pro tem) for several years. I was the first to investigate Raj Rajaratnam, the billionaire hedge fund manager who stole insider information and was convicted of insider trading. He got eleven years. I could cite other cases, but the point is, I know what I’m talking about in this particular area. I’ll post this first section as a review, but the full writeup will be on my blog.

So, everyone who ever has had a blood test or anticipates ever having one should read it. Everyone in Silicon Valley in the tech/startup world should read it. But don’t read it just because you should; it is just the best, most engrossing, most entertaining book I’ve read in years. I read it in two days and would have done it quicker if my daughter and her husband hadn’t been visiting from out of state. If it were fiction no one would have believed it. It would seem too far-fetched. I’m also a skeptic of what’s reported in the press or in tell-all books since I’ve seen reporting that is slanted or simply inaccurate on cases of mine. But what I know from first-hand experience tells me that this author, an investigative reporter for the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), has uncovered the truth in all its frightening, disgusting ugliness. The story he tells here is exactly what I have learned to exemplify the Silicon Valley milieu in which I live. It is a story of an egomaniacal young woman who envisioned herself as the next Steve Jobs, as a superstar tech entrepreneur, as the the first self-made female billionaire high-tech corporate genius. Elizabeth Holmes, the 19-year-old Stanford dropout who is the central figure in the book, founded Theranos, a company she claimed could perform hundreds of blood tests from a few drops of blood drawn with a thumb stick, thus revolutionizing health care.  It is a story of unbridled greed, lying on a pathological scale, of high officials like former Secretary of State George Schultz, retired generals, Stanford professors and others who betrayed their company, its shareholders, the patients and doctors who relied on the faulty tests Theranos produced, all for the promise of incredible riches. It’s a story of secrecy, intrigue, and intimidation. I’ll stop here for the book review sites because my next posts will contain spoilers. I’ll explain there why and how I know this book to be true and reliable. For now, I’ll just say read this riveting, superbly-written, true story. You won’t regret it.

A Howl of Wolves by Judith Flanders
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Sam(antha) Clair makes her fourth appearance in this mystery. Set in London and involving the theater and theater people (make that theatre since this is British through and through), the plot makes a cracking good start with the director of Thomas Kyd’s 16th Century play The Spanish Tragedy being found suspended, dead, and in costume and stage makeup, when the curtain opens the third act. Based on other reviews I’ve read, this isn’t the first theater-based mystery from this author.

Sam narrates in the first person with a witty stream of mostly self-effacing barbs. The author is a master of hyperbole. I would say mistress, but that sounds too salacious so I’ll settle for the sexist “master.” But then, a sexist master sounds salacious, too. Oh well. Anyway, every description is cleverly overstated. Sam has known earthworms with more upper body strength than she has. She picks up enough Chinese food to feed a few battalions. Her solicitor (that’s a “lawyer” for us Yanks) mother Helena is so formidable the mere tappety-tap of her heels produces “frissons of fear even in the hearts of Supreme Court Judges.” You get the idea. The style is lighthearted but there’s still a rather good murder mystery there. Sam has the advantage of having a husband at Scotland Yard and the aforementioned bulldog lawyer-mom to sweep away those niggling obstacles to crime-solving, like access to confidential lab results, interview notes, and other police material. If you’re looking for blood and guts, gunfights, and passionate sex scenes, you won’t find them here (except quite a bit of fake blood in the play, apparently).

The pace could have been faster and the ending less mundane, but the witty style kept the story going well enough to suit me. The aha moment was too contrived for my taste, dependent on Sam seeing something the reader couldn’t see, or at least which isn’t described well enough for the reader to pick up on as the critical clue. That puts this mystery in the “unfair” class in my book, but the intelligence of the writing style and the inside knowledge of the theater were more than enough to overcome that.

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My daughter is coming to visit from Texas this week. We are happy with our Tasters Choice instant, but I know she likes fresh brewed coffee in the morning, so I asked her what kind to buy for her visit. She wrote me back to get ground Starbucks Breakfast Blend. There’s a Starbucks just a few blocks from us (isn’t there one a few blocks from everyone in this country?), so I went over there today to buy it. Four baristas and twenty minutes later I got the coffee. I think there’s more process to building a Tesla car than buying coffee at Starbucks, but I’m not sure. It’s a close contest.

First off, they didn’t have Breakfast Blend at that store any more. So that required two baristas to confer and argue about what blend was the closest thing to it. They finally decided on Pike. Then they asked what roast – dark, medium, or light. I had no idea. That required the first two to consult a third barista, and once again the three of them couldn’t agree, at least not at first. Eventually I settled on medium out of a general feeling of cowardice. It was the safe bet. If I got it wrong, it wouldn’t be far from the right one. Next they asked if it had to be ground. When I said yes, they wanted to know what grind. Apparently there are numbers involved. Lots of numbers. Three? Five? Pi? How should I know? I just want some coffee for my daughter. Did the pioneers have to go through this at the general store two hundred years ago?

Thus enters barista number four, apparently the one with an advanced degree in nuclear physics and coffee brewing. She seemed to be a manager of some sort and wanted to educate me on the chemical properties of the various blends and brewing techniques. I was afraid for a while that she was going to recite the DNA sequence of whatever it was I’d bought. She had to settle for asking me about the coffeemaker I was using. Of course I had no data on that either since Taster’s Choice uses only a spoon and a microwave, unless you count the cup and faucet. She had to cogitate a long time before she was able to figure out how to dumb it down so that an ignoramus like me could answer her questions. “Was it an espresso machine?” “No. just a simple drip coffeemaker.” “Did it have a funnel type bottom or a flat bottom?” “Flat.” “Do you use a metal filter or a paper filter?” “Paper.” “You should use a metal filter. The paper filter removes some of the flavor by absorbing the [insert name of chemical here}…” “It’s the only thing we have. It uses paper.” Obvious disappointment on Prof. Barista’s face. “All right. well, I think we’ll use seven. It’s a finer grind that will work with paper.” With that I was actually able to pay and leave the shop although I could have left without the paying part. It had taken so long nobody remembered that I hadn’t yet paid. I paid anyway. It was worth the twelve bucks just for the entertainment.

The adventure didn’t end there, though. The parking lot presented its own challenge.The Starbucks shares a very small, closed lot with a Wells Fargo. Why anybody still banks with Wells Fargo after all the recent revelations about their banking practices is beyond me, but the lot is always very crowded. I reached my car, put on my sunglasses and put the car in reverse just about the same moment the driver of the car to my right did the same. He graciously nodded to me to go ahead. I started to back up but at the same moment a honkin’ huge white pickup, or possibly a 3000-stateroom Norwegian Lines cruise ship, parked directly behind me started to back up. For reasons best known to himself, the driver decided to crank the wheel so he was facing the closed end of the lot, rather than the driveway. He realized his error and executed the world’s slowest five-point turn in order to get turned around so he could drive out the driveway. When he finally cleared the space behind me I once again started to back out only to have a car from the street zoom directly behind me in order to get that spot vacated by the cruise ship, er, pickup. He was followed by yet another car from the street who entered hoping to find a vacant spot only to discover there weren’t any. He was thus blocking the two of us who were trying to exit. Eventually that driver, although not caring a hoot about us, realized that if he just let us leave he would have a spot to park. He wiggled his car over far enough that I could back out. Fortunately my Leaf has a tight turn radius.

The coffee is now safely home. My daughter darn well better like it.

A dangling modifier is a word or phrase placed such that it appears to modify something other than what it was intended to modify. I typically hear four or five every day on the news. They are not just bad grammar; they’re evidence of unclear thinking. For example, this morning I heard an ABC News reporter say,

“After being missing for four weeks, rescue workers announced today that they found the body of Mollie Tibbetts…”

Really? The rescue workers were missing for four weeks? There are several ways to say that grammatically. “Rescue workers announced today that after being missing for four weeks, Mollie Tibbetts was found dead …” or “The body of Mollie Tibbetts, the teenager who has been missing for four weeks, was found today, rescue workers announced.”

As long as we’re on the topic of grammar and language, there’s that tweet yesterday by our president about the “Special Councel” Robert Mueller. There is no such word as “councel.” It wasn’t a typo, either, because he repeated it several times. That’s a spelling error no one who managed to graduated from high school should make, much less a college graduate intensely involved ion the matter. He seems to have conflated two distinct words:

counsel: a lawyer or other adviser.

council: a representative body of people, typically formally elected or appointed

The Perfect Couple by Elin Hilderbrand
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I strained mightily to get through this, but gave up about a third of the way through. The author spends almost no time on the murder plot and way too much on bland descriptions of mostly uninteresting characters. The rest is spent prattling on about fashion and wines, apparently things the author values. This is her 21st novel, just like a certain female character in the story, and just like her, this novel seems “phoned in.” Maybe it’s a disguised autobiography.

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The Wife Between Us by Greer Hendricks
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

A few weeks ago I finished The Last Mrs. Parrish and reviewed it here. I could barely squeeze out two stars on that one. This one is so much like that one I thought one of them had to be a direct rip-off of the other. This is the more recent of the two by publication date, so I guess this one is the plagiarized version. The plots and characters are nearly identical. Even the audiobook readers sound almost the same. In short, the characters are all very dislikeable, although for different reasons, the plot is all too predictable, and none of it is believable. This one is slightly better written than that one, so I can give it a legitimate two stars instead of a barely squeezed out two stars. I just now noticed that reader reviews of that book named this one as a book to read if you liked Parrish. If I’d only seen that before I could have spared myself the experience here.

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Today our house phone rang with an unknown number in the caller display,  so as usual I let it go to voice mail.  When I listened to the message it was in Mandarin and was clearly a commercial robocall. Now I have no tolerance for Trump’s Make America White Again campaign, but I do understand the populist sentiment behind it. I’m a white guy (mostly) and never had to experience what it’s like to be a minority, but it was a bit disconcerting to realize that there are now so many Chinese in my area  that mass marketers are using Mandarin because that language is as likely as English (or more so) as being the primary language in the household with the 650 area code. The local high schools used to teach only Spanish and French as a second language. Now Mandarin is the most popular. I don’t know if they even offer the other two. Nextdoor.com has ISO posts for Mandarin tutors virtually every day.  It’s a changing world.

Tango Down by Chris Knopf
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Sam Acquillo is a hard-drinking, smart alecky, tough guy private eye with a resume that’s a little too good to be believable. Kid from the Bronx , former pro boxer, MIT graduate who became engineering V.P. of a major corporation, and by the time of this book anyway, a cabinetmaker and sailboat owner in ritzy Southampton, N.Y. This is the 9th Sam Acquillo mystery, but my first, so I’ve no doubt left out a lot of the backstory.

The homeowner for whom Sam is making cabinets is murdered by way of blows to the head from a golf club. The police arrest Ernesto, a Colombian immigrant in charge of the construction crew. His fingerprints are on the murder weapon. He claims the victim was teaching him to play golf and loaned him the club. Of course Sam believes him to be innocent and sets forth to prove it. Jackie, Sam’s friend and nominal employer is Ernesto’s attorney and Amanda, Sam’s beautiful neighbor, is Sam’s main squeeze. The rest you can work for yourself. the book is all about style, not plot, fortunately, because the former is quite good while the latter, not so much. The repartee is at least B+ quality. For a tough guy mystery the book is refreshingly free of the excessive gore, swearing, and lurid debauchery that typifies the style. It was not until about page 100 that the F-bombs started flowing, and even then it was merely a trickle. Needless to say, Sam figures things out before the local police, the FBI, and the CIA, all of whom get entangled, but as a former G-man I appreciated the fact that the author didn’t make any of them look corrupt, ill-intentioned, or incompetent, just not as smart as Sam. Sam can handle himself in a fistfight, of course, and there’s an excursion to Latin America so the title and cover image can be wedged preposterously into the story line. The very pedestrian solution doesn’t arrive until the last four or five pages, but it didn’t matter since as I said it was all about enjoying the style. Sam gets to cruise around the Little Peconic Bay on his sailboat with a beautiful half-naked woman drinking vodka and enjoying the sunset and seabirds when he’s not out beating up the evil-doers of the world while exchanging witty bon mots with his interlocutors. Enjoy it for what it’s worth.

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As I sit here typing, I can smell and see the smoke from the Mendocino fire about 130 miles north of here. The sun rose with an eerie red tint. Despite this, the weather people say the air quality is good. The smoke, at least the dangerous part, is too high to affect the ground level badly. The fire is the largest in state history and only about 35% contained, so it’s a bad one. So far there’s been no loss of life on this one that I know of.  It’s located near Clear Lake, the setting for much of my fourth Cliff Knowles novel, Death Row.

In my last post I complained about needing to fill my time with more reading and having trouble finding good stuff to read. In the last twelve hours I’ve started and given up on three books, two of which were audiobooks: The Strange Bird by Jeff Vandermeer (too artsy-fartsy and weird), The Crack in the Lens, by Steve Hockensmith (audiobook reader had horrible hokey Southern+Western accents, a sort of cross between Gomer Pyle and this narrator of Huckleberry Hound), and Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich (an author reading her own work is usually a mistake).

So what’s next? I joined a fantasy football league. I’m no pro football fan, although I often watch the local team, the 49ers. I record the games and don’t bother to finish watching if the Niners are losing badly. I joined the league for two reasons: I like analyzing data and it gives me an opportunity to do that, and a good friend and my son are both in this league, so it provides and activity to share with them. I don’t care about winning or losing as long as I get a season’s worth of entertainment. I just looked at several websites ranking players for fantasy football purposes and I’d never heard of about 98% of them. I also don’t have much idea of strategy beyond what the pros say (yes, there are fantasy football pros), but the point scoring system for my league is different from the standard one, so that strategy may not be of much use. Still, I’ve got my spreadsheet going already. By the way, in case you’re wondering, my research indicates that the league I’m in is legal in California – skill required and no rake – so it’s not considered gambling.

I’ve posted seven book reviews in the last three weeks. That’s a record for me, and must be a personal record just for reading that many books in that short a time. There was also one other book I started and gave up on quickly because it was so bad (Ghost Fleet by P.W. Singer). It just goes to show how much free time I need to fill. TV fare is so bad I watch news three times a day and even watched some daytime TV – old B movies. Then there are the crosswords and computer games I’ve been devouring. Thank heavens my son and his wife came over to visit Friday and we had a fun evening after a good Mexican dinner. When I’m not writing a book I crave something to occupy my time. Maybe I’ll think of a plot for the next one soon. When the books are good, the reading is really enjoyable, but when I hit a streak of losers as the last few have been, it gets me down. One bright spot: Welcome to the Family, a “Netflix original” (meaning they found a TV series in another country that they retitled in English and stuck subtitles on. It’s a wacky comedy entirely in Catalan! Try it.

The Real Michael Swann by Bryan Reardon
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The story is told from two perspectives. The first is that of an unnamed man who has just been injured in a bomb blast in Grand Central Station, New York. It’s told in the first person. The second, told in the third person, is from the viewpoint of Julia Swann, a suburban housewife living near Philadelphia. The man has head injuries and doesn’t know who he is or what happened to him. His only tie to the real world is his briefcase clutched tightly in his hand. Inside it he finds identity documents and phone for Michael Swann. He only knows he wants to get home. He begins his journey, his flight, to Philadelphia. Julia, meanwhile, realizes Michael was in or near Grand Central Station when the blast occurred. In fact, he was on the phone to her at the time. She begins her separate attempt to find him. Local law enforcement at all levels tries to help. This is yet another in the current fad genre of “unreliable narrator” stories.

That’s a great set-up for a story. Unfortunately it’s all downhill from there. Nobody in the story does anything remotely believable after that. Some of it is physically or legally impossible. The “big twist” at the end is totally predictable from soon after the blast. I certainly knew it was coming. The writing is tortured trying to keep it from the reader until the end. As a retired FBI agent I’m always sensitive to police procedure, and this book gets almost nothing right in that respect. I managed to get through it, so I got my hours of “entertainment” if you want to call it that, so I can give it a couple of stars but I can’t recommend it.

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The Reader by Bernhard Schlink
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This translation of a German novel about post-wartime Germany is engaging but ultimately left me with a feeling that it could have done more. Michael, a teenager, falls for an older woman in his neighborhood and she proceeds to satisfy his lust, playfully at first as though he is her boy toy. It develops into a real relationship of sorts, although Michael is not sure if she feels about him the way he does for her. When it stretches beyond a mere sexual relationship, they spend a weekend together. She likes his voice and asks him to read to her. He obliges. This continues for some time. Then one day she ends it cold. It turns out she has a secret. I’ll stop there to avoid spoilers.

I listened to the audiobook, which was well acted by the narrator. The translation is excellent, too. As I listened, I didn’t know it was a translated German novel, although I suspected it. The book is somewhat dark, but not overly so. I think it resonates better with Germans than it could with most Americans, including me. In the end, I felt lukewarm about it. There was a movie made of it, but I never saw the film.

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