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Chapter 21

Asher Bennett Carter

Boston, May 2015

Asher knew what Kennedy was getting at but he wasn’t obligated to give her any answer, because she, like most people, underestimated him. His was the art of weaponized incompetence. If he gave people nothing, nothing would be expected, and he had been quite successful so far. In any case, he wasn’t about to admit to her that he knew that theirs was indeed blood money.

Asher was at least aware that their father’s contribution to parenting would include imparting wisdom onto his children. Well, the William Carter Jr. brand of wisdom. He thought of his kids as permanent interns enrolled in his personal program of business acumen, a philosophy that deeply shaped their upbringing.

Asher was the first to reach eighteen, and therefore he was the first to deal with his father’s expectations of what a Carter child should be. To William’s surprise, Asher took great interest in how the company worked. The issue with that, though, was that Asher was negligent on a good day and foolish on a bad one, the circumstances created when a kid was given a map and told to follow directions without ever thinking for himself. That was Asher’s problem: he could not think. He had no imaginative capabilities, and unfortunately, that was half the battle when it came to mastering what William had done.

The summer following his last year at Princeton, instead of doing his one-month penance at the Carter Corporation, as was the norm for both him and his sister, he voluntarily spent the whole summer there. He had planned to take the next year off, a decision acceptable to his father only if he was “learning something.” Asher did plan on learning a few things, including what had changed about New York City nightlife in the four years that he’d been away, but something surprising happened that summer. He took an actual interest in the company. He wanted to prove his dedication, demonstrate his willingness to learn. He tried in earnest to understand the complexities of the business, but it made his head hurt. He often found himself lost, but he’d also never felt closer to his father in his life since he had the ability to ask his father tons of direct questions. Something he hadn’t done since childhood.

One night, they were working late in the office, the hum coming from the industrial air-conditioning providing a monotone soundtrack to their toil. “Can I ask something?” Asher said.

“Sure, son,” his father said without looking up.

“Has anyone ever died because of our work?” he asked. Asher was too aware of the gossip surrounding the Carter Corporation, that there might be a history of controversial methods when it came to conducting business abroad. He had never asked before, but now seemed as good a time as any. He wanted to understand the full picture of what he was getting into.

His father, who was reviewing a contract, put down the paper that he was holding. “Has anyone ever died because of our work?” he said, repeating the question back to Asher. William Carter Jr. paused for a moment and rolled his neck. His eyes wandered around the room before they found Asher’s.

“Not directly, but there have been accidents over the years. It’s a real estate venture, and we do construction, so accidents happen,” he finally said.

“Right, so anyone who’s died, died in an accident?” Asher said.

“Yes, anyone who died, died in an accident,” his father confirmed.

Asher nodded as his father stepped from behind his desk.

“Come, I want to show you something,” William said, walking out of his office and heading down the hall. Asher followed closely behind his father as he passed the rows of empty cubicles and offices. They went into the records room, a library of sorts with blueprints of buildings and module designs and the changes made to them throughout the years. His father opened a low drawer of a wide file cabinet and bent over the opening. He emerged holding a folded piece of vellum that he slid out from a folder that said “1993.” He then opened another drawer and did the same for a folder that said “2003.” He walked Asher over to the island in the center, where he spread both pieces of paper out and lit the table from beneath.

The plans appeared nearly identical. It was a building in Accra, Ghana, called the Paradiso, a complex of high-end apartments near the city center. An early project of the Carter Corporation.

“So I brought these out so that I can show you something that we decided to do very early on. See these modules?” William Carter Jr. asked his son, pointing to the document from 1993.

Asher laser focused on them, and William Carter Jr. said, “And see these modules?” He pointed to blueprints from 2003. Asher nodded again.

“They’re almost the same but different. The modules from 2003 have slightly rounder edges, wouldn’t really fit the designs from 1993.”

“Okay,” Asher said, not understanding what any of this had to do with his original question.

“Do you know why that is?” William asked. For much of his life, everything with Asher’s father seemed like a riddle. It was like playing Russian roulette and Jeopardy! simultaneously, always uncomfortable, rife with tension.

“Because ...” Asher’s voice trailed off as he waited for a good idea to solidify. “It had to be brought up to code?”

“Something like that,” his father said, more patiently than he deserved. “We make the modules and build the buildings, but what a lot of people don’t know is that we also sell the insurance policies. See, son, when I was building this business, I realized that if we stopped at modules and apartment complexes, we’d have a single point-of-sale problem. These people wouldn’t be repeat customers. They’d buy their one unit and not buy again. Most homes will be owned for at least ten years. But if these homes have parts that only are under warranty for a certain number of years, let’s say ten, then those parts need to be upgraded and paid for. It wouldn’t make sense to upgrade to the same exact part, so we make little tweaks.

“If you look here,” he continued, “you can see that in 1993, the edges of the modules are straight but in 2003 they’re round. So the modules from 1993 and 2003 can’t fit each other, and if you don’t purchase insurance, which you purchase from us at a monthly premium, you risk having to pay for the entire upgrade because these parts will either break down or not fit when all the other parts get upgraded. We also work with a variety of factories and have a similar system for software. And that’s how we developed sustained income.”

Asher looked closer, seeing the subtle changes magnified by the glare of the lighted table.

“Okay, so we charge people every step of the way,” he said. “We do the design, source the materials, manufacture the modules, and build, and then we also sell insurance for the individual units and everything inside them? That we also make.”

“Exactly,” William said. “We own over two hundred subsidiary companies. Now sometimes, these people aren’t able to pay us, so sometimes accidents do happen. And a few times, faulty elevators or even a collapse, a fire, things like that. They have happened over the years but it’s not often. All contractors know that that’s a possibility, and we have amazing corporate insurance to insulate us for such instances. Of course, son, all of this is private information, items that should never be shared with the masses. Do you understand?”

“Yes ... yes, of course. I got it, Dad,” Asher said, surprised that this was all new information to him. Had he really been working here for the last four summers with no idea how the company even made money?

Yes, he had. And that’s when Asher Carter briefly realized just how empty his brain was at times. He wanted to ask a follow-up question because something told him there had to be more to the story, but it wasn’t like he was going to ask how every one of the two hundred subsidiaries functioned.

His father went to put back the files, and they walked side by side to return to his office. When they arrived, the nightly cleaning staff was in there. “Stanley!” his father greeted the janitor warmly. This was a famous trait of William Carter Jr.’s, one of the signature things that people would talk about at his funeral: his affinity for cleaning staff at offices. William famously paid the cleaning crews at the Carter Corporation as much as he paid senior managers. He liked to say it was in honor of his father, who’d been given a lucky break while working as a janitor. Stanley had been with the Carter Corporation for as long as Asher had been alive.

William prattled on good-naturedly with Stanley while Asher got lost in his own thoughts about the business structure of the Carter Corporation and what to do about the fact that he didn’t understand how he’d ever be able to oversee something so complicated, and nor would he want to.

Still, it was nice to be with his father in this way, connected to something bigger than himself, and that’s what he had planned to say in his interview for this video about his father’s life. The muffled noises of Boston traffic floated up to his ears. “Just one second,” Kennedy said, pausing to let an ambulance’s siren subside.

Asher cracked the knuckles on his right hand and took a deep breath. As he sat across from Kennedy, reciting what he’d learned about the family business best he could, he was mindful of putting a positive spin on things while keeping more controversial matters close to his chest.

Asher tugged down the sleeves of his sweater and adjusted his Cartier watch. Today he was wearing a yellow-gold Tank with a brown alligator strap. It was a gift that he received on his thirteenth birthday. He sat slightly forward, belaboring his good posture. “The best part about my dad,” he said, looking past Kennedy and directly into the camera, “is that he treats all of his employees incredibly well. He knows that everyone has value to the organization, and he wants to make sure that people feel that. I think what a lot of people don’t know about him is that his humble beginnings made him more sensitive to the needs of everyday people. He really tries to improve lives and make them better.”

“How does he do that?” Kennedy asked.

Asher broke character. “What do you mean, how? Who cares? That’s a great sound bite. Use that.”

“But it doesn’t really say anything,” Kennedy countered.

“Yes. It does,” Asher shot back. He held out his left hand to her as he put down fingers for every point he made. “It says he’s a good guy, that he treats people well, and that he made it from humble beginnings. All of this was in the brief, and Dad’s public relations guy has been basically stalking me to make sure I stick to a script when we talk to anyone for any reason, so that’s what I’m doing. And you probably should too, Ken. That’s what we do in this family.”