Book 3 Chapter 61

            I finished the day out in the sand, surf and sun with my mates and the kids. There were no updates from any agency, I looked after supper before we went to sit around the bonfire on the beach.

            The kids quickly went to sleep after showers and baths. Them drifting off early allowed my mates and I to have some adult fun for a couple hours. The night was good for my mates and it was late before they snuck back to their own beds.

            We had been aggressive and gotten carried away, I had two hickeys that I was going to be able to hide with a tee shirt. We would have to be more careful.

Thursday morning was mass update day on nearly everything. We started with the house. Contractors had succeeded in digging and pouring he extra footer around house to support the weight of all the steel plating the Secret Service was going to wrap around it.  

            The plating was being installed starting today. The bullet resistant windows were being installed as the steel went up. Ther new concrete siding was being used to cover the steel. I wondered how they were going to fasten siding to one-inch-thick armor?

There had been a debate on what they were going to do about the garage that faced the highway.  It was decided to build a concrete wall two foot thick and twelve feet tall and cover both sides with field stone at the property line near the highway.

This was to replace the armored fence they had just built a few months ago. My house was going to look like a castle with that wall. I wondered if they were planning on a moat to complete the look? I surely wasn’t going to ask to give them any ideas.

I wondered if there was some place that sold replica knights armor, I would buy a couple and put one on each corner next to the highway. I decided to send someone on a mission to find some before the wall was completed. I would have the contractor put a corner tower in each corner. That would be the talk of the community pretty fast.

 The concrete would be reinforced with I beam steel. So much for having a view of the highway and the area on the other side of the highway. We weren’t happy but given the number of threats I saw no way around it other than staying in the White House full time and I did not want that to even be discussed.

The troop level in California was now down to pre riot levels. All the troops from other states were now home. Camp parks were one quarter of its original size.

Four hundred low- income developments some with as many as five hundred units had been built. There were another one thousand going through the expedited approval process. Families and those that had found jobs were given first pick of the units.

The next update was from NNSB, the Missouri cleaning and painting would be completed within thirty days. Tugs had already been contracted to tow her to Annapolis, the spot by Naval Academy was ready. They were doing all kinds of special treatments and paints to the hull so it could be decades before she would have to be pulled out for drydocking and cleaning again.

I needed to take the family on a trip to Camden, New Jersey to look at the New Jersey battleship. There was a guy there that was an expert on the Iowa class battleships. I had questions before the Missouri was put in place.  

The next update was on the Dover Air base closing in the Base Reduction Act passed by congress last year.  The Department of Defense had accepted the offer I had made and the GSA had added its approval.

The paper work was going to be sent to the congressional arm services committees tomorrow and therefore public. Tomorrow’s press conference was going to be a humdinger for sure.

The city of Dover was going to be livid they were already discussing all kinds of plans. They wanted to make all the base housing there more low-income housing. They were in discussions with developers to turn much of the open areas facing the marsh and Delaware bay into very high-priced condos; the kind that paid very high property taxes.

The Hawaii mess was coming to a close. The courts had shut down all the colleges and research groups wanting to go dig up the bodies for research. The justice department had argued that doing so was ghoulish and would cause unnecessary grief for the survivors and their families.

There was simply no reason to be doing this at this time or as long as there were any survivors alive. The judge agreed and locked down any research on the island for one hundred years to insure all the survivors had passed on.

The survivors from the Hawaii volcano were slowly being disbursed to different states as housing and jobs were found. It was a slow process but there were only a few of the FEMA camps left open. There were a few problems the lawyers and helpful media saw to that.

The recovery of artifacts from the Arizona was continuing; the remains of the ship was in worse shape than the underwater surveys had shown and the tons of ash had not helped. The ash was being sucked off and strained for anything that could go in the museum that was going to be built on the naval academy grounds.

Everything recovered was being handled and preserved by the experts. Uniforms, plates, cutlery, cups coins and hundreds of other items had been collected.  Some human remains had been found of course now it was just piles of bones or a few bones.

They were being sent to the lab that was now at California for possible identification. The military still had a goal to identify as many remains of WW2 fighters as possible. It was a task that got harder every day with many of the relatives passing away making DNA for comparison nearly impossible to get in some cases.

I finished up my updates in time to eat a hot breakfast with my mates and kids. The kids were disappointed because Lisa and Miss Amanda were holding class. Amanda Rubin was a certified private home school teacher that Lisa insisted we hire to help educate our children.

Our six children and Jakes twins were going to be privately home schooled, Lisa was still insisting they were going to be genius level. 

We were going to the beach this morning then we were going to retreat to the meeting room to watch the stockholders meeting for the first company that Marcy was going to try to take over.

The JBG Thimble Shoals Pirates Bank Investment Corporation would no longer be a secret after today and the next two weeks.

            The lawyers were there with all the necessary proxies and legal forms to carry out the business dealing as it was outlined step by step by the experts. I still did not understand everything Marcy, Jeanna and our tax experts had explained to me and better yet why they wanted these companies.

I knew it was all about getting diversity in the income stream but I didn’t think the companies were the ones we needed to buy. But I was no expert Marcy and Jeanna were the experts and they had hired the best experts to handle the acquisitions. Marcy and Jeanna had made us wealthy beyond our wildest dreams. I saw no real reason to challenge their decisions.

The rest of the morning at the beach was wonderful. We rode to the eastern end of the island and worked on our total natural tans. It was tough on Marcy and Vicky but they wanted to feel the sun. The boys played in the sand and the gentle surf. We covered them in sunscreen multiple times.

After lunch and looking at the morning updates I went to the cottage with my mates. The stock holders were scheduled to do all the voting starting at one. Our corporate lawyers had everything they needed.

            We watched as the first item from the floor was voted on. It was the golden parachutes that the executive board had put in place in the 80’s and 90’s was removed against their wishes and screaming objections.

‘’It has to be the first order of business otherwise they could all immediately resign cost millions,’’ Marcy said.

Then there was the floor motion that removed the entire executive board eliminating a billion dollars in annual expense. More screaming and threats the entire board would resign. They didn’t need to resign, they were fired

Then there was the call for a vote for the board of directors- usually a cut and dried process of nominees chosen by the executives. The exercise called for any nomination, from the floor. There were ten nominees from the floor then the vote. The ten from the floor were voted in and the ten yes men were voted out.

The new ten were Jeanna’s and Marcy’s chosen pick and were from our lawyers and for our Thimble Shoals investment corporation. A new executive board was chosen from the directors and the current group fired.

They requested any new business from the floor. The legal of Howard, Howard and Fine law firm announced that the TSPBCIC, the registered owners of controlling seventy five percent of the voting stock wished to move the company from a public traded company to a privately owned company. And then called for an immediate vote authorizing the move.

The new board opened the floor up for a thirty- minute debate before the call to vote. Curtis Warrens law group had notified the Stock exchanges to stop all trading of Verizon stocks at noon.

At one it was a done deal, there was a celebration in the room, Marcy had wine coolers and a beer brought into the room for us.

‘’The easy part was over now, begins the hard part.  All outstanding stocks have to be bought back. To add incentive for those stockholders to sell the stocks back to the company a five dollar per share premium was to be offered. After ninety days the outstanding shares would be paid off at today’s closing bell value,’’ Marcy said.

It would be ninety days before TSPBCIC could claim full ownership and more. I was sure there would be several lawsuits with Verizon being a Delaware corporation. Those Delaware corporation judges were eager for lawsuits to come before them delaying the takeover for a while.

I knew Verizon and its subsidiaries had fifty thousand vehicles that would now be transferred to MAAR. And nearly ninety thousand employees that would join JBG.

There was also a Challenger executive jet that would be sold. It was one year old and they had paid one hundred and thirty million dollars after all the upgrades the CEO and President wanted for their personal comfort and prestige.

‘’We don’t have any Challenger jets, no parts in the stock room for one. It is not worth the weeks and weeks of specialized training and certifications for the mechanics for us to keep it,’’ Marcy said.

‘’Then there are the two Gulfstream G 650’s that were only a couple years old for executive travel. Tomorrow all three planes would be flown to Morton to be added to the charter fleet and the Challenger to the gulf to the dealer where you bought Jakes plane. They are very interested in it,’’ Marcy said.

‘’I think we can reduce cost by several billion to increase profits. They spent over a billion on sports advertising. Nobody buys a Verizon phone because their name is on several stadiums, sports cars in all the different classes, racing boats of all series. All so the executives can go to these events and set in the front row. You buy a phone because of the service and price,’’ Marcy said.

‘’I can eliminate another billion in cost by closing down the group that deals with the stock market and stock holders, it’s over five hundred employees hopefully in six months I can eliminate them, ‘’ Marcy said.

‘’Their fleet offers more savings; I’m going to stop all purchases for a couple years and extent the in-service time for all vehicles, that should save two hundred fifty million a year,’’ Marcy said.

‘’And then there is that monstrosity of a building in New York for corporate headquarters worth five hundred million and we are not paying the crazy New York City property tax for that thing. As soon as the towers are done all the corporate operations will be moved here,’’ Marcy said.

‘’Are all the other companies you are looking suffering from the same over abundance issues,’’ I asked.

‘’Yes; and worse,’’ Marcy replied.

An agent knocked on the door and handed me a note. I read it and went to get dressed.