Wes Jordan Arranges for Roger to Win Charlie’s Support for Fareek

Wes Jordan’s plan to enlist Charlie Croker in Fareek Fanon’s defense makes Roger White the intermediary between a politically explosive accusation and a business leader on the brink of financial ruin. The proposed alliance is not a request for legal testimony: it is a carefully constructed public-relations bargain, in which Croker’s standing as a former athlete is meant to steady the city while his debt crisis supplies leverage. The scene exposes how Jordan intends to turn civic responsibility into a transaction, and how much of that transaction depends on Croker first meeting Fareek.

The proposed intermediary

Jordan redirects the conversation to what he calls their man, Charlie Croker. He presents Croker as unusually suited to defend Fareek because Croker once had a public identity as The Sixty-Minute Man, a name people recognized on the street. In Jordan’s account, Croker’s sports career would help him understand the pressure on a prominent athlete: public resentment, jealousy, and the speed with which observers seize on a perceived fault. Jordan judges the timing urgent because he expects the controversy to break open soon.

Roger does not accept this reasoning without reservation. He senses a missing link in Jordan’s logic, but initially gives little away. The hesitation matters: Jordan’s case rests less on a demonstrated connection between Croker and Fareek than on the possibility that Croker’s experience and stature can be made to serve a public purpose. Jordan nevertheless describes him as the essential figure, or someone like him, who might prevent Atlanta from splitting along its racial fault line.

Public order and the press conference

Jordan frames the Fanon case as a threat to the city, arguing that it reaches deep into white fears and could produce damage on a scale he associates with earlier racial crises. He imagines Croker’s participation as a means of keeping that conflict from becoming a wider rupture. Roger supplies the image of a racial fault line, and Jordan adopts it as the central description of what is at stake.

The plan is deliberately not to put Croker at a protest or rally. Jordan says the setting should be a press conference whose stated purpose is to urge calm and restraint. Within that appeal to public order, Jordan intends to emphasize that men, including Black male athletes, have rights too. Croker would then strengthen the message by describing Fareek as a fine young man and warning against the pressures and vilification directed at young athletes. The proposed role is therefore carefully limited in form but consequential in effect: Croker is not being asked to establish what happened in court, but to lend his name and public credibility to one side of a highly charged dispute.

Roger immediately questions the basis for Croker to praise Fareek. He points out that Croker may never have met him, except perhaps by seeing him from the stands. Jordan’s answer makes the meeting a necessary step rather than an optional flourish. Croker must meet Fareek, get to know him, and emerge ready to speak favorably on the record. Jordan even suggests that Croker might see something in Fareek that others have missed, though the plan depends on that possibility becoming a public endorsement.

The debt bargain

Jordan’s proposed civic alliance is inseparable from Croker’s financial emergency. He tells Roger that PlannersBanc has already seized Croker’s corporate jet, a Gulfstream Five, and that Croker is close to losing everything. A defense of Fareek delivered while Croker is visibly collapsing could be dismissed as the gesture of a failed, overreaching developer. Jordan therefore argues that the bank should restructure Croker’s debt so that his public intervention does not coincide with his exposure as a major commercial-real-estate debtor.

Jordan casts such relief as being in the city’s long-term interest and as a debt of gratitude the city could owe Croker if he takes the political risk. Roger asks where he fits into this arrangement. Jordan’s answer is precise: Roger, as counsel for Fareek, should explain the facts to Croker. Jordan himself must stay out of the approach because his involvement could be misinterpreted. Roger is not to ask Croker to testify or pronounce on the law; he is to invite Croker to make a judgment in the arena of public opinion.

The explanation Roger is supposed to give joins the two sides of the bargain. Croker can be told that Fareek deserves a favorable public judgment, and that supporters of Fareek are positioned to help ensure that banking interests restructure Croker’s loans on highly favorable terms. Jordan wants Roger to make Croker feel that his intervention would protect both the city and his own credibility at a pivotal moment. He also furnishes a flattering rationale tailored to Croker: no other Atlanta business leader has a sports career like Fareek’s, and Croker’s past gives him a distinctive authority to speak.

A field experiment in politics

Jordan recognizes that a verbal promise from an unfamiliar lawyer may not persuade Croker. His solution is to offer what he calls a practical demonstration: Roger should tell Croker to meet Fareek first and decide afterward whether to participate. If Croker agrees to speak at the press conference, communications from PlannersBanc about his outstanding loans are to cease immediately. The threatened and promised consequences are thus made testable within the plan: Croker is invited to judge Fareek personally, while the suspension of bank pressure is presented as evidence that Jordan can deliver relief.

Roger asks whether Jordan can actually arrange that suspension. Jordan concedes that if he cannot, the proposed demonstration will fail, but says he is not worried. That confidence does not establish that the bank has agreed, or that Croker will accept the proposal. It shows instead how Jordan expects political influence to operate: a public appeal can be made credible by coupling it to an immediate material concession.

Croker’s background complicates the clean civic image Jordan wants to build around him. Jordan notes that the sixty-year-old developer owns a 29,000-acre plantation in Baker County called Turpmtine. The name refers to the estate’s former turpentine crop, extracted from pine trees, and Jordan recounts that resin work was regarded as exceptionally harsh. He also tells Roger that Croker uses a racist name for the Black workers associated with the place. The detail sits uneasily beside Jordan’s hope that Croker will become a persuasive advocate for Fareek, underscoring that the proposed intervention is a political calculation, not proof of Croker’s moral consistency.

Jordan’s arrangement ends not with a secured endorsement but with a sequence of conditions: Roger must approach Croker; Croker must meet Fareek; the meeting must produce favorable words; and PlannersBanc must stop pressing its claims if Croker agrees to speak. Jordan presents the sequence as a lesson in how politics works, rather than as an argument whose logic alone will prevail. His plan makes the city’s racial crisis, Croker’s public reputation, and his imminent financial loss parts of the same negotiation.