Nassau

Nassau is the setting for Raymond Peepgass’s attempt to transform an offshore company into a source of wealth and leverage. The city frustrates his picture of a polished tropical resort: its cramped colonial streets, tourist bustle, and discreet financial addresses instead make it a place where grand expectations meet improvised realities. There, the brass nameplate of Colonial Real Properties, Ltd. becomes both a private emblem of Peepgass’s ambition and an instrument in his proposed deal for Croker Concourse.

A capital unlike the imagined resort

Before arriving, Peepgass had imagined Nassau as a tropical version of an elegant American resort, complete with palm trees, manicured lawns, white columns, shaded verandas, and smartly uniformed policemen directing traffic. The actual city, as he encounters it, has none of that crispness. It is a small, aging colonial capital whose patched and repainted buildings crowd together and seem to lean on one another. Peepgass judges that downtown is no larger than the Normandy Lea Apartments where he lives, a measure that makes the scale of the place feel especially modest beside his expectation of an expansive resort world.

His first impression is not simply disappointment. The gap between the imagined and the encountered Nassau establishes the city’s double character: it can appear unassuming at street level while participating in financial arrangements that reach far beyond its small center. Peepgass’s own view is also filtered through status-conscious expectations. He arrives with a picture of orderly tropical luxury, then has to make sense of a city that does not perform that picture for him.

George Street and the offshore address

At Number 23 George Street, the official address of Colonial Real Properties, Ltd., a narrow stairway begins barely a yard inside the entrance. Along the wall, forty-one brass plaques rise beside the stairs, bearing the names of American and European banks and corporations. First Gould Guaranty, one of New York’s largest banks, is among them. The newest and shiniest plaque belongs to Colonial Real Properties, Ltd.; Peepgass takes particular pleasure in seeing his company’s name among the established institutions.

The plaques promise more than the building contains. There is no office for Colonial Real Properties, Ltd. upstairs, but neither is there an office for First Gould Guaranty. The address is a dummy location used for overseas financial operations. Banks can use Bahamian arrangements to establish Eurodollar accounts, while individuals can place money in Bahamian banks under the protection of strict banking secrecy. Nassau’s reputation as Little Switzerland rests on this capacity to make a small place useful to much larger flows of money.

The city’s role in evading American restrictions has a longer history in the account. During the American Civil War, blockade runners used the Bahamas as a base for doing business with the Confederacy; during Prohibition, bootleggers used the islands for warehousing. At the time of Peepgass’s visit, drug dealers are using the Bahamas for a similar purpose. The mainland is near enough to keep the offshore setting accessible: Nassau is described as a thirty-minute flight from Miami and an hour from Atlanta. Peepgass does not seriously equate himself with famous smugglers or drug lords, but the corporate name engraved in brass gives his venture a tangible presence within this history of concealment.

A busy street and an old prison

Outside the corporate address, Nassau is crowded and noisy. Cars, mostly small Japanese models in Peepgass’s estimation, share the streets with motorbikes that sound like chainsaws, worn barouches and horses, and policemen blowing whistles. A vendor repeatedly calls out about doctor shells. Cruise passengers arriving at Prince George Docks spill onto the sidewalks, moving among shops and arcades and buying straw hats, conch shells, and souvenirs made from straw, wood, and glass.

Peepgass initially looks down on the scene as an image of restless idleness, then recognizes its usefulness. He has gone to considerable trouble and expense to dress like a tourist, and the visitors’ density gives him protective cover. His outfit—among it a floppy-brimmed straw hat, dark sunglasses, and a pale-blue short-sleeved sport shirt—lets him blend into the crowd he has just judged. Nassau is therefore not only a place for financial secrecy; its ordinary tourist traffic also offers a practical kind of concealment.

The city’s old library gives that concealment a more personal edge. Its circular room contains seven or eight open cubicles, shelves of books, and windows; at the center, a librarian can see into each one. The building had originally been a jail, and the cubicles were once cells with barred doors and windows. The librarian’s position recalls that of the warden who once watched the prisoners. Peepgass realizes that the circular prison had represented the latest in modern penology two centuries earlier, and the thought makes him freeze: his own overseas venture could expose him to incarceration if he missteps.

Peepgass’s business and Nassau’s purpose

That fear becomes a turning point rather than a retreat. Peepgass challenges himself not to remain a timid staff officer until PlannersBanc dismisses him, and leaves the library to meet Harvey Wyndham, his former Harvard Business School classmate. Harvey runs Arthur Wyndham & Son Realty, two blocks away. The firm’s name carries a history of its own: Harvey’s father added “& Son” when Harvey was still a child, partly as an affectionate hope and partly to suggest an established business. After trying his luck in the United States, Harvey returned to the Bahamas with his MBA and became the son his father had anticipated. He proved an able seller of island real estate to status-seeking Americans, Britons, and Germans, and eventually took over the firm.

Peepgass’s proposal uses Nassau’s discreet corporate infrastructure to link Harvey’s local brokerage to a syndicate’s planned purchase of Croker Concourse. He estimates an initial purchase price of about $50 million and a six-percent brokerage commission, or $3 million. He projects a resale in two or three years for about $120 million, which would yield a further $7.2 million in brokerage fees, and adds an estimated $300,000 in fees for leasing space in a building that is then less than half leased. His projected total is $10.5 million.

He proposes that Harvey’s firm handle the brokerage while Colonial Real Properties, Ltd. remains a modest, silent partner. For the initial sale, he offers Wyndham & Son one-third of the commission and his own company two-thirds, specifying that $2 million would be transferred to Colonial Real Properties under a contract drawn up and executed in Nassau. The scene establishes the city’s importance not through a completed transaction, but through the scheme Peepgass brings there: Nassau supplies the corporate address, the contractual setting, and the trusted local intermediary for an ambitious deal whose risks he has just imagined in the library’s former cells.