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position.
    Ranked against that array of beautiful and influential people were the legions of broken men and women, their families and, indirectly, their friends whose lives had been destroyed by his financial predation and who had to stand helplessly and watch as their lives imploded. If any man could be said to have more enemies than friends, he would be Pangborn. Also, it should be noted, that there were a few people who had had the audacity to stand up to him, or threatened to expose him. If anyone had been keeping track, had made the connection between them and Pangborn, they would have been struck by how many others like them had died unexpectedly. In accidents, mostly, a few from natural causes. At least that was what their death certificates would say. Pangborn was not a man to be trifled with.
    His was not the usual rags to riches story—certainly not a Horatio Alger narrative. He started out poor. That part was true, but his rise to fame and fortune had a darker thread than the “hard work is its own reward” line one would like to read in Fortune . His mother deserted the family of six when Martin, the youngest, was three. His father celebrated her departure by getting very drunk, beating up two of his older sons and attempting to rape his only daughter. One of the brothers, the one who’d suffered the lightest beating, split the old man’s head open with a Louisville Slugger. The family was remanded to Child Protective Services and sent to a series of foster homes. All but Martin ended up in jail at one time or another. The daughter, his sister, died of a drug overdose on the Southside of Chicago late one December night. The heroin had been a Christmas present from her pimp.
    For the most part, Martin, because of his age, managed to avoid these and similar disasters and, indeed, was unaware of any of them until years later, after he had achieved some measure of success occasioned by the suspicious death of his foster father who had built a modest acquisition business. There was one important exception to an otherwise uneventful life as a foster child. Martin, fearful for his young life, would never reveal to anyone the things which occurred in his bedroom almost nightly, which was why the caseworker assigned to him would report that his life in foster care had been unremarkable and, given the usual foster care statistics, a positive experience. She did remark as an afterthought that he seemed reticent to communicate with her. Those terrible and painful nights defined the relationship Martin had with his male foster parent and ultimately conspired to bring that man to an early, deserved, but quite unexpected death.
    Later, Martin would spend a great deal of money to discover what had happened to his siblings. He bought a modest annuity, anonymously of course, for each of those who remained alive so that they would not starve—unless they chose to—and then proceeded to erase them from his conscience.
    In his search for guidance, for a lighthouse, he would say later, he came to admire one man, a conservative thinker and blogger named Drexel Franks. Franks claimed to be distantly related to Bobby Franks who, everyone knew, was the thrill-killing victim of Leopold and Loeb from the nineteen twenties. Martin had never heard of either Bobby Franks or Leopold and Loeb. He Googled their names and read the story. He’d had several clashes with Jewish business owners in the past and the story turned his nascent dislike of certain men into a simmering anti-Semitism. It was about this time he started his journey from cutthroat entrepreneur to demagogy.
    Drexel Franks also had a highly filtered view of the American Constitution and its provisions. In his view, the current administration was populated with “One Worlders” (it was never clear what he meant by that, but Martin grasped the essence), bleeding heart liberals, and traitors. The Second Amendment became Franks’ pivotal