Preet Bharara:

It’s a Monday night in January of 2007, and Hassan Nemazee is at a party.  

It’s no ordinary party, because Nemazee is no ordinary guy… he does not have ordinary friends. The party is in honor of Terry McAuliffe – a powerful political fundraiser, who will go on to become the governor of Virginia. McAuliffe is celebrating his new memoir, with a big party at the Four Seasons.

The Four Seasons is legendary. It’s where the term power lunch was invented. Go there for lunch, and you’ll find a handful of the Forbes top 500. 

This particular night, the guest list is stacked. Barbara Walters is at the party. So’s Harvey Weinstein. And Al Sharpton… even Bill Clinton is there. 

Guests nibble hors d’oeuvres. They pose for pictures. In a few photos, you see Hassan Nemazee with his buddy McAullife. Nemazee’s wearing a bright red tie and a self-satisfied smile. The whole thing is sure to end up in the society pages. 

Nemazee is one of them... New York high society. He’s got a reputation as a family man, a generous philanthropist, and one of the most effective political money men in New York. 

I’m Preet Bharara, and this is Doing Justice. 

Today…a story about how a great reputation—and a whole lot of money—can distract people from the truth. 

I had only been in office ten days when my first new major case as US Attorney hit my desk. Luckily I had a team of trusted colleagues, like John Hillebrecht. John and I had worked together during my years at SDNY before I became his boss. 

John Hillebrecht:

And while I was, I was happy, because I expected, given what I knew of your judgment and other things, that you would be an extremely good US Attorney. But from a personal note, when a guy, you know. You know, leaves the office and comes back and is your boss when you used to hang out together, go to lunch together and get drinks together. You know, it’s time to leave. 

Preet Bharara:

One of John’s last investigations at SDNY, was the fast-moving fraud case of Hassan Nemazee. 

For our office, it all started late in the afternoon on a Friday in August 2009. Day 1.

A muggy summer day. The Yankees were about to face off against the Red Sox in the first of a three-game series. 

John Hillebrecht was on his way out of the office for the weekend when his phone rang. 

John Hillebrecht:

So I get a call from, from an agent. Her name was DaLynn Barker. Who turned out to be a very good and dogged agent and gave me the kind of basic rundown of the situation involving Mr. Nemazee.

Preet Bharara:

The agent told him that the FBI had received a tip from an investigator at Citibank. 

John Hillebrecht:

They had reason to believe that a very, very large loan, that had been made to him, had been obtained under false pretenses. 

Preet Bharara:

What was the size of the loan? 

John Hillebrecht:

It was $74.9 million.

Preet Bharara:

Nearly 75 million dollars – that was a lot of money. 

John started looking into the information the FBI had collected so far. 

John Hillebrecht:

There’s a flurry of phone calls that afternoon between me and the agents. And then getting kind of in dribs and drabs, a bunch of documents that showed accounts and a list of assets and things like that. And pretty quickly they began to get suspicious. 

Preet Bharara:

They were looking through things like bank statements and other financial documents from Nemazee showing he was able to pay off the loan. 

One of the documents showed that Nemazee had nearly a hundred million dollars in treasury notes at a company called Pershing. But Pershing’s address in the letterhead was wrong. 

Something wasn’t adding up.

John Hillebrecht:

Well yeah, more than. By, by that point. I’d say, you know, smelled really rotten. So it was clear that there were irregularities, let us put it that way.

Preet Bharara:

The FBI agents told John they were going to work on the case through the weekend. So John went home to his place in Brooklyn, watched the Yankees clobber the Red Sox, and went to bed. 

Day 2. Saturday. 

FBI Agent Dalynn Barker was the lead agent on the case. Citibank had tipped her off about Nemazee’s possible fraud. 

At that point, Special Agent Barker had been working white-collar financial cases with the FBI for a few years. 

Dalynn Barker:

I’m definitely not the typical person I think that folks would think of of an FBI agent. Um, I grew up in a small town in Texas. You know, blonde, high school cheerleader. But my dad had been in the Navy and my mom was my high school government teacher and really was drawn to public service.

Preet Bharara:

It was 2009 in the wake of the mortgage crisis and banks were becoming more diligent in their loan processes. 

Dalynn Barker:

I do think that banks, during this time, were actually reevaluating a lot of their documentation processes. And, you know, I can only presume that this bank was doing that as well in regards to large scale loans that they had. 

Preet Bharara:

It was a little odd that the bank would be raising a flag about Nemazee’s loan now – he’d been borrowing from Citibank for years. And not small amounts – 

Nemazee borrowed millions of dollars at a time, and always made his payments. 

It looks like he spent the money on things like Domino’s pizza, movie theater tickets and food orders from Seamless.. a trip to Palm Beach for New Year’s, mortgage payments, and shopping at Christian Dior and Bergdorf Goodman.  

But earlier that month, when a Citibank representative called Nemazee about his loan, the bank rep mentioned that they would be confirming some info with Pershing. They wanted to verify his assets. Prove he was good for the money. But Nemazee told them not to. He said that he’d rather pay off the loan balance than be verified.

Then, over the next few days, Nemazee provided Citibank with two statements to show that he had enough money to pay back the loan. One was the Pershing statement with the wrong address, and another one, supposedly from a separate firm called Westminster Securities. 

When Agent Barker started digging into the documents, she noticed that both had the same phone number listed on the letterhead. So she took a closer look at Nemazee. 

Dalynn Barker:

He had a, I believe it was a $20 million apartment on Park Avenue. You know, multi-million dollar home up in Katonah, New York. Those things would suggest that he was an individual of influence. 

Preet Bharara:

She found some basic information about Nemazee’s background. 

His parents were very wealthy – his dad was an Iranian shipping magnate. He went to Harvard and started Nemazee Capital, a firm that invested in private companies. They supposedly had two billion dollars under management. 

So Nemazee was rich on paper…  and visibly rich. He drove a blue Maserati Quattroporte. He stayed in all the flashiest hotels and ate in all the right places. You may have heard of some of them:

Michael Gross:

The Breakers and, Cipriani, Cafe Milano in Washington.

Preet Bharara:

Michael Gross is a journalist and bestselling author who’s spent decades covering the lifestyles of America’s wealthiest – the people who ended up in the society pages. 

Michael Gross:

You know, he took limousines. His wife shopped at Missoni and Zegna and Hermes and Dior. He was signaling his affluence and his influence. 

Preet Bharara:

And Nemazee lived at the right address… and in New York high society that’s a big deal. 

Michael Gross:

It’s a way of showing your bank book without showing your net worth. There was a writer named Tom Wolfe who, who coined the phrase “the good buildings.” And The Good Buildings were a handful of Park Avenue, Fifth Avenue, apartment houses. And those buildings had a certain cachet. 

Preet Bharara:

Nemazee and his family lived in one of the “good buildings,” 

770 Park on the Upper East Side, just two blocks from Central Park. 

This is an apartment for very, very rich people.  You know, the idea that you would have an apartment with three or four staff rooms in it. That’s that’s rooms for your maid and your butler to sleep in. Plus a study. Plus a library. Plus a laundry room. 

Michael Gross:

Most people’s apartments in New York are smaller than the laundry rooms at 770 Park Avenue. 

Preet Bharara:

770 Park is known for being full of exceedingly wealthy political donors. Liberal ones. Nemazee fit right in. He’d given generously, mostly to Democrats, and had been a top donor to Obama and both Clintons. 

Agent Barker was starting to get a picture of who Nemazee was. His prominence. His influence. His status. 

Normally, she’d spend time digging more deeply into his financial status, and the questions about his collateral…

But Agent Barker saw that Nemazee was booked on a flight to Rome… a flight the next day. 

He was supposedly going to meet his family on their yacht, but Nemazee knew that Citibank was asking questions about his loan… and in Italy, he’d be out of SDNY’s reach. What if he was planning to leave and never come back? 

DaLynn Barker:

Sometimes we might want to spend weeks or months conducting an investigation before a conversation. But when we learned that Mr. Nemazee had travel planned outside of the country, we decided that we needed to have a conversation with him pretty quickly. 

Preet Bharara:

Sunday August 23rd. Day Three. 

John Hillebrecht:

Hillebrecht: I get a call and am advised by the agents that, well, we’re not going to have that much time because this guy is leaving town. And he was, he had a flight outta, I believe it was Newark. That he was supposed to take that evening.

Preet Bharara:

John kicked into gear. His team had only a few hours to decide what to do, and the stakes were high. Not just because of the potential crime itself, but also because of who Nemazee was. 

John Hillebrecht:

You know, if we turned out we were wrong, you know, you’re going to get egg on your face. Which is not to say I haven’t had egg on my face before, but you want to make sure you’ve got your ducks in a row. You want to make sure you’ve, you’ve, you’ve been thorough and appropriately thorough.

Preet Bharara:

But the truth was, John hadn’t had the chance to be appropriately thorough. He’d only known about Nemazee for a weekend. 

John Hillebrecht:

We really hadn’t buttoned this down. Among other things. I hadn’t even seen a lot of the evidence. And I’m talking about the evidence that the agents had already seen. But then they found a whole bunch more stuff on Friday and Saturday that, that, that I had not, yet had a chance to actually eyeball.

That’s not the way you make a decision to charge, charge a person.

Preet Bharara:

Plus, Nemazee didn’t have any other history of wrongdoing. John needed to make a call fast, but he didn’t want to make it on his own.

John Hillebrecht:

I’m a chain of command guy, and I’m also a cover my rear end guy. You don’t want to act precipitously. 

Preet Bharara:

John went to deputy US Attorney Boyd Johnson. And Boyd, my longtime friend and trusted number 2, made the call that it needed to go further up the chain… so the two of them turned up in my office.

It was late Sunday morning, only ten days after I had been sworn in as US Attorney. I was in the office reading up on cases I hadn’t been briefed on yet. 

John Hillebrecht:

I remember you were in jeans and I think a tee shirt. and, and, there were a lot of boxes around. 

Preet Bharara:

John talked me through the situation. 

John Hillebrecht:

And we were both kind of like wow. In some respects, I was a little bit, wow, this is kind of like fast moving. It’s a lot of money. And by then I knew this guy was a big guy. He was a prominent guy. So it was kind of a constellation of things that one way or the other is going to get in the newspapers. Right? which is, which is, you know, good or bad, depending on which way it gets in the newspaper.

Preet Bharara:

It was tricky. This was the first high-profile case of my tenure, and it wasn’t going to look good if we  mistakenly arrested a well-respected philanthropist. There were reputations at stake – on one hand, mine and the Southern Districts’… and on the other, Nemazee’s.

To me, the fact that he was politically connected wasn’t important. US Attorney is an apolitical job. What was important was that we needed to avoid causing undue harm to Nemazee’s reputation. And to protect  the credibility of the US Attorney’s office and the FBI. 

We needed to make a decision immediately, because his flight was just hours away. We knew we had only a few options. One – confront him at the airport and arrest him. 

We didn’t think an arrest was a great option – We knew we had some evidence that he had forged documents. But did we have enough?

John Hillebrecht:

Obviously you don’t want to wrongly arrest somebody. You also don’t want to hesitate and let a scam artist get on a plane and leave, you know, with all his ill gotten goods.

Preet Bharara:

The second option was to just go talk to him. Meet him in the airport, and just ask a few questions.

John Hillebrecht:

And then, you know, there are a couple of ideal outcomes. You know, he makes an admission. That’s that solidifies the case. Right. Then it’s easy. Then you arrest him. 

Preet Bharara:

If he lied to us, we could arrest him too. But it seemed risky. 

What if he didn’t lie, didn’t give us cause to arrest him, and got on that plane?

But there was a third choice… what if we didn’t arrest him, but just asked him to stay in the country? John was dubious.

John Hillebrecht:

Initially, I, I kinda thought that was, well, all right. They can ask who’s going to say yes to that. Right?

Preet Bharara:

But we didn’t have many other options, and it was worth a try. 

John Hillebrecht:

Hillebrecht: I think we all decided the proper thing to do is, you know, to be respectful to him and not, you know, not pound the pavement and threaten him and call them a liar from the get go. Just like some questions have arisen. 

Preet Bharara:

John regrouped with the FBI agents on the case.

This is Special Agent Barker. 

Dalynn Barker:

At the time that we made the decision to approach Mr. Nemazee at the airport that Sunday night, I wasn’t sure, you know, how he would react. He obviously had had some requests from Citibank to provide documents, so he might’ve been aware that there were going to be additional questions. I also would guess that he didn’t expect those questions to come from the FBI. 

Preet Bharara:

Someone like Nemazee, who knew the power of appearances, might not react well when approached by federal agents. In public. Where someone could take photos that could end up in the press. 

It was Sunday evening, Day Three, when Special Agent Dalynn Barker and her partner got in a car outside of the FBI headquarters in Manhattan. 

The two of them arrived at Newark a few hours before Hassan Nemazee would need to be at the airport. 

Dalynn Barker:

I remember it was actually pretty quiet there. We immediately recognized Mr. Nemazee as he entered the airport, you know, near the check-in counter. 

Preet Bharara:

I don’t know what was going through his mind when two FBI agents in suits walked up to him. 

Maybe he thought there was some kind of mistake. Or maybe he thought he could easily talk his way out of whatever was coming. Or maybe he thought that he was about to be arrested in front of dozens of people.

But Agent Barker and her partner took it easy. They told Nemazee that they had some questions about his recent loan from Citibank. They showed him some documents, and asked if he had been the person to submit them. He said yes. 

Dalynn Barker:

Mr. Nemazee was very compliant. Very cooperative, you know, nice. Was willing to answer questions, but was mostly reassuring us that this was a misunderstanding.

Preet Bharara:

Then, the agents asked Nemazee if he’d voluntarily stay in the country while they worked out this so-called misunderstanding.

Dalynn Barker:

I was surprised that, that he was willing to stay. 

Preet Bharara:

Meanwhile, John Hillebrecht was at his house with the third Yankees game on… waiting on pins and needles to hear from the agents. 

John Hillebrecht:

It was a long pause between my last call and the call on which they told me, he had agreed not to get on the plane. I was, like, unbelievable. I was shocked.

Preet Bharara:

John filled me in, and we all breathed a collective sigh of relief. We avoided the doomsday scenario, where Nemazee would flee the country never to be seen again. Now John and the FBI could take some time with the evidence and figure out how to proceed.

But then, two hours later, John’s phone rang.

John Hillebrecht:

And I’m still watching the Yankees game. 

Preet Bharara:

It was Nemazee’s lawyer, Marc Mukasey. At SDNY, we were pretty familiar with Marc – he used to work with us there and lately, he’d been on the opposite side of a handful of white-collar cases.  

John Hillebrecht:

And Marc says, representing his client, it’s all a misunderstanding. You know, it’s all gonna get straightened out. Don’t worry about it. I know this guy. Any, any kind of, you know, kind of vouches for him. Frankly, as somebody he knows as a, as a member of the community 

Preet Bharara:

Then… Marc said that Nemazee would pay the whole 74.9 million dollars back to Citibank… the next day.

John Hillebrecht:

 So my first reaction was: Oh my God, I messed up.

Preet Bharara:

You have to understand – paying back seventy-five million dollars overnight is a pretty tall order. Even the wealthiest people would have quite a bit of trouble coming up with that kind of cash on short notice. And it was a Sunday!

John Hillebrecht:

So if he’s really got, you know, 70, another $75 million laying around, you have some indication that maybe the whole premise of our theory was lacking a basis. That’s kinda my immediate reaction. 

Preet Bharara:

I went to bed that night thinking, well, first: thank god we didn’t arrest the guy. And, I was glad the Yankees had won that last game of the series.

Day four. Monday morning. John was back in my office. 

John Hillebrecht:

I think I said something along the lines of, you are not going to believe it just happened.

Preet Bharara:

Well, I, my recollection is slightly different. I think you said exactly that except you included an F-bomb.

John Hillebrecht:

I neither confirm or deny that. 

Preet Bharara:

Nemazee had paid off the whole 74.9 million dollars before noon. I slumped back in my chair. Holy crap. 

But John looked at me and said, you know what, I’m still not convinced the guy’s clean. 

John Hillebrecht:

A guy pays back $75 million in a couple of hours, effectively, right. There was evidence that there was something, you know, as we say, fugazy about the documentation that he gave to Citibank. You know, there’s something weird here, so let’s figure it out.

Preet Bharara:

Around SDNY, John’s a bit of a legend. He’s a monster trial lawyer, and an expert in the art of getting evidence admitted in court. This hunch he had, though, that something was up with this repayment? 

It seemed improbable at best. He walked out the door and pressed forward with the FBI agents.

A few hours later, John and Boyd were back in my office. 

There was something screwy with the repayment.

Agent Barker had traced the money that had been wired to Citibank. Turns out — that money came from another loan.

DaLynn Barker:

That was particularly interesting. Paying off the loan to me was an act of saying you have questions. You know, the easiest way for him to resolve those questions was to actually pay off the loan. And to me concerning that, that was a simpler, solution to Mr. Nemazee than actually providing the detail that was requested around the collateral. 

John Hillebrecht:

Which you know, is, is a degree of chutzpa. Because instead of being a guy who had some kind of problem with his paperwork with Citibank, but otherwise was a, you know, above board kind of guy, when we now had some significant evidence of, is the guy’s a serial fraudster. 

…and he’s a serial fraudster to the tune of, you know, an excess, a hundred million dollars. 

Preet Bharara:

A serial fraudster. 

A hundred and fifty million dollars.

In the federal system, punishment is linked to the dollar value of the fraud. And Nemazee had doubled his fraud in an instant. 

Monday morning, I thought the guy could be innocent. But by lunch time, it looked like we had a major Ponzi schemer on our hands. Because that’s what he was doing – he was paying back his loan with another loan.

And look at who he was scamming! Hassan Nemazee simply strolled into the lobby of Bank of America and persuaded a second sophisticated financial institution to part with $75 million dollars. That takes a hell of a lot of clout. 

And Nemazee had used his seemingly extravagant wealth to build that clout, brick by brick. 

Michael Gross:

People who want influence, buy it by generating cash for the people who can hand out influence. Ie., politicians. 

Preet Bharara:

Journalist Michael Gross says that if you want to be influential, there’s only one thing you need.

Michael Gross:

You know, there’s a saying in New York, it doesn’t matter if you’re red or blue, as long as you have green.

Preet Bharara:

Nemazee, of course, had personally donated—pretty generously—to a long list of politicians. 

But he also was an active fundraiser on behalf of big-D Democratic presidential campaigns. Al Gore and Joe Biden had been to fundraisers at Nemazee’s Park Avenue apartment.

He’d spent decades using his money to make friends in the political establishment. Gross says there are two ways to gain influence with a politician.

Michael Gross:

You either give him your own money. Or you get money from all your friends, but you’re responsible for quote unquote, bundling it, putting it all together and handing it in a beautifully wrapped package to politician A, B or C. And if you become valuable enough, in terms of not just money, but the connections you offer. And enough money can buy you a job for instance.

Preet Bharara:

Nemazee got really close to one of those jobs in Bill Clinton’s second term. After he bundled for Bill Clinton’s re-election, Clinton nominated Nemazee to be the Ambassador to Argentina. But his name was withdrawn from the vetting process when some questions about his business dealings came up. 

It was embarrassing, yes. But it didn’t seem to do much harm to Nemazee’s reputation. I guess money talks louder. 

Now, the politicians Nemazee donated to didn’t help him get loans at Citibank or HSBC or anywhere else… but the reputation Nemazee was able to build through his political, philanthropic, and other rich-guy activities seemed to go a long way with the banks. 

But they didn’t faze John and Agent Barker. 

They started collecting the facts they needed for an arrest warrant… beginning with the mysterious Pershing and Westminster statements… and they found that the signatures at the bottom were forgeries.

They also figured out that the phone number that appeared at the bottom of both statements belonged to none other than Hassan Nemazee himself. 

We later found out that Nemazee, who wasn’t very good with computers, had been using his brother-in-law to create the false documents. And his brother-in-law wasn’t exactly a professional forger either. 

DaLynn Barker:

And that individual, if you could imagine was actually in some ways really just cut and pasting, the way your kid might make something for an art project, and then providing them to Mr. Nemazee.

John Hillebrecht:

It was not a sophisticated fraud in, in my view, by any stretch of the imagination. Pershing and Westminster are relatively well known financial institutions, with which Citibank and the other banks dealt regularly. Somebody could have very easily uh, found out pretty quickly that there was something wrong with these documents. 

Preet Bharara:

The picture of American success that Nemazee presented fooled the banks… they essentially skipped their due diligence. 

John Hillebrecht:

And I think, you know, the way you get away with that kind of stuff is you portray yourself as he certainly did here as a guy with hundreds of millions of dollars who would be a really good client for one of these banks to have.

Preet Bharara:

The investigation that had started with a bang just days before, now revealed that Nemazee had also defrauded Bank of America, HSBC and Citibank. At the end of the day, the total amount of money involved in the fraud? More than 290 million dollars.

Hassan Nemazee was arrested that Monday evening – one day after Agent Barker had confronted him at Newark.

DaLynn Barker:

I do recall on the day that he was arrested, he drove himself, to the New York office of the FBI in his Maserati, which we also seized as part of the investigation.

Preet Bharara:

So why would a guy that clearly had wealth risk everything by forging documents? 

DaLynn Barker:

I don’t believe that Mr Nemazee ever expected to be caught. He clearly had, you know, a belief in himself that. He, what he was doing was right, and that it was what was necessary for his wife and his children. 

I don’t know that I would use the word greed, although obviously amassing this kind of wealth and apartments and homes, would lend itself to someone seeing that as greedy. But he’s certainly, I think, was drawn to power, right? I think that he wanted to be seen as in a position of power and wealth in this case, I think allowed him to be in that position.

Preet Bharara:

I watched the reaction to Nemazee’s arrest with curiosity. Politicians scrambled to return his donations. Friends announced their shock. In one news article, an anonymous financier was quoted as saying, “People really liked the guy – even my wife, who can generally smell a rat from a mile away. But for this fraud, he was one of the nicest, most respectable, urbane, well-read persons you could ever hope to meet.” 

But for this fraud… there’s a lot in that statement. It’s a hell of a caveat. 

I’m sure Nemazee came off as a good guy. His charisma, his philanthropy, it all played a big part in his ability to pull off the fraud. And he really did donate a lot of money to good causes. 

The fact is – and this is something I really stand by – you can’t really know a person… I mean, REALLY know them.

Because Hasan Nemazee spent years lying his way into a gold-plated fantasy. His victims, besides the banks, were his wife and kids. They had to move out of their home… and see their family name all over the news… 

Reporter (archival):

Before being indicted, Hasan Nemazee was big time.

Reporter (archival):

Hassan Nemazee ran a Ponzi scheme.

Reporter (archival):

Nemazee was one of the biggest bundlers for Barack Obama

Jon Stewart (Daily Show, archival):

Ah! your first disgraced fundraiser as president! Mazel tov! [bells ding] 

Preet Bharara:

No page six this time, the Nemazee case was in the headlines for months. 

Nemazee ended up pleading guilty to three counts of bank fraud and one count of wire fraud. He was sentenced to twelve years in prison. He had to forfeit his Park Avenue apartment, his estates in Katonah and Rome, the yacht, the Maserati, and 93 million dollars in cash and securities. 

At the end of it, his wealth—and clout—were gone. Here’s Michael Gross.

Michael Gross:

I think that somebody who is high on this kind of life can’t even contemplate falling. And I think that the fall would be terribly devastating. I think that they’re running as fast as they can, and they figure that as long as they can keep those little legs moving, they’re going to be able to keep staying one step ahead of Preet Bharara.

Preet Bharara:

For me, the Nemazee affair was a spine-developing moment. You want to make sure you’re holding everyone accountable for crimes they have committed, but you don’t want to embarrass yourself – especially ten days into the job. We all have reputations to uphold. The key is to walk the line so your caution doesn’t paralyze you, and when you need to be more aggressive, you know you’re not being reckless. There’s no precise scale for balancing those things in the delivery of justice, yet they have to be balanced. 

That’s the job. 

From CAFE, this is Doing Justice, produced in collaboration with Transmitter Media. 

This episode was written by Lacy Roberts and produced by Shoshi Shmuluvitz. 

This podcast is based on my bestselling book, Doing Justice: A Prosecutor’s Thoughts on Crime, Punishment and the Rule of Law, which you can find at doing justice book dot com, and wherever books are sold.

We had production help from Jessica Glazer. Our editor is Sara Nics and executive producer is Gretta Cohn. 

The executive producer at Cafe studios is Tamara Sepper. And the chief business officer is Geoff Isenman. 

Meral Agish fact checked this episode. And Hannis Brown composed our original music and was our mix engineer for this series. 

I’m Preet Bharara. 

Next time… SDNY fights for a victim who never expected justice.

Tatiana Martins: I was incredibly concerned that there was going to be a lot of slut shaming. And that this was going to be a ‘put the victim on trial’ kind of trial, which in fact, it did turn out to be that in a lot of ways.