Fiduciary Duty Read Online Free Page A

caught with its pants down. Surprisingly, despite the ineptitude of the Brazilian government, it followed through very successfully. They began by trying to encourage the production of vehicles that ran on ethanol. The government quickly realized that nobody would buy such cars, and thus no company would make them if the fuel wasn’t available. Since the government happened to own a chain of gas stations, it simply started selling ethanol even though the demand wasn’t there. For good measure, the government also placed an order for a few thousand vehicles that ran on ethanol. There were fits and starts, but as the number of vehicles that ran on something other than gasoline increased, competing service stations like Shell and Texaco began selling ethanol as well. That in turn further encouraged car buyers and car makers, and thirty some years later, the typical Brazilian driver had choices Americans didn’t.
    As I thought about that, I realized there was a lesson in there for me. If I was going to get results, I would need to think far ahead, and I would need to be flexible.
    I had already taken the first step with the anonymous credit cards purchased in Orlando. The next step was to obtain a completely anonymous phone. And just like in Orlando, complete anonymity meant not showing up on a store’s security camera. São Paulo, a disorganized megalopolis seemed like a good place to get these items. I drove around the city more or less randomly until I stumbled upon the Marriott Hotel just off Santo Amaro Avenue, a busy thoroughfare. I found a place to park and walked into the Marriott, all the while wondering who Saint Amaro was and what he did to attain Sainthood. After ten minutes in the lobby doing my best imitation of an American just off the plane, I got up, slipped my wedding ring into my pocket, walked out and hailed a cab.
    I told the cabbie in broken Portuguese that I was an Argentine businessman who would be in Brazil for three weeks and I needed a temporary cell phone. Not surprisingly, he knew just the place to take me. Ten minutes later, we were outside a convenience store with music blaring into the parking lot. I told the cabbie I had too much of a headache to deal with the music, and asked him to pick me up a phone with three “chips” on it, with 300 reais of credit on each one.
    To be honest, the real headache came from understanding the Brazilian cell-phone system. I had spent some time on message boards before leaving the US, and I never quite figured it out, but then it seems nobody else understood the Brazilian cell-phone system either. It was, however, readily apparent that if you didn’t know what you were doing, you could spend a fortune making cell-phone calls in Brazil. Each of the major phone operators charged different prices per minute depending on whether the phone call was to an in-network number and whether the phone call was to a local number. Adding to the complication, at least one and perhaps all three of the major operators (as with many things in Brazil, it was never quite clear) had instituted a very opaque system of “bonuses” whereby one “earned” credit back depending on, well, I had no idea and had never been able to track anyone who did.
    The cabbie soon returned with a nifty little phone that had three “chips” – that is, three separate SMS cards, meaning the phone itself had service through three of four major telephone operators in the country. That would keep most of my phone calls at a manageable rate.
    “Where to now, sir?” the cabbie asked.
    “Take me somewhere I can meet girls,” I said with a wink, “Clean girls.”
    He brought me to a nondescript building, “Here you are, Mr. Fernandez. If you still have a headache I can take care of this too.”
    I laughed, and tipped him a hundred dollars in American currency, confident that if he remembered anything about me in a few weeks, it would be for being asked to meet girls and the tip, not my face and