“I was trained to view these outsiders as my enemies, and some longtime guards at the bank did see them this way. Others wondered why such a clearly powerful and impervious institution seemed so afraid of the First Amendment. Perhaps the bank was aware of just how much could be discovered through a little scrutiny. While I never uncovered evidence of criminal wrongdoing out on the street, I found that plenty had occurred inside the building. Over the past three decades, the bank now known as BNY Mellon has accrued a long rap sheet of financial crimes, including bribery, foreign exchange fraud, and pension plundering. Just prior to the 2007 merger between the Bank of New York and Mellon Financial, the former paid $38 million in penalties after federal investigators found that it had helped move $7 billion in illicit funds. According to the 2020 disclosures in the FinCEN Files, one of the shadowy figures it worked with was Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch accused of, among other things, ordering the murder of an American banking executive. This information presented a more unsettling theory about my employment. Perhaps I hadn’t been hired to protect BNY from criminal elements, but was instead brought on to help shield a villainous enterprise from outside examination.”