Why do people follow horrific orders when they have a clear chance to say no? That is the question Chapter 8 of Ordinary Men tries to answer, and the answers are more unsettling than you might expect.
Birkenfeld showed up at a French courthouse handing out free copies of his own book. An armed guard told him to stop selling. “I’m not selling them,” he said. “They’re free. Want one?” The cop hid a copy inside his body armor.
Some of the men came out of the woods covered head to toe in blood and bone fragments. Their uniforms were soaked. Their hands were shaking. And the day was not even close to being over.
So what do you do when you walk out of prison and find $104 million waiting in your bank account? If you’re Birkenfeld, you stand on a cold New Hampshire beach watching a sailboat fight the waves and think: yeah, that’s me.
A fifty-three-year-old career policeman stands before five hundred men at dawn, tears running down his face, and tells them their job today is to murder fifteen hundred people. Then he says something no one expects: if you cannot do it, you can step out. No punishment. No consequences. Just walk away.
Birkenfeld turned prison into a comedy show. This is the second half of Chapter 14 in my Lucifer’s Banker Uncensored retelling series.
Before the middle-aged policemen of Battalion 101 ever set foot in Poland, the machinery of mass murder was already grinding at full speed. Chapter 6 is not really about the battalion yet. It is about the nightmare they were walking into.
The chapter opens with a guy named Lopez sprinting out of the barracks, blowing through a fire door, and making a run for the woods. A fat guard they called Waddles wheezes after him. No chance. Lopez is gone.
These were dock workers, truck drivers, and salesmen. Guys pushing forty with bad knees and families back home. And they were about to be sent to Poland to do things none of them could have imagined a few years earlier.
Fort Lauderdale. August. Hot enough to melt your shoes. Birkenfeld walks into a federal courtroom to learn how many years he will spend in prison. The man who blew the lid off the biggest banking scandal in history is about to get sentenced like a common criminal.