Saving Justice by James Comey

Saving Justice by James Comey

Author:James Comey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flatiron Books


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Maybe it was something in the James River’s water that brought great cases to the big houses on the river bluffs. Just a half mile downriver from the politico and the fake heiress lived another prominent Richmond transplant, Baron Otto von Bressensdorf. The silver-haired founder of Lyons Capital owned the eleven-thousand-square-foot Tudor Revival mansion named Doolough Lodge by its original owners in 1920, an homage to their ancestral home in County Clare, Ireland. An application for the National Register of Historic Places noted the “steeply pitched slate-clad gable and hipped roofs, projecting castellated bays, wooden casement windows, and tall brick chimneys with terra-cotta pots.… Interestingly, the rectangular-shaped house is set with its short end to the river where a fieldstone terrace provides a commanding view.” Doolough Lodge suited the baron.

Each morning, he made the short drive in his Rolls-Royce to Lyons Capital’s richly decorated offices, adorned with mementos of a life well lived and well rewarded. The baron was not only of royal German ancestry but also the scion of a European banking family going back hundreds of years. His family’s generations of success had been interrupted only by the war years in Germany, when he was forced to flee the Nazis and risked his life to join Italian resistance fighters bent on killing Hitler.

After the war, he gained the trust of American authorities by using his financial genius to help administer Marshall Plan funds. The connections he gained from that effort helped him rebuild the family business from the smoking crater of Hamburg. Once rebuilt, that business—which became Lyons Capital—consisted of a network of hundreds of agents around the world, just waiting for the opportunity to arrange funding for worthy entrepreneurial projects. Much of the funding came from the baron’s equally impressive connections to European pension funds and other Continental sources of capital. He would travel periodically to Europe with a briefcase full of American projects needing funding and lay these before his European peers, who were hungry to invest in Lyons’s clients.

After the baron emigrated to the United States, his star only continued to rise. He and Lyons Capital first settled in Los Angeles. Despite being a continent away, the baron continued to be well regarded by the United States government in Washington. In fact, President George H. W. Bush honored him with the nation’s highest civilian award, the Presidential Order of Merit. He was also one of only a very few individuals to be honored while still living by having their names inscribed on the wall at the Ronald Wilson Reagan Eternal Flame of Freedom in Washington. It was his continual need to be in Washington—where he was a member of the National Republican Senatorial Committee—that led him to relocate Lyons from Los Angeles to Richmond in 1993; as an added benefit, the time-zone change made it easier to deal with his many European business contacts.

In both Los Angeles and Richmond, Lyons was an extraordinarily successful venture capital firm, finding funding for at least 70 percent—and perhaps as high as 90 percent—of the firm’s clients.



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