Now Korah… together with two hundred and fifty Israelites… combined against Moses and Aaron and said to them, “You have gone too far! For all the community are holy, all of them, and Adonai is in their midst. Why then do you raise yourselves above Adonai’s congregation?”

Korach Numbers 16-1

“I sold this company for a billion. After what those idiots have done to it, I wouldn’t buy it back for a nickel on the dollar!”

The air conditioning in the conference room was down for repairs. Matteo “Matti” Mottola had assembled his five direct reports for an emergency meeting, and they were all fanning themselves with pads of note paper they had brought in. Behind the pads, they were giving each other knowing eyebrow-raises. The Son of a Butcher was being himself.

“I can see those looks. Well, if I’m wrong, stand up and say so. The new management pays no attention to the expertise this team has built up over twenty years. We are a specialty retail food purveyor, not some mass-market cut-rate supermarket. The yahoos that have taken over are WAY out of their league, expanding into places where half the people are married to their cousin and walk barefoot to the NASCAR races.  They cut prices trying to sell to truck drivers when it’s the young urban professionals who appreciate what we have to offer and are willing to pay for it. So of course they’re bleeding money!”

Matti Mottola got his start working as a teenaged apprentice at his father’s butcher shop in Bensonhurst. The journeymen butchers resisted letting a kid loose with the sharp tools of the trade. They soon saw Matti cut into the carcasses with the enthusiasm of a Crusader.  In time, Matti took over the store and then expanded it across the five boroughs and then the Eastern Seaboard, and eventually into Los Angeles and the entire West Coast. Now there were nearly five hundred “Smart Mart” stores running up and down both coasts. The combination of his colorful origin and colorful rants inspired his unofficial nickname, “The Son of a Butcher.” But to his face, he was “Matti”.

When he sold his company to a national retailer, he had been assured that he would lead both his own chain of Smart Marts and a similar company, “Heartland Foods”, that was acquired at the same time. Heartland’s CEO, Gus Hagvall, pretty much copied Smart Mart’s model, but operated in the Midwest, especially Chicago and Minneapolis. Now that the deal was sealed, Matti had found himself reporting to Gus. 

Today, he had called his highest-ranking subordinates in for a private meeting. His goal was to reassert his dominance over the entire combined specialty foods division. By any means possible, which for a son-of-a-butcher meant pretty much doing anything short of drawing blood.

“Now I need us to put our heads together. We need senior management to kick that Cagacazzo Hagvall out onto the pavement before he moves forward to acquire Periwinkle’s Groceries, where they know nothing, absolutely nothing, about the specialty food model we invented.  We have to move. We have to move fast. That offer is going out in three weeks. I’m looking for suggestions.”

Matti’s inner circle shot glances around the room as though they were flipping a ping pong ball around, seeing how long they could keep it in the air. It landed in the shirt pocket of Alan Michaelson, Matti’s Chief Financial Officer.

“This isn’t the suggestion you asked for, but I’m being honest. We’re all here because they pay us a salary. You’re the one with the billion dollars. Why don’t you just take the money and walk? You could be sipping pina coladas at some resort in Antigua and not be fighting the jerks in corporate.”

Matti gave Alan a stone-faced stare. The other four executives tossed a new ball among each other, a little knowing grin that acknowledged their agreement with Alan, and relief that he was the one to say it.

“Anyone else in the room agree with Alan? I take my money and watch Rome burn from whatever mountain offers a clear view of the catastrophe?”

No one raised their hand, but they all gave Matti a look that told him “Hey, it’s not bad advice.” Matti’s head of operations, Leslie Schenkman, felt that she could take the suggestion to the next step. “I was in the room with you when promises were made. I agree that you should be running the division. But this is a fight you won’t win. Hagvall has the power now. If Rome is burning, you’re better off watching from a distance than sitting in the fire with the rest of us. You can afford to. You’re the billionaire.”

“Well thank you, Leslie, I appreciate your honesty. Now let me tell you WHY I’m the billionaire. It’s because I never wanted to be one. It’s because I give a shit about this business for its own sake. I take every bad decision personally. I built this up from my dad’s butcher shop and turned it into a five hundred store chain. If the know-nothings in corporate, or their golden boy from the Midwest, want to expand down a losing path, this is MY legacy that they’re destroying. You smell Rome burning? That’s my city putting smoke in your eyes. We all built it together, but I seem to be the only one in the room that cares. I’m sticking around. Let me know now if you’re going to take back the company with me. If not, then you can get up and walk out that door.”

The team pulled their chairs in and got to work.

Matti arranged to get an audience with the top executives at the company, whom he called the “puddle of liars” for the following week. He set up studies and business plans with his team. It no longer mattered to any of them what they thought Matti “ought to do” with his money. The goal was to show that Hagvall was leading the company to ruin.

But Matti found that every argument and every piece of analysis was a Mobius strip that bent around on itself, defying a clean either/or narrative. Michaelson could show that all the new stores Hagvall built had weak sales, but their operating costs were so low that they were typically making money anyway. Andrea Peterson, his head of marketing, brought out surveys that showed how the new territories had almost no brand recognition. But customers kept coming back anyway, and at higher rates than for new customers in any of the coastal stores that Smart Mart had built. Matti even hired some independent researchers to dig up some dirt on Hagvall, but the man proved to be a plausible honoree at any neighborhood Lutheran church. He married his high school girlfriend as soon as he graduated college, he had three children, one a star athlete, another a promising concert cellist, and his youngest a science prodigy and award winner.  It was pretty disgusting.

Matti approached his war with Hagvall as he did with other competitors who had ever elbowed in on his territory in the past twenty years. He determined what was most important to his customers, he made his product more appealing on every dimension possible, and he communicated these advantages in a way that made choosing the alternative seem out of touch with reality. His team put together the presentation decks that showed Hagvall’s strategy moving in a clear direction. Hagvall’s direction would destroy the brand in its most successful established markets, and it would create a financial black hole for developing ones. Every one on his committee had a sharp four-minute contribution to the presentation, sandwiched between Matti’s own “this way lay the gates of hell” introduction, and his eventual “there is a better way staring us all in the face but only I noticed it” final arguments.

Then two days before his presentation to the executive committee, Matti got kicked in the balls by Leslie. She had agreed to move over to the other side, reporting directly to Hagvall, from a position that enabled her to lead and accelerate the expansion into seven new states. They included major invasions of Texas and Florida, two states which were part of Matti’s own strategic plan. He called her office several times a day. None of his calls were returned. He threatened to kick her admin out onto the street. She handled his bluster with a blithe cheerfulness that sent Matti’s pulse to the point of near explosion.

For the day of the presentation, Matti arranged to fly what was left of his team over to corporate headquarters in Raleigh the prior evening. They rented a hotel conference room for the morning so that they could run through the material a few times and make it punchier.  Andrea brought her senior analyst, a whiz with presentation decks, to perform any last-minute editing and to add a few flashy animations that might add a gee-whiz factor for the North Carolina yokels. But where was Alan? Alan had all the dirt on the financials. He understood better than anyone why Hagvall’s path could not sustain a profit after five years.  Andrea reminded the others that she’d seen him drink heavily at last year’s Christmas party. Indeed, it triggered Matti’s recollection of seeing Alan retching into a urinal that night. Was he recovering from a bender? Matti had the front desk call his room, and got no answer. He went personally up to Alan’s room and banged so heavily on the door that several guests at adjacent rooms came to THEIR doors, thinking that there was an emergency. He flagged down a housekeeper, asked her to enter and clean up Alan’s room, and when he peeked in, he realized that Alan was not there.

Matti would have kept up the search, but Ken Taylor, his head of merchandising, reminded him of the obvious: if Alan was hungover, he would be more of an liability than an asset.

“Alan Michaelson is AWOL, and we can’t waste any more time looking for his ragged ass. I know his material cold, but if the corporate team tries to drill in with follow up questions, everyone please keep a printout of the full set of notes in front of you, and feel free to back me up. We will get through this because we are the best.”

The team shared a couple of taxis to the downtown headquarters as Matti reviewed the financial material that Alan had been set up to present. They timed their ascent to the top floor so that they could enter the executive conference room at eleven on-the-dot, allowing no time to be informally questioned or thrown off balance. A very attractive woman, about thirty years old, with creamy skin, valentine-red lipstick, and long frosted blond hair, was waiting at the entrance and introduced herself as CEO Jeff Lennon’s admin. She explained that the entire executive team was waiting in the conference room. As she escorted Matti’s team to the entrance, Matti wondered to himself if Lennon hired her for her skills or to serve as eye candy. If it was the latter, it further proved that he was unfit, and he sighed with the fear that these efforts would be pointless.

The executive committee was seated around a horseshoe shaped table, with Lennon in the center, all facing the far side of the room. Matti could see a projector thoughtfully set up in the center. Then he looked around. He saw the familiar puddle of liars that had once assured him that he’s be leading this division. He saw his former head of operations Leslie seated off to the side. Matti felt a little satisfied interpreting that in her “promotion” she seem to have been sidelined.

Then he saw two people he was not expecting. Two seats to the right of Lennon was Alan Michaelson, looking all-too-sober. Two seats in the other direction was Gus Hagvall, the man he was here to take to the mat.

“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. What’s left of my team will begin with our presentation shortly, but I first have to ask: what’s he doing here?” Matti was looking directly at Gus, who had to restrain himself from answering, so as to allow Lennon to do the talking.

“You’re here to tell us why Gus’s strategic plan and designs to acquire Periwinkle’s is a bad idea. He needs to hear what you have to say and potentially defend his plans later.”

“I plan to do more than that. I had planned to explain why he is unfit to lead this division, and I don’t want him looking me in the eyes every time I bring up his name.”

“Well, I’m sorry.”

“And what… what are you doing here, Alan? We looked for you this morning. I went up to your room. You’re supposed to be with the good guys. Did Darth Vader over there flip you?”

Lennon leaned forward so that Alan would not have to speak. “He’s here at my suggestion, not Gus’s. I called him this morning. I’m asking him to be an entirely impartial advisor, and based on our discussions this morning, I think he’ll do a fantastic job of that. He’s really on your side, Matti. But he also knows the numbers and he knows that the numbers don’t lie.”

“The numbers don’t lie… unlike almost every living breathing piece of shit sitting in this room.” Matti only thought that to himself. He wondered if the puddle of liars could read it on his face. Well, if they could, that was fine. He never said it aloud. He had plausible deniability.

Matti opened his presentation with a zeal that left him envious of evangelical preachers whose job was to perform with such bravado every week. His own parish priest always exhibited proper Roman Catholic humility, which was honorable but uninspiring. His team continued with that sort of humility, but he forgave them, knowing that his own passion needed to be balanced with professional respectfulness.  When it was time for his closing arguments, he was a little off-balance. He had planned to tear into Hagvall, but the man was in the room, so he handled it in a slightly indirect manner. “The plan to acquire Periwinkle’s reflects… a lack of professional judgement and understanding of our business.” He paused and added “and anyone proposing such a disaster cannot be trusted with leadership.” It was good enough.

At the conclusion, the executives from the parent company gave polite applause. Even Hagvall gave a few claps. Alan held onto his position of impartial judge and withheld applause, but he did give Matti an approving smile. Then finally the murmurs were interrupted by Lennon.

“I want to thank you, Matti, and the other members of your team for an excellent and extremely persuasive presentation. I understand that you came a little short staffed due to last minute changes, and I will take responsibility for that, but I’d never have guessed that if I didn’t already know. I’m going to ask the other members of your team to stay here with us while we pick their brains for a couple of hours. Matti, I know you’d want to be part of this, but this is how we do things here. Then we’ll reconvene tomorrow at eleven, and we’ll fill you in on what we’ve decided to this point. I can’t make any promises other than to say that we’ll be working through your material non-stop until they throw us out of the building.”

“Before I go, can I arrange a time later this evening to meet with my team at the hotel?”

“No, you can’t.  Simple as that. I’d ask you to please maintain a firewall between yourself and anyone in this room until after tomorrow morning.”

Lennon must have had some magical button on his laptop because the beautiful woman in the bright lipstick immediately entered the room and invited Matti to step out with her.

Matti waited until nine pm that night to try burning down the firewall. He stalked the hotel lounge, he knocked on his team members’ doors, he strolled the streets of Raleigh around the hotel looking for any bar or restaurant where they could be hiding. He found nothing. Exhausted, he remained at the last restaurant, furthest from the hotel, and ordered a glass of wine. He contemplated what was obviously his devastation. When someone tells you what an excellent presentation you delivered, it was their way of softening the blow when they told you to fuck off.

He showed up at exactly eleven o’clock the next morning. The beautiful woman was now wearing a more blueberry colored lipstick and her hair was raven black, which made her less appealing to Matti. “I wouldn’t expect them to tolerate even a goth-lite look in North Carolina, but what do I know,” he thought. She ushered him into the room, and everyone was there: Lennon and his henchman, along with Hagvall, and the rest of Matti’s own team. “Have you been here all night?” Matti asked.

“It feels like it,” Lennon said, as he gestured for Matti to take a seat at the front of the room. “Matti, one thing we all knew about you, which yesterday only convinced us even more of, is that there is absolutely nobody who understands specialty food retailing at a level equal to you. Even Gus Hagvall admitted to that, if a little reluctantly. I was serious when I said your plan was excellent, and persuasive, and everything it set out to be. Now here’s the plan. The acquisition of Periwinkle’s is off. We’re going to notify them tomorrow. We agree it would have been a disaster. We’re following your overall strategic plan. We’re halting development in the states along the rivers, and we’re going to use the resources originally dedicated to the Periwinkle deal to instead focus on intensive development in your chosen locations of Texas, Florida, Arizona, and Colorado, AND, as you recommended, increase penetration in California, New York, Washington, and Massachusetts by up to fifty percent.”

“I gotta tell you guys, I misjudged you. When I walked outta here yesterday, I thought my plans were going to be ignored. So now let’s talk execution.”

“Your team is going to spearhead the execution one hundred percent. Under the leadership of Gus Hagvall. You need to get back onto the next plane to Los Angeles, where your assistant is currently packing up the personal belongings in your office and will be delivering them to your home. The severance package is as it was specified in the conditions of your contract. We all thank you for your service and your vision, and wish you the best.”

“WHAT THE GOD LOVING FUCK? You love my ideas, you love the team I’ve assembled, everyone in this room agrees that I know this business better than anyone else on earth. Why are you kicking me to the pavement?”

“Because the one other thing that everyone in this room agrees on is that you’re a son of a butcher.”

Lennon let it hang in the air. He tried to stifle a laugh, but then Leslie couldn’t hold back, and as she began to laugh out loud, the laughter passed to Alan, and to the rest of Matti’s team, and to Hagvall, and finally to the entire puddle of liars. The laughter caused the walls to vibrate. The woman in the blueberry lipstick entered and asked if everything was alright, but as she saw that it was only laughter shaking the room she excused herself and withdrew.

The shaking moved from the walls to the very floor beneath Matti. It felt like an earthquake. Matti looked down and saw the earth burst asunder. It opened its mouth and swallowed him up, and Matti felt himself pulled down through the building, down through the earth, flying through the earth’s very core until he seemed to emerge on the other side. He looked around. The sky was inky blue-black. He was seated at a café table overlooking a beach, murmuring waves, and a distant ocean that reflected the moonlight. He turned his head over his shoulder and saw the lights of a luxury resort hotel in the background. A tanned muscular gentleman approached his table.

“G’day, mate. What can I get you?”

“Is this North Carolina? Where in hell am I?”

“Not Hell, mate. I’d say you’re about as far from both Hell and North Carolina as you can get.”

“Thank goodness.”

“You’re at the finest luxury resort in Western Australia, just outside of Perth. Can I get you something to drink to help you enjoy the evening?”

“A pina colada? No. Look at my face. Get me something you think I’d like right now.”

“Straight up.” The waiter returned in a couple of minutes with a martini glass that had seven coffee beans floating on top. The clear liquid in the glass smelled like licorice and it was on fire.

“What is this?”

“Flaming coffee Sambuca Romana. Wait for the flames to die down before you drink it.”

Matti contemplated the flames as they flickered and then extinguished themselves. He pushed his lip past the coffee beans and took a cautious sip from the top of the sweet penetrating liqueur.

“I suppose it’s an acquired taste.”

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More on the biblical portion Korach