My fellow fixers and cleaners:
It is my great honor to deliver the keynote at this year’s FixCon. What a turnout this year, right? Tell me, where else can you talk to peers about the intricacies of delivering a suitcase full of cash to a crooked judge? Well, maybe Frank’s house. Right, Frank? He calls that “the house that affluenza built.”
Hey, I’m just busting your balls, Frank is one hell of a fixer. This guy cleaned up a DUI for some CEO’s kid twice in one week. Hope that dad gave you a bonus, Frank! A pharmaceutical stock tip? Yeah, that makes sense.
Okay, I’ll address the elephant in the room. Obviously, 2018 was a tough year for fixers. While we were busy giving testifying witnesses black eyes, Michael Cohen was figuratively giving our entire profession one. It felt like it would never end, but Cohen will soon be behind bars. The US District Court fixed that one for us. But can we, the members of the National Fixer and Cleaner Association, clean up his mess? Of course we can!
As I look around this room, I see so many titans of our industry who lived through tougher times than this. Living legend Charles “Chappaquiddick Charlie” O’Doyle is here. [hold for applause] Great to see Robert Durst’s entire team out there. And we’re honored to be joined by this year’s Eddie Mannix Fixers in Popular Culture Award winner, Mr. Harvey Keitel. Give it up for The Wolf himself everybody!
There’s an old joke among fixers, have you heard this one? “What did the fixer say to the bartender? I don’t know, but whatever it was, it worked. The bartender withdrew the lawsuit and forgave his bar tab.” [hold for laughs]
For a profession that likes to keep things quiet, we sure heard a lot from Michael Cohen last year. CNN. Twitter. NYC Taxi and Limousine Commission hearings. And a lot of it was really deplorable stuff. What happened to civility and discourse among us fixers? Back in the day, you could pay a prostitute to sleep with your client’s brother-in-law and videotape it for witness intimidation purposes without the whole goddamn planet knowing about it! In a post-Cohen world, is all this the new normal?
And hey, I’m not at all against social media! Facebook is great! Hell, you used to have to drive to a guy’s house or his kid’s school to intimidate someone into not blowing the whistle on an unsafe work site. Now I can just slide into his DM with some pictures of his house and a can of gasoline and save myself the trip. Social media is a powerful tool when used correctly, but you can’t use Twitter to set up a mistress in a comfortable uptown pied-à-terre, can you? Or to blackmail a dirty health inspector? Frank probably could. [hold for laughs]
I’ll tell you one thing, Frank knows his way around a non-disclosure agreement, too. It was a rough year for NDAs, which, other than manipulating a crime scene and discrediting victims, is the fixer’s most useful tool. A politician knocks up his mistress, no problem. We whip up a simple non-disclosure payoff agreement contact with a standard two-party pseudonym side letter. And now? That NDA is no more reliable than a rigged online Drudge presidential poll. [hold for laughs]
I’m running long, and it looks like Frank is busy fixing another DUI. Go get ‘em, Frank! Before I go, I’d ask you all to think about what the National Fixer and Cleaner Association’s motto – Et Figere Possimus – means to you. As long as there are cheating husbands, or children uninoculated against affluenza, or college swimmers who “don’t need the rest of their lives ruined over one bad choice,” or drunk-driving rich people, or Kushners, we will be needed. After all, we know where the bodies are buried and which particular sex workers they belong to!
So stay strong, stay united and, most importantly, #ResistCohen. We can fix this.
Thank you.
