There were well documented dossiers on how the EPA made unique exclusions hundred of times over based upon the financial lobby- ing clout of the particular offender. Or how certain elected officials in Washington had pocketed funds from their PAC monies or how defense contractors were advised in advance of the con- tents of an upcoming billion dollar RFP. The cartons of files were absolute political dynamite. And, if released, could have massive repercussions in the world financial community. There was a fundamental problem, though. Scott Mason was in possession of unsupported, but not unreasonable accusations, they were certainly believable. All he really had was leads, a thou- sand leads in ten thousand different directions, with no apparent coherency or theme, received from an anonymous and dubious donor. And there was no way of immediately gauging the veracity of their contents. He clearly remembered what is was like to be lawyered. That held no appeal at the moment. The next obvious question was, who would have the ability to gather this amount of information, most of which was obviously meant to be kept very, very private. Papers meant not for anyone but only for a select group of insiders. Lastly, and just as important to the reporter; why? What would someone gain from telling all the nasty goings on inside of Corporate America. There have been so many stories over the years about this company or that screwing over the little guy. How the IRS and the government operated substantially outside of legal channels. The kinds of things that the Secretary of the Treasury would prefer were kept under wraps. Sometimes stories of this type made the news, maybe a trial or two, but not exactly noteworthy in the big picture. White collar crime wasn't as good as the Simpsons or Roseanne, so it went largely ignored. Scott Mason needed to figure out what to do with his powder keg. So, as any good investigative reporter would do, he decided to pick a few key pieces and see if the old axiom was true. Where there's smoke, there's fire. * * * * * Fire. That's exactly what Franklin Dobbs didn't want that Monday morning. He and 50 other Corporate CEO's across the country received their own unsolicited packages by courier. Each CEO received a dossier on his own company. A very private dossier containing information that technically didn't, or wasn't offi- cially supposed to exist. Each one read their personalized file cover to cover in absolute privacy. And shock set in.