29 The Real Game of Missing Money what they needed to finance their operations. Only when the Internet bubble burst several years later did I understand what was happening. The venture capitalist invests $1MM. The company is then plumped up for an IPO. They sell the stock to the pension funds and retail investors for $100MM. Then the company goes bust—but the early investors walk away with $99MM. For all I know, they increase their winnings by shorting the stock when it goes down. It is called a “pump and dump.” There were days it felt like the entire leadership of the U.S. financial system had gone mad. Ev- eryone was interested in nominal—and, with rare exception, no one was interested in real. I was offered an opportunity to settle my litigation in 1998—after several efforts to falsely frame us had failed—but under conditions that would let the bogus allegations hang in the market- place. I decided instead to fight and force the government and its so-called “whistleblower” John Ervin into court, requiring them to put forward a shred of evidence to back up their smears. Hamilton sued the government to collect outstanding bills and finally sued Ervin for tortious interference. It’s a shaggy dog story that is much easier to understand now that the world has watched the FBI and the Department of Justice try to falsely frame the President of the United States with a salacious dossier cooked up by a former British intelligence agent with funding from the Clinton campaign. It used to be hard to believe that the Department of Justice would simply make stuff up—now, it’s common knowledge. The decision to fight necessitated selling my home and moving out of Washington. The physical harassment was interfering with my personal life and health. I felt I would be better off living on an unpredictable schedule in multiple places—thus dramatically increasing the cost of surveil- lance and harassment. My hope was that it would require the DOJ, HUD, or whatever agency was funding the surveillance or harassment to request a contract reauthorization—something I believed would be difficult to get, given the failure of the phony frames. I sold my house and began a multiple-year process of liquidating my art, antiques, furniture, and library. eBay had just started, and I was able to provide work for former employees who started an eBay business liquidating Hamilton and my possessions. My company Solari, launched in March 1998, leased three SUVs, and we rotated them between my remaining employees and me while I proceeded to begin a decade-long process of driving hundreds of thousands of miles around America trying to understand what was happening in the real economy. I wanted to meet and get to know others who were trying to understand how to bring real solutions, and see what we could do about it. It also afforded me the opportunity to meet and spend time with the elder generation in my family. Before they passed away, I downloaded an extraordinary amount of family history. Between the wise elders in my family and the intelligence gathered from doing “pro formas” on how the mon- ey works in thousands of communities in all fifty states, I emerged with a much deeper under- standing of the real economy. In 1999, I was finally interviewed by one of the HUD and DOJ investigation teams (several had cycled off when they could not find anything wrong). It became clear that the people leading the investigation had no understanding of the relevant programs and facts. I spent most of the in- terview teaching them and then helping them formulate their questions so they made sense. The Assistant U.S. Attorney (AUSA) afterwards apologized to my attorneys and said that he would recommend that the process come to an end. However, when I called an attorney I was working with, who was an expert on black budget litigation, he explained that the DOJ would demote the AUSA and assign a new “hit man.”