School nemesis ... Cesar Augustus, circled upper left, and Allen Kurzweil, circled lower left in a class photo. Source: Supplied
CESAR Augustus, a 12-year-old boy at a Swiss boarding school called Aiglon, was a fan of Jesus Christ Superstar. So one day, he decided to “cast” the boys around him in the musical.
Proclaiming himself Pilate, he told a larger boy named Paul to be the centurion, a boy named Joseph to be “the rabble,” and a smaller boy named Allen to be Jesus.
For the “performance,” Augustus instructed Paul to tie Allen’s hands to a bunk using towels. Then, as the song Trial Before Pilate — which contains an interlude called The Thirty-Nine Lashes — played, Augustus, lip-synching the words as he went, whipped Allen with a belt.
He didn’t whip him 39 times, as some were fake-outs, adding additional masochistic joy to the act.
“Fake-outs were as much a part of the performance as those moments when the belt made contact,” writes the grown-up Allen Kurzweil, the memory as fresh as yesterday. “Introducing randomness into the rhythm of abuse appeared to delight Cesar as much as the abuse itself.”
When it was done, Kurzweil retired to a secluded room “in a dank corner of the basement filled with potatoes and mice,” and cried.
Throughout the years, he was never able to shake the memories of the abuse he suffered at Augustus’ hands. So later, as an adult and writer, he decided to track him down. He didn’t really understand why, what he hoped would be resolved or what he might say to his tormentor if he ever found him. Whipping Boy tells the story of the abuse, the search and what he found.
When Kurzweil arrived at Aiglon in 1971, at age 10, he was the school’s youngest and puniest student, and a middle-class boy in “a holding pen of privilege.”
He lived with four other boys in a fifth-floor room designed for two. One of his roommates was the imposing Paul, the son of a banking heiress. Another was Augustus, who was “rumoured to be the son of the chief of security under Ferdinand Marcos.” (This would prove to be untrue.)
Tormented ... Allen Kurzweil, author of "Whipping Boy". Source: Supplied
His first memorable interaction with Augustus came when one day, the larger boy pointed to a tree outside their window. “You know what that tree is used for?” asked Augustus. “If there’s a fire and we can’t use the stairs, I’ll have to throw you into that tree.”
Augustus came to calling Kurzweil, one of only a few Jews at the school, “Nosey,” augmenting the insult by “forming a C with [his] thumb and index finger” and “press[ing] it around his nose to exaggerate its profile.”
One evening, at dinner, Kurzweil “made the mistake of flattering Cesar about his tolerance for hot sauce.” Augustus said nothing, but at meal’s end, he “slipped a slice of bread into his pocket.”
That night, Kurzweil watched as Augustus rolled bits of bread into “pea-sized pellets,” laid six of them in a row on the windowsill, and drenched them with hot sauce. After lights out, Augustus approached Kurzweil with a pellet, and instructed him, “Eat it, Nosey.”
When Kurzweil refused, Augustus motioned to Paul, and the hulking lad reiterated Kurzweil’s fate. Finding no choice, Kurzweil downed the pellet — then, at the pair’s insistence, another, and then another, accompanied by the command, “this time make sure you chew.”
“It wasn’t long after I bit down on the third fireball that I began to whimper, and then cry,” he writes, “my tears triggered by the physiological effects of the chilli sauce and by the glee of its purveyors.”
By his early 40s, Kurzweil was a married journalist and author with a young son who was now facing Cesars of his own.
Kurzweil had moved on, but the abuse clearly left a psychic scar. He had attempted, to no avail, to track down his bully over the years, and he wrote a 2003 children’s book called Leon and the Spitting Image. The book was outwardly based on his son’s travails, but Kurzweil based much of the bully character on Augustus.
This, combined with the increasing ease and popularity of Google, reawakened a desire to track down his old nemesis.
In 2005, he found a 2001 New York Post article with the headline, “‘Knight Falls’ as Feds Bust Up a Royal Ripoff.” The story was that three Americans had posed as “fake European royalty” — including “a British knight, a Serbian prince and a German prince” — to steal “more than $1 million out of unsuspecting investors.”
The men, Kurzweil writes, “duped dozens of sophisticated investors into entering loan agreements with the Badische Trust Consortium, a sham investment house claiming to manage some $60 billion.” They “rented suites in Switzerland, travelled on diplomatic passports issued by the Knights of Malta and adhered to a 14-point dress code that required the use of walking sticks, homburg hats and Montblanc fountain pens.”
The scam itself was a high-value variant on Nigerian e-mail schemes, a promise of enormous investments in exchange for just a small (six figure) advance for expenses.
The three men went by the names Prince Robert von Badische, the Baron Moncrieffe and Colonel Sherry. To find their victims, they had two men in charge of recruitment, to “lure [the victims] in with false promises of big money.”
One of these recruiters was named Cesar Augustus.
Tracked down ... Cesar Augustus. Source: Allen Kurzweil. Source: Supplied
Kurzweil contacted one of the victims, Barbara Laurence, a television executive who had sought $50 million from the group to launch a Spanish-language home shopping network. Laurence, according to files he’d acquired, had testified about being duped for over $500,000.
Possibly worse, she — in a pattern Kurzweil would learn was part of the group’s scam — was forced to jump through logistic hoops that included last-minute travel to other countries at their whim, and wound up missing her grandmother’s funeral in order to adhere to one of the group’s deadlines. (Another victim missed most of the last few months of his dying wife’s life trying to meet the group’s demands.)
Kurzweil pressed Laurence for any details she could share about Augustus. She noted he was about 6 feet tall, possibly Spanish or Asian, “very slick” in an “Armani suit, designer glasses and shiny hair,” and reminded her of “a cheap version of Richard Gere in ‘American Gigolo.’ ”
Appearances were everything for the group. The fake royals flaunted spats, jewel-encrusted rings, and even, for “Prince” Robert, a monocle. They would meet with clients at the Delegates Dining Room of the United Nations, stating that, since it’s in the UN, the room was not subject to US banking laws. In truth, the dining room was open to the public and subject to all local and federal laws.
After her ordeal concluded in her never receiving the loan, Laurence contacted a criminal investigator at the US Attorney’s Office, marking the beginning of the end for the group.
Augustus was sentenced to 37 months plus five years of supervised release and served time in a minimum-security facility that Kurzweil notes sounded less like a prison than like Aiglon. He was released in 2005.
Kurzweil continued to toy with the prospect of contacting his bully but was held off by the knowledge of his criminality. Was he just a scammer, or was he violent?
He kept tabs on Augustus, who set up shop in San Francisco, from afar. According to his websites, Augustus seemed to be establishing businesses not unlike the trust, offering to help facilitate loans of $10 million to $100 million. He also launched a business in the self-empowerment field, and a film-production company.
Through this latter business, Augustus announced that he was holding a public fundraiser for one of his films. Finally, Kurzweil had a risk-free opportunity to see what his nemesis looked like in real life and to hopefully determine how dangerous it might be to make contact.
The first time he laid eyes on him in more than 30 years, Kurzweil, who brought his cousin Ruth to the event for support, temporarily lost his mind.
“All at once, my stomach tightens and I unleash a string of expletives,” he writes. “Ruth gives me a nudge. ‘Settle down.’ My brain tries to tell my mouth to heed her advice, but my mouth refuses to obey. ‘It’s him! Oh my God! F —, Ruth. S — t. It’s ... it’s ... it’s him!’ The uncontrolled babbling lasts nearly a minute.”
The slickster described by Laurence is nowhere to be seen. In his place is a stereotypical indie-film producer, in a short-sleeve shirt, Dockers and a goatee. Augustus worked the room for an hour as Kurzweil watched. In the end, he snapped a long-sought picture of his bully but made no contact.
Account of abuse ... Kurzweil’s book. Source: Supplied
His eventual reunion was facilitated, like many, by Facebook. When Augustus created a Facebook page, listing his alma mater, Kurzweil had the excuse he needed to make safe contact. He dropped him a “long time no see” note, mentioning he’d be in San Francisco for business (which was true) and asked about meeting to catch up.
To his surprise, Augustus responded enthusiastically, and the pair met for lunch. Kurzweil recounts the mundanity of their initial conversation — Augustus relays, at length, his work with a company that distributes aloe vera — all the while evaluating Augustus’ every word and action. When the man orders a spicy lunch, Kurzweil can’t help remembering his love for hot sauce.
Kurzweil tells Augustus that he’s planning a book about his old Aiglon classmates and discovers that their Aiglon memories diverge. Augustus recalls, with some apparent glee, others he used to pick on at school and, with less pleasure, those who picked on him. But Kurzweil is horrified to learn that not only does Augustus not seem to remember the abuse Kurzweil suffered at his hands (though he did recall that, “people would pick on you, right?”), but he didn’t remember that the pair were roommates at all.
When Augustus can’t find Kurzweil in their old school photo, it seems to the writer like “Professor Moriarty failing to recognise Holmes.”
Kurzweil kept in touch with Augustus for a year. When he returned to San Francisco on business, the two met again. Having sewn seeds of trust, and now confident that Augustus was not violent, Kurzweil eventually had the confrontation he had long hoped for, burrowing down on Augustus about both the childhood bullying and the details of the scheme.
In the end, Kurzweil realised that only so much of his decades-long mission could be blamed on Augustus, noting that “boarding school cruelties cannot explain my sustained fixation.”
Obsession is in the mind of the beholder, and Kurzweil nurtured his every chance he had.
While he derived satisfaction in the end from the direct confrontation with the man behind his demons, the truly important development was the obsession’s end — that once confronted, he was able to put Cesar Augustus in the past and proceed with his Cesar-less life.
“After much deliberation, I figured out what has now been absurdly obvious,” he writes. “The search for Cesar has always been, at its core, a search for someone else. Observing him through a two-way mirror ultimately enabled me to catch reflections of myself in the glass.”
This story originally appeared on The New York Post
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