For the next hour or so, a receptionist watched as Dreier paced the pension fund’s lobby, obviously waiting for someone. This is where things got strange. At one point, a man emerged from the elevators and moved toward the receptionist’s desk. Before he could reach it, however, Dreier cut him off. The man was Howard Steinberg, the Fortress executive who had come to sign the note. He was to meet with Michael Padfield, the same attorney Dreier had just seen. Dreier introduced himself as Padfield, handed him Padfield’s business card, and guided Steinberg into the same conference room where he had been waiting.

Everything appeared to be going smoothly until Steinberg suddenly asked if Dreier knew “Tom” ’s extension—apparently the two men were acquainted. Dreier reluctantly read off the number, at which point Steinberg rose, asked for a moment, and stepped outside. Dreier realized he was about to call “Tom,” who of course knew nothing about the meeting or the note; if the two men spoke, it was all over. Dreier watched as Steinberg began dialing a phone in the lobby. As he did, Dreier yanked up a conference-room phone and, in a bid to somehow prevent the two from speaking, dialed “Tom” as well.

“He called the guy, I called the guy,” Dreier recalls with a sigh. “He beat me to it.”

He cut off his call, knowing the end was near. When Steinberg returned to the conference room, Dreier says, “I could see he was suspicious. It was the questions he asked me and the look he gave me. He asked several questions about personnel at Ontario Teachers’, which indicated he was suspicious.” Sensing the worst, Dreier hurriedly signed the legal papers, then excused himself for a moment. But instead of returning, he headed for the elevator and left the building.

After a few minutes, Steinberg emerged from the conference room.

“Was that Michael Padfield?” he asked the receptionist.

“No,” she said.

Dreier’s plane was waiting. He had just boarded when his phone rang. It was a Fortress executive, informing him there had been “some kind of problem” at Ontario Teachers’. The Fortress man, not knowing Dreier was in Canada, much less that he was behind the “problem,” explained what little he knew. Dreier feigned astonishment. Moments later, his phone rang a second time. This time it was Peter Briger Jr., Fortress’s co-chairman of the board. “We don’t know what’s going on,” Briger told Dreier. “But we think there’s some kind of impersonation going on.”

“I played dumb,” says Dreier, “and said I would look into it.” When Dreier concluded the call, his mind raced. At that point, 9 out of 10 men would have simply fled back to New York. For some reason, Dreier returned to his limo and had the driver take him back to the pension fund’s offices.

“I was 90 percent sure I would be caught when I went back,” he says. “I was not thinking clearly. I was desperate. Clearly, there was a part of me that just wanted this to be over. I knew I was defeated. I went back knowing I would probably never leave that building [a free man].”

Once he was back in the Ontario Teachers’ offices, an attorney asked him to wait in the conference room. By and by, security guards appeared and told him to wait for the police, who appeared not long after and arrested him. Dreier went without resistance.

There’s a Moral to Draw

It was over. Canadian authorities held Dreier for four days, then put him on a plane back to New York’s La Guardia Airport, where U.S. marshals took him into custody, just as Dreier suspected they would. He didn’t bother with denials for long. He would admit everything: four long years of fraud, 80 or more bogus notes, 13 hedge funds and four private investors, $380 million—everything. His glorious new life, the firm, “the Dreier Model”—it had all been built on lies. Within days, attorneys began resigning from Dreier L.L.P. At one point, Dreier’s 19-year-old son, Spencer, barged into a meeting there and attempted to rally the assembled lawyers to his father’s defense; he was hooted out of the room. Ten days after Dreier’s New York arrest the firm declared bankruptcy. By that point almost every attorney had left. Dreier L.L.P. simply imploded.