A Stranger In the House of Ayer

As the Ayers remained largely uninvolved in Essex Street affairs, Doorly faced little threat that they would start asking questions. But the outside accountants who were hired each year to look over the financials were a different story. In early 2004, Doorly replaced Pricewaterhouse Coopers with a small Charlestown audit firm called Vitale, Caturano & Company (VCC). The company’s plan for the review of the 2003 books was to randomly scrutinize just a sample of the 300 or so trusts Essex Street managed. When his son’s trust was among those picked, Doorly requested that it be removed from the audit. The firm complied. Doorly also nixed a clause to have a third-party company review VCC’s work. Had the accountants taken a careful look, the Ayer family claims (in a lawsuit VCC is fighting), they’d have seen tens of thousands of dollars strangely passing through Adam Doorly’s trust, and a total of $28 million in cash apparently missing from the Ayer accounts.

Doorly hired VCC again to review the records from 2004—a year in which he sold off the New Hampshire car dealership for $4.5 million, returning about $2 million to the family. Of the rest, he allegedly deposited $300,000 into his personal trust, bought a $430,000 condo in Harvard that his nephew moved into, and tipped two of his favorite mechanics $10,000 each. Doorly sent Hunt $25,000 toward a Waltham condo, and later half a million to buy it outright. Some of the other money he gave her financed a clothes-shopping spree, for which she thanked him in a late-night e-mail. “I purchased a few things that will look [good] on the back of a chair. So, I had to say goodbye to some of those new benjamins,” she wrote. “It was difficult but I was a big girl. A very brilliant man once told me that the benjamins were there for when I needed something and I need[ed] some things today.”

With the Ayer fortune at his disposal, Doorly had many opportunities to be magnanimous. When he jetted down to Florida, he was happy to let the staff at his sports marketing firm assume he was a high-powered executive. “He was always very secretive about what he did for a living, but he would definitely want people to know he was in charge,” says a former colleague. When a hurricane bore down on Florida in 2004, Doorly flew the employees to Massachusetts and put them up in a hotel. “He was strangely philanthropic, let’s say,” notes the former colleague. When his Essex Street assistant of 22 years retired, Doorly allegedly bought her a condo.

After another clean audit report came through in the spring of 2005, Doorly’s spending spun out of control. On a $270,000-a-year salary, he was making so many purchases that he qualified for an American Express Centurion card, the so-called Amex Black, which has a minimum annual threshold of $250,000. His credit card statements were peppered with transactions from jewelers, art dealers, casinos, and hotels in Las Vegas, Colorado, Seattle, Alaska, and Hawaii. He was traveling so much that he had to have the engines of his jet rebuilt—a job that cost $1.5 million. In all, he was burning through an average of a quarter-million dollars a month.

In late December, Doorly and his wife planned to visit the El Conquistador golf resort and casino in Puerto Rico. Just after he left, his assistant, Kim Borans, who was relatively new to the position, received an e-mail from VCC. For their latest audit they planned to inspect the trusts of Doorly and his son. Doorly told Borans to explain that he wanted his and Adam’s trusts skipped. The accountants in Charlestown agreed to consider it. Privately, they were suspicious.

“We predicted this response,” one accountant wrote to another. “This is why I hate this client.”

“Ha—I didn’t even realize that we had picked [Doorly’s] account,” the colleague responded. “Shouldn’t we be able to see these balances? …I mean, honestly, these could be the accounts with all the fraud!”

In early 2006, assuming everything was more or less under control, the Doorlys took the jet to Florida, where they boarded the world’s largest luxury liner, the Queen Mary 2, for a $37,000 cruise to Rio de Janeiro. When he returned, Doorly tried to rein in his profligacy. He’d recently sold one property (returning all of the proceeds to the Ayer family accounts), and now put a few others up for sale. He even decided to part with the Gulfstream, telling Adam in an e-mail that it was the hardest decision he’d ever had to make.

Still, he allowed himself another big purchase, a gift for his son, whom he hoped would move closer to home. That February, he bought Adam a $790,000 luxury condo overlooking the Public Garden in Boston. It may not have escaped Doorly’s notice that it was right down the street from Frederick Ayer’s Commonwealth Avenue mansion, which had just been added to the National Register of Historic Places.

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