A Stranger In the House of Ayer

As the newest face at Essex Street, Doorly’s assistant, Kim Borans, found herself with a lot to learn. But the more Borans saw, the more she wondered about what was going on.

A trained accountant herself, Borans would later say she was troubled by an instance in December when Doorly had her make a transfer to an account that strangely was carrying a negative balance. She’d gotten her job through a friend, Mark Gobeille, the company’s tax adviser, and she finally decided to stop by his desk in February to ask why an account at a company like Essex Street would ever be in the red. Gobeille called up on his computer several accounts with negative balances, explaining that they were all for Doorly’s ventures. To Borans, Gobeille didn’t appear particularly concerned by the accounts—though he was a bit frustrated that only Doorly seemed to understand what they were for. If anything ever happened to Doorly, Gobeille admitted to her, they’d all have a hell of a time making sense of what was going on.

Borans had other concerns as well. She’d noticed another red flag: Doorly was setting rules for the audits. Borans declined to comment for this story, but in a deposition filed in Suffolk Superior Court she recounted her mounting worries. About a week after speaking with Gobeille, she invited him for dinner with her and her husband at their home in Peabody. After they’d eaten, their conversation turned to Doorly, and to checks he’d apparently written from an account he shouldn’t have been using. They agreed they’d have to tell someone. Borans wanted to take her concerns to the Ayer family. Gobeille, though, preferred bringing up the accounting irregularities with the audit firm; better for his and Borans’s own sake to involve an outside party, he thought, in case they were wrong or the family didn’t believe them. Doorly was, after all, their boss. But Borans balked at the idea. The discussion grew heated. According to her deposition, Gobeille finally rose to his feet. “The entire place is a cesspool. Everyone knows,” she remembers him yelling. “Just stay out of it. It’s not your problem.” (Gobeille denies characterizing the office in those terms, and says his frustration was over the course of the action they’d take, not over whether they’d intervene at all. Both he and the Ayers’ lawyer deny that the family or employees had any idea what Doorly was up to.) Borans was shaken by the argument. Her husband let Gobeille know it was time to leave.

Days later, on March 8, 2006, Borans asked to speak privately with Caleb Loring III and Jamie Totten, the Essex Street board member. “I think something’s wrong,” she told them. She explained that Doorly had asked her to keep a transaction hidden from Loring, according to a court filing. Over the next two weeks, Loring and the family lawyers attempted to unravel what they could of Doorly’s other secrets. On March 20, 2006, the lawyer visited Suffolk Superior Court. The next morning, Doorly was fired.

As soon as Doorly was escorted from the office, Loring got people working on his computer. They changed Doorly’s passwords and began copying his e-mails, finding photos from his vacations, details of his investments, and flight schedules for his jet. Later, forensic accountants collected nearly a dozen boxes of papers from Doorly’s office. They also discovered his ledger book. The accountants and lawyers spent weeks sorting through Doorly’s personal records and the family’s electronic bank statements. Mark Gobeille’s prediction was proven true: Making sense of the tangled financial puzzle that Doorly had created was no easy task. He had been the only person who had any true sense of what had become of Frederick Ayer’s riches.

As news of the scandal was quietly passed around the North Shore, the Ayer family publicly rallied behind Caleb Loring. Behind closed doors in Beverly, big changes were being made. Loring resigned from his management position—he remains family liaison—and was replaced by Jamie Totten, who, according to Borans’s deposition, made it known that everyone in the office was “guilty until proven innocent.” David Ayer, the former trust partner, returned to the office with his timber company’s experienced treasurer in tow.

Kim Borans stayed on for only a few more months, working long hours in a highly scrutinized atmosphere. At one point, according to her deposition, David Ayer asked her if the place could operate without Gobeille. She told Ayer that he was indispensable in understanding how Essex Street worked. She was also told that another employee would be fired, but that the family later decided against it, on the advice of a lawyer. The family ultimately concluded that Doorly had acted alone.

Borans had earned the Ayers’ trust, and a sizable raise. And she and her husband were in the middle of buying a house. But she felt she needed out. After she resigned in June, she and her husband closed on a home in North Reading. They completed their purchase the old-fashioned way—with a mortgage from Wells Fargo.

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