“Alright, Allen.
A man as busy as you doesn’t make social calls without a reason.
Just say what you actually came for.”
Zach looked at Allen, who had been talking without pause for the better part of an hour, and interrupted with the directness of someone who had run out of patience for the preamble.
“Alright, Zach.
You’re right.
There is something, and I might need your help.
Only if you’re willing, of course.
I wouldn’t repay the people who saved my life by putting them in a difficult position.” Allen’s expression shifted, the easy confidence dropping briefly into something more genuine and slightly uncomfortable.
John Leighton’s expression settled.
Zach shrugged and gestured for him to continue.
“Because you two are my lifesavers, I recently looked into your situations.
I found out you both came out of St.
John’s Welfare Institute, which I didn’t know before.
And Zach, I found out something else.
I didn’t expect that the lawyer people in the southern districts call the most approachable and conscientious in Los Angeles was actually you.”
Zach said nothing.
John Leighton looked at him with genuine surprise.
He had not known that either.
“I’ve been thinking for a while about how to get the Black Python Gang out of the underworld.
After learning about you, Zach, I think you’re the person I need.
Specifically, legal help.
We’re fighters.
We know how to handle ourselves in a conflict.
We don’t know how to wear suits and run businesses.”
…
John Leighton glanced at Zach, who caught the look and quietly explained.
Growing up as an orphan with very little, Zach had built his legal practice around helping people who had no one else to turn to.
The clients he took on for free were concentrated in the southern districts of Los Angeles, which were largely low income and underserved.
Over years of doing this quietly and consistently, without looking for recognition, he had earned a reputation among those communities that had nothing to do with the law firms he worked for.
It was entirely his own.
It also explained, John Leighton thought, why Zach’s finances had always been so tight despite more than a decade of legal experience.
In the United States, law was a high income profession.
Unless you spent a significant portion of your working life representing people who could not pay you.
John Leighton found he could only express quiet admiration.
This was not something he could honestly say he would have done himself.
Perhaps, when wealth arrived in sufficient quantity, he would choose charity.
But the specific thing Zach had done, giving his time and expertise freely for years to people who had nothing to offer in return, required a quality of character that was genuinely rare.
“Allen, I appreciate you saying that.
But I’ll be direct.
I don’t involve myself with people in the underworld.
So I’m afraid I can’t help.”
“Zach, what I’m actually trying to tell you is that the Black Python Gang has made a decision together.
We want out.
All of us.
We want to live like normal people, and that’s the real reason I came to you.
“A complete withdrawal?” Zach straightened slightly.
“Complete.
No more drugs, no more gang conflicts.
Nightclubs would continue, but that’s a legitimate business.
The problem is that if we simply walk away from the south entirely, the area falls into chaos.
I need to think through how to step back without leaving a vacuum.
That’s where I need guidance.”
Zach looked at him steadily.
He understood what Allen was describing.
A full public withdrawal while maintaining enough quiet influence to keep the area stable.
Leaving the underworld while not abandoning the south to something worse.
It was a fine line, and whether it could be walked honestly was a question worth asking.
“I know what you’re thinking, Zach.
Maybe it sounds like I want everything both ways.
But think about it practically.
If we abandon the underground completely and walk away, the south descends into something worse than what’s there now.
If we restrain those forces ourselves and direct them toward something legitimate over time, isn’t that better than chaos?”
“My idea is simple.
We set up companies.
We hire people properly.
We start with industries that are legal, even if they sit near the edge.
Nightclubs.
Fitness clubs.
Security companies.
We bring the gang members in as employees, give them legitimate work, and manage them the way a real business manages its people.
Two or three years of that, and I think the results would speak for themselves.”
…
John Leighton was listening carefully, and something in him had quietly come to attention.
He had been thinking about this exact territory for a while now.
Security infrastructure in particular.
A professionally run security company, built properly with real operational capability, was one of the most effective forms of personal protection available to someone whose wealth might eventually attract the wrong kind of attention.
He had thought about it in the abstract.
Allen had just walked in and described the specific foundation that could make it real.
The phrase that came to mind was an old one.
You search everywhere for something, then find it without looking.
He looked at the hesitant Zach and the quietly hopeful Allen and felt the moment clearly.
“Zach.
I think we should consider it.
What Allen is describing isn’t wrong.
Starting in legitimate adjacent industries as a transition is a reasonable path.
And what you would be doing is exactly what you’ve always done, legal consultation, standard company procedures, nothing that couldn’t be defended anywhere.
If it doesn’t work out, you can step back.
But I think it’s worth trying.”
We’re not asking you to join anything.
We’re asking for business help from a lawyer.
Nothing more than that.” Allen looked at him with something close to genuine appeal.
Allen had no real choice in the matter.
Setting up companies, navigating American business law, managing the transition from informal structures to legitimate operations, all of it required legal support, and legal support required trust.
He knew his own history.
Finding a lawyer willing to work with someone who had his background was not simple.
Zach was the only lawyer he knew personally, and every quality that mattered, character, competence, reliability, Zach had demonstrated all of them without being asked.
Seeing that Zach’s expression had moved from flat refusal to something more conflicted, Allen read the room correctly and stopped pushing.
He told Zach to take three days and give him an answer, said his goodbyes with reasonable brevity for someone who had spent most of the evening talking, and left.
…
“John.
You looked pleased about that entire conversation.”
“Zach, this world is genuinely complicated.
There are no purely good people and no purely bad people.
Allen and his group want to legitimise themselves and build something real.
In my view, that is worth supporting.”
“But also think about our own situation for a moment.”
“What’s wrong with our situation?”
John Leighton gave him a look.
“Zach.
With Yahoo, we are already worth several million on paper, and closing in fast on something considerably larger.
If Yahoo goes public, we could be looking at billionaire territory.
And beyond Yahoo, we are planning to build an investment company.
I am confident that company will succeed.
Find another Yahoo, or several, and the wealth becomes very large very quickly.”
“When ordinary people accumulate that kind of wealth without backing, without protection, without any structural support around them, it doesn’t always bring good fortune.
Sometimes it brings the opposite.
We are both orphans.
We have no family networks, no institutional connections, no inherited position.
A sudden explosion of wealth, fully exposed, could attract the wrong attention very quickly.”
“Allen coming to us now is actually well timed.
If we maintain the right kind of relationship with them, keep ourselves clean and clearly separate from anything illegal, and they genuinely follow through on going legitimate, then we have something useful nearby.
If they don’t follow through, we walk away.
We lose nothing.
The upside is real and the downside is minimal.”
Zach was quiet for a while after that.
What John Leighton had said was reasonable in a way that was difficult to argue with.
The premise required Yahoo’s success and the discovery of further investments of similar quality, but Zach noticed that he had accepted both of those things without consciously deciding to.
Somewhere along the way he had simply started believing that John Leighton would pull it off.
“Alright, John.
Maybe you’re right.
I hope I’m not making the wrong call.” He said it with the sigh of someone committing to a decision.
“This is the right call.
I’m certain of it.”