DAY ONE: FIRST APPROACHES

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Nassau has a slow customs procedure. I was in line nearly half an hour, right behind a young American man who was also traveling alone. We both wore dark jackets and formal shirts, whilst around us loud mouthed families in shorts and slacks and joggers made us look slightly conspicuous.

We got chatting. He was here to visit a bank, some kind of work to do with the bank in London he worked for. I told him I was here to investigate the offshore business. Oh, that’s cool, he said, nodding earnestly, that’s cool. Are you a journalist? I explained as best I could. That’s cool, he said again, still nodding. I tried to get more information out of him, but he was having none of it. As we shuffled down the line he got more cagey, deflecting all my questions, even about where he was staying. By the time I was through customs he was gone. He was not in the line for taxis, which is Nassau is more of a confused huddle for taxis. But he wasn’t huddling.

My hotel is very big, and is in a complex of 3 ‘resort’ hotels that includes a 24-hour casino. I had an early night, and this morning at 6.00 am (11.00 my bodytime) I strolled down and took a look at the gaming floor. A lady was playing a blackjack machine alone; the dealer was a life-sized moving image on a bank of plasma screens right across the table from the lone woman. Half a dozen other lonely souls were sitting at fruit machines, their necks and heads never moving as they played. No one so much as made eye contact with me. I fed a dollar into a machine, and left.

I took the first bus into town, and had a bacon and cheese sandwich with jalapeno peppers for breakfast, then sat in Rawson Square, right across from Parliament Square. This is the very heart of the Bahamian juridical and political system, and the majesty of power is diminished only by the color of the buildings, which are all a nice pink.

By now I am getting nervous, because today is the day I begin looking for Headless Ltd. I don’t know whether Headless Ltd exists, but I’m here looking. I also don’t know whether sniffing around for this particular offshore company might be risky. Just in case I attract any unwelcome interest, I am writing this blog, to prove who I am and what I’m doing here. I also have with me the Encyclopedia Acephalica, a surreal text written by the members of Acéphale (the secret society) plus a paperback edition of one of my own books, which has a photo of me in it. I feel that together these books will serve as evidence if things get difficult. At least, I felt that when I packed. Now I feel like a fucking idiot.

Even if Headless Ltd does exist, I have no idea who or what is behind it. Or what to expect when I start looking. But you have to make a start. Mine is an address:

Ansbacker House
East and Shirley Streets
North Nassau.

If the Headless Company has anything to do with the presumably defunct secret society Acéphale, this is where I’ll find the answer.

What I’m looking for initially is some sort of proof, something to ground the investigation. When we look for proof, I guess we most obviously mean something we can see clearly, the ‘ocular proof’ that Othello demands before murdering Desdemona, that sense of ‘seeing is believing’, of ‘seeing it with our own eyes’. When it comes to proof, we also like to be able to touch things, to feel their width and weight, to be ‘in touch’ with reality, to get a grip. If we combine both these things - visual and tangible proof - that’s going to be incontrovertible, enough proof to satisfy anybody. What else is there when it comes to proving the existence of an entity?

Well, here is the proof:

I saw it; I touched it. This is not any old building, though. It’s the Bahamas Supreme Court Registry and the Court of Appeal Registry. Right next to it on East Street is the Police Station, and directly behind is the Supreme Court in Parliament Square. This is a little bit worrying. I start to take pictures whilst I think about what to do.

Inside the building I am now photographing are the offices of an offshore management company called Sovereign Trust. Headless Ltd is administered by Sovereign, and therefore lies somewhere within. If you are interested in Headless, then you need to be interested in Sovereign, too. But I am not going to go in without a little thought and preparation; I’ll only get one chance.

It does strike me that although I am at a specific address in a specific place, when I go in search of information on the company Headless, I have no established gridlines, no references that will tell me when I’ve reached that particular space (conceptual or concrete). There will be no brass plaque on the wall announcing that Headless Ltd is registered here; there will be no doorman sporting the company logotype on his peaked cap, no receptionist in the company colors... People register offshore companies in order not to be detected, to be anonymous, to be unconnected with the ‘real’ world in which they operate. Finding out about such a company will be a bit like acting out a mystery without a script, and unless I get very lucky, there’ll be no cut and dried solution to this mystery, just a better understanding of the mystery. In terms of location, of concrete, physical proof, Headless itself might be miles away (if miles is the right expression). So what exactly is this? Am I here to find out that Headless is not here?

There is, of course, no brass plate announcing Headless Ltd. The Sovereign Trust will probably manage thousands of such companies from their offices. Yet there is no brass plate announcing Sovereign outside Ansbacker House either. The Sovereign people are really not trying to get noticed here. As I start to get some shots of the building a woman in a black suit and a man in a security uniform come out and hang around on the steps, both of them with mobile phones or walkie-talkies in their hands.

I wander up the road and photograph the Zion Baptist church. As I do my best at looking all interested in pink architecture, it strikes me that Sovereign’s role is to stop me getting to the other, hidden company. This is an interesting idea: a corporate disguise, or a body guard. But when you are outside the building, 4000 miles from home, alone in a strange country that you know almost nothing about, it’s also a slightly scary idea: how far would these management companies go in the pursuit of secrecy? And the offshore companies that they are shielding? How tough are THEY? Above all that, what about the (‘offshore’) jurisdictions in which these companies are registered? How far will the authorities here go to protect a company’s anonymity? You notice that I am here doing the dirty work, not my artist paymasters goldin+senneby...

It also strikes me that I am blogging in ‘real time’, doing a day by day account of things here. Yet is Headless Ltd a day by day sort of company? Is it like a company that you can see and do business with today? Or does it run on some different time scale, a vestige of former times, perhaps, or some sort of entity in waiting? If an entity is wholly secret, is there any reason for it to move at today’s pace? Perhaps its corporate anonymity is a front for something utterly different, not tax-shy individuals, but different kinds of forces, organizations or collectives, even individuals. The anonymity seems to be such that any kind of entity might hide itself within an offshore identity, as if in a time capsule, or a bunker, safe and protected not only against the vicissitudes of markets and fiscal regimes, but against whole periods of time, political epochs, against history itself.

On the other hand, perhaps it’s just a bunch of folk that don’t want to pay 35% of their profits to the government. But if so, why call their low-visibility, high-anonymity offshore hideaway HEADLESS?

“Can we help you?” the lady asks.
They’ve walked a little way up the street, and meet me as I come back down. I saw them moving towards me, but I could hardly run away, so I back down to meet them. They stare at my camera.
“I’m interested in the buildings,” I say, pathetically. (Well, I could hardly whip out my copy of the Encyclopedia Acephalica. What would you have said?).
I also stare at the camera, which now looks like a very, very tangible kind of proof of guilt hanging around my neck, like a noose.

They very helpfully point me in the direction of some more pink colonial style buildings. And off I go, none the wiser. But safe in my ignorance.
Until tomorrow.

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