Chapter 12There weren’t that many people in the United States who haven’t had at least a circumstantial connection to Avery Manning. Despite his broad presence, this gray-haired and block-headed gentleman enjoyed one of the privileges rarely available to the very wealthy – his face wasn’t too familiar to the public, or at least not in the way that applied to eccentric billionaires like Howard Hughes, John Paul Getty or the famous Rockefellers. He wasn’t smiling at people from a billboard, wasn’t shouting on television, he wasn’t even seen on the cover of a magazine. For a man so relatively unknown to the general audience, Avery Manning was disproportionately and almost rudely rich, yet free enough to walk the streets of his city without paparazzo pressure, eat an ice cream, grab a beer or
