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<span style="font-weight: bold">After a Boss’s Fraud, Training for a New Job and Holding on to Hope </span>
Published: November 8, 2009
Few may recall the spectacular downfall of Marc S. Dreier, the prominent Manhattan lawyer who pleaded guilty to running an elaborate fraud scheme, because his house of cards fell just days before Bernard L. Madoff’s did.
Mr. Palmer, 46, was a copy machine operator and trainer at Dreier L.L.P., a Park Avenue law firm, for more than two years, until Mr. Dreier — who eventually pleaded guilty to selling $700 million in bogus promissory notes to hedge funds and investors — was arrested in December.
The 250 lawyers at the firm abandoned ship, and “it all fell apart,” Mr. Palmer said. He learned of his unemployment by e-mail, and is still owed $2,000 in back wages.
“I like to work,” Mr. Palmer said from his bare-bones living room in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, where he spends most of his time at a makeshift work station consisting of a small table, a computer and an Internet connection. There he scours Careerbuilder.com, Monster.com, Craigslist.org and Hotjobs.com for hours. “I don’t like to get up in the morning and not work,” he said. “I like a paycheck.”
But 20 applications and one interview later, Mr. Palmer’s life is suspended, as if in amber. After the implosion of Dreier L.L.P., he decided to return to the health care industry, which he had entered several years before but abandoned because of the low pay. He made $11 an hour caring for disabled people, while he earned $56,000, plus overtime, as a mail room clerk and paralegal at Dreier and various other law firms before that. (In his native Jamaica, which he left 12 years ago, he briefly worked as a constable before receiving an associate’s degree in business finance in London.)
This year, taking advantage of his midcareer slump, he enrolled in the dialysis technician program at Manhattan Institute’s School of Allied Medicine and Nursing and lived off unemployment benefits and the $3,000 he had managed to save — until August, when his savings ran out.
He gets $380 a week in unemployment benefits, after taxes, but his monthly expenses exceed that: rent for his one-bedroom apartment is $954; phone and Internet service is $100; electric and gas cost $89; and he has $11,000 in credit card debt.
Tuition for his six-week dialysis course was $1,299, but he was $600 short. He had been attending the city’s Workforce 1 Career Center, which referred him to Catholic Charities Brooklyn and Queens, one of the seven beneficiary agencies of The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund. His caseworker there, Alexandra Louis, was able to secure the remaining money so he could receive his certification. In August he graduated with a 4.0 grade point average.
But without the 2,000 work hours necessary to complete the next level of certification, Mr. Palmer is stymied. What he needs now, he said, is an employer willing to take a chance on a skilled but inexperienced technician with either a job or a paid internship. Once he has that, he can earn $80,000 a year.
“Sometimes you feel the pressure, but you hope for the best,” he said. “You hope for the phone to ring with a 212 number.”
This holding pattern is a departure for him. During his interview at Dreier L.L.P., he began interviewing the recruiter, peppering her with questions: What skills would he need for this job? How would she describe her ideal candidate for the position? Why did the position become vacant?
“She scratched her head and said, ‘No one ever asks that,’ ” he recalled. She hired him on the spot.
Ms. Louis is hardly surprised by Mr. Palmer’s ingenuity. “When he came in, it was so inspirational that he was already involved with so many of these services,” she said. “He was very proactive, already enrolled in the dialysis tech program — these are things we’d normally do. He stood out.”
<span style="font-weight: bold">While it might be easier for him to give up and return to Mandeville, the town in Jamaica where he grew up and where his father and 11 siblings still live, “I love America,” he said. “I love the hospitality.” </span>
“I think by the end of the year I’ll probably get something,” he added. “I’m keeping my fingers crossed.”
here suh
<span style="font-weight: bold">been following the story of his ex-boss for a while now
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