My favorite pastime growing up was video games. I really got into RPGs like Final Fantasy, and I can still beat Contra without the cheat code. I remember my mother would rent me a Nintendo game from Turtles or Phar-Mor, and I would stay up all night playing it. After all, I only had three days before it had to be returned to the store, and very few games had passwords that allowed you to continue your game another weekend.
Decades later, I own an XBox 360, but it sits idle for most of the year, because once I start a game, I want to beat the game. And unlike in the 1990s, you can no longer beat a game in a weekend. Or a week. So my holiday tradition is a Purge–I pick a video game that I expect I can beat most or all of during the break. Once I feel I have sufficiently devoured that game, I can return to the real world, and my console can hibernate until the next long holiday.
Thrice that has meant playing the Batman: Arkham series. It’s perfect in the sense that not only is it a lot of fun, but the main quest does not take a tremendous amount of time to complete, the side quests are all bite-sized, and it’s sufficiently repetitive that by the time the holiday is over, I feel like I’ve had my fill for the year. Which brings me to my actual point, wholly unrelated to the prologue you have just suffered through: I’m Batman.
Or rather, qui tam attorneys are Batman. We are the civilian defenders of justice who operate in the shadows of the federal seal to fight the fraud that the authorities don’t know about or are too busy to handle. When the Department of Justice sends out the bat signal, we appear to provide whatever assistance they need. The criminals think we are monsters, and they cower at the thought of our spoiling their operations and sending them to jail. Corporate think tanks and defense attorneys in the pockets of big business try to paint us as vigilantes and villains and claim that we do more harm than good. But the public knows better. We are the silent guardians, the watchful protectors–the dark knights.
Fraudsters beware: