Nothing But Money

The fourteenth-floor apartment on Central Park South was the kind of art deco address Rodgers and Hart dreamed about. Right at the southern edge of the park, between Seventh and Eighth Avenues in the heart of the island of Manhattan, it faced Frederick Law Olmsted’s masterpiece in all its splendor. In the daylight the park presented an ever-changing seasonal panorama: a forest of pale green in the spring; a glorious wonderland in winter; a carnival of maroon, yellow and orange come fall. In the summer it was an emerald carpet, the castles of Manhattan peeking out at the edges. And at nightfall, the view from the fourteenth floor really came into its own. The park became a great black sea ringed by the jewelry boxes of Central Park West, a twinkling armada headed uptown to the northern tip of Manhattan. This was the view Francis Warrington Gillet III had purchased for himself and his new family. An address to envy. A castle in the sky. Far below, yellow taxis competed for tourists, their horns and screeching brakes a distant symphony. Up here on the fourteenth floor, Francis Warrington Gillet III lived above it all.

As he stood in the dark alone at midnight, gazing down upon the park, his park, Warrington remembered his birthday. It was something he usually tried to forget. In October he would turn thirty-nine. In some ways, thirty-nine seemed worse than forty. Any year with a nine in it meant you were looking back and trying not to look ahead. Thirty-nine meant this was the last year he could say he was in his thirties. After that he’d be middle-aged. You might even say halfway done. Halfway done meant you had to take stock of what you had accomplished. You had to make comparisons, reflect on certain choices. You had to add things up and see whether you were greater or lesser than the sum of your parts. In the summer of 1997, Francis Warrington Gillet III believed he was destined to beat that equation. He had found his calling, and it was money.

The great-stepgrandson of the cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post and the scion of the Gillet family, a family of United States senators and old horse country money, had arrived at his destiny. He was a stockbroker. A maker of big money. He was clearing $300,000 net, and he’d set his sights on much more. Looking over at the lights of Central Park West, he could remember what it was like when he first arrived in May of 1996, still a bachelor stockbroker living large in the all-night party that was Manhattan. At the time, he was swimming in opportunity. A chart of the Dow from the Crash of ’29 to 1996 looked something like a ski slope that no towrope could climb. Starting in about 1995, the trading volume had begun to rocket skyward, and the increase was reflected in Warrington’s rising commissions. The Dow, which had traded under 5,000 for sixty-five years since the crash, was headed for 10,000 and nobody was going to stop it. The fabulous flop of the 1980s now seemed like a speed bump. There was no way to go but up, and Warrington had managed to wangle himself a front-row ticket to ride.

Life was good. He’d worked his way up from a rookie at Smith Barney in 1989, when the market was in the toilet. He bounced to a small shop called Global American, which went out of business. He suffered fits of unemployment, but that was the way it was on Wall Street. He jumped to Lad enburg Thalmann & Co., then Grunthal & Co., then Baird Patrick & Co. in 1995, just as the market began to take off. Most of his clients were wealthy overseas customers he found through his connections from private school and steeplechase and growing up around extremely wealthy Maryland horse country people. He bought and sold stocks for large institutional investors like the Bank of Monaco. He earned a mention in a New York Times gossip column as a “prince of the moment,” right alongside John F. Kennedy Jr. and David Lauren.

And 1996 was looking even better. He’d hooked up with a small-sized outfit called Monitor Investment and was practically the top producer at the place in no time. His contacts were golden. He bought a Lamborghini. He hung out at Harry Cipriani’s on Forty-second Street. He was on top of the world. That very night he’d gone out drinking with friends and it reminded him of those days when he was still single. The giddiness you got hanging around models, the freedom you acquired with your corporate expense account, the belief that you were invulnerable. Then he remembered—1996 also included the arrival of Warry the Fourth.

Warry the Fourth had shown up in May and changed everything. For his entire adult life, Warrington III had done pretty much what he wanted when he wanted. His childhood was kind of a dream. He’d grown up around money in a house with its own name—Tally Ho Farms. His kingdom consisted of rolling green hills, miles of clean white fence, Thoroughbreds prancing in the morning sunlight. He never had to think about attending public school. His sports were steeplechase and polo. He knew people who wore cravats without irony. There were yachts and servants and winters in Monaco. It was a perfect little world, far removed from mundane middle-class existence or the scary world of the poor. It was the world of the Gillets of Worthington County.

Staring out at the darkened park in the heart of the big city, Worthington County seemed pretty far away. It surely had been one surreal trip. He’d bummed around Europe endlessly until he was bored out of his mind. He’d tried competing professionally at steeplechase until he failed but told himself he was bored out of his mind. He’d immersed himself in acting school and, for the first time, was not bored out of his mind. He truly loved it. He had a vague sense that if he put his mind to it, he would succeed. It would just happen because it always did. People in his world were simply bound to succeed. They were blessed with so many advantages; the idea of failure was not to be considered. At least, that’s what he’d been told.

It wasn’t that simple, of course. He’d only made it through two years at Villanova, bored by his chosen subject, economics, so he was wandering through the world without a college degree. And when he went to acting school, it was his father who paid his rent on Sutton Place. And he wasn’t a very good actor. He wound up doing mostly TV commercials. His best role was a nonspeaking part as Jason in one of the Friday the 13th horror series. He got the part because he didn’t make the cut for a speaking role.

He had met Martina at the Coffee Shop in Union Square. At the time, back in 1995, this was a happening place. It was one of those spots that become hot for a year and then are as empty as the Canadian wilderness when someone—no one knows precisely who—declares the place dead. The Coffee Shop was, in 1995, the kind of place Warrington could relate to. Young people—mostly younger than Warrington—trying to talk on cell phones over the cheerful din. Everyone always on their way to something else. And lots of models. In 1995, Warrington spent lots of quality time in places like that. In 1995, if you were an up-and-coming Wall Street guy trolling for rich clients and aggressively pursuing a certain image, you were expected to be out pretty much every night of the week talking to beautiful women.

Martina was a Swedish model. She was gorgeous in a way that made people—both men and women—stop and stare when she strolled into a room. They were a beautiful couple. He was a handsome fellow, a good-natured guy who liked to have a good time and could charm people simply with the warmth of his ebullient self-confidence. When Martina got pregnant, Warrington hesitated. He wasn’t sure if he had what it took to be a father. Look at his experience with fathers. His real father was a guy who sometimes confused philanthropy with philandering, and his stepfather wouldn’t know if he was jailed, bailed or dead unless it was printed on the front page of the Racing Form. Nevertheless, Warrington proposed; he and Martina were married in a matter of months. By May, little Warry the Fourth had joined the entourage, and Francis Warrington Gillet III became a new man.

Of course there was still time for discovering which bar made the best martinis on Thursday nights. On this night, Martina was on vacation in Europe with Warry the Fourth. His progeny and namesake was now about fourteen months in this world, and although Warrington loved him to the core of his soul, little Warry the Fourth could wear you down with his caterwauling all around the apartment. And the apartment didn’t help. No, not at all.

Truth be told, Apartment 14N with the drop-dead views of Central Park was, in fact, tiny. Sure, when you mentioned the address—240 Central Park South—people stopped yammering on about themselves and actually listened. Central Park South was a big deal. Not just anybody could land there. Of course, rarely did he invite people up. In fact, never did he invite people up. And he certainly never told any of his good buddies down on Wall Street that he lived with wife and child in a studio apartment. Not two bedrooms, or one bedroom and a half, where the sophisticated Manhattanite pretends a closet is a bedroom. No, this was no bedrooms. One room. A kitchen, living room, dining room, den, master bedroom, child’s bedroom—all in one room. Only the bathroom had a separate space with a real door and everything. His castle was a studio. It was a cold, hard fact.

Even though he was making a million dollars investing other people’s fortunes, Warrington was quite aware that you never know what can happen. It was always a question of maintaining the net. Warrington had rented a studio because he was never sure if fortune would take her smile away from him. Sure he was making good money, but in a year, he could be on the street. He’d been unemployed twice in the last three years. He’d handled a couple of major deals, but that was it. Although the market was trending in the right direction, it all could change. You had to be a fool to think otherwise. That was why he got the studio.

And he wasn’t going to be like his father. He was going to provide. He was going to succeed on his own terms. He hadn’t married rich; he’d decided he would be the source of his own success. He figured with the market headed in the direction it was heading, he’d soon be clearing upper six figures and be able to buy a bigger place on Fifth Avenue or down in Soho. In fact, he expected this. He believed in this. He planned to send Warry off to prep school, just as he had been, and then on to the college of his choice. He would probably buy a second home in the Hamptons. Or maybe at Telluride. Who was to say where the horizon ended? That was the only way to look at things. You had to make yourself see unlimited opportunity.

He couldn’t remember his dream when he awoke suddenly to the sound of pounding at his front door. He looked at his watch—7 a.m. Who the hell would bang on your door at this hour? He stumbled out of bed and toward the door, blinking and trying to understand what some guy was hollering out in the hall.

Warrington hastily ran to the front door, all the while pleading, “I’m here! I’m coming!” He had seen so many TV shows he was sure they were about to bust down the door and charge into his tiny studio, guns drawn and breathing hard with adrenaline. He slid back the door and stood facing a man he recognized immediately.

The guy he was looking at was Nick Vito. He was a stockbroker working out of a small office in the World Trade Center with whom Warrington had tried to do a deal. They’d discussed ways to wire money into a Bahamas account so that both could reap the benefits of the 1996 bull market. Warrington still had his business card: Nick Vito, Thorcon Capital. It looked like a real business card presented by a real stockbroker who worked in a real office. Only none of it was real. Reality struck Warrington hard: Nick Vito was actually the FBI, standing in Warrington’s doorway at an ungodly hour holding up a different kind of business card—a gold badge that said “Special Agent D. True Brown.” Nick Vito/True Brown was reciting TV banter about how Warrington had the right to remain silent and all that, but Warrington was mostly trying to remember as much as he could about Nick Vito and what he might have said that would give True Brown reason to put him in handcuffs.

It was tough to remember. Most of it seemed so innocuous. Warrington had been introduced to Nick by a colleague. The colleague said he knew of an aggressive young broker with plenty of big-money clients looking to take new companies public. He just needed a little encouragement, usually in cash. The guy’s outfit, Thorcon, was small, but he would be happy to chat with Warrington. It all sounded like a win-win proposition, so Warrington had done what any hungry stockbroker would have done and tracked down Nick Vito to see if they could work something out.

First they talked by phone. Then they met face-to-face at Nick’s office in the World Trade Center. Nick seemed like a decent guy, maybe a little stiff. He was certainly knowledgeable about the market, and they soon were able to work out the details. There would be discounted stock handed over to Nick as commission. There would be money wired to an account in the Bahamas. The arrangement was essentially a bribe, but Warrington felt it was, at that time, an extremely common practice among small brokerage houses that dealt with over-the-counter stock. You could even argue it was leaning toward legal, or at least hidden behind a façade clever enough to fool the average drone at the NASD.

But perhaps not the FBI. Here Warrington stood in his underwear in his fabulous studio apartment, unable to remember precisely what he’d said to Nick Vito or Special Agent D. True Brown or whoever was standing right there in front of him. It had been nearly a year since Warrington had last seen the guy, so remembering what he’d said wasn’t so easy. In fact, the more he thought about it, the more confused he became.

Warrington alternated between anger at himself and a growing sense of dread. The anger came from the fact that the deal he’d discussed ad infinitum with Nick Vito, with the Bahamas bank accounts and free restricted shares, hadn’t even gone through. Discovery Studios was a big bust. But it was difficult to escape the fact that the conversations about said deal had, in fact, taken place. And when Nick Vito, now Special Agent D. True Brown, began reading off a description of the charge filed against Warrington, the sense of dread began to overwhelm Francis Warrington Gillet III. The anger morphed into raw fear.

“Francis Warrington Gillet III did conspire, confederate and agree together with others to commit offenses against the United States,” Special Agent True Brown intoned. “To wit, to commit wire fraud in violation of Sections 1343 and 1346 of Title 18 of the United States Code . . .”

The phrases floated by. “Commercial bribery.” “Part and object of the conspiracy.” “Unlawfully, willfully and knowingly.” Each was like a shovelful of dirt on a coffin. Here he stood in his own apartment, a privileged son of affluence and influence now facing up to five years in prison for committing a crime. Several crimes. And the documents Agent Brown was reading even made a point of alleging that his actions were “against the United States.”

As far as he could tell, Francis Warrington Gillet III was still standing in his own apartment in his own country. He had always believed in the system of checks and balances. He’d always embraced the idea of a criminal justice system that protected those who worked hard and paid their taxes from the seething, blood-seeking criminal hordes. Until this very moment, the police, the judges, the prosecutors—they were all on his side. They were all his friends. Now here he stood, on the other side. He could think many things. Whose fault was it? What if he’d done things differently? Suppose he’d never met Cary or Jeffrey or James “Jimmy” Labate or Sal Piazza or any of the rest of them? He thought of these things but he kept coming back to another, darker, more impenetrable question that buzzed and whined inside his skull like a gnat. And that question was this: What would his family think when they learned the truth about Francis Warrington Gillet III?