Nothing But Money

The shiny black cars pulled into the parking lot at the pier in the far end of Brooklyn. It was dark and the wind whipped in off New York Harbor. This was miles from Little Italy. This was Canarsie, which is an Indian name, though there hadn’t been too many Indians in the neighborhood for a while. Two groups of men exited the black cars and greeted each other in the parking lot before turning and heading into a restaurant called Abbraciemento’s.

The restaurant was perfect for a sit-down. It was located on a pier that jutted out into the swirling mouth of New York Harbor, a no-exit cul-de-sac that allowed patrons to sit with their backs against the water and see anybody coming into the lot. It was not A Tree Grows in Brooklyn or Arsenic and Old Lace or even Dog Day Afternoon Brooklyn. It was a part of Brooklyn that hadn’t found its way to the silver screen, and probably wouldn’t anytime soon.

The receptionist at Abbraciemento’s was accommodating in every possible way. Both groups of men were ushered quickly to a corner table where there was enough room for the Bonanno crime family of New York to sit across from the Genovese crime family of New York. It was time for a little gangster détente.

Robert and Frank Lino were there with a six foot four inch associate named Eugene Lombardo. They were there to represent the interests of the Bonanno group. Representing the interests of the Genovese group was Ernest Montevecchi and two of his associates. Nobody called him Ernest. Everybody called him Butch. The matter at hand was simple: who gets what on Wall Street.

When Robert Lino first showed up on Wall Street as a silent partner at DMN, Jeffrey Pokross had promised that only a handful of wiseguys knew about the money to be made there. He’d mentioned Philly Abramo and claimed the other families were clueless. That was true, as far as it went, and for a time it was one golden opportunity after another for the up-and-coming organized crime family named after the disgraced boss Joe Bonanno. It was surely a way for the only Mafia family in history to allow an FBI agent to infiltrate its ranks to recover its good name in the underworld. Wall Street was the hills of California in 1849, and it was all theirs. This was, for a time, good news for Robert Lino. Robert Lino was convinced he’d found El Dorado, and so he enthusiastically convinced his captain and cousin, Frank, to get involved in the Wall Street miracle.

But Robert was ambitious. He’d found another brokerage called Meyers Pollock Robbins through one of his second cousins, Eugene Lombardo, the six foot four inch street guy with the knee-length leather jacket. Eugene believed himself to be a man of finance. He carried at least two cell phones at all times, and was on one or both at any given moment. Lombardo was not an actual member of an organized crime family, although he yearned to be one. He was just a lowly associate, but he had found Meyers Pollock all by himself, and he saw it as a way to win himself a promotion into the Bonanno crime group. Meyers Pollock had all the trappings of a legitimate brokerage house. Headquarters on the ninety-first floor of the World Trade Center, branch offices at 100 Wall Street and in suburban New Hyde Park. It was perfect, and now the Bonanno family had two guys in two Wall Street houses, pumping and dumping to their hearts content.

It was too good to last. In months, it was clear to Robert Lino that just about every tiny brokerage house with a WASP name had a guy named Tony or Vinnie working behind the scenes. They were everywhere: Joseph Stephens, White Rock Partners, J. W. Barclay, A. R. Baron, D. H. Blair & Co. At any given moment, wiseguy brokers both licensed and otherwise would drift from one of these firms to the other, leaving when they got too many customer complaints. There were more wiseguys wandering in and out of these firms than at the Ravenite. It was clear that soon conflict would visit Meyers Pollock.

The problem with Meyers Pollock was Eugene Lombardo. Most of the time he was all bluster and blather, but he had an unfortunate habit of throwing his weight around in front of people. He seemed to believe that humiliating a subordinate was not effective if it was done in private. Lombardo became an issue when Pollock was having problems with a stockbroker named Jonathan who ran Meyers’s office in New Hyde Park. Jonathan didn’t seem to understand that the company he was now working for was run by gangsters. He certainly was happy to pocket the cash bribes forwarded his way, but he did not like to be lectured by guys he believed to be inferior to him. They were farther down the evolutionary scale; he was at the top. He operated under the misconception that intellectual superiority trumps physical threat. All he wanted was to be left alone to make money and keep his end of the scam running.

His job was to push a company called HealthTech, which purported to run a string of upscale workout gyms in Texas and Arizona. It traded under the symbol GYMM. To pump up GYMM, Jonathan had recruited a number of brokers who weren’t controlled by Lombardo. They far outproduced those under Lombardo’s wing. He then tried to fire Lombardo’s brokers. Jonathan the broker insisted that he had the “right” to fire unproductive brokers. Lombardo’s response was simple. He leaned his six-foot-four frame forward in the conference room of Meyers Pollock in front of a roomful of people and slapped Jonathan the broker in the face.

Jonathan the broker did not pull out a .38 and shoot Eugene Lombardo in the forehead. He did not reach for a baseball bat or pull a shiv to avenge his compromised manhood. He sucked it up, for the moment. Eugene Lombardo was a big guy, allegedly backed up by an organized crime family. Jonathan the broker knew that. But something had to be done. He couldn’t let this insult go. The solution was obvious. If a big guy smacks you, get another big guy to smack him back.

Now, in a corporate setting, this would be like going over your boss’s head to complain about your boss. It was a maneuver fraught with danger. But Jonathan the broker decided his manhood was worth it, and so he called upon Butch Montevecchi, a soldier in the Genovese crime family, to fix things up. A sit-down was arranged at Abbracie mento’s in Canarsie.

Pleasantries were exchanged. Butch Montevecchi was an affable silver-haired guy from the West Side who was known for his connections to Russian organized crime. He was considered tough but reasonable. The Bonannos were coming into this little dispute at an advantage because they already had control of Meyers Pollock, but it was always better to have control of something nobody else knew about. And the Genovese family was not to be taken lightly. They were considered the stealth family, run by the quietly ruthless old boss Gigante. Now that Jonathan the broker had let them know all about Meyers Pollock, the Genovese family wasn’t going anywhere.

In between the plates of antipasto and gnocchi, a compromise emerged. It would be simple: both families would chop up Meyers Pollock, bleed it dry, and walk away. Jonathan the broker would think he’d received some form of retribution because Eugene Lombardo would be told to stay away from him. Now Jonathan was put with the Genovese family, who could treat him however they wished. In a way, there was even more pressure on Jonathan because he now had not one but two mob families looking to make money, which only meant that more money needed to be made.

Soon the conference at Abbraciemento’s was over. Everybody shook hands all around. The Linos and Eugene Lombardo went their way, Butch and his associates went the other way. Everybody was happy. The gangsters had achieved a first—a brokerage house selling stock to unsuspecting investors across America was now attached to not one but two separate sets of organized criminals. It was just a new version of the New York/New Jersey waterfront being divided up. That was the whole reason organized crime was organized—to eliminate unnecessary conflict so everybody got his share. There was plenty for all. Wall Street was an endless supply of other people’s money.

Eugene had heard this kind of thing before from Claudio, who was a fairly emotional guy. Claudio didn’t know much about doing things in moderation. He owned a 1997 thirty-two-foot Powerplay speedboat and had made millions with a bogus consulting firm in Boca Raton called Equities Consulting Group. Pretty much anything could set him off. Eugene was considered a bit of a hothead, but compared to Claudio Iodice, he was Gandhi.

Once again Claudio was having problems with the CEO of HealthTech, a guy named Gordon Hall. Gordon was very frustrating. Eugene was pretty sure HealthTech was going to make everybody a lot of money. It was a good scheme. They were using a string of workout gyms in Texas and Arizona and Oregon to claim they were selling the next Bally’s. At the time, national workout chains were burning up the market. All they had to do was overstate the assets a bit, such as by 80 percent, and soon they would all be rich. That, anyway, was the plan as imagined by Eugene Lombardo.

Meyers Pollock had handled all the brokers and promoters, cold-calling senior citizens and plastering the bulletin boards on the Internet with hyperventilation about HealthTech. On New Year’s Eve, 1997, HealthTech was selling for 87 cents per share. A day later it was selling for $1.34 per share. The trading volume had jumped 250 percent. Only a month before 642,000 shares of HealthTech were traded. In January 1997, the number blasted to the sky—2.3 million shares traded under the SIC code GYMM. In exchange, HealthTech’s CEO, Gordon Hall, had transferred two hundred thousand shares of HealthTech to a fake consulting company owned by Lombardo called N.A. Promotional Services—free of charge. Another one hundred thousand shares showed up in the accounts of N.A. Promotional in February 1997. Lombardo and Iodice, who was responsible for recruiting corrupt brokers in Florida to pump up HealthTech, split the profits. N.A. Promotional allowed Lombardo to claim he’d been hired by HealthTech as a financial consultant, when in reality he was more an organized crime consultant.

For Lombardo, this was better than hijacking truckloads of women’s bathrobes out at Kennedy Airport or milking the proceeds of Joker Poker. Between January and April, he sold all 200,000 shares of his free HealthTech stock for $430,000 in pure profit, kicking up a percentage to the Bonanno family as required. He and his partners then repeated the scam with HealthTech warrants, with Lombardo, Iodice and another co-conspirator selling off warrants they’d received for free for a breathtaking profit of $900,000.

“Let’s forget everybody,” Iodice was saying. “Let’s go right to his house. That’s it. He can’t pull that stock certificate. There’s no money. They got a buy in there on Wednesday. That’s it. The whole game is over.”

“Forget about it,” Iodice complained. “I’m gonna end up getting them thrown in jail for this today. I told the other guy, you don’t find him in fifteen minutes, I said, ‘Do yourself a favor. I’m on my way to Arizona. Keep yourself outta the office because even if I just see you, you’re fucking getting hit.”

Lombardo did his best to calm down Iodice. He was aware that this kind of behavior, this paying visits to people’s houses, was sometimes necessary but almost always bad policy. And at the very least, he needed to let the Linos know what was going on before anything unusual happened out in Arizona. This would not be easy. Iodice was steaming.

“I don’t really care anymore,” he said. “These fucking people are not making me out to be a fucking jerkoff. I’m tired of it. I ain’t no fucking jerkoff! I never was somebody’s jerkoff. I’m going to Arizona. I’m not going to his office. I’m going to his family’s house.”

Somewhere in New York, an FBI agent wrote down in a log, “Wire 5105, Tape 38A, Call 49.” Participants were listed as “Eugene Lombardo and Claudio Iodice.” Anything they couldn’t make out was listed as “UI” for unintelligible. The log was filled with similar notations, all of them involving conversations taking place over Eugene Lombardo’s busy cell phones.