Nothing But Money

Jeffrey Pokross had learned some disturbing things about Warrington Gillet. First, there was talk that Little Warry was about to hop a plane for elsewhere. Guys like this were always a problem. Then he learned that Warrington was going to be arrested. Then Cary Cimino learned of Warrington’s actual arrest and came to DMN to talk about it with Pokross. In the office, Cary mentioned the fact that Warrington’s arrest was sealed. This began a series of frantic inquiries by Jeffrey and Cary. Soon they learned that Warrington had met with prosecutors, and then they learned Warrington had mentioned a specific dollar figure that Cary had made on a deal. The implication was clear. Warrington was cooperating with the FBI.

Pokross was aware that Jimmy Labate was not crazy about Cary Cimino. After Cary’s charges had been dismissed, Jimmy began to suspect Cary was a cooperator. Jeffrey did not believe Cary was cooperating, although he was quite sure that Warrington was. This put him in a difficult spot. The gangsters also suspected Warrington was a rat, and if they decided this was true, they might just go and put Warrington in a trunk. Pokross did what he could.

At one point, he, Sal Piazza and Jimmy Labate discussed potential harm caused by Warrington if he was cooperating. Piazza noted that Warrington knew quite a lot about Monitor and DMN. Warrington had been right in the middle of both the Spaceplex scheme and the Beachport debacle. Jimmy thought the guy with his pedigree and prep school ways was a joke. He called him “the blitherer,” and said no professional member of law enforcement would take the guy seriously.

Frank Lino sat in the same fifth-floor courtroom in Lower Manhattan Warrington had recently visited, surrounded by the chaos of criminal justice in action. He leaned back in his chair, smiling broadly at the spectacle unfolding around him. He wore a purple Super Bowl jersey over his gray sweatshirt, which was generally the kind of thing you wore when you were awakened at your home by the FBI at 6:16 a.m. He folded his hands over his chest and yawned. Dozens of lawyers milled about in the well while the magistrate on his bench perused paper and courtroom personnel called out the names of Italian-Americans. The proceeding appeared to be like a large-scale Broadway revue where every single actor and actress went on stage and forgot his or her part all at the same time.

There were agents all over Brooklyn, picking up everybody involved in Meyers Pollock Robbins Inc. They picked up the broker who’d caused all the trouble between the two families, Jonathan. They got one of Frank’s soldiers, Boobie Cerasani. They got Eugene Lombardo out in Las Vegas, and Claudio Iodice down in Boca. Butch Montevecchi they got upstate. Nineteen guys in all. It was a big headache for Frank, and it was also a big headache for federal magistrate’s court.

The prosecutors went on about how this was the biggest example in history of the mob’s infiltration of Wall Street. They were saying the infiltration was “relatively isolated” and did not “threaten the overall stability of our markets,” but it demonstrated “efforts by members of organized crime and their associates to extend their unlawful activities to the federal securities markets.”

Nevertheless, Frank Lino was relaxed. He sat back as if poolside, skimming the paperwork with the confidence of a man who does not see the term “life imprisonment” anywhere on the page. It was a pretty unusual piece of paper for a gangster case. There was, of course, the usual racketeering and conspiracy and extortion, but there was no gambling, no labor shakedown, no shylock charges, no allegations of murders or murder attempts or even beatings with office chairs. There were all these allegations having to do with securities fraud and wire fraud. It was almost embarrassing.

While the bureaucrats in the crowded room moved about with files and the magistrate wrote notes to himself, Frank Lino joked with Boobie Cerasani. It looked like the agents had given Boobie time to put on his best gangster ensemble when they dragged him out of bed at 6 a.m.—he wore a black turtleneck under a black suit coat and had a face like Don Rickles in a bad mood. Boobie had been one of the few guys who really spooked the FBI agent, Joe Pis-tone, when he pretended to be Donnie Brasco. Donnie believed Boobie had been involved in a number of murders, and had made a point of staying away from Boobie. Frank and Boobie went way back. Here they were, arrested by the FBI and sitting in court, but they could have been hanging out at the social club for all the anxiety they displayed.

The magistrate was getting the tedious job of arraignment and bail done by groups of four. The script was the same for everybody—you’re escorted in, you’re told you’re a notorious Wall Street criminal, your lawyer argues for bail. In cases like this, everybody gets out, because there is no violence in the paperwork. This would go on into the afternoon, with codefendant after codefendant—all of whom weren’t used to getting up at 6 a.m.—milling groggily about the courtroom, waving at relatives and trying to find a marshal to get them their belongings so they could go home.

When it was his turn, Frank Lino expected to be labeled a “danger to the community” and a “risk of flight.” It was not to be. Today Frank was just a respectable captain in the Bonanno crime family involved in clean criminal activity on Wall Street that was clearly a danger to the community but not that kind of danger. A different kind of danger. An acceptable kind of danger, economic in nature and mostly detrimental to the senior citizens who’d invested their life savings in Meyers Pollock’s many scam over-the-counter stocks. Under these circumstances, the criminal master-mind usually gets to walk out the door after promising to put up his house as collateral in case he decides to take a quick unscheduled trip.

For Frank Lino, this was quite a bit different from the time he was busted back when he was a kid, when the New York Police Department of the 1950s went after him with the lit cigarettes in the dirty basement room. This was a civilized affair. The FBI agents were polite. The bail seemed steep—$1 million—but it wasn’t real bail. It was bail bond. He just had to scare up four relatives to sign over their homes and that was that. He was even free to go before they signed. His lawyer made a point of telling the judge that Frank was a hardworking telephone company salesman with nine grandchildren, but the bail didn’t budge. The prosecutor stopped his argument, Frank’s lawyer stopped his, and they all filed out to the clerk’s office to sign papers and turn in Frank’s passport. It was all quite amazing, what with all the “with all due respects” and “if it pleases the courts.”

The border between Brooklyn and Queens was difficult to discern. Brooklyn had always been older, a place where people lived forever. Queens always seemed more transient, like a rest area on the way to the real suburbs in Long Island. Figuring out where one started and the other stopped was impossible. There were certain neighborhoods where you couldn’t tell where you were, and in one such locale—Maspeth, on the Brooklyn/Queens border—the Bonanno crime family was holding its annual Christmas party at an Italian restaurant called Casablanca.

The party was taking place less than three weeks after the big arrests of Frank Lino, Boobie Cerasani, Eugene Lombardo, Claudio Iodice and all the rest, so they were likely a topic of conversation at Casablanca. Everybody was out on bail, so nobody would be spending the holidays at the Metropolitan Detention Center. Generally speaking there was a feeling that Wall Street arrests were somehow different.

No one seemed very concerned. The potential prison time hovered around five years, and pretty much everybody concerned was willing to do that kind of time and then get back on the street. Frank was in such a good mood he was hosting the party.

On paper the Casablanca was owned by a guy named Anthony. In reality it was owned by Joseph Massino, the boss of the Bonanno crime family. The Christmas party was an event that allowed all the members and associates of the Bonanno family to stop by and bring envelopes of Christmas cash for the boss. It was always well attended.

The players paraded through: Boobie Cerasani showed up with his girlfriend and child in his usual black turtleneck/ black suit coat. Dirty Danny brought his wife. Frank’s son, Joey, whom Frank had brought into the life of organized criminals, was there. Gene Lombardo showed up without his cell phones. There was a guy, Joe, who owned a school bus company, who brought his whole family. T.G. from the Bronx represented the Lucchese family; a guy named Georgie was there for the Colombo family. There was even a guy named Tutti.

In a building across the street, FBI Special Agent James Meskill sat at the window with a video camera, trying to identify as many members and associates of New York’s five organized crime families as he could. He would write down the suspected name and the time shown on the video. It was all part of an ongoing procedure. It was an investigation that never ended.

For Frank Lino, it was a good holiday season. His lawyer was already working on an arrangement with the federal government that would get Frank out in forty-seven months, and by now he and his cousin, Lombardo, had made so much money, what were a few years in a comfortable federal prison? This wasn’t state time. All around, the atmosphere at Casablanca was one of conviviality and general good cheer. The Wall Street bust was seen as a speed bump. Of course, nobody was too happy about Cousin Eugene. In fact, just about everybody wanted to kill him, the Genovese family in particular. By now everybody knew that the investigation was made up almost entirely of conversations on Cousin Eugene’s many cell phones. Some of these conversations went on for hours and were quite detailed, with names and ranks and all the rest.

Then there was the business with Claudio Iodice and the drain cleaner. Nobody quite knew what to make of that. Claudio had been acting increasingly erratic in the days leading up to the arrest. He was picked up the same morning as everyone else, retained a lawyer and then got himself released on bail. There had been some reluctance to let him out, given the FBI tapes of him threatening to track down and stick a knife into the HealthTech CEO and his entire family, but a solution had been crafted and he was allowed to go. The only caveat was that he was required to wear a special electronic monitoring bracelet around his ankle that allowed court personnel to track his whereabouts. He was ordered to stay inside his air-conditioned home in Boca and was allowed to visit only his lawyer and his doctor. Really it wasn’t so bad.

A few days after he snapped on the bracelet, the police received a 911 call. When they broke into his home, they found Claudio lying on the floor of his bathroom, passed out and very near death. At the hospital, the doctors were somewhat puzzled by what they discovered. Somehow Claudio Iodice was still alive, but he no longer had an esophagus. Some substance had been poured into Claudio—either by himself or by others—that had essentially eaten it up. It was gone. Since Claudio couldn’t speak, the police who looked into the matter were the ones to determine that he had ingested a modest but effective amount of drain cleaner.

The complications were endless and, in a certain way, fascinating. The loss of his esophagus left Claudio unable to swallow anything. This caused enormous problems because on any given day, normal human beings swallow pints of spit. This spit wound up getting into Claudio’s body cavity and causing untold numbers of internal infections. In the weeks after his interaction with the drain cleaner, it was clear Claudio was going to be spending a lot of time at the hospital.

Besides wondering about all the ramifications of losing one’s esophagus, the most common question that occurred to people when confronted with Claudio and the drain cleaner was simple—why had this occurred? Was it possible he feared prison so much he was willing to ingest sulfuric acid in the hopes that he would somehow survive but be so maimed as to avoid spending any time behind bars? If that were true, he couldn’t have thought too much about what life would be like without an esophagus. Ultimately the doctors would have to sew his stomach directly into his windpipe, which would allow him to survive, in a way, but would make his life an endless misery. And how could he have been sure it wouldn’t just kill him? Or perhaps he didn’t care.

Perhaps it was a suicide attempt. It was likely that Claudio was depressed. The government had charged him with numerous counts of securities fraud and was trying to seize every dollar he owned. They even put a lien on his thirty-two-foot Powerplay speedboat. He was on several tapes making threats. He and Eugene Lombardo were practically the stars of the FBI’s show. They had both implicated several members of organized crime. Even if he got a good plea deal and did a few years in prison, how could he walk the streets again without thinking that someday some guy would come up behind him and put five in his brain? Perhaps getting the job done right now would save everyone a whole lot of aggravation.

Jimmy Labate, Sal Piazza and Jeffrey Pokross were sitting in the conference room at DMN talking about deals. As was always the case, the smallest guy in the room—Jeffrey Pokross—was the guy doing the most talking. He was a catalog of schemes. Every day he thought up new ways to steal. His newest brainstorm involved bribing the guys who ran some of the union locals to dump their members’ pension funds into stock DMN was pushing. He wanted to start with the pension fund of Production Local 100, a union he believed would soon be available as a kind of piggy bank. It was controlled by a guy they knew, Frank Persico. Pokross had noticed a change regarding Frank Persico. When Persico’s name first came up, it was no big deal. Lately—or more precisely, after the Meyers Pollock arrests—Pokross noticed that Robert Lino and Jimmy Labate would get worked up when Frank Persico’s name popped up.

After Robert Lino’s cousin, Frank, and all the rest were arrested in the Meyers Pollock mess, for some reason DMN Capital had managed to stay off the radar. That was somewhat surprising, considering that Jeffrey Pokross and Robert Lino had spent a considerable amount of time dealing with Meyers Pollock in the months preceding the arrests. Yet DMN Capital did not appear to interest the FBI. It seemed that Robert Lino, Jeffrey Pokross, Sal Piazza, Jimmy Labate—all of them had dodged the bullet. That was good news, because the market was taking off.

Tech stocks were the mantra. The profits were mind-boggling. The Internet was spawning dozens of new company concepts each week. Everybody was dropping run-of-the-mill jobs with real paychecks to sign up for a start-up with not much in the way of wages but plenty in the way of stock options. You could sell anything by just plopping a dot-com on to the end of your idea. You wanted to use the Internet to sell pet supplies? Kitchen cabinets? Truck parts? No problem. In fact, you could now sell anything you wanted through the Internet. Sure it was really just another way to advertise and attract buyers. Who cared? Just create a company and you’re off.

In so many ways, the stars had aligned for the forces of DMN Capital. The day they busted everybody at Meyers Pollock, the feds eliminated DMN’s competition. Now DMN could sell everything. Spaceplex was a lousy amusement park on Long Island. Beachport was a bunch of ice shows. Country World was a ratty old casino in Colorado. Monolite supposedly made parts for semis—supposedly. Take ’em public, make a mint. Watch the profits soar. Sure you could lose money, but mostly you didn’t. Nobody had seen anything quite like it. Certainly not the gangsters of Wall Street, who knew they had a good thing going as the market took off for the heavens.

This was the thought that ate away at Jimmy Labate when he turned up the TV in the conference room. Since the Meyers Pollock busts, he had become increasingly paranoid. Every time Pokross would begin discussing investing the detective’s union pension funds or Frank Persico over at Production Local 100, Jimmy would jump up and turn up the TV. Jimmy would tell anybody who asked that there were bugs everywhere, FBI agents on every corner and, more likely than not, an informant in their midst. He couldn’t prove it. He just sensed it.

He was particularly sensitive about Frank Persico. Down at DMN Capital on Liberty Street, Robert Lino and Jeffrey Pokross understood one mission above all when it came to keeping the money flowing—keep the contraption off the regulatory radar. Now that Meyers Pollock had collapsed and DMN was free and clear, they needed to keep things low-key. Keep the wiseguys behind oak veneer walls. Keep the investors believing that they were dealing with graduates of the Wharton School, not graduates of the Brooklyn waterfront. Robert Lino and Jeffrey Pokross both knew that Frank Persico was going to make that mission a challenge.

Frank Persico was the cousin of Alfonse Persico, the more-or-less boss of the Colombo crime group. Alfonse was the son of Carmine Persico, the real boss of the family, but Carmine was behind bars for the rest of his life and he’d designated as acting boss his son, a college graduate who’d once had his minions shoot a guy in the testicles for messing around with his wife. Cousin Frank Persico was Allie Boy’s official designate on Wall Street, and he’d really gotten into the role in a serious way. For instance, though Frank looked like a Teamsters foreman with his no-neck fireplug physique and nylon jogging suit wardrobe, Frank himself was an actual registered stockbroker legally approved to buy and sell stocks to the trusting public.

How Frank Persico had obtained his license was not clear. In the early 1990s, regulators had discovered a number of individuals like Frank who’d paid others to take the exam under their name. Some—but not all—were caught. Frank—whose only experience eligible for listing on a résumé was “trucking assistant”—had some made it through the Series 7 exam and was now listed as a registered broker for one esteemed brokerage house after another: Joseph Stephens, William Scott, White Rock, State Street. All sounded quite legitimate. All were as rancid as fish left lying too long in the sun. It was a mystery worth investigation that would remain unsolved why anyone would buy stock from Frank Persico, but many an investor did.

Frank Persico’s real job was to represent the interests of the Colombo crime family and his cousin, Alfonse, and when Jeffrey Pokross was looking for brokers to push one of his bogus stocks, he’d heard only good things about Frank and his registered brokers’ license. Jeffrey had asked Frank to come aboard to help hype Beachport stock, and at first, the marriage of the Bonanno and Colombo families had gone swimmingly.

Then the marriage careened toward divorce. Persico had a problem with his emotions, plus he was not too swift with numbers. He blew up his relationship at William Scott, so Lino, Labate, Piazza and Pokross discussed putting him at another brokerage they controlled, First Liberty. They put him in there, and he helped them push a deal called 1-800--TRAVEL. Usually these things work out well for all concerned. This time it was different. After Persico booked the stock into client accounts, the deal went up for about a day or two and then went straight down to $1.

Persico was furious, and because the deal came from a Bonanno wiseguy, he blamed DMN. He became convinced that DMN had set him up, that they were shorting the 1-- 800-TRAVEL stock just to screw him. All of his brokers suffered, their clients suffered, and now he was having a tough time calling customers and raising money for other house stocks.

More disputes between DMN and Persico erupted. Persico got it into his mind that a $40,000 copy machine at DMN was really his. Many citizens might have pursued the matter through litigation in small claims court or taken their dispute to a TV judge and hashed it out in front of a national audience. Frank Persico had a different approach. He came into the DMN office and demanded stock as compensation for the copy machine. Jimmy Labate gave him forty thousand personal shares of whatever they were about to pump up, but did so with the promise that Persico would give Jimmy back the money at cost after he sold the shares at profit. Persico apparently forgot about the back end of the deal, and Jimmy got not a dime. Jimmy estimated Persico owed him $80,000; ill will between the two followed.

Then Persico brought in a hustler named Albert Alain Chalem, a day trader from New Jersey who always wore baseball caps and did not seem to have a job. He claimed he’d made millions after selling a printing business in Queens and was now playing the stock market for fun and profit. He was also a friend of Alfonse Persico, the son of the boss of the Colombo family. Chalem and the Persicos hung out in Fort Lauderdale on Chalem’s fifty-five-foot Hatteras, the Miss Boombastic. Nothing this guy owned was in his name. Frank Persico promised that Chalem would turn lead into gold, so he was allowed to work at DMN on certain deals. Soon it became obvious that Chalem was hustling everybody. He had worked with Meyers Pollock, with Philly Abramo, and now with DMN, and appeared to be playing one off the other. The rumor was he was shorting DMN house stocks in a big way. Frank Persico’s latest contribution to DMN was asked to leave. That was the last time Robert Lino and Jeffrey Pokross saw Albert Alain Chalem and his baseball cap.

Now they sat in the conference room discussing the problems of Frank Persico with the TV set turned up loud. They had come to realize that Frank was short in both the temperament and intellect departments, and the deficit was causing certain frictions. He was the cousin of the boss’s son, and he had come to believe his last name allowed him to tell other people what to do.

She said Frank had come into the office and started ranting and raving about a copy machine. She didn’t know what he was talking about. He’d pulled out a gun. She didn’t see much else because she dove under the desk, but when she came back up she had figured it all out. Frank had gone and shot the computer and stormed out.