CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
August 3, 1999
At 4:20 p.m. Jeffrey Pokross stepped out of a yellow cab into the summer heat of Midtown Manhattan. From there he crossed the most famous piece of sidewalk in the city and entered the air-conditioned bar of Sparks Steakhouse, a restaurant known the world over for the gangster who’d died where Jeffrey had just tread.
Pokross was supposed to be meeting Cary Cimino, and Cary had picked the locale. He certainly had a crude sense of humor. Nearly fourteen years earlier, around Christmas 1985, the then boss of the Gambino crime family, Paul Castellano, had had a dinner reservation at Sparks. He didn’t quite make it. On the sidewalk in front, four men wearing long white coats and black Russian hats shot down Big Paulie and his driver while shoppers with bags of Christmas gifts in hand dove for cover. There lay Big Paulie on the cold ground in his expensive winter coat, blood oozing, his reign finished and Sparks’s reputation sealed. Guides on tourist buses pointed it out. Effete restaurant guides described it as a “macho bastion” with “too much testosterone,” but Cary loved the place. It was real New York, not Tribeca or Soho or all those other precious neighborhoods where people like his former best friend, Francis Warrington Gillet III, hung out. This was where real men ate red meat and drank red wine and reveled in the success they had achieved on their own terms—not because Daddy gave them a trust fund.
Pokross was vaguely aware of his mission. Cary had asked for the meeting because of certain concerns he had about being arrested at any minute. As usual, all the concerns involved Francis Warrington Gillet III. Cary was convinced that Warrington was a cooperating witness. Cary barely spoke on the phone anymore and never to Warrington. He had recently become convinced somebody was following him on the street. After Cary requested the meeting, the FBI wired up Pokross and tasked him with exploring Cary’s Warrington-phobia.
At the Sparks bar, Pokross ordered Absolut on the rocks with a twist of lime. This was a Tuesday in August and Manhattan wasn’t its usual bustling self. The people who could afford it were already out in the Hamptons. The rest were waiting for the weekend to do the same. Still the bar was unusually crowded and Cary was late. Pokross chatted with the bartender and checked his cell phone voice mail. There he discovered a message from Cary saying he was sitting at the bar at Sparks. Pokross looked down the bar.
“Hey, Cary,” he said, pushing his way through the crowd to the other end of the bar.
“How long you been sitting there?” Cary asked, startled.
“Five minutes,” Pokross said. “You got to be kidding. You were sitting over there?”
They both laughed, and Cary lied about how he was turning thirty-nine in a month.
“You gotta be forty-two,” Jeffrey said.
“Why?”
“Because you gotta be a year older than me ’cause your vision is worse than mine.”
Pokross sipped his vodka and asked Cary what he was up to.
Cary said, “Disappearing to L.A. for six months, then I’m going to move off to London, then I’ll disappear into an Eastern European country like Prague or Hungary for a year or two, let it all blow over. I’m not fleeing the law because I’m not under indictment,” he said. “There’s no warrant for my arrest, so if I’m in a different country, I’m not on the lam.”
“What do you expect a problem from?” Jeffrey asked.
Cary replied, “Anything we’ve done in the past. It’s going to come up and bite us in the ass.”
Pokross had heard the concerns before. They had come up quite often with Cary, who could not seem to understand that fearing imminent arrest was just part of the game when you’re a full-time criminal. He knew, more or less, where this was going.
The two men ordered and joked and argued about moneys owed and waited for the waiter to leave before continuing their talk. The restaurant was full and loud, and it would be very difficult to hear the substance of what Cary and Jeffrey were discussing, but any observer could tell this was not a conversation filled with laughter and good feeling. Pokross mentioned a CEO named Manas in one of their schemes who’d pleaded guilty and was testifying against others they knew.
“The U.S. attorney, fuck them,” Pokross said.
“USDA,” Cary joked. “Department of Agriculture.”
“Fish and Wildlife,” Pokross said, laughing. “In your case, it’s Fish and Wildlife, the filthy animal that you are.”
Pokross said he’d heard their names had come up in the other case. They discussed getting the court transcripts and splitting the cost. “This is hot off the presses,” he said. “Jeffrey and Cary were the promoters. Or Cary and Jeffrey. You and I are joined like brothers.”
“I like that,” Cary said, scribbling something on some paper.
“You’re writing down quotes now?”
“My biography,” Cary said. “My life story.”
Pokross asked Cary if he’d approached any of his friends to see if they’d been questioned.
“What do you mean?” Cary asked.
“Well Warrington has vanished,” Jeffrey said. “Where’s Warrington? Down at his folks’ farm?”
“Yeah. Why don’t you call him?”
“Why don’t you call him?”
“I don’t speak with him anymore,” Cary said. “We had a huge fight.”
Jeffrey knew all about Cary and Warrington. He’d heard the original tape, which he’d turned over to the FBI, and he also suspected (but did not know for sure) that Warrington was, like him, cooperating. He’d heard all kinds of things. Warrington had fled New York after his arrest, even while his case was still pending. He’d moved back to his mother’s horse farm in Maryland, and despite his rich upbringing, he was actually desperate for money. Pokross pointed to his glass and ordered another Absolut, this time with tonic. Cary ordered a Diet Coke.
“Do you think it’s better to let sleeping dogs lie with him or what do you wanna do?” Jeffrey asked.
“Why don’t you call him?”
“And ask him what?”
“Has he been approached by the Feds? He got arrested. It was sealed.”
Pokross: “What happens when something gets sealed?”
Cimino leaned forward and answered, “ ’Cause he’s cooperating.”
“Then why would you want to call him?”
“Right.”
Pokross handed Cary two recent news releases from the Dow Jones newswire, about two stock promoters who’d been convicted of securities fraud in the Spaceplex deal. They discussed what Pokross called “our mutual exposure points.” This was another name for anybody involved in their schemes who might now be talking to the FBI. Warrington was a “mutual exposure point.”
“Let’s go over Warrington for a minute.”
“There’s nothing to go over,” Cary said. “He’s about to turn state’s evidence. He’s untouchable. Unless you want to whack him.”
“I think you broached that issue at one point before,” Jeffrey said, recalling Cary’s reference to a “dirt lunch” some months before. “I really don’t think that’s the way to do it.”
“Why?” Cary persisted. “If you whack him, you, um, his testimony is no good in court. Because you can’t cross-examine the witness.”
Jeffrey couldn’t resist: “As they say, dead men tell no tales.”
“Right. So the bottom line is . . .”
“What do you suppose I do with him?” Jeffrey asked. This appeared to be a carefully worded question. He was not suggesting that he himself should do anything regarding Warrington. He was just exploring what Cary might think to do with the guy.
“Have Jimmy take care of him,” Cary said, obligingly. “I don’t care how it’s done, just take care of him. He’s not married anymore,” he added, as if this might seal the case. “His wife left him.”
“She did?”
“She lives in New York now.”
“Who lives in New York?”
“She does,” Cary said. “He can’t even feed his family. He’s been living in the same cottage without electricity. Go down there, have them put a gun in his mouth.”
“No,” Jeffrey said. “You never pull a gun unless you’re willing to use it.”
“No, no, no,” Cary said. “You miss the point.”
“What’s the point?”
“Put the gun in his hand, put the gun in his mouth, pull the trigger, make it look like suicide. It’s not hard to believe he committed suicide, he’s so down and out.”
“Oh, I mean, I think that’s a little involved, don’t you?”
“What’s it going to cost us, ten Gs?” Cary asked. “You got to get rid of him.”
“Why don’t you put the whole ten grand up? I don’t want any part of it.”
“What are you afraid to kill someone now?”
“It’s not the first thing on my wish list, no.”
“But you don’t want to go to jail. What would you rather have, five years in jail or whack Warrington? They are going to use the majority of his testimony against us. Do you want to destroy the case against us?”
Jeffrey asked, “Do you think he’s a credible witness?”
“Yeah.”
“You do?”
“He has checks,” Cary said.
“Did you ever give him checks?”
“No,” Cary said. He paused. “Yes. As a matter of fact, I did. He cashed a check that had a fictitious name, but it doesn’t matter. He’s a credible witness. The core of the case against you is Warrington. The core of the case against us requires testimony. If you eliminate the testimony, you eliminate the case.”
Cary claimed that besides his own words, Warrington had their words on two hundred and thirty hours of secret recordings of phone calls implicating everyone in everything. He said, “Do you want to take care of the problem, yea or nay?”
“Personally, I have to think about it,” Jeffrey said.
“Think about it. Let me know because my vote’s yea.
I’m tired of, when push comes to shove, people backing down.”
“Well I don’t back down from shit,” Jeffrey snapped. “Where we’re taking us, which is like . . .”
“Naw,” Cary interrupted. “He deserves it.”
Pokross said he’d decide whether to mention Cary’s request to Jimmy Labate. “That may spook Jimmy,” he said. “So I got to think about it a few days.”
“Want anything to eat, by the way?” Pokross asked.
It was clear that Cary truly believed Warrington was the source of all his problems. If there was no Warrington, there would be no problems. It was also clear that Cary was not at all like the gangsters Pokross had known for years. They would never discuss something like this in a restaurant with a million tourists and businessmen in white shirts and ties and who knows who else sitting all around them. They wouldn’t use terms like “put a gun in his mouth” and “make it look like suicide.” No way. It would all be arranged by implication, without anything explicit uttered. Cary, it was clear, was an amateur. A pseudo-gangster who was so trusting of his longtime pal Jeffrey Pokross that he’d say things like this and expect no one would ever know. In this regard, already he was wrong.
When they finished, Pokross left Sparks and walked around the corner. He got into a leased car parked on the street, pulled up his shirt and pulled off the wires taped to his chest. He handed the wires and the tiny recorder tucked in his waistband to Special Agent Kevin Barrows of the FBI. Jeffrey Pokross, after all, was a reliable cooperating informant, skilled at coaxing out culpability. With Cary Cimino, they were learning, you didn’t need much coaxing.