It was a sweetheart setup—I had the protection of the FBI as I broke the law.
When I got back to Jersey in May of 1993, Harry gave me my official assignment: “Get yourself back on the street,” he said, “and be a bad guy.”
That was easy, no training required there. He and Newark’s assistant US attorney, José “Joe” Sierra, had only two caveats before I headed out to, basically, be myself. Seeing as I’d just demolished the trucking industry and ripped if off by $2 billion, “it would be good if you don’t go into trucking right now,” said Joe.
“And,” Harry added, “don’t kill anybody.”
Got it. No trucking, no murder; I could do that. Anything else, I took their conversation to mean, was fair game. We won’t look, just don’t get caught.
So I went back to my old ways and started a new company, Cambridge Investment Corp.—taking the name from an area in London where Kate and I used to walk south of Hyde Park. I convinced a businessman I knew, David Lardier, to be “acting” boss and put the company in his name while I took the title of chairman. I assured him that because of my sealed plea agreement, no potential investors would ever know I was a convicted felon. But because I was still awaiting sentencing, it was better I stayed a bit under the radar.
Still, I ran the meetings, made the decisions, and everyone reported to me and called me “Boss.” Failure to disclose a de facto ownership was fraud, I knew. But Harry and Joe never said anything about not committing fraud. We found office space in Wayne, sandwiched between a strip joint and the Department of Motor Vehicles.
For two years, Cambridge would be the umbrella for a number of companies I’d acquire involving cars, software, buses, couriers, funeral homes, and hotels. If there was a business I thought I could make a lot of money from or steal a lot of money from, I took it.
I was embarking on a double life, like a secret agent, and to keep my lives straight and worlds separate I bought three cell phones—two Motorola 1993 flip phones, one for my businesses and one for personal; and a nonflip Unisonic “Bat Phone” for my FBI calls. I Scotchtaped little labels on the back of each so I wouldn’t mix them up.
One of the first companies I bought was a group of funeral homes from a nice middle-aged couple, Richard and Alida Quirk, in Bergen County. When I say “bought,” I don’t mean I actually paid for it. In fact, I convinced them to give me money—just like I’d seen Enzo do with Alberto Lido.
The Quirks’ company was in financial trouble, and I was like a shark spying a wounded fish and going in for the kill. I went to meet them in my new Mercedes, designer suit, and Rolex to tell them that they’d be rich beyond their wildest dreams if they’d follow my instruction: invest $1million in Cambridge and sell me their funeral homes using a $3 million promissory note. Not only would they get their $3 million owed plus $1 million invested back but they’d make another $20 million from their investment in Cambridge that first year!
“We’re going to make a lot of money together,” I promised. “You’re going to get money from all my big deals!”
Promising people everything and seeing their eyes light up never got old for me. I loved a fresh, new conquest, when nothing bad had happened yet—like the honeymoon phase of a new romance.
I took over the funeral homes and proceeded to immediately loot them the usual way, by not paying the bills and stealing the receivables. That always takes a few months to do, so I had a lot of wakes and funerals to contend with in the meantime—which was another way I made money. Those caskets cost up to $10,000 each; why not reuse them and pocket the money each time someone bought a new one? It only made sense.
I showed the corpses in their caskets at the wakes and at the cemetery, even going so far as to lower them into the ground at the cemetery. But after everyone left the grave site, we’d take the embalmed bodies and caskets back to the funeral home, stow the bodies in cardboard boxes in the garage, and recycle the casket for the next dead guy.
Bad, I know. Crossing-the-line bad. Sacrilege bad. But they told me to go out there and be a Bad Guy, so I was.
We were supposed to bury or cremate the stowed bodies, but we fell behind. After a few months we had at least sixty embalmed bodies stacked up on top of each other in piles until one garage was completely filled, so we had begun using our second garage for the bodies.
I didn’t know that when I took Brenda there one afternoon for a quickie, after-lunch blow job. I’d spotted Brenda’s great ass in a store months earlier and hired her, purely based on her magnificent tush. One day after a boozy lunch we returned to the funeral home to fool around and I backed into the second garage.
Cruuuunch!!! It was the sound of bones smashing under my Mercedes tires.
I got out of the car to find I’d run over at least twenty bodies—broken bones, scattered limbs, and busted up cardboard was everywhere. It looked odd with no blood, like someone had committed a mass murder in a wax museum. Way to spoil the mood, I thought. I looked over at Brenda who was so drunk she didn’t even notice and was busy unhooking her bra. Maybe not so spoiled.
I whipped out one of my Motorola flips.
“Rob! I ran over all our dead clients! Call up the crematory people and tell them to get a U-Haul over here to load up the bodies and take them away!”
Harry said not to kill anyone; he didn’t say anything about after they were dead.
But I do want to point out that I stuck to the thou-shalt-not-kill commandment, as promised. During my first year back, I heard from my on-the-lam girlfriend, Kate Davies. She tracked me down at my mother’s and came to see me with her new, young, rich boyfriend in tow. He apparently had a problem. Kate’s boy toy was one of the heirs to a European shipping conglomerate, and he wanted me to make his sister disappear so he could inherit all the family money.
“Kate, I can’t help,” I told her. I wasn’t sure if the boyfriend was kidding or not.
I felt bad. She helped me when I needed to get out of the country, and I’d dumped her in London. I made a referral—it was the least I could do.
With the $1 million from the Quirks, I paid cash to buy a Porsche-Audi dealership and convinced Freddy Minatola, my Cadillac guy for fifteen years now, to leave his longtime sales job and be my general manager at Somerset Hills Audi.
This is how it worked: Volkswagen Credit gave us cars on credit, we sold them, and they trusted us to tell them how many we sold and give them their share of the money. So if they gave us one hundred cars in one month worth $50,000 each, that’s $5 million credit. At the end of each month they sent an auditor to pick up the inventory information, and we reconciled how much we owed them and paid up.
Freddy was so good at selling cars that we quickly went from selling a hundred a month to selling seven hundred per month. And because I knew trucking people who loved a good kickback, I was able to bring in imported Audis on tractor-trailers from all over the country that other dealerships in the area didn’t sell.
Three months was all it took for us to become the largest Audi dealership in the country. I’d already been stealing for two of those three months.
The auditor who did the inventory once a month did all the figures and paperwork manually because we didn’t have computer systems yet. As our sales doubled, then quadrupled, it got harder for him to tabulate everything. It got especially more difficult after Freddy took him out to bars and got him shitfaced. That guy returned back to the lot so toasted, he could barely see straight, never mind count cars or numbers. So he signed off on whatever Freddy wrote down. Within those first three months, I’d taken $5 million. We also had used cars that came in each week from customers who traded up, cars we were supposed to return to Volkswagen. Instead, Freddy sold them and brought me the cash—I made at least $100,000 per week that way, too.
By month four, Volkswagen Credit was onto us. The hapless auditor came in with his boss and went through all the numbers. The next day, they closed down our dealership. I got a call from Harry on the Bat Phone and he was furious. They had to investigate me now, he said, and he had to recuse himself and put another agent in charge, a friend of his.
I met them both in Harry’s office a few days later and explained in a fifteen-minute monologue exactly what happened, the god’s honest truth this time.
“Listen,” I said, “I hired my friend, Freddy Minatola. He used to work at Brogan Cadillac, see. But listen, Freddy does a lot of drugs and he gets all fucked up and I think he took a lot of the money because he’s got his bad drug habit, you know? I don’t know what happened exactly. That fucker, Freddy. I tried to help him with his problems and he fucked me over real good, that motherfucker Freddy!”
I looked over at Harry, who was stone-faced. His agent friend had fallen asleep in his chair and started to snore. They didn’t give a fuck, it was all for show. A few days later Harry called again.
“The agent said there’s nothing to investigate,” he said. “Case closed.”
I slowly closed the Bat Phone with a smile. This would be the first of many FBI cover-ups of my illegal actions, and it was a beautiful thing to behold. There was no way they were gonna get rid of me on account of a few million dollars—they trained me and needed me! It was a sweetheart setup—I had the protection of the FBI as I broke the law. You might even say I had a license to steal.
But, there was the matter of what I owed the FBI in return. “Quid pro quo, Clarice,” as Hannibal Lecter says.
After I returned from Virginia I made one attempt to bring the FBI recorded intel on the mob. After a failed try to sew a recording device into my suitcase, the tech people gave me a one-inch-by-one-inch self-transcribing F-Bird that could record for eight hours. I put it in the breast pocket of my suit and went to a confidential meeting with some mob guys at a social club in Manhattan. I was shitting bricks the entire time, so worried someone would frisk me. When we checked the recording the next day, it was all muffled and unusable.
“Harry, I’m never doing that again,” I insisted. “This thing is going to get me killed.”
Harry agreed. And soon, he didn’t even need me to bring in that kind of intel anymore. New developments had occurred on the Camino front that completely changed my assignment. Camino’s lawyers had successfully appealed his 1991 verdicts and now he was headed back to Philly for a new trial facing those same charges. Added to that, the Feds brought new charges against him for crimes committed in New Jersey and he was going to have a whole separate trial for that in Newark.
Which meant that Harry would now spend the next two to three years preparing for the Newark trial because it was such a massive case involving so much money—$3 billion. Camino had the best lawyers in the country, and they planned to shove the US attorney’s dick in his mouth, but Harry wasn’t about to let that happen. He knew that if he could nail Enzo’s ass to the wall, it would make him a rock star at the FBI.
And he had just the person to help him do it—his ace in the hole, me.
Harry and Joe needed to absorb every bit of detail and data I had in my brain about Camino as if it were their own.
Now it was my turn to train them.
I started meeting Harry and Joe twice a month at the FBI office in West Paterson or at Joe’s office in Newark. Within the first few days I’d already memorized the secret push-button front-door codes for both buildings after deciphering the tones while listening to Harry and Joe punch them in.
At our meetings, I taught them all about the creative, inner workings of trucking fraud that Camino, Barnetas, Kapralos, and I employed. As I talked, Harry sat mesmerized. They’d been investigating the looting of trucking companies for years and couldn’t figure out the machinations. Now I was giving him the combination to unlock it.
“But I couldn’t find the trail of money. How were they able to take so much cash out?” Harry asked.
“Truck stops,” I said. “They used truck stops to launder it.”
“How?”
“They’d write checks to different truck stops all over New Jersey that were cooperating, and the truckers would take in the checks and get cash from the cashiers.”
“Smart,” Harry said, nodding. “The truck stops don’t need to report the checks they cash.”
“Right,” I said. “And the truckers were already cashing their paychecks at these truck stops all the time anyway when they stopped for fuel on the road. It was a perfect way to do it because the check-cashing agencies would also get a big fee for cashing the checks, much more so than the banks. So everybody was getting something.”
“And the cashiers just agreed?”
“They were taking orders from their bosses. They were told to just cash the checks.”
“They would have enough money?”
“They were prepared. Tommy Barnetas would walk into a truck stop with $20,000 to $30,000 worth of checks every day and cash them. It was like a bank. They were cashing up to $100,000 to $200,000 a day in total using various truck stops.”
Harry was floored. And hungry for more information as I doled it out to him. In exchange he kept FBI higher-ups off my back about not bringing in new mob info. Not only was I indispensable for the Camino trial, he told them, but I could be essential for ongoing help with other cases other agents couldn’t crack.
“The guy has an accounting background and he’s fucking brilliant,” Harry told the US attorney. “He can look at paperwork and follow the trail of money faster and better than anyone we got.”
Harry already had a notch on his belt for bringing me in. Sharing me with others gave him another.
They put me in a little room in the West Paterson office where, once a week, agents hoisted stacks of “live” files involving corporate mail fraud, money laundering, drug running, and accounting onto my desk. I reviewed cases on white-collar criminals moving money all over the world and politicians in trouble—well-known mayors, senators, and governors.
“What do you think?” the agents would ask. “How do I prosecute them?”
I’d show them the trails of money. Look here and look here, I’d say. I saw the numbers the same way I saw the squares and pieces on a chessboard: as a whole story all at once, from beginning to end, and I instinctively knew all the moves and motives in between.
During these years it didn’t escape my notice once again that I was being followed. But the question this time was by whom?
Kapralos and Barnetas were by now in prison after I’d helped Harry with their cases, but Camino was out on bail awaiting his new trials, so he was around and I’m sure worried I was talking. And if anyone in the mob heard I was an informant, they’d want to make sure I kept my mouth shut about them, too. And lastly, the FBI could be following me to keep tabs on whom I was seeing and what I was up to. It was enough to make a guy paranoid.
I was watching O. J. Simpson’s white Ford Bronco chase live on TV at the Cambridge office on a Friday in June 1994 when Freddy came rushing in, panicked.
“There are four agents in two cars in our parking lot watching the building!”
Fuck. Enzo sent guys to clip me. Yeah, I was paranoid. Freddy, Dave, and I went outside to beat the shit out of them. I forgot about calling the Fed hotline and telling them, “Aquamarine down!”
“Who the fuck are youse?” I asked, banging on one of the cars and causing a commotion. Two big guys looking really pissed off got out and slipped their hands under their jackets. My expert, Quantico-trained spatial awareness went into high gear; they were going for their guns. Instead, they pulled out government badges. Oh, shit.
“Who the fuck are we?” asked one of the guys. “Who the fuck are you!”
They were US treasury agents staking out the strip joint next door, waiting for Russian mob guys to show up. Not only had we blown their cover, we’d blown months of man-hours and thousands of dollars of investigative work. I should have noticed their Chevy Impalas and casual khakis! Did these guys all shop at the same shopping mall outlet?
I explained to the agents who I was and gave them Harry’s name to verify me and they let us go. After they left, Freddy and Dave and I went into the strip club to get drunk and watch naked girls. We needed to de-stress. And Dave wanted to see what Russian mob guys looked like.
The next day, I was summoned to Joe’s office so he and Harry could ream me out.
“You blow their cover,” Joe yelled, “and then you go into the strip club they were staking out and get smashed? Are you kidding me? What the hell is wrong with you?!”
Seems there was a Treasury guy inside, too, who ratted me out.
“Hey, it was youse guys who trained me to keep my antennae up,” I yelled back, “and now you’re mad ’cause I was trying to protect myself? I thought those guys were sent to clip me!”
Harry sighed. He knew I was right. He didn’t want anything bad to happen to me, either. Which is why the one time I did call in my emergency code name, Harry came running.
In the fall of 1994, just before Whitey Bulger fled Boston and went on the lam, Tina got a warning in the mail for me. It was a paperback book on the Philly mob and inside some words were underlined in pen:
Omertà
Tyrone DiNettis
And in the margin, a handwritten note:
Tommy better keep his mouth shut.
She brought the book to my office, and I called FBI headquarters right away: “Aquamarine. I got a problem.”
Harry showed up fast with another agent to make sure I was okay and they carefully put the book into a plastic bag and took it back to headquarters for fingerprinting. If something were to happen to me it was evidence of a threat, he said. DiNettis was one of Camino’s right-hand guys, you may remember, and both were associated with the Nicky Scarfo crew in Philly.
Not long after Tina got the book delivery, one of Scarfo’s capos, John Stanfa, was indicted for conspiracy to commit murder. Among other charges, he’d arranged for the drive-by shooting of Joseph “Skinny Joey” Merlino a year or two earlier. Merlino was about to become the new boss of the Philly crime family when the attempted assassination took place—from a moving white van on a bridge. Which confirmed my gut suspicion a decade earlier that it was the Nicky Scarfo crew who tried to kill me when I went into the Passaic River.
Tina was worried about me, warning me that treating the mob and the FBI like a human chess game would lead to a bad end.
“Sooner or later, Tommy, if you play with fire,” she said, “you’re going to get burned.”
It was a lesson I still hadn’t learned in so many areas of my life—business, money, drugs, and with women, too.
I told myself maybe Tina was jealous because I’d dumped her and was about to marry another woman. Before I left Detroit and went on the lam a few years earlier, I met a gorgeous twenty-year-old blonde, Dorian Hayes. She was one of those rosy-cheeked, Michigan State college girls I told you about, working as a cocktail waitress in a strip club called The Landing Strip in Romulus, Michigan. I was sitting at a table getting all fucked up when she slithered past in a little bikini, balancing a tray on her arm. Just like when I met Debbie, I reached out and grabbed Dorian by one of the strings and pulled her in.
“Sit down here with me,” I said to her, putting her onto my lap. “You’re not going anywhere. You’re mine now.”
Dorian and I lost touch while I was in South Africa, but when I was in Virginia getting trained, she tracked me down at my mother’s address (everyone seemed to find me there) and sent a perfumed love note for me to my lawyer’s office in DC. When I got out of training, I invited her to Jersey for a visit and she never left.
We had a lavish wedding in September 1994 in Dearborn, Michigan. Did I love her? What did I fucking know about love—nothing. She was young and beautiful, and so I married her. I was stinking rich again and chartered a jet to fly everyone in and put them up in suites at the Ritz Carlton—my parents, the Quirks, David Lardier, Freddy Minatola—the whole cast of characters came for the big event, everyone except Lauren.
Now seventeen, there was only a five- or six-year age gap between the two, her and Dorian, and they were like siblings vying for my affection and attention. I couldn’t blame Lauren. She’d lost a year with her father when I was in South Africa and was desperate to make up time with me.
Lauren as a teenager, around the time I married Dorian
“Baby, we’ll have plenty of time together,” I promised. “You’ll see.”
I think it broke her heart a bit when I announced Dorian and I were engaged. She had been hoping I’d get back together with Debbie and refused to come to the wedding. I wish I had known then how to talk with her about it, but I didn’t. I wish I had known how to assure her that no one could or would ever replace her in my heart.
In the summer of 1995 our daughter Alison was born. Once again, I was in the delivery room and I kissed her forehead and followed her as the nurses took prints of her hands and feet, never taking my eyes off her. Lauren loved little Alison and the feeling was mutual, and that love became a bonding thread for Lauren and Dorian as well.
That year, Cambridge was finally going to shit after I looted and busted too many companies. But I didn’t care, because I always had another great idea up my sleeve.
Instead of going into trucking, I was going to try my hand in the courier business. I’d simply do there what I’d done in trucking—consolidate and roll up dozens of companies, which had never been done before in the courier business. Business was business, it didn’t matter what the product was, it was all the same.
I was told by a friend to get in touch with New Jersey businessman Pauly Russo—aka “Fat Pauly”—because he could open up the doors for me in the courier business. He was a successful entrepreneur who owned one of the biggest privately held courier companies in the country. For my genius deal to work, I needed Fat Pauly’s help to lure the others. Over lunch, I explained the millions we could make if he pounded the drum and led the way for us.
He was a short, round man with twinkling eyes and a smile as honest as the day. He was also straight as an arrow and wary to work with me at first, until I laid out the numbers in front of him.
“It’s a function of economics,” I told Fat Pauly. “There’s no way this deal won’t work. It’s mathematically impossible.”
It took a few months to convince the other fifteen companies to join us and another year to put the deal together on paper, but by November 1995 we were doing an initial public offering on the stock exchange. I was home making potato leek soup when I got the call from one of my crew:
“Tom, we pulled it off! We just raised $250 million in one hour on NASDAQ!”
The courier deal was one of Cambridge’s biggest bona fide success stories against the other looting and stealing ones. Fat Pauly made a cool $20 million profit, I made $25 million, and the owners of the other companies were deliriously happy because I sold them for ten times what they were worth and now they were stinking rich, too.
I had a knack for selling, for putting deals together, ever since I was a kid. I just didn’t know how to do it without the stealing part; they were two sides of the same coin to me, two sides of myself that I couldn’t reconcile.
The following year, Harry had his own long-awaited success that he’d worked so hard for. In the fall of 1996 it was showtime for Harry and Enzo Camino in court. Harry got up on the stand and repeated what I’d taught and trained him to say perfectly. After a grueling six-week trial, the jury convicted Camino of all fifty-four counts of conspiracy, money-laundering, and embezzlement in his indictment.
Harry was a star at the FBI, and they promoted him to a top position at the main office in Newark. I had helped him nab the bad guy.
Over the years people have called me a career maker or a career breaker, depending on which side of the coin you got from me when you flipped it.
That year, I was a career maker for Harry.
The breaking was yet to come.