CHAPTER SIX

Number 39

The next morning, I went to Roy’s and found him in the dining room, decked out in a silk Hermès dressing gown, sitting at the head of the table breakfasting with two impressive-looking men. He invited me to sit down and order from his Spanish cook. Then he introduced me to Mike Rosen, the firm’s top litigator, and Paul Dano, his business partner.

Roy came straight to the point and explained that he was bringing lawsuits against Igor, Phoebe, the clinic, and anybody else he could go after. Then, in a moment of melodrama, with all eyes fixed on mine, Roy said: “You’re gonna be our main witness. You just have to be in court when we need you.” And, he added, “Don’t worry: we’ll tell you what to say.”

“Sure!” I replied enthusiastically, gaining nods of approval from everyone. After I finished breakfast, Roy shook my hand, called me “partner,” and everyone was all smiles. Before I left, and with my absolute loyalty established, Roy told me to come back and check with him at eight that evening. I spent the day strolling around the neighborhood, greatly relieved and delighted by the course of events.

At eight, I rang Roy’s bell. Roy answered, and I followed him upstairs to the living room. There, seated in the wing chair, was an exceptionally handsome and well-built guy who Roy introduced as Dave Tacket and who I came to understand was Roy’s “friend.” Dave fixed me a drink as Roy filled him in on the situation next door. I noticed a change in Roy’s personality compared with our previous meetings. He was very charming, wanted to be addressed as “Roy,” and spoke to me in familiar terms as one does to a friend.

Up until this point, Roy was only aware of the basic facts about the Fergusen Club, Igor, and Rubel. Now Roy wanted to know all I could tell him about the club and its operation. When I told him about Igor’s situation, his dependence on Allen and Kevin, and my friendship with Terry, Roy was intrigued. He found it particularly interesting that a large portion of the rents was paid in cash and anxiously collected by Allen and Kevin. When I mentioned that Terry suspected that a lot of this cash went unreported, Roy asked me to write an estimate of the rent the house took in per week and drop it off at his office. When he asked me about my artwork and I explained that I was currently working on my first collection, Roy said that they would come over and take a look, and he suggested that he might be able to help me as well.

Before I left, Roy gave me a copy of a letter he had sent to Igor, Rubel, and the clinic. It was a chilling statement that spelled out in no uncertain terms that their actions were illegal. It informed them that the tenants were now represented by Saxe, Bacon, and Bolan (Roy’s firm), that the tenants would remain in residence, and that the case was being handled personally by Roy M. Cohn, Esq. It was signed by him.

Several days later, I dined with Terry. He said that Roy’s letter had hit Igor like a bombshell and sent him into a panic, yelling and screaming at his idiot lawyer, Rubel. Terry said that on that evening, Igor, Allen, and Kevin were at the table, where for so many nights before they had dined in comfort. On this night, the dinner was left untouched. “It all had to be thrown out because they were too upset to eat.” Terry continued, “And they discovered that it was you who went to Cohn.” That was music to my ears.

Roy lost no time in organizing the neighborhood, the inhabitants of which read like Forbes’s list of America’s wealthiest people. He had pamphlets distributed describing “lines of methadone patients” on Sixty-Eighth Street if action wasn’t taken. The following evening, Roy held a neighborhood meeting at his town house. Everyone showed up, from wealthy antique dealers parading around in mink coats to stockbrokers and investment bankers in hand-tailored suits. Rich decorators came with their poodles, and society women lamented that “the neighborhood was going to the dogs.” A row of neighborhood dowagers, dripping with diamonds, were planted on a sofa.

Roy appeared and announced to the crowd his intention to petition the court to issue an order restraining the clinic from moving into the town house. The evening turned into a society cocktail party. Neighbors vented their anger and swore the clinic would have to move in “over our dead bodies,” but they offered nothing else beyond signing a petition and shaking Roy’s hand.

The clinic, which was called Encounter Inc., was a rehabilitation program for troubled teens involved with drugs. It was designed to treat twenty patients at a time, who would reside there. The program had originally begun down on Spring Street, and it was state funded, but it had also attracted donations from wealthy supporters. Mr. Levi, the managing director, had staffed the clinic with several psychologists and counselors.

Roy’s investigators discovered that a friendship had long existed between Mr. Levi and Rubel, Igor’s lawyer. Together they had devised a cushy arrangement whereby the clinic would renovate the house and pay Igor a hefty yearly rent, using taxpayers’ money provided by the state. And the director, Levi, was planning to have an apartment for himself in the town house, to boot.

The eviction deadline came and went without any show of Igor’s enforcers. Mrs. Parker bid us a sad farewell and wished us luck. In her distress, she left her set of master keys on the desk—which quickly found their way into my pocket. I was elected super, being the only person who both owned a toolbox and knew the secret formula for filling the ancient boiler with water each day.

Roy got his restraining order, but it didn’t do much good. Right on schedule, Encounter’s counselors and patients moved in and occupied every vacant room in the house. A hearing was called in the New York State Supreme Court, and it didn’t go our way. With the press and a number of powerful politicians taking Encounter’s side, the judge wasn’t about to enforce the court order. Instead he modified it, allowing the program to coexist with the remaining tenants until the issue of who had the legal right of occupancy was decided.

The judge was also about to grant the clinic’s request that the plaintiffs post a ten-thousand-dollar bond to cover damages in the event the plaintiffs lost, but in lieu of a cash bond, Roy persuaded the judge to accept a notarized guarantee signed by a “responsible individual” to cover up to ten thousand dollars in court-awarded damages. Of all the millionaires in the neighborhood who vowed their support, Roy couldn’t find a single one who would sign it. In the end, I wound up signing the document. I don’t know how Roy got the judge to accept it, but he did.

It was obvious that there wasn’t going to be any quick fix to the problem. Each side was intent on evicting the other. For Roy, the stakes were high. All the newspapers were following the story, and his reputation was on the line. He called me over almost every evening around seven for a daily briefing on what had gone on at the house.

I’d have to hunt around to find him. Sometimes he’d be in the penthouse, the kitchen, his bedroom, or even in the bathtub while we had our talks. I noticed a Brice Marden hanging on the wall of his bedroom and recognized the painting. Tony and I had dropped in on Brice when he was working on that series. When I mentioned it to Roy, he offered to have the dealer who sold it to him come over and see my work. Indeed, Roy started to send all kinds of people over to my place to look at my paintings, even a couple of guys from the Gambino family who were waiting for the old man, Carlo, to finish up his business with Roy.

One evening, Roy explained that we could be tied up in court for at least a year. His plan was to “quiet things down” and “get it out of the press” so that he could “take care of it behind the scenes.”

For me, this news was a godsend. After having the rug pulled out from under me twice in the past year, I only wanted some time and breathing space to make enough money so that, no matter what happened next, I’d be able to handle it. The good news was that since the lawsuits had begun, we hadn’t paid another cent in rent. The bad news was that, without my promised job, I was under pressure to make money again.

Gino’s favorite pastime, or rather his second occupation, was circulating in café society and certain Upper East Side bars frequented by rich single women. Gino suggested that I put on my suit and join him on his forays. His main hangouts were the bars in the high-end hotels like the Sherry-Netherland. He was quite the Romeo and had a number of middle-aged lady friends with Park Avenue addresses. Although we didn’t have much luck hustling “high-class broads,” it gave us the opportunity to discuss business and hatch Plan B.

Gino was not ignorant on the subject of art and antiques. In fact, he confided to me over drinks at Elaine’s that he sometimes fenced stolen objets d’art to crooked dealers in the city. When he mentioned that even some of his rich friends had bought hot items from him, I decided to confide to Gino the truth about the “Dutch” paintings in my room and the way I made money.

Gino began to get the word out among his millionaire friends that he was helping the Mob move some artworks stolen from museums and galleries in Europe. As predicted, they took the bait and wanted in on the action. Cloaked in secrecy—like under the Brooklyn Bridge at two in the morning—Gino would produce a “van Goyen,” but the customer had to be ready, usually with a couple thousand bucks in cash. Soon Gino was making sales to “rich broads” on Fifth Avenue and Garment District businessmen, with the proviso “You gotta bury the piece for twenty years.”

“But Gino,” I remarked after he’d made a few sales, “what if they find out it’s a scam?”

“No problem,” he assured me. “I’ll just break their heads.”

Gino was particularly agitated after the judge modified the court order. With his patience wearing thin, he was ready to take matters into his own hands.

“Kenny, let me tell ya somethin’,” Gino said as he hunched over me in a confidential chat in a bar. “I’m gettin’ sick of all this bullshit, ya understand?” I promised him that I did, as I glimpsed the strap of his shoulder holster beneath his jacket.

“So, what can we do about it?” I asked him.

Gino got down close to my ear. “Look, we put two gallons of rubber cement in that fuckin’ furnace that heats the boiler downstairs, set the timer, and take a walk. When we come back, the place is a parking lot!”

“I don’t know, Gino. Look, I just want to make money out of this whole thing somehow.”

“Okay, so listen to this,” he said. “I saw ’em filling up a storage room in the basement across from my room, with all kindsa stuff that businesses donate to ’em. They put a padlock on the door. We can bust in there tonight and see what they got.”

Equipped with flashlights and tools, Gino and I broke the lock and entered the storage room at two in the morning. At first it looked like a bust. There was nothing but cases of canned food and bags of rice. Gino started ripping open boxes, and he hit pay dirt. “Olive oil! There’s a ton of olive oil here! I can move this shit!” he said. Gino had discovered box after box, each containing six gallons of imported olive oil. Before the night was over, we had boxes of olive oil stacked to the ceilings in the closets of our rooms.

A ferocious hatred grew between me and Mr. Levi, the director of the clinic. Levi was a creepy-looking guy who was in the habit of striking intimidating poses in the lobby just outside my door. He dressed in outdated mod clothing. His favorite ensemble consisted of a ghastly double-breasted suede overcoat that reached his ankles, leather boots, and a hat that resembled the kind worn by the Three Musketeers. His attire, I believe, fulfilled a romantic fantasy in which he cast himself as a courageous cavalier on a noble quest to defend his clinic and vanquish all his enemies.

Levi vowed to make my apartment his abode. I, in turn, told him to “fuck off” on every occasion. He saw me as the embodiment of all his troubles and was convinced that, if he could only get me out of the house, he would be on the road to victory. But this enmity hardly approached the contempt Roy had for Rubel, architect of the whole ridiculous scheme. An incompetent, middle-aged oaf, Rubel had a long nose that hung down in the middle of his fat, florid face in a way that made it look like the rear end of a baboon. He showed up in court wearing a cheap, ill-fitting overcoat and a dopey Russian hat of fake chinchilla that he twisted onto his head. As an added refinement, he carried a plastic attaché case that refused to stay closed.

Rubel was hopeless in the courtroom. Since he’d gotten Igor into this mess, he had no choice but to play it out to the end. He went on the offensive and brought a pathetic lawsuit against me, designed in his fertile imagination to get me evicted. After reviewing the papers, Roy was so appalled at the man’s stupidity that he briefed me on a few simple points of law so that I could show up in court and get the case thrown out myself.

It just so happened that the day before I was scheduled to appear in court, Tony showed up, broke as usual. He was desperate to go to Boston with friends from SoHo for an important sculpture show that weekend. Again the subject of his selling a “Dutch” painting came up, but then I had another idea.

Having just sold a painting myself, I was flush, and sitting in the lobby of the Warren Club was an exceptionally fine seventeenth-century Italian credenza. Things had been known to disappear there, and under the present circumstances anything could happen.

Tony was taking a bath in my tub when I put it to him. “You want four hundred bucks?” His eyes grew big. “I’ll tell you what. You know the club they have down the street, the Warren Club? Well, there’s a small cabinet next to the Coke machine in the lobby that I want. You grab it, and I’ll pay four hundred for it.”

The next day I went to the court on lower Broadway. It turned out that Rubel hadn’t even brought his case against me in the right kind of court! Instead of landlord-tenant court, he’d brought the suit in small claims court. It was a rinky-dink affair where they handled dog bites and broken windows. The judge, who had long since gone crazy there, resembled a mad scientist, with a mess of gray hair and disheveled robes.

Rubel began by accusing me of all sorts of crimes, from destroying property to refusing to pay rent. With each charge Rubel made, the judge snapped his head toward me and glared through his Coke-bottle glasses. For a minute I began to get worried, but when the judge realized that Rubel was asking for an eviction, he blew his top.

“Mr. Rubel, you’re in the wrong pew!” he yelled. “Why don’t you go back to law school?” and he promptly threw out the case. Rubel turned purple with rage, slammed down a stack of papers, and began to yell at the judge. The judge threatened to have him arrested if he didn’t shut up. As I left the courtroom, I looked back and saw the judge lean over the bench and scream at Rubel, “Now get outta here!”

As soon as I returned to the house, I was confronted by Ann and Raun, who were engaged in serious conversation outside my door.

“Did you hear what happened last night?” Ann excitedly asked as I approached. “Somebody went into the Warren Club and took a valuable piece of furniture. The police were over there and came here too!”

“Well, who took it?” I asked, turning pale.

“Oh, they don’t know,” she said, “but some guy was seen running out of the lobby and diving into a Checker cab with it. The police asked a lot of questions and filled out a form.” Blood returned to my face, and I regained strength.

“Well, I hope they catch ’em,” I replied with outrage.

Then they wanted to know what had happened in court. As I opened the door to my rooms so we could talk in private, I looked down, picked up a folded note on the floor of the foyer, and slipped it into my pocket. I pretended to have to use the bathroom and pulled out the note. It read: “Got the piece at my place. Call me later. A.”