Nothing But Money (19 page)

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Authors: Greg B. Smith

BOOK: Nothing But Money
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In the middle of all this some obnoxious guy decided it would be a good idea to lean across the bar between husband and wife and begin to hit on wife.
At first, Jeffrey wasn’t sure this was really going on. Then it became obvious. Jeffrey would tell people, “I’m not a tough guy. I never purported to walk around and say I would do personally things of that nature, personally.” But Jeffrey had to do something. Something had to be done. He poked the guy in the chest and waved his arms about. The guy was quite a bit larger than Jeffrey but out of shape. And Jeffrey could make himself seem bigger than he actually was.
A scene ensued.
In a minute four of the guys from Monitor were all over this guy. They pulled him away from the bar and offered up a little threatening body language. The guy sat down with his pals, one of whom happened to be a big Monitor client nobody wanted to offend. But the obnoxious guy—Jeffrey soon learned the guy’s name was Mitch—he kept up. Now it was commentary about short guys and how he’d like to fuck that guy’s wife, etc. This type of commentary was not encouraging a healthy group dynamic.
One of the Monitor guys, Vinny, a guy from the neighborhood, said to Jeffrey, “You want I should take him outside and give him a beating and put him in a trunk?”
Jeffrey said no, Vinny, that would not be a good idea at this time. Meanwhile Jeffrey’s wife was very upset and wanted to go home to New Jersey right away. Jeffrey was in the middle. He could just leave and then live with this guy’s voice in his head for weeks on end. Or he could do something.
When the guy was facing away, Jeffrey walked up behind and grabbed him by the back of the shirt. This time he threw the guy, Mitch, onto the floor as hard as he could.
The place erupted. The bartender and the owner of Joseph’s came running over and started yelling at the guy, Mitch, telling him to get the hell out. He and his pals left, making the usual threats.
A few weeks later, the big client who was friends with Mitch showed up at Monitor’s office. He said his friend Mitch wanted $50,000 right now or he would press charges. Jeffrey told the client to fuck himself. Jimmy Labate heard the whole thing.
“Jimmy, he offered me the opportunity that he would go there or send somebody up there and put Mitch in the hospital for real,” Pokross said. “I told Jimmy, ‘No, no, no.’ ” Jeffrey had a better idea. He called up a lawyer and made all the arrangements. He figured if the guy was threatening to sue him, he might as well sue the guy first.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
March 25,1996
 
It was possible that some of the guests arriving at the Box Tree Hotel on this chilly spring evening came by Lexington Avenue subway, but it was highly unlikely. Most showed up in limousines, a few by shiny black livery cabs. They exited in formal wear or long glittering gowns, the women with their hair, jewelry and cleavage arranged for show. The men headed straight for the bar. Nearly everyone stopped to shake the hand of the man of the hour, Francis Warrington Gillet III, who stood at the door with the smile of a man who knows he is the center of the world.
This was a big night for Warrington. He was to be married, and this dinner at the Box Tree was to provide the stage for his public transformation from suave bachelor-about-town to regular ordinary married guy.
As hotels go, the Box Tree was an unusual spot, even by New York standards. It consisted of only nine rooms and four penthouse suites fit inside two adjacent town houses in a quiet street of the Upper East Side. Its lobby featured stained glass windows by Louis Comfort Tiffany and a sweeping four-story art nouveau staircase. Some of its rooms looked like Versailles, some looked like Japanese tea gardens. It was located in the heart of the Upper East Side, a unique neighborhood in a city of ever changing ethnic mix.
The Upper East Side was an exception to the rule in New York, a city that is not really a city but a collection of insular villages. There is Italian Brooklyn in Bay Ridge and Bensonhurst; there is the Caribbean in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights and Jamaica in Queens. The citizens of Puerto Rico are well represented throughout the Bronx, while the Irish inhabit Woodside in Queens and Norwood in the Bronx. Almost all of the city’s neighborhoods, from the border of Long Island to the edge of Staten Island to the Yonkers line, are an ever-shifting mosaic of humanity, with one ethnic group morphing into another from generation to generation. Everywhere, that is, except the Upper East Side.
There longevity is at a premium. Some of the families who’ve lived there forever date back to the
Mayflower
. They are the wealthy progeny of the robber barons: the Vander bilts, the Rockefellers, the Morgans, the Astors. This is the social register neighborhood, the silk stocking district. Here are all the WASP totems that imply seriousness and sophistication: the Waldorf Astoria, upper Madison Avenue, Park Avenue duplexes, Bobby Short at the Carlysle, the King Cole Bar at the Hotel Saint Regis, Museum Mile, dowagers doing lunch, actual French poodles, and of course, the Box Tree.
At the Box Tree, Warrington watched as one hundred and fifty of his closest friends entered the elegant dining room to celebrate him. And, of course, his new wife-to-be, Martina.
The wedding was to be a few nights away at the Swedish Church, also on the Upper East Side. His fiancée, of course, was Swedish. The Box Tree was hosting a sort of pre-wedding reception for Warrington and Martina. On this delicate March evening some of the biggest money in America sat at round tables with white linen and polished silver and impeccable crystal and toasted the beautiful new couple and the boundless life of happiness that awaited them.
Mary Lou Whitney was there, along with Joseph Cornacchia, who owned one horse that was a favorite in the upcoming Preakness and another that had won the Kentucky Derby two years back. Warrington’s real father, Francis Junior, was there with his new bride, another heiress from Palm Beach. His real mother was there with his stepfather, Schapiro, and his half-brother and real sister. His good friend Cary Cimino sat at a table talking his talk to an executive from a major construction firm. Although this was purely a personal affair, it would be unreasonable to expect that Cary wouldn’t have conducted a bit of business by the time the last dance was danced. He could be excused.
In fact, Warrington owed much to Cary. In some ways, without Cary the wedding itself wouldn’t have been happening at all.
When Martina first told Warrington she was pregnant, he’d practically run for the hills. This was life-changing news to a guy who’s biggest worry was whether the maitre d’ knew him well enough to comp him and his table full of models. Now he was being told that he was going to be a father. He was going to have to take care of someone other than himself. The
New York Times
had recently mentioned Warrington in a column about the city’s most eligible bachelors. There was no mention of Martina or the little Warry the Fourth in her belly. The all-day, all-night party of the former Jason of
Friday the 13th
was about to morph into a life of changing diapers and warming bottles. It was enough to make any guy with a trust fund and no responsibilities run screaming into the night.
He sought advice. His father was useless. This was a man who had told him to marry for money, not beauty. Dad was a full-time philanderer who viewed monogamy with contempt. He had nothing to offer. Instead, Warrington turned to his friend Cary Cimino.
Since the New Year’s Eve party on Coco Chanel’s yacht in Gustavia Harbor, Warrington had come to trust Cary in matters beyond mere business. Of course the foundation of their relationship was mutual benefit derived from the buying and selling of stock. In the last year, Warrington had done the Spaceplex deal, first while he was still at Gruntal, then when he jumped to Baird Patrick, and now at his new job as a registered stockbroker working out of the Philadelphia-based Monitor Investment Group. When Spaceplex was over, Cary had found another company, Beachport, and now Warrington was working on that.
Of course, working with Cary was a bit unusual. The first time Warrington had gone to Monitor to meet Cary’s friends Sal and Jeffrey and Jimmy face-to-face, he was a bit surprised. Monitor itself looked like every brokerage he’d ever seen: oak-paneled walls, guys in shirts and ties sitting at desks working phones, tapping at computer screens, hard at work at the business of money. He could see that most of the people there were just like everybody else he’d met on Wall Street. They’d attended prep school, they’d acquired degrees from prestigious colleges, they knew all the best spots in New York before they wound up in a
New York
magazine best-of list, and they knew to stay away from those places once they made the list.
Somehow Jeffrey and Sal and Jimmy didn’t really fit in with that scene.
From Warrington’s genteel perspective, Jeffrey Pokross was short and loud and mightily impressed with himself. He talked with a Brooklyn accent, though Warrington knew he was from Kentucky. Jeffrey had a tendency to lecture rather than converse. Neither Warrington nor Cary really liked the guy, but he often had new deals going and he was the guy behind Monitor. Then there was Sal Piazza. He was quiet and seemed to know what he was talking about, but he was clearly not from the Dalton School. He wore jogging suits to work and lived on Staten Island. He owned a boat called the
Second Office
, moored at the World Financial Center, and made distinctions between capable guys and knock-around guys and legit guys. He talked about the Hawaiian Moonlighters Club in Little Italy and the Veterans and Friends social club in Bensonhurst. Warrington had no idea what the guy was talking about. He couldn’t have located Bensonhurst on a map.
And then there was Jimmy Labate. Forget Jimmy. He was about as far from the Gilman School as you could get. If the guy finished sixth grade, Warrington would have been shocked. He was barely literate. Trying to explain a reverse merger to Jimmy would be like trying to describe the theory of relativity to a ten-year-old. But Cary loved the guy. He was always repeating Jimmy’s stories about beating up guys with golf clubs and the like. Warrington didn’t understand Cary’s fascination with Jimmy.
Cary, on the other hand, he could relate to. Cary was a college graduate. Warrington knew he’d gone to Boston University and just laughed it off as a Cary-ism his friend’s occasional claim of being a Stanford grad. That was just Cary. He tended to exaggerate. Warrington liked him anyway. Sure he visited a tanning booth each week. Sure he’d had certain injections and surgeries to keep himself looking young. Warrington could relate to that. He and Cary were about the same age, heading into their mid-thirties together.
Cary was down to earth enough to hang out with Jimmy but also smooth enough to charm Warrington’s horse country friends. Even Martina. She’d hated him at first, but now even she thought he was amusing. That was his way. The longer you knew him, the more you liked him. He often talked nonsense, but it was always charming nonsense.
In a way, Warrington saw himself as Cary’s escort into the world of horse farms and debutantes and all the rest. He was kind of an older brother. He and Cary had recently flown to Europe for a business/pleasure trip. The stated purpose was for Warrington to meet with overseas clients in Milan. They decided to stretch the trip out a bit, starting in Paris. Warrington had been to Paris dozens of times, beginning when he was a child. Cary had never been. Cary had also never been to a Euro horse race, so Warrington took him to the Arc de Triomphe at Longchamp the first weekend in October. It was a totally different scene, far more sophisticated. All traces of Damon Runyon had been erased. Cary was a bit out of his element. Somebody like Jimmy Labate wouldn’t have known what to do at Long-champs. Here Warrington was king.
They bet heavily on a favorite. They won.
The ebullience overflowed. Warrington left Cary in Paris to meet with one client and was riding high as he flew to Milan to meet with another. He was feeling so good, he bought himself a red Ferrari and had it shipped back to the States. He could afford it. With Cary and Monitor he was making more money than ever before.
Now, as his wedding reception at the Box Tree unfolded, Warrington could see that Cary fit right in. He was charming everyone at his table. He was tan and fit and wore the right clothes. He said the right things. He laughed at just the right moments. Sure, he was a bit rough around the edges, but that was part of his charm. A little taste of Brooklyn was refreshing for this crowd. And he was like them in another way—he rarely made a distinction between a social setting and a business opportunity. As he chatted away, Warrington imagined that Cary was probably lining up a deal. That was important, to always have a new deal on the horizon. Now that Warrington was about to become a married man with a kid on the way, it was even more important to pay attention to the bottom line.
That was something even his Palm Beach father would appreciate. His father hadn’t said much when he told him about getting married to Martina, but he’d certainly been mightily impressed by his new red Ferrari.
 
 
It was Friday, and Warrington once again stood in line at the Marine Midland Bank branch in Lower Manhattan, around the corner from Monitor Investment Group’s office. He held in his hand a check for $9,750 written on a Monitor account and made out to one Johnny Casablanca. In front of him snaked a line of Monitor brokers, all waiting patiently to cash their own version of that check. All amounts came in just under $10,000, the amount that requires a bank to report the transaction to federal authorities. This was a weekly event, this line.

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